NYC, the NYPD, the RNC, and Me

Good first-person account of the intimidation used by New York police officers against protesters exercising their freedom of speech. There's a lot of coverage of protests in Myanmar these days, but very little about protests in America. The original article (link below) has many links, so it's better if you just read it at Common Dreams.

NYC, the NYPD, the RNC, and Me
Fortress Big Apple, 2007
by Nick Turse
TomDispatch.com
October 1, 2007

Thomas Friedman "is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country"

Despite his strong advocacy for the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Thomas Friedman retains his position as opinion writer for the New York Times and is considered by some to be "the nation's preeminent centrist foreign policy genius". Glenn Greenwald, as a result of a minute analysis of Friedman's columns over the past five years, comes to the conclusion that "Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country." Here are some choice excerpts, followed by the entire essay:

These are the premises which Friedman, prior to the invasion, expressly embraced:

(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.

Just ponder that: Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq even though, by his own reasoning, that war was being done the "wrong way" and would thus -- also by his own reasoning -- create nothing but untold damage on every level.

...

Friedman himself continues to play the same repugnant game, arguing: (1) If we don't do X, we should not stay in Iraq; (2) X is impossible or unrealistic; (3) I do not advocate withdrawal. David Frum has made the same argument -- we will lose in Iraq and create far worse damage if we don't send more troops, which we don't do; nonetheless, we must remain in Iraq.

The reason for this is as transparent as it is despicable -- "withdrawal" is a prohibited belief in Establishment Washington. You can pretty much advocate any course of action other than that. Why is the Baker Commission filled with people who supported this invasion in the first place? Shouldn't it be dominated by -- or, at the very least, be substantially composed of -- people who opposed the war from the beginning, i.e., the people who demonstrated foresight and wisdom and judgment?

Establishment Washington is concerned right now with only one thing -- saving their own credibility and reputation. The reason why The Washington Post's David Ignatius said recently that Chuck Hagel was "right about Iraq and other key issues earlier than almost any national politician, Republican or Democratic" -- even though Hagel favored the invasion and many "national politicians" opposed it from the beginning -- is because the Washington Establishment still thinks that those who opposed the war from the beginning don't count, that they're still the unserious, know-nothing losers who should be ignored.

Full essay:

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald
Friday, December 01, 2006
The Tom Friedman disease consumes Establishment Washington

Someone e-mailed me several days ago to say that while it is fruitful and necessary to chronicle the dishonest historical record of pundits and political figures when it comes to Iraq, I deserve to be chastised for failing to devote enough attention to the person who, by far, was most responsible for selling the war to centrists and liberal "hawks" and thereby creating "consensus" support for Bush's war -- Tom Friedman, from his New York Times perch as "the nation's preeminent centrist foreign policy genius."

That criticism immediately struck me as valid, and so I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 through the present regarding Iraq. That body of work is extraordinary. Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country. Yet he is, of course, still today, one of the most universally revered figures around, despite -- amazingly enough, I think it's more accurate to say "because of" -- his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest strategic foreign policy disaster in America's history.

This matters so much not simply in order to expose Friedman's intellectual and moral emptiness, though that is a goal worthy and important in its own right. Way beyond that, the specific strain of intellectual bankruptcy that drove Friedman's strident support for the invasion of Iraq continues to be what drives not only Tom Friedman today, but virtually all of our elite opinion-makers and "centrist" and "responsible" political figures currently attempting to "solve" the Iraq disaster.

In column after column prior to the war, Friedman argued that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was a noble, moral, and wise course of action. To Friedman, that was something we absolutely ought to do, and as a result, he repeatedly used his column to justify the invasion and railed against anti-war arguments voiced by those whom he derisively called "knee-jerk liberals and pacifists" (so as not to clutter this post with long Friedman quotes, I'm posting the relevant Friedman excerpts here).

But at the same time Friedman was cheering on the invasion, he was inserting one alarmist caveat after the next about how dangerous a course this might be and about all the problems that might be unleashed by it. He thus repeatedly emphasized the need to wage the War what he called "the right way." To Friedman, the "right way" meant enlisting support from allies across Europe and the Middle East for both the war and the subsequent re-building, telling Americans the real reasons for the war, and ensuring that Americans understood what a vast and long-term commitment we were undertaking as a result of the need to re-build that country.

Only if the Bush administration did those things, argued Friedman, would this war achieve good results. If it did not do those things, he repeatedly warned, this war would be an unparalleled disaster.

Needless to say, the Bush administration did none of the things Friedman insisted were prerequisites for invading Iraq "the right way." And Friedman recognized that fact, and repeatedly pointed it out. Over and over, in the months before the war, Friedman would praise the idea of the war and actively push for the invasion, but then insert into his columns statements like this:


And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won't be able to do it right.


But: Despite the Bush administration's failures to take any of the steps necessary to wage the war "the right way," Friedman never once rescinded or even diluted his support for the war. He continued to advocate the invasion and support the administration's push for war -- at one point, in February, even calling for the anti-war French to be removed from the U.N. Security Council and replaced by India, and at another point warning that we must be wary of Saddam's last-ditch attempt to negotiate an alternative to war lest we be tricked into not invading -- even though Friedman knew and said that all the things that needed to be done to avert disaster were not being done by the administration.

Put another way, these are the premises which Friedman, prior to the invasion, expressly embraced:

(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.

Just ponder that: Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq even though, by his own reasoning, that war was being done the "wrong way" and would thus -- also by his own reasoning -- create nothing but untold damage on every level. And he did so all because there was some imaginary, hypothetical, fantasy way of doing the war that Friedman thought was good, but that he knew isn't what we would get.

To support a war that you know is going to be executed in a destructive manner is as morally monstrous as it gets. The fact that there is some idealized, Platonic way to fight the war doesn't make that any better if you know that that isn't what is going to happen. We learn in adolescence that wanting things that we can't have -- pining for things that aren't real or possible -- is futile and irrational. To apply that adolescent fantasy world to war advocacy is the hallmark of a deeply frivolous and amoral person.

And it is exactly that sickness that is still -- almost four years later -- the most pervasive syndrome when it comes to our war debates. Greg Sargent and Atrios, among others, have been documenting one instance after the next of serious, sober political "leaders" who (a) recognize that our current course is a failure, (b) acknowledge that no real alternative exists, but nonetheless (c) lack the courage and integrity to advocate withdrawal. John McCain is the worst and most glaring example, as he expressly argues:

(1) It is immoral to stay in Iraq if we don't send in more troops.
(2) We are not going to send in more troops.
(3) I oppose withdrawal and think we should stay in Iraq.

Friedman himself continues to play the same repugnant game, arguing: (1) If we don't do X, we should not stay in Iraq; (2) X is impossible or unrealistic; (3) I do not advocate withdrawal. David Frum has made the same argument -- we will lose in Iraq and create far worse damage if we don't send more troops, which we don't do; nonetheless, we must remain in Iraq.

The reason for this is as transparent as it is despicable -- "withdrawal" is a prohibited belief in Establishment Washington. You can pretty much advocate any course of action other than that. Why is the Baker Commission filled with people who supported this invasion in the first place? Shouldn't it be dominated by -- or, at the very least, be substantially composed of -- people who opposed the war from the beginning, i.e., the people who demonstrated foresight and wisdom and judgment?

Establishment Washington is concerned right now with only one thing -- saving their own credibility and reputation. The reason why The Washington Post's David Ignatius said recently that Chuck Hagel was "right about Iraq and other key issues earlier than almost any national politician, Republican or Democratic" -- even though Hagel favored the invasion and many "national politicians" opposed it from the beginning -- is because the Washington Establishment still thinks that those who opposed the war from the beginning don't count, that they're still the unserious, know-nothing losers who should be ignored.

Howard Dean is still a leftist lunatic who is "soft" on national security, as are the Congressional Democrats who voted against the war resolution. Tom Friedman and John McCain and Condoleezza Rice and Charles Krauthammer are the credible, serious foreign policy geniuses.

