Indigenous People Speak Out...

By Dave Wheelock shed
August 28, 2004
A recent Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) conference in South Dakota provided ample evidence of the need to explore new directions to counter the environmental and cultural decline facing indigenous people.
The Protecting Mother Earth Gathering has been held annually at locations throughout North America since 1990. This year the four-day encampment, hosted by the Rosebud Lakota nation, convened on the edge of the sacred Black Hills. The meadow campground -- once Lakota homeland -- had to be rented before these local people could again feel their sacred earth beneath their feet.
I attended as a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin while interning with ReclaimDemocracy.org, a nonprofit organization working to restore citizen authority over corporations and revoke illegitimate corporate power. Plenary and breakout sessions addressed issues native communities continue to face: extraction of water, minerals, gas and other resources; pollution; and other environmental justice issues. A sense of urgency and personal pain prevailed as women and men from tribe after tribe related their communities' battles against destruction of their land and culture.
For native people, “the environment” is not an external luxury. We recognize the earth is a living being, and within her resides survival of culture and life itself. Those who believe these connections can be replaced with a culture of mass consumption are adrift from reality. Yet we cannot separate ourselves from this culture, for we are inexorably tied to “mainstream society” both physically and through our moral responsibilities as human beings native to this soil.
Several speakers used the term “colonization.” They referred not merely to economic domination by non-tribal entities, but also to something more personal and equally damaging: the absorption of young minds into a corporate culture of consumption that lacks respect for the natural world. This use of the term reflects a vivid understanding of the insidious nature of corporate intrusion into all areas of life -- in Indian Country and throughout the world.
During a plenary session on globalization and “free trade,” I was struck with the perception that indigenous people of all lands have been fighting defensive battles since others came to our shores, prairies, and forests. For generations, tribes have faced threats whose immediacy has the effect of denying the space to devise long-term solutions.
The litany of outrages against Indian communities delivered by the speakers' panel underlined my realization that those of us who struggle against the unrelenting and destructive forces of corporatization have been drawn into a shortsighted strategy of reacting to localized transgressions that fester everywhere. In doing so, we divide our limited time and money and disperse our considerable talents and energies.
During open discussion, I tried to convey the opportunity to seize the offensive by reshaping the structure of corporate power and not merely defending against their depredations. Corporations are not people -- they are creations of people that should not enjoy constitutional rights meant for citizens. I shared my belief that we can revoke the powers they so often abuse by educating ourselves on the history of corporations and then taking appropriate action at the local and state level, building momentum toward nationwide change.
I was encouraged by spontaneous applause for my remarks and the disappearance of all the ReclaimDemocracy.org brochures I'd left on an information table. Over the remainder of the conference several people took me aside to express their willingness to open this new front of engagement.
The most powerful tool in the hands of native people is our hard-won status in the United States and the worldwide community as sovereign nations. Meanwhile, environmental and progressive movements within “mainstream society” are subject to dismissal by the corporate-governmental establishment as “special interest groups.”
There lies a source of great potential strength in alliances between tribes, native non-profits like the Indigenous Environmental Network, and non-native equivalents such as ReclaimDemocracy.org. While our non-indigenous allies can bring their technological expertise and funding sources to bear on our common goals, tribal groups can contribute our political legitimacy, a vast experience of resistance, and a deeper level of understanding to the campaign.
Our Oneida nation has survived and even flourished by mindfully observing the dominant U.S. culture, then proactively using the knowledge gained for the benefit of all creation. All Americans might benefit from adopting a similar formula for action that centers on understanding corporations at the structural level and developing the strategies necessary to regain control of them.

"I'm very ashamed"
The former Texas official who got George Bush into the National Guard apologizes for making sure that young men with important "family names" did not have to fight in Vietnam.

Former TX Lt. Gov. Barnes Admits on Video That He Got George W. Bush, Son of a Rich Man, Into the TX Air Nat'l Guard While Kerry Volunteered to Face Enemy Fire in Vietnam (See "Barnes on Patriotism" Video)," goes to the source for this video, Austin4Kerry.com.

Imperialism Without Empire
By Jonathan Schell, The Nation
Is the United States -- as so many have said, in celebration or dismay -- a planet-mastering empire or not? The question presses upon us as George W. Bush gets ready to descend upon New York for the Republican convention, as he once descended upon the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln under the banner declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq. Just as the President's landing on the Lincoln invited an assessment of the Iraq war, so now his visit to New York invites assessment of the larger, global mission of the administration. (And, come to think of it, Manhattan Island, with its slim uptown and its broad-beamed downtown, is shaped rather like a gargantuan aircraft carrier.) The decision to hold the convention in New York City was apparently conceived as a triumphal return by the nation's savior to the scene of September 11. But the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President's policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire "axis of evil," consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, "Why do they hate us?" Whatever the reasons, "they" have multiplied to include most of the world. In the face of so much failure, I wrote recently to my book editor and friend Tom Engelhardt, America's title to global empire seems at the very least in question. (This column does double duty as the third in an exchange of letters on the subject between me and Engelhardt at his superb website, tomdispatch.com, sponsored by the Nation Institute. The earlier letters can be read at the website under the August 2004 posts.) Engelhardt responded with an eloquent list of America's imperial assets, including, among other items, its 700-plus military bases, its supine Congress, its nearly half-trillion-dollar military establishment, its division of the Earth into five military commands, its ambition to dominate space and its militarized political parties. So the answer to the question, "Is the United States a global imperial power?" must be an unequivocal yes. However, if the question is shifted very slightly, and we ask, "Is the United States a global empire?" the answer is less obvious. Bush's America plainly has global imperial ambition, but does it have the corresponding accomplishment? Perhaps the question can be better addressed by dividing it into two parts: first, whether the United States has the wherewithal to play an imperial role, and, second, whether the world is ready to receive American imperial direction. Clearly, the world's will to resist is as notable as the U.S. will to impose itself. It's sometimes said that America is militarily strong but politically weak (and economically in a gray zone). Yet even the extent of U.S. military strength, often called unchallengeable, is open to question. The United States definitely has the largest heap of weaponry on the planet. But if, as the remarkable American failure to have its way with the "axis" countries suggests, that military punch cannot produce the desired results, then is it correct to speak so confidently of unlimited military "strength"? Or is there, as I believe, something in the very fabric of today's world that tends to resist or elude or otherwise negate the operation of military force and, with it, imperial subjugation? Has "military strength" itself become weak? At the pinnacle of the global system, where the great powers face one another, conventional military superiority is stalemated by nuclear arms, already possessed by nine nations. The United States styles itself the sole superpower, but if push comes to shove can it defeat nuclear-armed China or Russia? The paralyzing, equalizing power conferred by nuclear arsenals goes unremarked on in our supposedly "unipolar" world (as if the influence of nuclear arms had simply disappeared with the end of the Cold War), because no acute conflict among the larger powers forces it on our attention. But as soon as a crisis arises, the fiction of unipolarity, even on the strictly military level, will become obvious. The confrontation with North Korea has already been instructive in this respect. That country's putative possession of just a few nuclear weapons (along with its considerable conventional forces) has probably been enough to deter the sole superpower from attacking it. The other, equally great, barrier to imperial expansion, acting at the base of the global system, is the ferocious resistance mounted by local populations. In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen. In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke. Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American "empire" a colossal leftover from a vanishing age? Let us admit, however, that the sudden popularity of global imperial ambition in the United States is not due entirely to arrogance and lust for power, evident as these are. It is also a response, however perverse, to requirements of the time that even the antagonists of empire will acknowledge are inescapable. The Earth is fragile, and the Earth is becoming one -- economically, ecologically and digitally. A global politics to deal with both conditions is required, and the idea of empire, especially of global empire, offers the most familiar answer, historically speaking, to this need. That it is a desperately wrong answer is shown by the sweeping failure of the Bush policies. But defeating the Bush Administration will not be enough. The need for a truly global politics -- a need that, in part, called forth America's misbegotten empire -- must be met.

Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. He is most recently the author of The Unconquerable World (Metropolitan Books) and A Hole in the World, a collection of his "Letters from Ground Zero" columns for the Nation Magazine.

I Posted This a while ago...Lost in the Archives

With U.S. combat deaths approaching 600 (note: now at 960) since major combat operations ended in Iraq nearly 16 months ago (in contrast to only 109 before the fall of Baghdad), the Pentagon has decided it's time to get some help in figuring out how long the postwar fighting might last. The Army quietly released a contract announcement last week that it was seeking to calculate "the possible intensity and duration of a guerrilla war in Iraq." The Army wants to award a contract to the Dupuy Institute, a Washington-area think tank, by the end of the month. The institute will be asked to study "casualties from various guerrilla conflicts in the 20th century," including the Greek civil war, the Malaysian insurrection and the Indochina war (the Vietnam War isn't specifically mentioned), the contract announcement says. Charting the death and destruction of those conflicts should tell the Pentagon "if the casualties in Iraq will decline over time, increase over time or remain at a steady state." The study will provide the basis for estimating costs, the announcement says, and "will also attempt to address projected force sizes for such a war." There was no immediate word from the Pentagon on a question likely to be raised by critics of our postwar planning: What took so long?

Imperial Hubris Costs Lives
Blondie

Good Reading from Tom Dispatch

The Militarization of our Fragile Republic
by Tom Engelhardt
Dear Jonathan, The slew of letters our previous exchange about empire brought into the Tomdispatch e-box indicates that we're hardly the only ones with empire on the brain. Letter-writers, articulate and thoughtful, young and old, wanted to remind us that the U.S. had always been an empire; or that the real imperial thrust of the globe was corporate and/or consumerist (that, for instance, whatever happened to the Bush administration, KBR, the base-building, military-supporting wing of Halliburton, was already victorious); or that the Cold War itself may have been little but a cover for ongoing imperial politics ("Did the Cold War exist objectively, or was it a name for U.S. colonial foreign policy? Will the Cold War come to be seen as a minor episode in the multi-century history of colonialism?"), or a score of other things, almost all provocative, all reminding us that beyond the blathering, confusing torrent that is now our media, critical thought is still alive among our citizenry. It seems perhaps less alive in Iraq where our imperial centurions have been pounding the daylights out of Najaf, Falluja, and other Iraqi cities. Here, for instance, is a description from Luke Harding, a British Guardian correspondent, of an intense bombardment in downtown Najaf as seen from the roof of his hotel, just over a mile from the Shrine of Imam Ali: "It's really, really relentless -- there's a war plane circling above me, and straight ahead beyond the palm trees there are puffs of black smoke from the Old City, which has been repeatedly hit and pulverized… To my right, over in Najaf's old cemetery, two Apache helicopters have been circling and re-circling all afternoon, I think just picking off Mahdi army fighters among the graves." Alex Berenson and Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times recently quoted Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, commander of the First Battalion of the Fifth Cavalry in Najaf as saying ("Overwhelming Militiamen, Troops Push Closer to Shrine," Aug. 24), "We want to destroy the enemy, destroy his will, make him fight on our terms. Slowly but surely, we're achieving that." It's the sort of military statement that you could have found in any old history book of colonialism (or that could have come straight from America's Vietnam experience). At the end of a startling three weeks of fierce resistance to the world's most powerfully armed military in Najaf, Baghdad's Sadr City, and elsewhere in southern Iraq by lightly armed, largely untrained, poor, unemployed Iraqi men and boys, perhaps the Shrine of Imam Ali will indeed fall to the Marines -- or to the battalion of recently trained but clearly reluctant Iraqi troops the Americans are threatening to shove into the breach so that infidels will not actually occupy the holy ground. (Do we believe that no one sees through this sort of transparent maneuver -- transparent at least anywhere other than in the United States?) But should it really be so hard for Americans, who from the Alamo and the Little Big Horn to Pearl Harbor have such a tradition of mobilizing "last stands," of, in short, mythologized acts of national martyrdom, to grasp that such a (delayed) "victory" by the world's last superpower with its Apache helicopters, F-16s, and Predator drones, against desperate locals (local to Iraq, if not Najaf itself) can't be a victory for long, though -- to be thoroughly cynical -- perhaps it's only meant to be long-lasting enough for next week's Republican convention. Or perhaps the aging Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani will indeed ride to everyone's rescue. On this I'm convinced, though -- whatever may once have been the case, the world is, as you argue, now ungovernable by these older imperial methods and the military-style thinking that goes with them (though whether there's a more effective, newer style of imperial governance, as so many readers suggested, that passes under the misnomer of "globalization" is another question entirely). In fact, I'm convinced that, from the global (nuclear) realm to the local (popular resistance) realm, the power to crush, even to threaten to crush, is an arrow that has somehow been removed from the imperial quiver (though the power to destroy grows ever greater). Perhaps this was the true message that, during all those Cold War years, lay embedded in the superpower nuclear standoff that went by the all-too-appropriate initials of MAD (mutually assured destruction), and that remains no less operative in the supposedly "unipolar" world that has followed. In other words, as you've also argued, at both the Brobdingnagian and the Lilliputian levels -- at both the imperial head and the imperial feet -- a kind of ruling paralysis has set in for the last standing empire. There is, of course, irony in this, because if the Bush administration was intent on demonstrating anything, it was that the restraints once so much the essence of the Cold War superpower standoff had long ago fallen away and that the United States was capable of pursuing a path of global domination of its choosing without fear of contradiction, significant opposition, or possible defeat. It has, with remarkable success, demonstrated the opposite. As we see in the smashed Old City of Najaf, a power to destroy remains, but what seems beyond its grasp is ruling even a single other country in the style once so familiar to students of the British, French, Japanese, or German empires. This is the imperial roadblock they've come up against in Iraq and elsewhere abroad, and both of us in our letters have been looking abroad -- to that terrain, that landscape, for which empires are supposedly made. But what if we look instead to our "homeland" -- an ominous term only recently introduced here that seems swiftly to have replaced "country" or "nation" and that, with its Germanic overtones, hints at where we've been headed these last years. Whatever our military can't do abroad (despite its staggering technological power), it has proved capable indeed of quite peacefully transforming our society at home, which in the last sixty years has experienced a striking, if until recently hardly noticed, degree of militarization. The militarization of the United States, which started during World War II, accelerated in the 1950s with the creation of a "national security state" and Eisenhower's famed "military-industrial complex" (with its "revolving door" for employment between its military and industrial halves, and the artful scattering of military bases in congressional districts nationwide, not to speak of the artful seeding of funds and plants for the production of new weaponry hardly less widely). Washington in those years became a war capital and was rapidly Pentagonized. After a post-Vietnam dip, militarization proceeded apace in the Reagan years with the Pentagon functioning ever more as a central ministry for basic and advanced scientific and technological research and development (in a country that had no other centralized way to organize such funding projects). Reagan's Star Wars program for the militarization of space, for instance, was focused on research in part meant to spin off a dazzling array of future civilian products and projects. By 1991, the interweaving of the Pentagon, vast weapons corporations, the military-funded academy, the intelligence agencies, lobbyists, and politicians who relied on all of the above had become so much the life of Washington and the nation that, when the Soviet empire collapsed in a remarkably peaceful fashion, there was no real hope that anyone in Washington would stop for a second to reconsider our way of war, much less offer the American public or the world a "peace dividend" of any sort. There is no greater evidence of how deeply our society had been Pentagonized than the continuing commitment to war and a vast nuclear arsenal in a world that briefly threatened (and that's the only word for it in this context) to lack all significant enemies. What was striking though into the 1990s was how much of this had taken place out of sight of the ordinary citizen. It's what gave American militarism its distinctive form. In all those years when the Pentagon was creating militarized little Americas all over the globe, the creeping militarization of our own society was taking place largely beyond view and with none of the classic trappings that proud and assertive militaries like to display. There were in most of those years, no troops in the streets, no major parades, few uniforms in the news (when a war wasn't being reported), and so on. A tipping point, however, seemed to arrive in the younger Bush years under the rubric of the war on terror. The police have since been given a military once-over and it has become increasingly commonplace in cities like New York and at airports, train stations, or even in subways, to see well-armed troops in uniform on patrol or at rest. (During the Democratic convention in Boston, for instance, I leapt into a taxi to rush from one site to another and, as we passed police squads on horses, groups of troops in camo with impressive guns slung over shoulders, and omnipresent helicopters hovering overhead, the driver, an immigrant from Africa, suddenly said to me, "This is the first time since I got here that I've felt like I was back home…" How true. Boston suddenly had the look of some Third World dictatorship. This visual change has gone hand in hand with other changes -- the final defanging of Congress as an agency of budgetary oversight, the breaking down of barriers between spying abroad and at home as well as between military and civilian policing duties, the further bloating of the military budget, even the "privatization" of many military functions fusing the military and the corporate in yet another way -- which I briefly reviewed in our previous exchange of letters and which leave the Pentagon as the 800-pound gorilla in just about any room. Where once the world out there was divided into military "commands," with the setting up of a North American Command (NORTHCOM), we too are now included. Meanwhile, the Pentagon takes ever more gargantuan bites of our budget even though, other than small groups of fanatic opponents, we have no conceivable enemies capable of seriously threatening us; and both presidential candidates have no choice but to promise the military yet more money, more troops, more weapons, more of just about everything. Here's a small sign of the times: In previous decades, as Pentagon budgets grew and its weaponry became ever more expensive and exotic, Congress, that constitutionally-mandated holder of the power of the purse, still attempted to exert some small oversight on at least the Pentagon's more egregious workings. This usually expressed itself in criticism of Pentagon pork (overpriced simple objects purchased by underwhelmed military officials) and useless weapons programs like the B-2 bomber that were repeatedly challenged in Congress but, like so many Draculas with a host of vampiric followers in innumerable congressional districts, simply refused to die. Such modest attempts to rein in the military were reflected in our press in periodic rounds of outraged articles about ridiculous weapons systems and ludicrous Pentagon purchases. These have, strikingly, largely disappeared from the media. I never thought I'd be nostalgic for those peripheral pieces of reportage about million-dollar monkey wrenches or toilet seats. So, on the one hand you, Jonathan, argue that we have an unexpectedly constrained imperial world out there; on the other hand, constraints here in the "homeland" seem to be evaporating. What's left is a vast, sprawling, interlocking set of institutions, anchored in the uniform, intent on creating weapons of an ever more horrific sort to be tested in small wars elsewhere, and on garrisoning the globe. The growth of this strange, still only half-seen creature seems at the moment unstoppable. Like a cowbird baby in some smaller bird's nest, it has long outgrown the rest of the crowd and yet is still insistently demanding more food. Add into this mix in a not-so-distant post-Iraq world in which the finest military on the planet has suffered an incomprehensible defeat at the hands of groups of ragtag nobodies, an angry (not to speak of confused) officer corps; throw in the odd charge of betrayal (who lost Iraq?), sure to happen should there be a Kerry presidency, and you have a combustible mix here in these United States. While the heft of the unelected Pentagon has grown beyond all bounds and probably for the foreseeable future (short of a staggering, unexpected upheaval) beyond all restraining control, there is another no less unbalancing phenomenon at work. Our democratic system seems to be rapidly growing ever feebler, ever more constrained, as the present billion-dollar presidential election is making all too clear. In fact, if you think for a moment about our most recent candidates for president, amid a nation of several hundred million souls, doesn't it tell you something that all of the last four elections and this year's as well will have been won by a candidate who attended Yale University. In two of them (1992 and 2004), both candidates attended Yale. Yalies include the Elder and Younger Bushes, Bill Clinton (Georgetown and then Yale law school), and John Kerry. Add in two losing candidates from Harvard, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis (Swarthmore and Harvard Law School), and the only odd duck in the group is Bob Dole who attended Washburn Municipal University in Kansas. Narrowing it down further, the present election is being fought out not just by two very wealthy Yalies, but by two men who belonged to the same tiny, ultra-hush-hush secret society, Skull and Bones, while at Yale. Now, I'm not especially conspiracy-minded -- or rather, while I believe that our world may be riddled by conspiracies, I'm not much for conspiracy theorists who, I suspect, are the last to know -- but such an "only in America" candidate-selection system certainly implies a kind of bankruptcy from a democratic point of view. The fragility of our republic can be felt no less in the anxious discussions of touch-screen voting fraud and election theft that have migrated from the Internet to the op-ed pages of our major papers. Here are words that once would have been used in describing some Third World country, but now are increasingly attached to discussions of ours: stolen election, coup d'état, cabal, dynasty. Wouldn't it be a painful irony if, at the very moment when we were proven to be a failed military empire, in the "homeland" it was the republican parts of our system that were "paralyzed." What happens then, when the empire -- or simply the angry centurions -- return to NORTHCOM?