It is not merely the case that having been pro-war doesn't count as a strike against anyone. That is accurate. But far worse, the opposite is also true. It is still the case in Establishment Washington that having been pro-war in the first place is a pre-requisite to being considered a "responsible, serious" foreign policy analyst. And having been anti-war from the start is the hallmark of someone unserious. The pro-war Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are serious national security Democrats but Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha are the kind of laughable losers whom Democrats need to repudiate.

Establishment Washington really is not interested in how to end this horrendous and despicable debacle we unleashed in Iraq. They are not interested in how to maximize U.S. interests. They are only interested in how to find a way to bring this disaster to some sort of slow resolution that looks as though it is a respectable and decent outcome -- anything that makes it seem like it wasn't a horrendous mistake in the first place. That is what the Baker-Hamilton Commission is about and it's what all of these Beltway analysts are doing by endorsing these premises:

(1) Things in Iraq are disastrous and our current policy there is a total failure.
(2) Our troop presence is not improving the situation; things have gotten steadily worse.
(3) There may be goals that, if theoretically met, would improve things, but those goals can't and won't be met -- either because we lack the resources or because they are just not achievable.
(4) No matter what, we absolutely cannot begin withdrawing, and those who want to do so are radical and unserious.

So what is being done now is exactly what Tom Friedman did before the war -- we continue to endorse a policy (staying in Iraq) even though we consciously know that no good can come from it and that it will produce nothing but bad results, and we justify that based on the fantasy that we could, in theory, improve things. Tom Friedman is a morally bankrupt narcissist whose only devotion is to the self-love of his own genius. He emphatically advocated the war beforehand but included every caveat possible so that, no matter what happened, he could claim to have been right, which is exactly what he has been doing.

But tragically, there is nothing unique about Tom Friedman. What drives him is the same mentality that enabled the administration's invasion of Iraq and, so much worse, it is the mentality that is keeping us there and will keep us there for the indefinite future. We stay in Iraq in pursuit of goals we know are fantasies, because to do otherwise requires the geniuses and serious establishment analysts to accept responsibility for what they have done -- and that is, by far, the most feared and despised outcome.

The invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. But the behavior of our political and media leaders after that, and now, reveal that they are not just bereft of judgment but entirely bereft of character.

UPDATE: In comments, J makes an insightful and important point about people like Friedman who always think that their particular criticism of the administration, the war and other similar matters defines the outermost limit of what constitutes acceptable, responsible and permissible dissent. To be unserious, irresponsible, shrill, etc., means to transgress the limits definitionally established by their views.

UPDATE II: Hilzoy, via e-mail, directs my attention to this article from TAP's Harold Meyerson regarding pundit responsibility for Iraq, in which he says:

“I have to admit I’ve always been fighting my own war in Iraq,” Friedman wrote in the summer of 2003. “Mr. Bush took the country into his war.” Was it too much to ask the nation’s most important foreign-policy journalist to focus on Bush’s war -- particularly because, well, it was Bush, and not Friedman, who was president?

It's amazing enough that people like Tom Friedman failed to understand that point. But what is more amazing still -- and truly both infuriating and tragic -- is that they still don't seem to be able to digest it.

Between imperialism and Islamism

Good article from Himal Southasian and ZNet:

Between Imperialism and Islamism
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
Himal Southasian
September 28, 2007

Between the xenophobes of the West and the illogical fundamentalism in Muslim societies, the choices keep getting grimmer. A mutually beneficial disentanglement can only be provided by humane, reasoned and principled leftwing politics.

***

Many of us in the left, particularly in Southasia, have chosen to understand the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism as a response to poverty, unemployment, poor access to justice, lack of educational opportunities, corruption, loss of faith in the political system, or the sufferings of peasants and workers. As partial truths, these are indisputable. Those condemned to living a life with little hope and happiness are indeed vulnerable to calls from religious demagogues who offer a happy hereafter in exchange for unquestioning obedience.

American imperialism is also held responsible. This, too, is a partial truth. Stung by the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States lashed out against Muslims almost everywhere. America’s neoconservatives thought that cracking the whip would surely bring the world to order. Instead, the opposite happened. Islamists won massively in Iraq after a war waged on fraudulent grounds by a superpower filled with hubris, arrogance and ignorance. ‘Shock and Awe’ is now turning into ‘Cut and Run’. The US is leaving behind a snake pit, from which battle-hardened terrorists are stealthily making their way to countries around the world. Polls show that the US has become one of the most unpopular countries in the world, and that, in many places, George W Bush is more disliked than Osama bin Laden. Most Muslims see an oil-greedy America, in collusion with Israel, as a crusader force occupying a historic centre of Islamic civilisation. Al- Qaeda rejoices. Its mission was to convince Muslims that the war was between Islam and unbelief. Today it brags: We told you so!

But like poverty and deprivation, imperialism and colonialism alone did not create violent Islamism.

Consciousness is not simply a consequence of material conditions; less tangible, psychologically rooted factors can be very important, as well. It is a palpable truth that the most dangerous religious radicalism comes from a deliberate and systematic conditioning of minds that is frenetically propagated by ideologues in mosques, madrassas and over the Internet. They have created a climate wherein external causes are automatically held responsible for any and all ills afflicting Muslim society. Shaky Muslim governments, as well as community leaders in places where Muslims are in a minority, have also successfully learned to generate an anger that steers attention away from local issues towards distant enemies, both real and imagined.

Islamic radicalism is bad news for Muslims. It pits Muslims against Muslims, as well as against the world at large. At the same time, it is only peripherally directed against the excesses of corrupt ruling establishments, or inspired by issues of justice and equity. The primary targets of Islamist violence today are other Muslims living in Muslim countries. Some fanatics terrorise and kill other Muslims who belong to the wrong sect. Others accuse “modernised Muslims” as of being vectors of hellish sinfulness – what is known as jahiliya – deserving the full wrath of God. The greatest ire among the orthodox is aroused by the simplest of things, such as women being allowed to walk around bare-faced, or the very notion that they could be considered the equal of men.

Contrary to its claims, Islamic radicalism is indifferent to the suffering of Muslims. We have not seen a large- scale street demonstration in any Muslim country protesting the ongoing genocide of Muslims in Darfur. The slaughter of Bosnian and Chechnyan Muslims caused only a hiccup in the Muslim world. And, for all the rhetoric against the West, the American aggression on Iraq did not result in mass demonstrations by Islamic parties in any Muslim country.

On the other hand, fundamentalist fury explodes when the Faith is seen to be maligned. For example, mobs set afire embassies and buildings around the world for an act of blasphemy committed in Denmark; others violently protested the knighthood of Salman Rushdie. Even as Muslim populations become more orthodox, there is a curious, almost fatalistic, disconnection with the real world. This suggests that fellow Muslims do not matter any more – only the Faith does.

Islamic radicalism now knows no borders. In searching for solutions to an exploding problem, we must realise that the speed of communication makes it meaningless to regard problems in different parts of the Muslim world as solvable in isolation. Rising Islamism in one country cannot be wholly attributed to the government policies of that country (although that government may well bear considerable responsibility). Nevertheless, let us take a quick look at the Southasian region, before turning back to the global problem. Islamic radicalism has achieved an overwhelming presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is also rapidly changing the texture of society in Bangladesh, and is worsening relations between the minority Muslim population in India and the Hindu majority.

Blowback in Pakistan

Pakistan is in the grip of a full-scale Islamist insurgency. Unable to combat the toxic mix of religion with tribalism, the Islamabad government has lost administrative authority in most areas bordering Afghanistan. The Taliban have asserted full administrative control in many tribal areas, forcing local government functionaries to flee. Taliban representatives are now the law. A widely available Taliban-made video shows the bodies of common criminals and bandits dangling from electricity poles in the town of Miranshah, the administrative headquarters of North Waziristan, while thousands of appreciative spectators look on. Girls’ schools have been closed, and barbers have been handed six-foot-long death shrouds – shave and die. Polio vaccinations have been declared haram by the ulema, and the government campaign has subsequently stalled. Taliban vigilante groups enforcing the sharia patrol the streets of tribal towns, checking, among other things, the length of beards, whether the shalwars are worn at an appropriate height above the ankles, and the attendance of individuals in the mosques.

A new breed of young militants, trained in the madrassas, now calls the shots in many places in Pakistan. They have displaced the leadership of the traditional village elders, the maliks. In August 2007, a “peace jirga” of tribal leaders from Pakistan and Afghanistan was held in Kabul, attended by Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf. It was a failure. Many influential maliks were afraid to come to the gathering, in spite of being offered protection by both governments (see Himal September 2007, “No jirga like a peace jirga”).

Sectarian clashes in Pakistani tribal areas are rife, fuelled by fiery mullahs operating private FM radio stations, broadcasting incendiary programmes targeting rival mullahs and the ‘immorality’ of modern culture. In April 2007, mortars and rockets were freely used by both Sunnis and Shias in Parachinar and Dera Ismail Khan in NWFP. In villages of Hangu District, in the tribal areas, both sides have exchanged light artillery and rocket fire, oftentimes leaving scores dead. In May 2007, fierce armed battles broke out between the Ansar-ul-Islam and Lashkar-e-Islam groups in Bara in the NWFP, while Tank and Mingora saw bloody clashes with the Frontier Constabulary.

The Talibanisation of Pakistan’s tribal areas has caused alarm, but the six-month-long standoff with the local Taliban of Islamabad’s central mosque, the Lal Masjid, was stunningly novel. Islamic vigilante squads roamed the city burning CD stores, kidnapping alleged prostitutes, and enforcing their own version of morality. This would have continued for even longer but for an incident in July that drew the ire of the Chinese government, after Chinese citizens were kidnapped from a Chinese-run brothel in Islamabad. The Pakistan Army finally launched a bloody assault that left at least 117 dead and hundreds more injured. This episode showed that various militant organisations, including Jaish-e-Muhammad (which had pioneered suicide bombings in Kashmir) could easily establish themselves in the city, with the super-vigilant Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and other military organisations choosing to look the other way.

Under US pressure, the Pakistan Army has mounted military offensives against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in recent months, but the resistance has stiffened. Pakistani soldiers are now refusing to fight. On 1 September, an entire military convoy surrendered to militants in Waziristan without firing a single shot. Three hundred Pakistani soldiers were taken hostage. But what shook the establishment was the subsequent suicide attack in Rawalpindi, on a bus carrying ISI employees on their way to work. More than 25 were killed. Since the bus was unmarked, this was clearly an inside job, suggesting that tribal militants and the Taliban have infiltrated deep into the military establishment. Not surprisingly, there has been a concurrent rise in fears in the West. According to the August 2007 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, 35 percent of US foreign- policy experts believe that Pakistan is most likely to become the next al-Qaeda stronghold; 22 percent say that Pakistan is an ally that least serves America’s national-security interests.

The rest of the neighbourhood

Afghanistan is in a still more desperate state than its neighbour, with Hamid Karzai’s government controlling little more than Kabul. Poppy cultivation is up; girls’ education is down. As in the Pakistani frontier, the Taliban have risen from the ashes after being routed by the American action following 9/11. They could have – and should have – been defeated by a correct mixture of military force, political strategising and speedy economic reconstruction of devastated areas. Instead, Washington, DC’s myopic emphasis on military solutions has led to the Taliban’s revival and subsequent spill-over into Pakistan’s tribal areas. While Afghans do not want a return to the brutality of the Taliban regime, the wholesale corruption and participation of war criminals in the Karzai government has robbed it of credibility.

Bangladesh, which owes its birth to linguistic rather than religious nationalism, is nowhere close to Pakistan or Afghanistan in terms of militant influence. Nevertheless, there is a rapid transformation in progress. Many militant incidents, including bomb blasts, have occurred over the course of the past year. Reflecting broader changes within Bangladeshi society, mainstream politics has also transformed. In 1971, few would have thought that the Jamaat-i-Islami, which had openly sided with the West Pakistani army, could ever re-establish itself in Bangladeshi politics. But the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the last ruling party, had a number of senior leaders with close ideological affinity to the Jamaat. In villages, activists are imposing veils on women and forcing men to grow beards; secular intellectuals and leftwing activists have been murdered; Ahmadis are being persecuted; and what remains of the Hindu minority is being made increasingly uncomfortable.

India, whose democratic traditions have long provided a safety valve, had seen far less Muslim militancy than Pakistan, except in Jammu & Kashmir. But in 1992, a mob of Hindu zealots tore down the Babri Masjid, challenging India’s claim to being a secularist and pluralist democracy. This set into motion a cycle of reaction and counter-reaction that has yet to play itself out. A state-assisted slaughter in 2002, which left almost 2000 Muslims dead in Gujarat, has been the most tragic consequence so far. Unlike in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Muslims in India are primarily the victims, and not the perpetrators, of violence. Most are poor and uneducated, while the community itself lost most of its capable individuals as migrants to Pakistan during Partition. While Muslim conservatism in India has increased visibly over the past decade, a growing Muslim middle class, and alternatives to the mosque as a venue for socialising, have made India relatively peaceful. However, as the July 2006 Bombay train bombings and this August’s explosions in Hyderabad illustrated, extremist violence is on the rise, with the techniques used by the extremists similar to those used by al-Qaeda and other Islamic militants.

What America must do

Southasia is not alone in facing violent Islamic militancy, of course. Faced with internal failure, manifest decline from a peak of greatness many centuries ago, and afflicted by cultural dislocation in the age of globalisation, many Muslim societies have turned inwards. From the early 1950s, following the era of decolonisation, a sense of grievance and frustration had produced a multitude of Islamist movements spreading from Algeria to Indonesia. But they were inconsequential. Had the US not cultivated them as allies against communism during the Cold War, history could have been very different.

Looking back to the middle of the 20th century, one cannot see a single Muslim nationalist leader who was a fundamentalist. Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq – all sought to organise their societies on the basis of secular values. However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to control and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with Western greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later that of the United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultraconservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. In time, as the Cold War pressed in, nationalism became intolerable. In 1953, Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Britain targeted Nasser. Sukarno was replaced by Suharto after a bloody coup that left more than half a million dead.

Things came to a head with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The American strategy for defeating the ‘Evil Empire’ required marshalling the forces of Islam from every part of the world. With General Zia ul-Haq as America’s foremost ally, and Saudi Arabia as the principal source of funds, the CIA openly recruited Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funnelled support to the mujahideen. It worked. In 1988, Soviet troops withdrew unconditionally, and the US-Pakistan-Saudi-Egypt alliance emerged victorious. A chapter of history seemed complete. But appearances were illusory, and events over the next two decades were to reveal the true costs of this victory. Even in the mid 1990s – long before the 9/11 attack on the US – it was clear that the victorious alliance had unwittingly created a genie suddenly beyond its control.

All this is history – and unchangeable. Today, relations between Islam and the West, particularly as represented by the US, are worse than ever before. A civilisational clash may not be here yet, but it could be around the corner. How can it be avoided? Imagine for a moment that the US had a sudden change of heart, realised the error of its ways, and wanted to bury the hatchet with Muslims. How could the US atone for its past? Here are ten key elements.

First, as demanded by both Muslims and non- Muslims across the globe, the US needs an attitudinal change. It must repudiate grand imperial designs as well as its claim to being an exception among nations. The notion of total planetary control had guided the Republican administration even before the attacks of 11 September 2001. The Democrats, meanwhile, many of whom have now publicly turned against the Iraq war, limit their criticisms to the strategy and conduct of the war, the lies and disinformation dispensed by the White House, suspicious deals with defence contractors, and the like. But they share with Republicans the belief that the US possesses the right – and adequate might – to mould the world according to its wishes. The people of the US must somehow convince themselves of the need to obey international laws and etiquettes, and that they do not have some divine mission to fulfil. In the post-Tony Blair period, Britain must also seek a foreign policy independent of the United States, and cultivate independent relations with Muslim countries.

Second, the creation of a Palestinian state must not be further postponed. The dispossession of Palestinians has been appropriated as a Muslim cause with huge symbolic significance. Peace between Islam and the West is impossible without some reasonable resolution of this problem. The US has given Israel carte blanche for military action against the Palestinians, as in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. American officials remain silent about the future of occupied territories. The fact that Hamas and Fatah are at each other’s throats does not mean that the Palestinian problem has gone away. On the contrary, it strengthens extremism and makes everything more difficult. Without a Palestinian state, the Palestinian problem will mutate into a new and still less controllable form.