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of the The American Empire Project and consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture among other books.

Good Morning World...

Up early...house is full of our children...his, mine, other's. I managed to sneak away the laptop from these cyber teens so I could review the news of the day and, in turn, post it to all through Hubris Watch.

The list of U.S. casualties in Iraq is 60 so far for this month. If you log onto lunaville.org you can see the lists and review local news regarding the death of a favorite son or daughter. Whether the death toll is relevant to this administration, I need to know and feel the stories from the mothers and dads, spouses, children,teachers, coworkers and friends of the fallen. Not out of morbid curiosity do I feed this impulse, but that too often in the news today front page is nothing but spins by the pols regarding events that happened thirty years ago in another war. Comparisons aside, I find it deplorable that Dubya has yet to attend one funeral for a fallen soldier. He instead spends his time denying accusations that he is less than truthful, that his administration is a economic failure, and the cost of the war in Iraq continues to spiral. While Bush ponders in deniability, soldiers and innocent civilians continue to die.

I have two yellow ribbons on my elm tree out front. One for a friend's son who is a Marine with the First Expeditionary Force, and the other is my soon-to-be-son-in-law, a SeeBee, who is also an expectant father. Both are in Iraq, the latter for his second tour. The impact of knowing someone who is in harms way, fighting a war that was wrought for the secret agendae of a powerful cartel, affects those here at home who wait, watch the news, and pray for the survival and safety of their loved ones. These boys are young, earnest and idealistic. They have chosen the path of the warrior and coming from a family of warriors, I do see both sides. Every generation has faced war. War has been around since the establishment of agricultural settlements as early as the civilizations of Sumeria and Mesopotamia. Will there be a time where civilized society no longer accepts the death and devastation in the name of nations, oil, turf, religion and tyrannical power? Have we not evolved into a species that can split the atom, send itself into the solar system, develop technological advances at a rate more accellerated than in any time of history? Yet, we can't escape war. This war was germinated in arrogance and deceit. The Bush administration has a somewhat cavalier attitude toward the cost of this faulty endeavor, and continues to justify its motives even when clear evidence suggests otherwise. Will Pace return to the deserts of the middle east? Eventually, and there will be another region that requires the sacrafice of our children. My son turns 18 in two years. Will I have to tie another yellow ribbon to my elm tree? I pray not.

What Now, Iraq

The Reality of Iraq
By: Molly Ivins, Syndicated Columnist
AUSTIN, Texas -- Remember what it was like just before the war? Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction -- Colin Powell told us to the pound how many tons of this, that and the other -- Saddam had a reconstituted nuclear program, he had numerous ties to Al Qaeda, and he was an imminent threat.
As the president put it, we couldn't afford to wait until the smoking gun was a mushroom cloud.
"To think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just another attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand the question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action; fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. ... .Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect."
The quote is from Thucydides, the Father of History, writing about the day in 415 B.C. when Athens sent its glorious fleet off to destruction in Sicily. I have not been re-reading Thucydides, but found the quote in a footnote in a splendid little book called "Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy" by Lewis Lapham, in my opinion the most incisive essayist in America.
I bring this up only because it doesn't look as if anyone else is gonna. John Kerry is running such a cautious campaign that George W. Bush can get away with falsely claiming that Kerry would have supported the war even if he had known then what he knows today. This does, of course, raise the awkward question of whether George W. Bush -- had he known then there were no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, no ties to All Qaeda and no imminent threat -- would have gone to war himself. The one legitimate excuse they always had -- that Saddam Hussein was a miserable s.o.b. -- was the one they specifically rejected before the war.
It is so painful to read about what is happening in Iraq today (can we put the old dog about how the news media are ignoring "the good news" to rest now?), it is not clear whether we should barf or go blind. With the best will in the world, one cannot pull a positive outlook out of this tragedy. I never advocate despair, but ignoring reality is just as destructive. What. A. Mess.
Still trying for something useful, I'm on the Lessons to Be Learned program. It took the Bush administration months and months and months of false claims to persuade a majority of the American people that declaring war on a country that had done nothing to us was a necessary thing to do. Almost to the day the fighting started, polls showed most Americans had grave doubts about the enterprise. Then most of us went along because, hell, if our people are over there fighting, then we're behind them.
What we need to figure out is why so many of us then became so invested in this awful enterprise. As the president says, fool me once, shame on, uh, somebody or other. John Kerry isn't going to remind any of us we were wrong -- that would be rude. (Sooner or later, someone is going to ask Kerry the question he so famously asked about Vietnam: "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?" He'd better have an answer ready.) The reason Kerry won't "blame America first," as the Rush Limbaughs would put it, is not just because none of us likes to have our nose rubbed in our mistakes, it's a political calculation. In case you hadn't noticed, John Kerry is winning this presidential race -- that's why he's running such a cautious campaign.
The patriotic bullying that went on in this country over Iraq should not be forgotten. It is brilliantly described and dissected in Chris Hedges' important little book, "War Is a Force That Gives Life Meaning." In one of the great ironies of the Iraq War, Hedges himself became the victim of the very group-think he had analyzed after starting a speech with the observation, "War in the end is always about betrayal; betrayal of the young by the old, soldiers by politicians, and idealists by cynics." He was booed off the stage.
Wretched excess always accompanies war fever -- in World War I, "patriots" used to go around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that they were "German dogs." As I have noted elsewhere, people like that do not go around kicking German shepherds.
Some of that bullying, swaggering tone remains with us, in our politics. To treat with contempt any effort at "nuance" or "sensitivity" -- in one of the most fraught and sensitive situations we've ever been in -- is just ugly know-nothingism. As Republicans used to say to Democrats abut the election debacle in Florida last time, "Get over it."
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COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