Third, the US must take seriously the impact of collateral damage on civilian populations. The heavy use of airpower in Iraq and Afghanistan inevitably led to large numbers of non-combatant casualties. Often the ‘coalition forces’ refuse to acknowledge civilian deaths; when confronted with incontrovertible evidence, they apologise and issue miserably small compensation. Karl Inderfurth, Assistant Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, recently admitted that “military actions [in Afghanistan] … by US and NATO forces will speak louder than those sincerely expressed words. As the death toll of civilians mounts, Afghan hearts and minds are being lost and, with that, the spectre of losing the war looms.” Very sensibly, the goal of “zero innocent civilian casualties” was recommended a year ago by retired General Barry McCaffrey after a trip to Afghanistan.

Fourth, the US must stop threatening Iran with a nuclear holocaust for trying to develop nuclear weapons, while rewarding, to various degrees, other countries – Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea – that have developed such weapons surreptitiously. The Sunday Times in London reports: “The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days.” It would, of course, be highly preferable if Iran could be dissuaded by peaceful means, including sanctions, from making a bomb. But there is no strong moral argument available to the US against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, given both its own nuclear stance and the fact that Iran’s initial nuclear capability was provided by the US during the Shah’s rule. The US refuses to work through the United Nations, or to support a nuclear-weapons free zone in West Asia. So far, the US has refused even to hold direct talks with the Iranian leadership to defuse the nuclear crisis. Overtures by Iran, such as were made by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his letter to President Bush in 2006, were rejected. But North Korea’s nuclear test showed that US refusals to hold one-on-one talks have failed miserably. On the other hand, nuclear negotiations in exchange for oil have partially succeeded in halting North Korean nuclear developments.

Fifth, the US must not exploit the Sunni-Shia schism in the hope of weakening both. Clever as this might seem, using religious passions to achieve political ends is dangerous. Moreover, created monsters have a habit of turning against their masters – some notable examples include the CIA’s Afghan jihad, Israel’s experiment with Hamas, Pakistan’s with jihadist groups, and India’s with Sikh extremists. For US strategists, exploiting sectarianism is a hard temptation to resist: al-Qaeda and parts of the Sunni community in Iraq and Lebanon see Iran and Hizbollah as an even greater threat than the US occupation. They would welcome a US attack on Iran, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, and might even provoke a confrontation to encourage the US to do so.

Sixth, the US must not support dictators and quislings like General Musharraf and Hosni Mubarak while preaching the virtues of democracy. This breeds anger and resentment, and is especially dangerous given that US hypocrisy is so transparent.

Seventh, the West must seize opportunities that project it as generous, rather than aggressive. Providing disaster relief (including following the 2004 Tsunami and the 2005 Kashmir Earthquake) did much to build a positive image. Soft power is critical. Draining the swamps where extremism breeds will require increasing foreign aid to poor Muslim countries, creating economic and employment opportunities there, and desisting from policies that reward only the elites of the recipient societies.

Eighth, the US must accept the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have become worldwide symbols of arbitrary torture and imprisonment. They demonstrate that, in dealing with suspected ‘terrorists’, the US has suspended subservience to the rule of law. In doing so, it does only marginally better than the real militants it seeks to combat. Nor should the US outsource the use of torture to repressive regimes like Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. This too can only backfire. For dealing with terrorism suspects, judicial mechanisms based on defendable principles, rather than expediency, must be developed.

Ninth, soldiers and officials must be prevented from desecrating Islamic holy symbols. Numerous such incidents are known to have taken place, exemplified by the flushing of a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo. Fortunately the US military has officially recognised that this is extremely dangerous, due to the boost it provides to extremists. Of course, violation of rules in combat situations may be difficult to prevent. The award of knighthood to Salman Rushdie is another example of unwise provocation: it may or may not be justified on grounds of literary merit, but it instantly kindled Muslim anger.

Tenth, and finally, discriminating against Muslims living within Western societies is both morally wrong, and will only invite further radicalisation. One sees that Christians, Jews and Hindus are able to freely run private educational institutions in the US, but Muslim schools are viewed with much suspicion. A secular society must have no preferences between religions. Any perceived deviation from this is sufficient to convey to a minority group that it is an object of persecution. Indeed, paranoia is easily detectable in the US Muslim community. Education in the West must therefore be secular in word and spirit, and all schools should be open to all faiths. In other words, no religious schools should be permitted. Unfortunately there is little chance of this at the moment, as US politics have become increasingly captive to the politics of born-again Christians who see the world through a biblical prism. The UK, too, needs to secularise itself, perhaps on the French model. Its multiculturalism is not working. Like Turkey, it should ban the veil in government buildings.

What Muslims must do

There is little justice to be found in history. Nevertheless, sometimes nemesis doggedly pursues the past. Muslim states that had pushed the Islamist agenda are today besieged by the forces they helped to create.

Pakistan is the prime example. Twenty-five years ago, under a military regime, prayers in government departments were deemed compulsory, punishments were meted out to those who did not fast during Ramadan, beards were encouraged, selections for academic posts required that the candidate demonstrate knowledge of Islamic teachings, and jihad was propagated through schoolbooks. But the same army – whose men were recruited under the banner of jihad, and which saw itself as the fighting arm of Islam – today stands accused of betrayal, and is almost daily targeted by Islamist suicide bombers. Since 2001, it has lost over a thousand men fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Slogans once common at army recruiting centres (for instance, Jihad for Allah) are now in the trash can, and bearded officers are losing out in promotions.

The rise of Islamic militancy in Pakistan owes much to the cowardly deference of Pakistani political leaders to mullah blackmail. Their instinctive response has been to seek appeasement. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto suddenly turned Islamic in his final days, as he made a desperate, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to save his government by banning alcohol, declaring Friday a holiday, and proclaiming Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Benazir Bhutto, fearing mullah backlash, made no attempt to challenge the horrific antiwoman Hudood and blasphemy laws during her premierships. And Mian Nawaz Sharif went a step further, by attempting to turn Pakistan into a Saudi Arabia by instituting sharia laws.

In Bangladesh, the Jamaat-i-Islami and Islamic Oikya Jote have been coalition partners of the BNP, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s party. During Khaleda Zia’s third term, there was a rise in attacks on Ahmadis and Hindus, a ban on Ahmadi publications, and a rise in religious militancy in general. During her times in office, Khaleda Zia used her fundamentalist allies as weapons against Sheikh Hasina Wajed, her bitter political and personal rival. Both leaders bicker and accuse the other of encouraging terrorism, while refusing to face up to their own responsibilities. In all of this, the Jamaat has been the winner, having set up thousands of madrassas, thus giving a significant impetus for training jihadist fighters who can fight causes around the world.

But blaming individual states and political leaders does not make for a satisfactory explanation of the huge rise in global Islamic militancy. One must seek reasons at a broader level. It is a sad truth that Muslims have little presence in today’s world affairs, in science or in culture. This has led to diminished self-esteem, as well as increasing recourse to political Islam. Some dream of a new global caliphate. But the premises of this politics are false. Each blow inflicted by America after 9/11 has led Islamists to predict that the pain and humiliation will force all Muslims to close ranks, forget old grudges, purge traitors and renegades from their ranks, and generate a collective rage great enough to take on the power of today’s governing civilisation. Each time, they have been dead wrong.

So what do Muslims need to do? A paradigm shift is essential. Muslims must realise that the awesome strength of Western civilisation – which also made possible its predatory imperialism – springs from accepting the premises of science and logic, respecting democratic institutions (at least within national borders), allowing value systems to evolve, and boldly challenging dogma without being condemned for blasphemy. They must connect the West’s success with personal freedom and liberty, superior work ethics, artistic and scientific creativity, and the compulsive urge to innovate and experiment.

Muslims, if they are to be a part of mainstream civilisation, will have to adapt to a new universal cultural climate, one that accepts human rights as defined by the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the equality of men and women. On the part of Muslim minorities and immigrants to non-Muslim countries, this means acceptance of different behavioural norms, and a move away from the current tendency of ghettoisation and towards greater integration into the larger society.

Meanwhile, Muslims themselves must stop believing convoluted conspiracy theories that purport to explain their states of weakness. For example, it is widely held that today’s sectarian warfare is a consequence of some cunningly remote manipulations by enemies of Islam. But in fact, the Shia-Sunni schism, and the first related bloodbath, followed almost immediately after the death of the Prophet Mohammad.

Muslims must also stop dreaming of theocracy and sharia law as solutions to their predicaments. This means acknowledging the sovereignty of the people rather than the rule of Allah, the latter by way of a self-appointed priesthood, such as vilayat-e-faqih and khilafat-e-arz. These are essentially prescriptions for a theocracy run by mullahs. It is simply impossible to run modern states while remaining shackled to medieval religious laws. Economic development, an expansion of individual liberties, democracy, an explosive growth in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities – these and a host of other benefits will forever remain distant dreams without the modernisation of thought. The only way by which Muslim societies can become democratic, pluralistic and free from violent extremism is by going through their own internal struggles. Indigenous reform is difficult but possible. Islam is certainly as immutable as the Koran, but values held by Muslims have changed over the centuries.

The role of the left

Looking down at planet Earth from above, one would see a bloody battlefield, where imperial might and religious fundamentalism are locked in bitter struggle. Whose victory or defeat should one wish for? There cannot be an unequivocal preference; each dispute must be looked at separately. And the answers seem to lie on the left of the political spectrum, as long as we are able to recognise what the left actually stands for.

The leftwing agenda is a positive one. It rests upon hope for a happier and more humane world that is grounded in reason, education and economic justice. It provides a sound moral compass to a world that is losing direction. One must navigate a course safely away from the xenophobes of the US and Europe – who see Islam as an evil to be suppressed or conquered – and also away from the large number of Muslims across the world who justify acts of terrorism and violence as part of asymmetric warfare. No ‘higher authority’ defines the leftwing agenda, and no covenant of belief defines a ‘leftist’. There is no card to be carried or oath to be taken. But secularism, universalistic ideas of human rights, and freedom of belief are non-negotiable. Domination by reasons of class, race, national origin, gender or sexual orientation are all equally unacceptable. In practical terms, this means that the left defends workers from capitalists, peasants from landlords, the colonised from the colonisers, religious minorities from state persecution, the dispossessed from the occupiers, women from male oppression, Muslims from Western Islamophobes, populations of Western countries from terrorists, and so on.

Mobilisation on the left is urgently needed at a time when extremists on both sides of the present divide have moved to centre stage. Even after the end of George W Bush’s presidency, the Americans are bound to continue bombing Muslim lands. They think they can win. But their power, though large, is limited. Iraq has proven the point. On the other side, Islamist groups will continue to recruit successfully, so long as a large number of Muslims feel that they are being unfairly targeted, and that justice has ceased to matter in world affairs. America cannot win. Nor can the Islamists. It is for the left to bring sanity to the world, by rising above imperialism, xenophobia, cultural determinism and religious extremism, and drawing the attention of the people back onto their real problems.

Himal Southasian | October-November 2007

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945, by Milton Mayer (Introduction and Chapter 1)

I am going to be posting the entire text of Milton Mayer's fascinating, thought-provoking book on how ordinary Germans became Nazis, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1993-1945. Here is the first installment, the Introduction and Chapter 1.

Sign of the times

Today I saw this Target ad, which reminds me of all the instructional films about "duck and cover" during the Cold War.


Here's the Target Family Safety Planning Guide the ad links to:


Here are some old "civil defense" propaganda posters for comparison:

Turning Ahmadinejad Into Public Enemy No. 1

From the informed commenter Juan Cole comes this description of the Two Minutes Hate of yet another Middle Easterner by an increasingly moblike, nationalistic America:

Turning Ahmadinejad Into Public Enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial is all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.
by Juan Cole
Salon.com
September 24, 2007

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited.

The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the Sept. 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of al-Qaida, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.

Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. Critics have also cited his statements about the Holocaust or his hopes that the Israeli state will collapse. He has been depicted as a Hitler figure intent on killing Israeli Jews, even though he is not commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces, has never invaded any other country, denies he is an anti-Semite, has never called for any Israeli civilians to be killed, and allows Iran’s 20,000 Jews to have representation in Parliament.

There is, in fact, remarkably little substance to the debates now raging in the United States about Ahmadinejad. His quirky personality, penchant for outrageous one-liners, and combative populism are hardly serious concerns for foreign policy. Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran’s rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo. The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.

The neoconservatives are even claiming that the United States has been at war with Iran since 1979. As Glenn Greenwald points out, this assertion is absurd. In the ’80s, the Reagan administration sold substantial numbers of arms to Iran. Some of those beating the war drums most loudly now, like think-tank rat Michael Ledeen, were middlemen in the Reagan administration’s unconstitutional weapons sales to Tehran. The sales would have been a form of treason if in fact the United States had been at war with Iran at that time, so Ledeen is apparently accusing himself of treason.

But the right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by Iran’s ceremonial president to the U.N. General Assembly has generated sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who recently pressed Gen. David Petraeus on the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons smuggling into Iraq from that country (thus cleverly using one war of choice to foment another).

American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm among the Europeans and at the United Nations for impeding Tehran’s nuclear energy research program. While the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy purposes. Washington wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the United Nations but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of Russian and Chinese reluctance. The Bush administration may attempt to create a “coalition of the willing” of Iran boycotters outside the U.N. framework.

Washington is also unhappy with Mohammad ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has been unable to find credible evidence that Iran has a weapons program, and he told Italian television this week, “Iran does not constitute a certain and immediate threat for the international community.” He stressed that no evidence had been found for underground production sites or hidden radioactive substances, and he urged a three-month waiting period before the U.N. Security Council drew negative conclusions.

ElBaradei intervened to call for calm after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said last week that if the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear research program were unsuccessful, it could lead to war. Kouchner later clarified that he was not calling for an attack on Iran, but his remarks appear to have been taken seriously in Tehran.

Kouchner made the remarks after there had already been substantial speculation in the U.S. press that impatient hawks around U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney were seeking a pretext for a U.S. attack on Iran. Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation probably correctly concluded in Salon last week that President Bush himself has for now decided against launching a war on Iran. But Clemons worries that Cheney and the neoconservatives, with their Israeli allies, are perfectly capable of setting up a provocation that would lead willy-nilly to war.

David Wurmser, until recently a key Cheney advisor on Middle East affairs and the coauthor of the infamous 1996 white paper that urged an Iraq war, revealed to his circle that Cheney had contemplated having Israel strike at Iranian nuclear research facilities and then using the Iranian reaction as a pretext for a U.S. war on that country. Prominent and well-connected Afghanistan specialist Barnett Rubin also revealed that he was told by an administration insider that there would be an “Iran war rollout” by the Cheneyites this fall.

It should also be stressed that some elements in the U.S. officer corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency are clearly spoiling for a fight with Iran because the Iranian-supported Shiite nationalists in Iraq are a major obstacle to U.S. dominance in Iraq. Although very few U.S. troops in Iraq are killed by Shiites, military spokesmen have been attempting to give the impression that Tehran is ordering hits on U.S. troops, a clear casus belli. Disinformation campaigns that accuse Iran of trying to destabilize the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government — a government Iran actually supports — could lay the groundwork for a war. Likewise, with the U.S. military now beginning patrols on the Iran-Iraq border, the possibility is enhanced of a hostile incident spinning out of control.

The Iranians have responded to all this bellicosity with some chest-thumping of their own, right up to the final hours before Ahmadinejad’s American visit. The Iranian government declared “National Defense Week” on Saturday, kicking it off with a big military parade that showed off Iran’s new Qadr-1 missiles, with a range of 1,100 miles. Before he left Iran for New York on Sunday morning, Ahmadinejad inspected three types of Iranian-manufactured jet fighters, noting that it was the anniversary of Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 (which the Iranian press attributed to American urging, though that is unlikely).