From Clay Bennett...
Blondie

Vanessa Redgrave: Guantanamo's torture regime is a shameful disgrace
The British intelligence services and the Foreign Office appear complicit in the torture
23 August 2004
I have just returned from a theatre workshop in Croatia, with women who survived Tito's concentration camp for political prisoners on the island of Goli Otok. Officially this was a "work site" or "labour camp", and was opened by the Yugoslav State Security Service in 1948, when Tito split from Stalin.
The women prisoners were suspected of being pro-Stalin. They were never formally charged with a crime, and were never tried or given access to lawyers or a chance to defend themselves. On the island they were subjected to hideous beatings, forced to stand over urine buckets or against a wall for hours on end in "stress-positions"; they were deprived of sleep, denied food and drinking water as punishment and locked away in isolation. They were prohibited from washing even in the sea, and had to endure repeated interrogations and "self-criticism". They were called "bandits", "scum", "traitors", "enemies of the state". In effect, Stalin's methods were being used by the State Security Service against those suspected of being "pro-Stalin". No one knows how many went mad, how many died, or how many attempted suicide. In Tito's time, this was a "State Secret".
All the survivors of Goli Otok (the island had a camp for men as well) agree that under prolonged conditions of torture, they would do anything, say anything, write anything and sign anything that was demanded of them in the hope of being released.
I have also just finished reading the 115-page document Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay compiled by Birnberg Pierce & Partners, lawyers for the three British citizens released from Guantanamo Bay without charge in March. Their accounts of detention are horrifyingly similar to the conditions in Goli Otok. In both cases, the denial of a trial, and a specified date of release added to the physical torture the three endured.
Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed were captured in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. All three state that they were physically tortured in Sherbagan, Kandahar, before being consigned to the psychological and physical hell of Guantanamo Bay. In March this year they were sent back to England and released without charges.
Asif and Shafiq say they were interrogated by an SAS officer in Kandahar before they were flown to Guantanamo. Rhuhel states that he was questioned in Kandahar by MI5 and separately by someone from the Foreign Office. He was in a terrible state from prolonged sleep deprivation, starvation and dehydration. The MI5 officer told him he would be sent home if he agreed to "admit to everything" that was put to him. "I just said 'OK' to everything they said to me. I agreed with everything, whether it was true or not. I just wanted to get out of there." During their two years of incarceration in Guantanamo M15 officers and a representative of the British embassy in Washington made six or seven visits/interrogations. All three men made complaints about the conditions under which they were being held; and about the interrogations by US military intelligence and other US agencies. The British intelligence services and the Foreign Office appear therefore to be complicit in the conditions of psychological and physical torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
The document depicts a Kafkaesque nightmare combined with a barbaric system of punishments, including "short-shackling" for hours on end. Any decent person, British or American, could only feel the utmost shame and revulsion that such methods should be used.
It is clear from the accounts of the three British detainees that many prisoners have gone mad and many have attempted suicide. The Foreign Office has evaded the requests of family lawyers to allow independent doctors to see the British citizens and UK residents who still remain in Guantanamo.
Torture is morally repugnant, degrading both the tortured and the torturers. It is also wholly destructive of security, which in part depends on intelligence. Torture produces dysfunctional intelligence since the suspect is being forced to give only the answers the interrogators want.
Article 2 of the UN Convention on Torture, 1984, states: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." Both the UK and the US signed and ratified this convention. Yet our Appeal Court has upheld our Government's case for accepting evidence extracted under torture.
In the name of security, our Government is destroying the principles and the laws which are the foundations of the security of all citizens; these principles were proclaimed by the American Patriots in their Declaration of Independence and after the war, in their constitution which also prohibits cruel and degrading treatment. It is a spine-chilling disgrace that the Blair government has supported the Guantanamo torture regime, and agreed to the pre-tribunal hearings that have been repudiated by US civil rights lawyers and human-rights NGOs.
info@guantanamo.chr.org

From the Mindless Dubya

At a fund-raiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council, "Mr. Ferrell's Bush, who was wearing a flight suit, boasted of his plan to replace logged ancient redwoods with 'substitute trees' made out of red-painted plywood. He then told the crowd: 'Will I be able to do everything you people want? No. Frankly a lot of endangered species are going to be extincted. But this is part of evolution and natural selection. Which, by the way, I don't believe in.' "

Sorry this is Late, but here again is the...DAILY MISLEAD!

August 27, 2004
Rumsfeld Misleads about Prison AbuseSpeaking yesterday in Phoenix, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that there was no way that he and other top military officials could have known about the abuse and torture that took place at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Rumsfeld said, "if you are in Washington, D.C., you can't know what's going on in the midnight shift in one of those many prisons around the world."1 But a classified portion of a report by three Army generals (the Fay report) - obtained by the New York Times - found that the atrocities that took place in military prisons were the result of actions taken at the top of the military hierarchy. According to secret sections of the Fay report, the former top commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez "approved the use in Iraq of some severe interrogation practices intended to be limited to captives held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Afghanistan."2 Moreover, "by issuing and revising the rules for interrogations in Iraq three times in 30 days, General Sanchez and his legal staff sowed such confusion that interrogators acted in ways that violated the Geneva Conventions."3 A separate investigation headed by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger "faulted the Pentagon's top civilian and military leadership yesterday for failing to exercise adequate oversight and allowing conditions that led to the abuse of detainees in Iraq."4 Rumsfeld was cited specifically for contributing to "confusion over what techniques were permissible for interrogating prisoners in Iraq."

5 Sources:
"Rumsfeld: No plans to resign ," Arizona Daily Star, 8/27/04.
"Army's Report Faults General in Prison Abuse," New York Times, 8/27/04.
Ibid.
"Top Pentagon Leaders Faulted in Prison Abuse," Washington Post, 8/25/04.
Ibid.

Canadian MP Won't Recant Remarks

An 'Idiots' Defense
Liberal MP sticks to guns on anti-American remark
By MARIA McCLINTOCK -- Sun Media
OTTAWA -- Outspoken Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish rejected a call from Prime Minister Paul Martin that she retract her "coalition of the idiots" remark. Instead, Parrish who got into hot water last year for calling Americans "bastards" -- stood by the anti-American, anti-missile defence rant she delivered at a Parliament Hill rally Wednesday.
"I respect (Paul Martin) incredibly. I gave it a great deal of thought but I won't be withdrawing (the comments)," Parrish said yesterday.
"The word has a proper definition. It's ignorance, it's lack of knowledge, it's lack of common sense. With this project called missile defence, we only have George Bush's word for it -- that it's even on the drawing board and would possibly ever work ... why would you enter into something like that? I don't think the word is that strong."
Parrish's comments prompted a backlash from Liberal cabinet ministers.
WON'T ZIP HER LIPS
Immigration Minister Judy Sgro said Parrish should have "kept her mouth shut."
Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew agreed, calling the comments "completely unacceptable."
But Parrish said that zipping her lips is not "something that 28,000 people in my riding elected me to do."
For the second straight day Martin called the comments unacceptable -- especially when the federal government is in negotiations with the U.S. over Canada's involvement in the missile defence program.
"I think they should be withdrawn but the fundamental fact is that this is too important a debate to be derailed by those kinds of comments," Martin said, adding he spoke to Parrish Wednesday.
Conservative MP Stockwell Day said Parrish's comments are another black eye for Canada-U.S. relations. "Mr. Martin made a promise to improve Canada-U.S. relations. This is his first big test," said Day, the party's foreign affairs critic. "Unless Paul Martin can show Canadians and our friends in the U.S. that he is serious about ending these attitudes in the Liberal Party ... he sends a message that he shares those attitudes."

maria.mcclintock@tor.sunpub.com

"Here's what I think of your civil rights, your demand for proof of WMDs or a connection between Saddam and terrorists, the Kyoto Accord, the French and Old Europe and all the towelheads, the ICC, no child left behind, separation of church and state, and especially stopdubya.com".
 

"It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. "

Herman Goering

Whose Government is it Anyway?

When we recall the now-famous incantation, “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” we focus on its content: John F. Kennedy invited Americans to become active participants in, rather than passive recipients of, American democracy. But the word that stands out for me is the personal pronoun “your.” How different jfk’s message would have been had he exhorted Americans to ask what they can do for “the” country. In the word “your” resides the personal connection between citizens and nation that has broken down, replaced by an adversarial stance of citizens toward their government.
Presidential historian Robert Dallek cites a comment someone made to Eleanor Roosevelt after FDR’s death: “I miss the way your husband used to speak to me about my government.” Here, too, the personal pronouns leaped out at me: “my” government, hearing him speak “to me.” In their eagerness to turn voters against the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy--the party that gave Americans services such as Social Security and Medicare that the other party now claims to protect while clandestinely striving to erode--Republicans have defined a new enemy: “the government.” The sense of unity that followed the September 11 attacks by a literal enemy has been dissolved as Republicans encourage Americans to see their own government as a metaphorical enemy. Like an autoimmune disease, this metaphoric battle turns the body politic’s protective forces against the body itself.
Rather than regarding the government as ours--a source of services that better citizens’ lives--many Americans now see the services the government provides as their due, while regarding the government that provides those services as an enemy force. The illogic of this stance was eloquently expressed in Bill Clinton’s remarks on the 30th anniversary of Medicare in 1995: “We had people all over America coming up to me, or the first lady, or to Senator [Ted] Kennedy, saying, ‘Don’t let the government mess with my Medicare.’” Again, the parts of speech tell all: The personal “my” (“my Medicare”) reveals the closeness these speakers feel toward the service the government provides, while the impersonal “the” (“the government”) evinces how distant, disconnected, and distrustful they feel toward the source of that treasured service.
How could John Kerry as president repair this internal rift and restore a sense of connection between citizens and their government? One way is to attend to the smallest parts of speech. He should refer to himself as “your president” and talk of “your” government or “ours.” He must avoid the temptation to leap on the bandwagon that Republicans have built by claiming that he, too, will get government off your backs. It’s an easy way to hitch a ride, but it undermines Democratic leaders’ ability to get the credit their party deserves for having created the programs voters now see as part of the landscape, and to garner citizen support for future programs.
Effective presidents have embraced new communications technologies. Roosevelt’s fireside chats made brilliant use of radio, a technology that brought the public voice of a political leader into people’s homes, the most private of spaces. With television, not only a voice but a physical persona enters the home, sits down to dinner, becomes a member of the family. Ronald Reagan exploited these aspects of TV to become a “great communicator.” He was not a great orator, nor was he great at communicating information. But he was superb at communicating the illusion that he was speaking directly to each listener--“to me.” Ironically, he used this skill to avoid communicating, in the sense of addressing an issue. With his famous “there you go again” quip, he sidestepped the substance of Jimmy Carter’s criticism. The good-natured image became the substance of what Reagan communicated.
Kerry and other candidates have exploited Internet technology for fund raising; organizations such as MoveOn.org use the Web to create communities of physically distant but likeminded individuals. When Kerry announced his vice-presidential choice in e-mails to his core supporters, he made them feel included, part of his community.
The Internet likewise can be used to restore bonds between citizens and their government. E-mail offers perhaps the most intimate connection of any technology. Many people who would never talk about personal matters face to face are able to do so in e-mail or instant messaging, which they experience as akin to personal correspondence or to writing in a diary. And this technology is the one that young people--sadly, among the most disaffected from government--are most comfortable with. It pervades their daily lives in a way that even television never could.
To understand the effect of public policies on people’s lives, citizens need to hear personal stories. How about a chance to meet, each week, an individual whose life was affected--for better or for worse--by decisions made by particular judges or the Supreme Court; by a particular act or policy enacted with Democratic support or allowed to lapse by a Republican Congress; by a civic action of their own, such as unionizing their workplace? How about regular online town halls, in which the president answers questions put to him by citizens over the Internet? In this way, those who log on and participate--yes, not listen but participate--can begin to experience themselves as part of a community that includes their government.
Restoring a sense of intimate connection between citizens and their government is essential to heal the corrosive divisiveness that contributes to the crippling vulnerability so many Americans now feel. And it is essential to ensure that their government can continue to provide services and protection rather than becoming their actual enemy, as, in the hands of Republican administrations, it has in fact become.

Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.

Know Thine Enemies

By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Since World War II, American foreign policy in general has been both realistic and moderate. There have been occasional bursts of intensified anxiety and paranoiac fears, but, by and large, American presidents--both the Democrats and Republicans who’ve been elected since 1948--have been able to maintain a steady course. Today, however, we are facing the first case in which extremism of the kind that Barry Goldwater once foreshadowed is now dominant in the White House. In my view, there is a very simple equation here: Extremism equals recklessness. Extremism destroys the commonsense, inner core of realism and produces reckless policies justified by demagogy and even deception.
America cannot simultaneously wage a war against those who threaten us and become a protagonist in every other part of the world in which terrorism is directed at others. It is also senseless to claim, as Vice President Dick Cheney has, that terrorists hate all nations and all peoples.
In fact, the terrorists in Northern Ireland are waging a war against the British, and, obviously, we are on the side of the British. But the terrorists in Ulster are not waging a war on the Argentines. The terrorists in Kashmir, meanwhile, are waging a war against the Indians, but not against the Finns.
The terrorists that go after us tend to be identifiable, and they tend to come from the Middle East. This suggests that dealing with the problems of the Middle East--not only with the security aspects of it but also with the political conflict--is the necessary focus of any serious American response. Babbling in general terms about terrorism as an abstract evil and then attacking Iraq is simply a mechanism for increasing the ranks of terrorists who define the United States as their principal enemy.
America has no choice but to act as a stabilizer in the world. No one else can play that role. The problem is that we may not be doing so if we define our relationship with others by a phrase the president has been so fond of: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” The implication is that our leadership is not consensual but is based on a Manichaean doctrine: If you’re not doing what we want you to do, you define yourself as our enemy.
Instead, the United States should focus on a clear identification of which terrorists are concentrating their hostility on America. You determine where they come from and then you attempt to eliminate them. At the same time, you should undercut the political, social, and religious impulses that recruit such terrorists. In brief, you do not wage a vague, undifferentiated, theologically defined, and universal war against “terrorism with a global reach” that, unfortunately, has the effect of multiplying our enemies and replenishing the terrorist ranks. Instead, you concentrate your response directly on those who truly threaten us. And you try to destroy them and isolate them politically.
Executing this is not so difficult. We know who the terrorists are. We should be able to establish where they come from. We have some basis for judging how they are recruited. And we also should have some broad awareness of the social atmosphere that creates them.
The neoconservatives in the Bush administration have been primarily preoccupied with creating a situation in the Middle East in which there would be no major security threat. But, in effect, they have created a doctrine that--if seriously pursued in Pakistan, North Korea, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of the world--would impose undertakings and obligations that would transform the character of American society. And if these obligations were undertaken and then abandoned, it would greatly increase global insecurity.
This is why the neocons’ prescriptions are ultimately suicidal.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter’s national-security adviser and is the author, most recently, of The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership.

ON THE FRINGE of the recent Democratic National Convention in Boston, there was a miniconvention of a group called Veterans for Peace. Most of the 400-plus participants were Vietnam veterans, though there were smaller contingents of veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and the first Gulf War. But the most dramatic presence was that of a group of new kids on the block, veterans of the war in Iraq. These new veterans could come to have a powerful influence on our country. Iraq veterans undergo the same psychological struggles of all survivors over images of deaths , how much to feel and not to feel, pain and guilt from the deaths of buddies and their own behavior. Above all, war survivors hunger for meaning -- for some kind of moral judgment about their encounters with death.
In this quest for understanding, it turns out that Iraq veterans have much in common with their older compatriots who fought in Vietnam. Both groups were involved in a confusing counterinsurgency war conducted in an alien, hostile environment against a nonwhite enemy as elusive as he was dangerous. The result in both cases was an atrocity-producing situation -- one structured militarily and psychologically so that ordinary soldiers with no special history of violence or antisocial behavior were suddenly capable of killing or torturing civilians who were loosely designated as "the enemy."
A significant number of Vietnam veterans found meaning in opposing their war while it was in progress. The hearings on American war crimes and the throwing away of medals were their way of rejecting the war and holding not just themselves but their country accountable.
Their impact on the nation was different from that of other antiwar protesters because they were able to bring the Vietnam death scene directly to the American public, as John Kerry did in his 1971 testimony before a US Senate subcommittee, when he asked, "How we can ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
What Kerry and other antiwar veterans were contesting was the wartime tradition that in order to make sure the fallen did not "die in vain," one must rally round the flag, assert the nobility of the cause, and prosecute the war ever more vigorously.Instead, they invoked the authority of the dead to oppose rather than perpetuate the war.
This kind of alternative is by no means new -- it was powerfully expressed by writers surviving World War I and goes back as far as Homer.
Iraq veterans are beginning to express similar sentiments. In Boston they sounded not unlike their Vietnam predecessors. They emphasized the large-scale killing of Iraqi civilians by American firepower, along with their own widespread confusion. "We were lost. We had no idea what we were doing," was the way one put it.
These veterans formed a new organization at the convention, Iraq Veterans Against the War, modeled on the earlier Vietnam Veterans Against the War. It is too early to say how many will join this new group; much depends on what happens in Iraq and on the extent of antiwar opposition at home.
But there is already a personal and primal connection between veterans of Vietnam and Iraq: They are literally fathers and sons or daughters. Generational transmission of war experience has always had enormous psychological importance. Men who fought in Vietnam told me decades ago of having heard, on their fathers' knees, tales of courage and heroism in fighting the "good war." Those World War II fathers were often perplexed and angered by their sons' disillusionment with and bitter opposition to their own war. But Vietnam veteran fathers may have no such difficulty with the disillusionment of their children.
The sharing of an antiwar sentiment may indeed be a powerful bond. That was the case with an Iraq veteran, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, who spoke at the meeting of the extreme chaos in which neither Americans nor Iraqis could be "protected" and of her constant question of "what we were doing there."
American soldiers fighting in Iraq are also saying things reminiscent of their Vietnam veteran fathers and uncles. The British newspaper The Guardian reported American soldiers as saying: "It's really frustrating cause I mean we can't find these guys. They shoot at us all the time, they run away, we try to figure out who it is, we interrogate people -- do they know who it was? No, nobody knows who it was"; and "This is the last place I'd probably ever want to die"; and "I don't have any idea of what we're trying to do out here. I don't know what the [goal] is, and I don't think our commanders do either."
These feelings arise from the war in Iraq. But the Vietnam experience hovers over everything; it is reactivated by what we hear about Iraq. In that sense a shared parent-child antiwar sentiment may come to reverberate throughout society. We have not heard the last of this poignant generational alliance.