The display of this military equipment was accompanied by a raft of assurances on the part of the Iranian ayatollahs, politicians and generals that they were entirely prepared to deploy the missiles and planes if they were attacked. A top military advisor to Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei told the Mehr News Agency on Saturday, “Today, the United States must know that their 200,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are within the reach of Iran’s fire. When the Americans were beyond our shores, they were not within our reach, but today it is very easy for us to deal them blows.” Khamenei, the actual commander in chief of the armed forces, weighed in as well, reiterating that Iran would never attack first but pledging: “Those who make threats should know that attack on Iran in the form of hit and run will not be possible, and if any country invades Iran it will face its very serious consequences.”

The threat to target U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the unveiling of the Qadr-1 were not aggressive in intent, but designed to make the point that Iran could also play by Richard M. Nixon’s “madman” strategy, whereby you act so wildly as to convince your enemy you are capable of anything. Ordinarily a poor non-nuclear third-world country might be expected to be supine before an attack by a superpower. But as Mohammad Reza Bahonar, the Iranian deputy speaker of Parliament, warned: “Any military attack against Iran will send the region up in flames.”

In the end, this is hardly the kind of conflagration the United States should be enabling. If a spark catches, it will not advance any of America’s four interests in the Middle East: petroleum, markets, Israel and hegemony.

The Middle East has two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and nearly half its natural gas, and its fields are much deeper than elsewhere in the world, so that its importance will grow for the United States and its allies. Petro-dollars and other wealth make the region an important market for U.S. industry, especially the arms industry. Israel is important both for reasons of domestic politics and because it is a proxy for U.S. power in the region. By “hegemony,” I mean the desire of Washington to dominate political and economic outcomes in the region and to forestall rivals such as China from making it their sphere of influence.

The Iranian government (in which Ahmadinejad has a weak role, analogous to that of U.S. vice presidents before Dick Cheney) poses a challenge to the U.S. program in the Middle East. Iran is, unlike most Middle Eastern countries, large. It is geographically four times the size of France, and it has a population of 70 million (more than France or the United Kingdom). As an oil state, it has done very well from the high petroleum prices of recent years. It has been negotiating long-term energy deals with China and India, much to the dismay of Washington. It provides financial support to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese Shiites who vote for the Hezbollah Party in Lebanon. By overthrowing the Afghanistan and Iraq governments and throwing both countries into chaos, the United States has inadvertently enabled Iran to emerge as a potential regional power, which could challenge Israel and Saudi Arabia and project both soft and hard power in the strategic Persian Gulf and the Levant.

And now the American war party, undeterred by the quagmire in Iraq, convinced that their model of New Empire is working, is eager to go on the offensive again. They may yet find a pretext to plunge the United States into another war. Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York this year will not include his visit to Ground Zero, because that is hallowed ground for American patriotism and he is being depicted as not just a critic of the United States but as the leader of an enemy state. His visit may, however, be ground zero for the next big military struggle of the United States in the Middle East, one that really will make Iraq look like a cakewalk.

***

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

American snipers lure Iraqis with "bait", shoot them

This article from the Washington Post portrays the elaborate self-delusion of American military forces trying to convince themselves that the killing they are doing is right.

U.S. Aims To Lure Insurgents With ‘Bait’: Snipers Describe Classified Program
by Josh White and Joshua Partlow
The Washington Post
September 24, 2007

A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.

“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”

In documents obtained by The Washington Post from family members of the accused soldiers, Didier said members of the U.S. military’s Asymmetric Warfare Group visited his unit in January and later passed along ammunition boxes filled with the “drop items” to be used “to disrupt the AIF [Anti-Iraq Forces] attempts at harming Coalition Forces and give us the upper hand in a fight.”

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a baiting program should be examined “quite meticulously” because it raises troubling possibilities, such as what happens when civilians pick up the items.

“In a country that is awash in armaments and magazines and implements of war, if every time somebody picked up something that was potentially useful as a weapon, you might as well ask every Iraqi to walk around with a target on his back,” Fidell said.

Soldiers said that about a dozen platoon members were aware of the program, and that numerous others knew about the “drop items” but did not know their purpose. Two soldiers who had not been officially informed about the program came forward with allegations of wrongdoing after they learned they were going to be punished for falling asleep on a sniper mission, according to the documents.

Army officials declined to discuss the classified program, details of which appear in unclassified investigative documents and in transcripts of court testimony. Criminal investigators wrote that they found materials related to the program in a white cardboard box and an ammunition can at the sniper unit’s base.

“We don’t discuss specific methods targeting enemy combatants,” said Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman. “The accused are charged with murder and wrongfully placing weapons on the remains of Iraqi nationals. There are no classified programs that authorize the murder of local nationals and the use of ‘drop weapons’ to make killings appear legally justified.”

It is unclear whether the program reached elsewhere in Iraq and how many people were killed through the baiting tactics.

Members of the sniper platoon have said they felt pressure from commanders to kill more insurgents because U.S. units in the area had taken heavy losses. The sniper unit — dubbed “the painted demons” because of the use of tiger-stripe face paint — often went on missions into hostile areas to intercept insurgents going to and from hidden weapons caches.

“It’s our job out here to lay people down who are doing bad things,” Spec. Joshua L. Michaud testified in Iraq in July, discussing the unit’s numerous casualties. “I don’t want to call it revenge, but we needed to find a way so that we could get the bad guys the right way and still maintain the right military things to do.”

Within months of the program’s introduction, three snipers in Didier’s platoon were charged with murder for allegedly using those items and others to make shootings seem legitimate. Though it does not appear that the three alleged shootings were specifically part of the classified program, defense attorneys argue that the program may have opened the door to the soldiers’ actions because it blurred the legal lines of killing in a complex war zone.

James D. Culp, a civilian attorney for one of the snipers, Sgt. Evan Vela, said the soldiers became “battle-fatigued pawns in a newfangled concept of ‘baiting’ warfare that, like an onion, perhaps looked good on the surface, but started stinking to high hell the minute the layers were pulled back and scrutinized.”

Spec. Jorge Sandoval and Staff Sgt. Michael Hensley are accused by the military of placing a spool of wire into the pocket of an Iraqi man Sandoval had shot on April 27 on Hensley’s order. The man had been cutting grass with a rusty sickle when he was shot, according to court documents.

The military alleges that the killing of the man carrying the sickle was inappropriate. Hensley and Sandoval have been charged with murder and with planting evidence.

As Sandoval and Hensley approached the corpse, according to testimony and court documents, they allegedly placed a spool of wire, often used by insurgents to detonate roadside bombs, into the man’s pocket in an attempt to make the case for the kill ironclad.

One soldier who came forward with the allegations, Pfc. David C. Petta, told the same court that he believed the classified items were for dropping on people the unit had killed, “to enforce if we killed somebody that we knew was a bad guy but we didn’t have the evidence to show for it.” Petta had not been officially briefed about the program.

Two weeks after that killing, Sandoval and his sniper team stopped for the night in a concealed “hide” in the village of Jurf as Sakhr along the Euphrates River. While other snipers slept, Hensley watched as an Iraqi man, Genei Nesir Khudair, slowly approached the hide. He radioed to Didier, then a first lieutenant, for permission to go for a “close kill.”

“I told him that as the ground forces commander, I would authorize that if it was necessary,” Didier testified. “And about five minutes later, he told me that he had indeed killed the individual.”

The U.S. military alleges that Vela, on Hensley’s order, shot the Iraqi man twice in the head with a 9mm pistol after he had been taken into custody. It was Vela’s first kill, and he was visibly shaken. “He looked weird,” Sgt. Robert Redfern testified. “Just messed up from it. How would you feel if you had to shoot someone?”

At the time the two shots rang out, Sandoval was on guard duty about 20 meters away, out of sight of Vela, inside a broken-down pump house along the Euphrates River, soldiers testified.

Vela and Hensley told investigators that the man had an AK-47 with him and that he posed a threat, but other soldiers have alleged that the AK-47 was planted next to Khudair after he was shot.

Hensley’s attorney could not be reached to comment. Sandoval’s attorney, Capt. Craig Drummond, thinks his client is innocent in both deaths.

“Literally, they have charged this guy with two murders when on both occasions he was just doing his job,” Drummond said.

Drummond said Sandoval did not have anything to do with placing an AK-47 in the pump-house killing. Sandoval made a statement to investigators discussing his involvement in planting the command wire on the first victim.

“That was done by one of the soldiers at the scene basically out of stupidity. The guys were trying to ensure that there were no questions at all about this kill,” Drummond said. “It was done to overly justify a kill that didn’t need justification.”

Hensley is also charged with killing an Iraqi man whom he approached after the sniper team noticed the man placing wires on a road. Hensley shot him outside his home, maintaining that the man appeared to be moving for a weapon.

Two and a half months after the shooting near the pump house, authorities seized Sandoval while he was vacationing at his mother’s house in Laredo, Tex. The charges have baffled family members, who describe Sandoval as a caring and honest young man who is being punished for following orders.

“This has been a shock to all of us,” said his eldest sister, Norma Vasquez. “He’s been in shock, too, he doesn’t know what . . . is going on.”

Sandoval, a former high school ROTC member, is scheduled to face a court-martial in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Vela’s father, Curtis Carnahan, said he thinks the military is rushing the cases and is holding the proceedings in a war zone to shield facts from the U.S. public.

“It’s an injustice that is being done to them,” Carnahan said. “I feel like you can’t prosecute our soldiers for acts of war and threaten them with years and years of confinement when this program, if it comes to the light of day, was clearly coming from higher levels. . . . All those people who said ‘go use this stuff’ just disappeared, like they never sanctioned it.”

Partlow reported from Baghdad. Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

University of Florida police shock student with Taser at Kerry speech

From the Associated Press. My conclusions: 1) Tasers should be outlawed. They are not used as a less-lethal replacement for guns, but as torture devices. 2) We live in a Fascist country, in which police consider the public the enemy, and violence against innocent people is acceptable. 3) John Kerry is not a leader. Also see this article from Salon, with a video of the incident and other Tasering incidents, including the infamous UCLA library video.

Student Arrested, Tasered at Kerry Event
By TRAVIS REED

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — A university student with a history of taping his own practical jokes was Tasered by campus police and arrested after loudly and repeatedly trying to ask U.S. Sen. John Kerry questions during a campus forum.

Andrew Meyer, 21, spent a night in jail before his release from jail Tuesday morning on his own recognizance. He had no comment when he left. His attorney, Robert Griscti, did not return messages seeking comment.

Videos of the Monday night incident, posted on several Web sites and played repeatedly on television news, show University of Florida police officers pulling Meyer away from the microphone after he asks Kerry about impeaching President Bush and whether he and Bush were both members of the secret society Skull and Bones at Yale University.

University spokesman Steve Orlando said Meyer was asked to leave the microphone after his allotted time was up. Meyer can be seen refusing to walk away and getting upset that the microphone was cut off.

As two officers take Meyer by the arms, Kerry, D-Mass., can be heard saying, "That's all right, let me answer his question."

Audience members applaud, and Meyer struggles for several seconds as up to four officers try to remove him from the room. Meyer screams for help and tries to break away from officers with his arms flailing at them, then is forced to the ground and officers order him to stop resisting.

As Kerry tells the audience he will answer the student's "very important question," Meyer yells at the officers to release him, crying out, "Don't Tase me, bro," just before he is shocked by the Taser. He is then led from the room, screaming, "What did I do?"

Meyer was arrested on charges of resisting an officer and disturbing the peace, according to Alachua County jail records, but the State Attorney's Office had yet to make the formal charging decision. Police recommended charges of resisting arrest with violence, a felony, and disturbing the peace and interfering with school administrative functions, a misdemeanor.

University President J. Bernard Machen issued a statement Tuesday saying he requested the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate the arrest. Officials said it would determine whether the officers used an appropriate level of force.

Machen called the situation "regretful" in an afternoon news conference and said two officers involved in the incident were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the probe.

"We're absolutely committed to having a safe environment for our faculty and our students so that a free exchange of ideas can occur," Machen said.

Kerry said Tuesday he regretted that a healthy discussion was interrupted and that he never had a dialogue end that way in 37 years of public appearances. He also said he hoped neither the student nor police were injured.

"Whatever happened, the police had a reason, had made their decision that there was something they needed to do. Then it's a law enforcement issue, not mine," he told The Associated Press in Washington.

Meyer has his own Web site and it contains several "comedy" videos that he appears in. In one, he stands in a street with a sign that says "Harry Dies" after the latest Harry Potter book was released. In another, he acts like a drunk while trying to pick up a woman in a bar.

The site also has what is called a "disorganized diatribe" attributed to Meyer that criticizes the Iraq war, the news media for not covering the conflict enough and the American public for paying too much attention to celebrity news.

Associated Press writer Andrew Miga in Washington contributed to this report.

Catastrophist governance and the need for a tricameral legislature

Interesting essay.

Catastrophist Governance and the Need for a Tricameral Legislature
William Irwin Thompson
Printed in Annals of Earth, Spring, 2007 Issue.

As American school children, we were all raised to believe the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson's "That government is best that governs least." Americans of a Republican and Libertarian persuasion feel that interference of the state in the life of the individual is evil, and the excesses of fascism and communism in the nineteen-thirties and forties confirmed their Superman comic book sense of the superiority of "The American Way." Even to this day in a new century with new problems, the Republicans and Libertarians in their think-tanks like the Cato Institute continue to rant on about the evils of Big Government.

When government is seen as an intrusive menance, then cutting taxes as a way of starving it to death is the basic neocon philosophy of governance--a philosophy that Bush has eagerly sought to implement. In an updated version of Kipling's nineteenth-century imperialism of "the white man's burden," the neocons sought to bring suburban Right Wing party politics to tribal, medieval, and socialist societies in Afghanistan and Iraq in a policy of enforced modernization through unrestrained market economics and military invasion.

The liberalism of FDR's New Deal was a response to a man-made economic catastrophe, but the historical landscape we are now entering is one of natural catastrophes: of tsunamis that can devestate the coastlines of many countries at once, of earthquakes and hurricanes that can devastate entire cities, of volcanic eruptions that can darken the planet's skies and eliminate summers and the harvests that come at their finish, and pandemics spread by the jet travel of economic globalization. When one adds human contributions to the forces of nature in the form of global climate change, then one begins to see a new world in which the individual citizen is utterly powerless to address the rise of oceans or the shift of tectonic plates.

A philosophy of government based upon nothing more than tax cuts simply won't cut it any more. In a tranquil world, nature can be taken for granted as a stage upon which the human drama unfolds, and agriculture and industry can be used as the foundation for a business model of political governance. Farmers and merchants became the first wave of representatives elected to Congress; then, as the process of governance became larger and more complex, lawyers became the representatives of the businessmen who supported their campaigns for office.

But this tranquil world in which nature is a stage only for human ambition is a thing of the past. The rumblings of a new global storm have sounded on the horizon with the tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004, and Katrina in 2005. When hurricanes again devastate our coastal cities, and earthquakes strike the populous cities of the West, this global storm will strike us head-on and full force. At that time we will need something other than businessmen grousing about Big Government and proposing tax-cuts for the wealthy to serve as our philosophy of government.

What will the politics of catastrophe look like? In a crisis, our first instinct will be to revert to the archaic politics of the primate band and look to some alpha male to deliver us from evil. We will pray to some archaic paternal god in the sky to save us and we will surrender to the will of some dominant Big Brother to protect us through martial law and even stronger versions of the Patriot Act. But alpha male dominance and military power will be utterly incapable of addressing the problems we face. In this crisis, we will need scientists and not more soldiers and lawyers.

Certainly, when East Coast multiple hurricanes overlap with West Coast earthquakes at a time of massive neocon war deficits, we will enter a time when natural catastrophes, and not just terrorist attacks, create the punctuated equilibirium that drives evolution. At that time, the smug boomerism of capitalism that takes nature for granted in industrial development and distorts the ecological sciences to reinforce its own political ideology will be as historically irrelevant as peasant magic was to the industrial revolution. At this time, whatever culture is able to miniaturize science into a civilization—American, European, or Asian—and keep it intact during a period of catastrophes, whether from gobal warming or volcanic eruptions, or both, will determine the fate of humanity.