Robert J. Lifton is a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author, most recently, of "Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World."

"President Bush's campaign is now attacking John Kerry for throwing away some of his medals to protest the Vietnam War. Bush did not have any medals to throw away, but in his defense he did have all his service records thrown out."

- NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno"

No More Lives...No More Lies 

My Hero on ZNet

Advocacy and Realism: A reply to Noah Cohen
by Noam Chomsky; August 26, 2004

[This is a reply to an article by Noah Cohen, which in turn is a response to an interview Chomsky gave with Shalom and Podur several months ago.]

Noah Cohen’s charges raise some interesting questions about advocacy, principle, and realism, which have much broader applications. Let’s focus on his particular case – defense of Palestinian rights -- bringing up the broader issues in this context. The core question, then, has to do with the stands that can be taken by people with serious concerns for the fate of the Palestinians, who have suffered severely and face an even more miserable future unless we find ways to reverse the processes now underway, for which we bear considerable responsibility and accordingly, can influence if we choose.
Among the options under discussion are one-state and binational approaches. These are crucially different. There are many forms of multinationalism in the world: Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, etc. The concept is a cover term for arrangements that allow forms of autonomy for groups within complex societies, not necessarily only those that choose to regard themselves as “nations.” Quite different are one-state systems, with no form of autonomy for various communities. In the US, for example, Latinos do not have autonomy or control over language or education in the areas stolen by violence from Mexico (or elsewhere); nothing approaching, say, the partial autonomy in Catalonia, to mention one of many cases of some form of multinationalism.
Let’s turn to some of the relevant background. Pre-1948, binationalism was a minority position within the Zionist movement. From 1967-73 Israel had a real opportunity to institute a binational settlement in cis-Jordan in the context of a full peace treaty with Egypt and Jordan, hence the relevant part of the Arab world. There was no interest. The PLO had no interest. US articulate opinion was bitterly opposed. My own writings on the topic were harshly attacked from all sides.
After the 1973 war, that option was effectively closed. Palestinian national rights were, for the first time, clearly and forcefully articulated in the international arena. A two-state settlement was brought to the UN Security Council in January 1976, vetoed by the US, an act condemned by Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the PLO. Since then there has been a broad international consensus in favor of a two-state settlement, blocked by the US and Israel alone. It should be unnecessary to review this history once again.
In contrast, there has been no support for a one-state solution from any significant actor throughout this period. It has never been considered an option in the international arena. The PLO spoke about “democratic secularism,” but in a form that called for liquidation of all Jewish political, social, and cultural institutions within an “Arab nation.” For this reason alone – there were many others – the stance had no impact, except as a weapon for advocates of US-Israeli rejectionism. These matters were discussed in print in the 1970s; there is a brief review in my book Toward a New Cold War (1982, 430n). To say that the idea has had no support in Israel is an understatement. It is rejected with virtual unanimity and considerable fervor, and would be even if there some basis for taking seriously the rhetoric about democratic secularism. Under the (virtually unimaginable) circumstance that some meaningful international support would develop for such a plan, Israel would oppose it by any possible means: that includes the ultimate weapons, which Israel has available and can use.
Since the late ‘90s, a "one-state settlement" has become a welcome topic of discussion in elite circles, so much so that the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books have run major articles proposing this approach – I won’t say “advocating” it, for reasons to which I will return. Same in similar circles elsewhere. It is worth bearing in mind that when the solution was realistic and would have saved a lot of blood and agony, it was utter anathema. Why the change? The only explanation I have seen is what appears in the interview with Shalom-Podur, which I won’t repeat. But let us put that aside, and turn to the current situation.
Right now, there are several possible stands that might be taken by those concerned with the people of the region, justice for Palestinians in particular. Evidently, such stands are of only academic interest unless they are accompanied by programs of action that take into account the real world. If not, they are not advocacy in any serious sense of the term.
Perhaps another word of clarification is in order. Attention to feasible programs of action is sometimes dismissed as “realism” or “pragmatism,” and is placed in opposition to “acting on principle.” That is a serious delusion. There is nothing “principled” about refusal to pay attention to the real world and the options that exist within it – including, of course, the option of making changes, if a feasible course of action can be developed, as was clearly and explicitly the case with regard to Vietnam, discussed in the comments that Cohen brings up and completely misunderstands. Those who ignore or deride such “realism” and “pragmatism,” however well-intentioned they may be, are simply choosing to ignore the consequences of their actions. The delusion is not only a serious intellectual error, but also a harmful one, with severe human consequences. That should be clear without further elaboration.
I will keep here to advocacy in the serious sense: accompanied by some kind of feasible program of action, free from delusions about “acting on principle” without regard to “realism” -- that is, without regard for the fate of suffering people.
One stand is support for a two-state settlement in terms of the overwhelming and long-standing and very broad international consensus (including the Palestinian Authority), barred by the US and Israel though supported by the majority of the US population and acceptable to majorities, possibly large majorities, within Israel (depending on how questions are asked in polls). There are various concrete forms. One version is the Geneva Accords, which, as noted in the interview, “gives a detailed program for a 1-1 land swap and other aspects of a settlement, and is about as good as is likely to be achieved.” The terms and maps are readily available. Since Cohen does not address these matters, apart from citation of an irrelevant source, and does not suggest anything that is more “likely to be achieved,” there is no need to go beyond the interview. These proposals constitute a basis for negotiations that is vastly improved over the Clinton-Barak Camp David proposals as well as the (much less unacceptable) Taba proposals that followed. For the first time, they open the doors to a 1-1 land swap that could be meaningful, and they break from the cantonization programs of earlier proposals. They still have objectionable features, but the operative question is whether they can be taken as a serious basis for negotiations, and whether there is an alternative that is likely to offer more to the Palestinians than proceeding on this basis.
If there is such an alternative, let’s by all means hear it. Those who do not want undertake that responsibility are choosing, in effect, to take part in an academic seminar among disengaged intellectuals on Mars.
Support for the international consensus is true advocacy, not posturing or academic debate. The reason is straightforward, as discussed in the interview: there are obvious and realistic programs of action associated with this stand. The main task is to bring the opinions and attitudes of the large majority of the US population into the arena of policy. As compared with other tasks facing activists, this is, and has long been, a relatively simple one. Relatively; no such tasks are easy. What has been lacking is commitment, not opportunities. Those who are unwilling to undertake the commitment have only themselves to blame for the likely outcome, which is taking shape before our eyes, in directions that are all too clear. To the extent that US policy can be shifted towards the international consensus and domestic opinion, support will increase in Israel, almost automatically, as a result of the dependency relation that Israel consciously adopted over 30 years ago. There will undoubtedly be settler resistance, but at least in the judgment of the most senior Israeli security officials, the problem should not be too difficult to deal with, as quoted in the interview.
A second possible stand is support for a binational settlement, perhaps a federal arrangement of the kind that has long been discussed and exists successfully elsewhere, or in some other form. This stand moves from rhetoric and posturing to true advocacy when it is accompanied by a feasible program of action. There is such a program, with two essential steps. The first is to implement a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus, and reversing the escalating cycle of hostility, hatred, violence, repression, and dispossession. The second step is to proceed from there. For reasons that are clear to anyone familiar with the region, two states in cis-Jordan make little sense, and both communities have good reasons to seek further integration. That is a feasible program, but only in steps. Those who think otherwise have the responsibility of formulating their program to implement directly the alternative they propose; as noted, that was possible before the mid-1970s, but not since. Until we see that program, there is nothing to discuss, and there is no advocacy in the serious sense of the term.
A third possible stand is support for a no-state settlement, generalizing multinationalism (in the broad sense indicated) beyond the borders of a state. That approach would be based on the recognition that the nation-state system has been one of the must brutal and destructive creations of Europe and its offshoots, imposed by force on much of the rest of the world, with horrendous consequences for centuries in Europe, and elsewhere until the present. For the region, it would mean reinstating some of the more sensible elements of the Ottoman system (though, obviously, without its intolerable features), including local and regional autonomy, elimination of borders and free transit, sharply diminishing or eliminating military forces, etc. Applied elsewhere, say to North America, it would entail, to mention just one example, reversing Clinton’s post-NAFTA militarization of the (previously quite porous) Mexico-US border, with a severe human cost, and dealing in some humane way with the fact that the US is sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by brutal conquest. Similar issues arise throughout the world.
For what it’s worth, I’ve also advocated that in public, and in fact have been (maybe still am) under investigation for the crime of “separatism” by the Turkish security system for remarks on this matter in a talk in the semi-official Kurdish capital of Diyarbakir, later published, maybe posted on Znet. There’s also an (implicit) advocacy of something like that in Charles Glass’s excellent book Tribes with Flags.
Is there a feasible program for this, so that it reaches the level of true advocacy? Yes, along the path of advocacy of the more limited binational proposal. The no-state stand is more reasonable and probably more feasible in the longer term than the one-state position. At least this approach recognizes the realities of the region, and the importance of some form of self-determination and autonomy for the complex array of intermingled groups and interests.
How should we rank these objectives in order of preference? My own judgment, since childhood and still today, is that among these alternatives, the no-state solution is by far the best (not just in this region), a binational state second, and a two-state solution worst. Note that I have omitted the one-state version. One reason I have already indicated: a binational system is much better suited to the needs and concerns of the two communities, and I suspect would be preferable to them if it can be approached in steps. But we need not speculate about that. Until the immediate one-state proposal accepts the discipline of “realism,” and is accompanied by some indication of a feasible program of action, we are back to the Martian seminar.
As already mentioned, I presume this is why the proposal has become acceptable in elite intellectual circles, as distinct from the years when a binational version was feasible and was anathema. Now the ideas are welcome, demonstrating our humanity, but without concern that they might lead anywhere. There are, however, those who greatly welcome this proposal as an immediate demand, rejecting the intermediate stages, and hope that it will be widely adopted. To quote the interview:
“The propaganda systems in Israel and the US will joyously welcome the proposal if it gains more than even marginal attention, and will labor to give it great publicity, interpreting it as just another demonstration that there is "no partner for peace," so that the US-Israel have no choice but to establish "security" by caging barbaric Palestinians into a West Bank dungeon while taking over the valuable lands and resources. The most extreme and violent elements in Israel and the US could hope for no greater gift than this proposal.”
If the only alternative open is a “one-state settlement” without preliminary stages, we can have little doubt that Israeli and US hawks would rejoice, and would proceed, with overwhelming public support to impose their own brutal arrangements on the occupied territories. Since Cohen ignores these matters entirely, I’ll leave it at that, simply noting that we do not reach the level of advocacy, in a serious sense, unless these topics are addressed with care.
Much the same holds with regard to the “right of return.” As stated explicitly in the interview, “Palestinian refugees should certainly not be willing to renounce the right of return.” That is not in question (Cohen’s misrepresentation omits this crucial sentence). A different question is whether the right will be implemented. In this case too, under the (virtually unimaginable) circumstances that any meaningful support might develop for it, Israel would resort to its ultimate weapons to prevent it. Those who have any concern for the fate of the refugees will not dangle before their eyes hopes that will not be realized. And they can hardly claim that to do so is a moral stance.
The same is true generally, including the other examples mentioned here. The Cherokees have the right of return to the lands from which they were driven, and “should certainly not be willing to renounce” that right. The 10-15 million Kurds of Turkey have the right to self-government in a much broader Kurdistan, and “should certainly not be willing to renounce” that right. Suppose that someone were to dangle in front of the eyes of Cherokees or Turkish Kurds the hope that those rights will be realized if only they reject any arrangements that to some extent mitigate their grim circumstances. Such a person might believe him/herself to be a “defender of the Cherokees” or of the Kurds, and to be acting “on principle,” but would be seriously misled.
I have been assuming so far that the discussion is among people who care about the people involved and their fate, in particular the Palestinians, the most miserable victims. There is, of course, another possibility. We might shift to the academic seminar among disengaged intellectuals on Mars. We can then join them in deriding “realism” and feasibility – that is, attention to the real world and consideration of the consequences of our actions for the victims. And we can engage in abstract discussion of what might be “right” and “just” in some non-existent universe. But if partipicants in these exercises decide to come down to earth, and to have some concern and compassion for the victims, they have the duty of explaining to us how we proceed from here to there. If they have a suggestion, let’s hear it so we can evaluate it, and if it is reasonable, act on it. Those who are convinced by the proposals if they are ever presented should by all means pursue them, but for the moment the matters is entirely academic, since there are no meaningful proposals for action other than the step-by-step ones already outlined; at least none that I have ever seen. For the reasons I explained, I think that those who take these stands without reaching the level of serious advocacy are serving the cause of the extreme hawks in Israel and the US, and bringing even more harm to suffering Palestinians. Since the comments have not been addressed, I have to leave it at that.
I don’t see anything substantive in Cohen’s charges that has not already been answered. To illustrate the pointlessness of response, I will simply take the first charge, skipping the rhetorical flow that precedes:
“In general, the argument rests on two pillars:
1) Israel's history of colonial occupation and expansion must be separated from all other colonial histories as a special case and special consideration must be given to Zionist colonial settlers as a historically vulnerable group; 2) Since this "historically vulnerable group" also has massive military power, nuclear weapons, and U.S. military and economic support, calling for an end to the colonial regime is unrealistic; it only hurts the colonized, and should be redirected to more useful activities.
The first is a tortured attempt to meet arguments about justice; the second is an attempt to make them moot by arguments about realism.”
Pillar 1) is an invention, unless Cohen means that this is a “special case” in the exact sense in which every other case is a “special case,” with its own properties that should be taken into consideration by anyone who has the slightest concern for the people involved, in particular the Palestinians. The rest of 1) we can ignore.
In pillar 2), Cohen is quoting himself, not me. The reference to “U.S. military and economic support” is also his invention: the interview to which he refers, and everything I’ve written and said about that topic for many decades, make it unmistakeably clear that ending that support should precisely be our objective – not reinforcing that support by adopting a stand that is extremely welcome to the ultra-hawks, as just explained. To the extent that the charge of “realism” is accurate, I certainly accept it, and would recommend it to anyone who hopes to do something useful in this world, and therefore takes into account real world circumstances and the consequences of our actions for suffering people.
The rest continues along the same lines. If any reader thinks there is some point that should be addressed, I’ll be glad to consider it.

Top 11 reasons not to fire Donald Rumsfeld.
11. Fear of retribution.
10. He was only following orders.
9. He knows where all of the bodies are buried and what parts have been removed to keep Dick Cheney alive.
8. The administration's investigation of Abu Ghraib only found fault with the "Office of The Secretary of Defense," so it's really the building's fault.
7. Rumsfeld is one of the few people in the entire administration with actual military service (albeit non-combat) and he is needed for credibility.
6. As Dubya says: You can't blame the guy at the top for the bad behavior of his immediate subordinates.
5. He's the best hitter on the softball team.
4. He only approved the use of torture that he would want applied to himself.
3. Need to keep him around to take the rap for some really bad stuff yet to be revealed.
2. Hasn't the he suffered enough already?
1. If anyone in the administration loses his job, the terrorists win.

MoJo News from Around the Globe

Zimbabwe's Opposition: Playing into Mugabe's Hands?
August 26, 2004 4:21 PM
Robert Mugabe barely kept his job as president of Zimbabwe in 2002, by way of an election marred by fraud and intimidation. Unimpressed with Mugabe's reforms for the next presidential vote in March, his main opposition has responded by threatening to boycott the election -- virtually guaranteeing Mugabe's lock on power.
The Movement for Democratic Change, which holds 57 of the Parliament's 120 elected seats, said it will not take part in elections until Mugabe agrees to adhere to the election standards set up by the Southern African Development Community, a group of 14 nations that includes Zimbabwe. In the words of MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi:
"Until there are tangible signs the government is prepared to enforce the SADC protocols on elections, the national executive has today decided to suspend participation in all forms of elections in Zimbabwe."
On Thursday, the governments of Great Britain and South Africa echoed the call for reform, which is obviously needed. However, the MDC boycott only strengthens Mugabe's hand, allowing his government to portray the opposition as sore losers. Hence government minister Patrick Chinamasa's reaction to the boycott:
"They have lost the confidence of Zimbabweans and will not win elections. It is their democratic right not to be embarrassed and we will not lose sleep over that."
Real election reforms are clearly required, but denying voters a viable alternative seems like a poor strategy. What's needed is pressure from other SADC members for Zimbabwe to enforce agreed-upon guidelines like media freedom and independent observers. Mugabe's reluctance to take these steps only reinforces the perception that a fair election -- which would likely end his reign -- is precisely what he doesn't want.
- Jeff Fleischer
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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.
© 2004 The Foundation for National Progress