No doubt, human fear more than Western science will shape our response and probably create a mood of religious superstition and End of the World popular scenarios in which the face of Jesus is seen in the clouds and Elvis sightings are reported over Graceland. The Executive branch of government will probably once again seek to manipulate this fear to its own ends in the same manner that it used the fear of terrorists to secure its re-election, but in other biomes within our national ecology of mind, we might just begin to glimpse an opportunity for a new era of democratic revolution.

Our eighteenth century constitution was conceived by rural aristocratic land owners and slave holders who feared popular democracy as the rule of the urban mob, but it was also midwived by urban Federalists who wished to bring forth the economy of a modern nation-state. The machinery of the state with its checks and balances was an eighteenth-century steam engine fueled by the people but held on course by a governor. A bicameral legislature was that century's vision of balance between passion and reflection--between a lower house of pushy and uncouth merchants and farmers and an upper house of men of property and culture.

But in an age of global warming and suden catastrophes from pandemics, earthquakes, coastal innundation, tsunamis and volcanoes, a scientific academy will be needed for a tricameral legislature in which government is provided with sound and objective scientific information and informed guidance. The Bush Administration sought to constrain and edit science so that it would tell it what it wanted to hear for its own neocon ideological reasons; in other words, it sought to treat science in the same way it treated Intelligence and the CIA in particular. Since the CIA has only the single client of the Presidency, both the CIA and the Supreme Court have been corrupted by the growth of the "Imperial Presidency." A third chamber will be needed to be composed of truly intelligent and independent scientists, artists, scholars, and professors of constitutional law. These outstanding citizens will need to be men and women of "intellectual property," and not simply popular celebrities chosen through elections funded by the wealthy and the few owners of the media. They will need to be elected to this third chamber by an ad hoc electoral college composed of the faculties of the state universities and the outstanding private universities of the nation, from Harvard in the East to Stanford in the West. And at the same time that this twenty-first century ad hoc Electoral College is created, our present anti-democratic eighteenth-century Electoral College should be abolished. The President should be elected by a simple popular majority so that Florida, 2000 can never happen again. And it is this third chamber that should nominate members to the Supreme Court based upon their knowledge of constitutional law and not their party politics. In the election of 2000 we saw what happens when the Supreme Court intrudes and applies party politics to negate a plurality in the popular vote.

To avoid the imperial presidency and the neocons' doctrine of "the unitary executive" that have sucked power away from Congress, something needs to be done about the flawed institution of the American Presidency. The conventional wisdom of the Founding Fathers was that to avoid a takeover of the republic by a military dictator one should insure that the military was under the governance of a civilian President as Commander-in-Chief; but in choosing a military hero as our first president, the Founding Fathers also showed how difficult it was to avoid the shadow of Julius Caesar. The neocons' perversion of the Founding Fathers' wisdom has transformed our civilian presidency into nothing but the Commander-in-Chief of the world's largest military-industrial establishment. As the Presidency has evolved over centuries, we have seen--even before the horrors of Bush and Cheney--that purely civilian presidents like Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman were capable of suspending habeas corpus and creating a National Security State without the need of a military putsch. Parliamentary democracies-- such as Ireland, Germany, and Israel--have settled for the wisdom of separating the Head of State from the Head of the Government with the two offices of President and Prime Minister, or Chancellor. Switzerland, a country refreshingly immune to charisma, chose the most radical solution of all by having an executive council in which the Presidency rotates among the members of its "Bundesrat." Having grown sick of our contemporary simulacrum of a Roman Emperor, as well as the dominance in American culture of sports celebrities, movie stars, and military heroes, I confess that I am attracted to this bland Swiss model, but our American culture has so labored over the centuries to construct a hagiographic image of the President that I doubt that Americans could ever deliver themselves from this idolatrous worship of POTUS. POTUS omnipotens est. So our popularly elected President would most probably be expected to chair an Executive Council for the four years of the term of office.

To avoid the excesses of the imperial presidency, I propose that in the catastrophic condidtions to come, we replace the Presidency with an Executive Council of four, consisting of the popularly-elected president, the popularly-elected Vice President as President of the Senate, and one representative elected by the new Academy of Arts and Sciences and another by the traditional House of Representatives. The popularly elected President should be defined as the Head of the Government, and the President of the Academy of Arts and Sciences should be defined as the Head of State. At the end of four years, the two chambers of the Academy and the House would elect new representatives to the Executive Council, so the Executive Council would change along with the popularly elected President and Vice President. The line of succession in which the Speaker of the House remains third in line after the popularly elected President and Vice President could remain as is in our present constitutional situation. Since the Speaker of the House has enough to do in overseeing the largest third house of the Congress, it might better serve the model of an executive council if the House elected another representative to the Council and that this position was separate from the position of Speaker of the House. It would be the work of this Executive Council to sign bills into law through a ¾'s majority. The President could remain as Commander-in-Chief, since it is hard to direct a war by committee, and the current Presidential Cabinet could continue its work of advising the Council and administering the various departments of government, such as Agriculture, Defense, and Foreign Affairs or "State."

Would conflict and abuse of power be avoided in such a situation of an executive Council of Four? Given human nature, naturally not. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were a disaster, so there is no absolute protection from evil simply by sharing it, but there is hope that if all are not of the same party and ideology, there are more opportunities for balance and self-correction.

Of course, I realize that such an amending of the Constitution would open up the political process to crazies and not simply scientists--and to some crazy scientists as well. The possibility for such dramatic change would only be possible under unimaginable circumstances that I am here trying to imagine—such as the innundation of the East Coast and the earthquake devastation of the cities of the West Coast. Under such circumstances of unimaginable crisis, we would need to hold a new Constitutional Convention composed of the members of Congress and the Electoral College of the members of the faculties of our universities and colleges who would then elect their representatives for the creation of the new Third House, the Academy of Arts and Sciences. This new tricameral legislature would then address itself to the reconstruction of our devastated environment and polity. Since the Senate would probably be fearful of the lessening of its power, the third house should probably be limited to two members from each state and be required to submit legislation to the popularly-elected House and not directly to the Executive Council. I am not a constitutional lawyer, so it should be the work of any future Constitutional Convention to hammer out the details on the iron anvil of politics.

My modest proposal for a tricameral legislature and an amending of the Constitution is merely an amateur's sketch, but the sketch, like any political cartoon, does come from a pattern-recognition of the dangers inherent in our new mediocracy. The electronic media have created a new technopeasantry whose attacks on the imaginary castle of science's Dr. Frankenstein now threaten to eliminate scientific textbooks from our schools to replace them with the Bible. As popular ministers thrust themselves to the head of the empassioned multitude, waving their Bibles in the air, we will be brought back to the ugly Thirty Years War of religions that preceded the Age of Revolution from 1689 to 1789. If we slide into that abyss of a new dark age, then we will have indeed fallen off the edge of history.

Warriors and high priests have been the entwined poles of human culture since the origin of urban civilization in the fourth millennium B.C.E. Now that formation has expressed its sunset-effect in the evangelical fundamentalism of Karl Rove's redesign of the Republican party and Cheney's Halliburton hostile take-over of Iraq. This supernova of the dying star of militarism and religious fundamentalism is, of course, not confined to Christianity, but also expresses itself in the extremism of the Israeli West Bank settlers, right-wing Hindu nationalists, and Islamist terrorists. In ideological thinking, the content camouflages the structure, and that is why very often in conflict extremes are very much like one another.

But this too shall pass. Like the Dark Ages and Inquisition that preceded the Renaissance, or the period of global slavery that preceded the Enlightenment, humanity has still a chance to face the coming era of ecological devastation, pandemics, and natural catastrophes and respond in a way other than chaos and rule by war lords in collapsed states. Like the Dark Age monks who miniaturized classical civilization and made it a curricular content inside medieval civilization, whatever cultural group that can miniaturize scientific civilization and place it within a new formation of a post-religious spirituality of fellowship and not followership will carry us across the great rift into a new stage of cultural evolution. If we fail, then the dark age interval will be much longer.