Tom's Dispatch from Mother Jones

Return to NORTHCOM
The Power to Crush, Even to Threaten to Crush, is an Arrow That has Been Removed from the Imperial Quiver.
August 26 , 2004
By Tom Engelhardt
Last week, Jonathan Schell and I exchanged letters on the nature of the American empire, based in part on his analysis, in his book The Unconquerable World, of three centuries of armed as well as unarmed resistance to various imperial urges by the peoples of our planet. Now, he has taken up the subject of imperial America again in his latest "Letter from Ground Zero" in this week's issue of the Nation, which the editors of that magazine are kindly letting me post at Tomdispatch.com. What follows is an adapted version of my response to that letter.
Return to NORTHCOM
The slew of letters our previous exchange about empire brought into the Tomdispatch e-box indicates that we're hardly the only ones with empire on the brain. Letter-writers, articulate and thoughtful, young and old, wanted to remind us that the U.S. had always been an empire; or that the real imperial thrust of the globe was corporate and/or consumerist (that, for instance, whatever happened to the Bush administration, KBR, the base-building, military-supporting wing of Halliburton, was already victorious); or that the Cold War itself may have been little but a cover for ongoing imperial politics ("Did the Cold War exist objectively, or was it a name for U.S. colonial foreign policy? Will the Cold War come to be seen as a minor episode in the multi-century history of colonialism?"), or a score of other things, almost all provocative, all reminding us that beyond the blathering, confusing torrent that is now our media, critical thought is still alive among our citizenry.
It seems perhaps less alive in Iraq where our imperial centurions have been pounding the daylights out of Najaf, Falluja, and other Iraqi cities. Here, for instance, is a description from Luke Harding, a British Guardian correspondent, of an intense bombardment in downtown Najaf as seen from the roof of his hotel, just over a mile from the Shrine of Imam Ali: "It's really, really relentless -- there's a war plane circling above me, and straight ahead beyond the palm trees there are puffs of black smoke from the Old City, which has been repeatedly hit and pulverized… To my right, over in Najaf's old cemetery, two Apache helicopters have been circling and re-circling all afternoon, I think just picking off Mahdi army fighters among the graves."
Alex Berenson and Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times recently quoted Lt. Col. Myles Miyamasu, commander of the First Battalion of the Fifth Cavalry in Najaf as saying ("Overwhelming Militiamen, Troops Push Closer to Shrine," Aug. 24), "We want to destroy the enemy, destroy his will, make him fight on our terms. Slowly but surely, we're achieving that." It's the sort of military statement that you could have found in any old history book of colonialism (or that could have come straight from America's Vietnam experience).
At the end of a startling three weeks of fierce resistance to the world's most powerfully armed military in Najaf, Baghdad's Sadr City, and elsewhere in southern Iraq by lightly armed, largely untrained, poor, unemployed Iraqi men and boys, perhaps the Shrine of Imam Ali will indeed fall to the Marines -- or to the battalion of recently trained but clearly reluctant Iraqi troops the Americans are threatening to shove into the breach so that infidels will not actually occupy the holy ground. (Do we believe that no one sees through this sort of transparent maneuver -- transparent at least anywhere other than in the United States?)
But should it really be so hard for Americans, who from the Alamo and the Little Big Horn to Pearl Harbor have such a tradition of mobilizing "last stands," of, in short, mythologized acts of national martyrdom, to grasp that such a (delayed) "victory" by the world's last superpower with its Apache helicopters, F-16s, and Predator drones, against desperate locals (local to Iraq, if not Najaf itself) can't be a victory for long, though -- to be thoroughly cynical -- perhaps it's only meant to be long-lasting enough for next week's Republican convention. Or perhaps the aging Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani will indeed ride to everyone's rescue.
On this I'm convinced, though -- whatever may once have been the case, the world is, as you argue, now ungovernable by these older imperial methods and the military-style thinking that goes with them (though whether there's a more effective, newer style of imperial governance, as so many readers suggested, that passes under the misnomer of "globalization" is another question entirely). In fact, I'm convinced that, from the global (nuclear) realm to the local (popular resistance) realm, the power to crush, even to threaten to crush, is an arrow that has somehow been removed from the imperial quiver (though the power to destroy grows ever greater).
Perhaps this was the true message that, during all those Cold War years, lay embedded in the superpower nuclear standoff that went by the all-too-appropriate initials of MAD (mutually assured destruction), and that remains no less operative in the supposedly "unipolar" world that has followed. In other words, as you've also argued, at both the Brobdingnagian and the Lilliputian levels -- at both the imperial head and the imperial feet -- a kind of ruling paralysis has set in for the last standing empire. There is, of course, irony in this, because if the Bush administration was intent on demonstrating anything, it was that the restraints once so much the essence of the Cold War superpower standoff had long ago fallen away and that the United States was capable of pursuing a path of global domination of its choosing without fear of contradiction, significant opposition, or possible defeat. It has, with remarkable success, demonstrated the opposite. As we see in the smashed Old City of Najaf, a power to destroy remains, but what seems beyond its grasp is ruling even a single other country in the style once so familiar to students of the British, French, Japanese, or German empires.
This is the imperial roadblock they've come up against in Iraq and elsewhere abroad, and both of us in our letters have been looking abroad -- to that terrain, that landscape, for which empires are supposedly made. But what if we look instead to our "homeland" -- an ominous term only recently introduced here that seems swiftly to have replaced "country" or "nation" and that, with its Germanic overtones, hints at where we've been headed these last years. Whatever our military can't do abroad (despite its staggering technological power), it has proved capable indeed of quite peacefully transforming our society at home, which in the last sixty years has experienced a striking, if until recently hardly noticed, degree of militarization.
The militarization of the United States, which started during World War II, accelerated in the 1950s with the creation of a "national security state" and Eisenhower's famed "military-industrial complex" (with its "revolving door" for employment between its military and industrial halves, and the artful scattering of military bases in congressional districts nationwide, not to speak of the artful seeding of funds and plants for the production of new weaponry hardly less widely). Washington in those years became a war capital and was rapidly Pentagonized. After a post-Vietnam dip, militarization proceeded apace in the Reagan years with the Pentagon functioning ever more as a central ministry for basic and advanced scientific and technological research and development (in a country that had no other centralized way to organize such funding projects). Reagan's Star Wars program for the militarization of space, for instance, was focused on research in part meant to spin off a dazzling array of future civilian products and projects.
By 1991, the interweaving of the Pentagon, vast weapons corporations, the military-funded academy, the intelligence agencies, lobbyists, and politicians who relied on all of the above had become so much the life of Washington and the nation that, when the Soviet empire collapsed in a remarkably peaceful fashion, there was no real hope that anyone in Washington would stop for a second to reconsider our way of war, much less offer the American public or the world a "peace dividend" of any sort. There is no greater evidence of how deeply our society had been Pentagonized than the continuing commitment to war and a vast nuclear arsenal in a world that briefly threatened (and that's the only word for it in this context) to lack all significant enemies.
What was striking though into the 1990s was how much of this had taken place out of sight of the ordinary citizen. It's what gave American militarism its distinctive form. In all those years when the Pentagon was creating militarized little Americas all over the globe, the creeping militarization of our own society was taking place largely beyond view and with none of the classic trappings that proud and assertive militaries like to display. There were in most of those years, no troops in the streets, no major parades, few uniforms in the news (when a war wasn't being reported), and so on.
A tipping point, however, seemed to arrive in the younger Bush years under the rubric of the war on terror. The police have since been given a military once-over and it has become increasingly commonplace in cities like New York and at airports, train stations, or even in subways, to see well-armed troops in uniform on patrol or at rest. (During the Democratic convention in Boston, for instance, I leapt into a taxi to rush from one site to another and, as we passed police squads on horses, groups of troops in camo with impressive guns slung over shoulders, and omnipresent helicopters hovering overhead, the driver, an immigrant from Africa, suddenly said to me, "This is the first time since I got here that I've felt like I was back home…"
How true. Boston suddenly had the look of some Third World dictatorship. This visual change has gone hand in hand with other changes -- the final defanging of Congress as an agency of budgetary oversight, the breaking down of barriers between spying abroad and at home as well as between military and civilian policing duties, the further bloating of the military budget, even the "privatization" of many military functions fusing the military and the corporate in yet another way -- which I briefly reviewed in our previous exchange of letters and which leave the Pentagon as the 800-pound gorilla in just about any room.
Where once the world out there was divided into military "commands," with the setting up of a North American Command (NORTHCOM), we too are now included. Meanwhile, the Pentagon takes ever more gargantuan bites of our budget even though, other than small groups of fanatic opponents, we have no conceivable enemies capable of seriously threatening us; and both presidential candidates have no choice but to promise the military yet more money, more troops, more weapons, more of just about everything.
Here's a small sign of the times: In previous decades, as Pentagon budgets grew and its weaponry became ever more expensive and exotic, Congress, that constitutionally-mandated holder of the power of the purse, still attempted to exert some small oversight on at least the Pentagon's more egregious workings. This usually expressed itself in criticism of Pentagon pork (overpriced simple objects purchased by underwhelmed military officials) and useless weapons programs like the B-2 bomber that were repeatedly challenged in Congress but, like so many Draculas with a host of vampiric followers in innumerable congressional districts, simply refused to die. Such modest attempts to rein in the military were reflected in our press in periodic rounds of outraged articles about ridiculous weapons systems and ludicrous Pentagon purchases. These have, strikingly, largely disappeared from the media. I never thought I'd be nostalgic for those peripheral pieces of reportage about million-dollar monkey wrenches or toilet seats.
So, on the one hand you, Jonathan, argue that we have an unexpectedly constrained imperial world out there; on the other hand, constraints here in the "homeland" seem to be evaporating. What's left is a vast, sprawling, interlocking set of institutions, anchored in the uniform, intent on creating weapons of an ever more horrific sort to be tested in small wars elsewhere, and on garrisoning the globe. The growth of this strange, still only half-seen creature seems at the moment unstoppable. Like a cowbird baby in some smaller bird's nest, it has long outgrown the rest of the crowd and yet is still insistently demanding more food. Add into this mix in a not-so-distant post-Iraq world in which the finest military on the planet has suffered an incomprehensible defeat at the hands of groups of ragtag nobodies, an angry (not to speak of confused) officer corps; throw in the odd charge of betrayal (who lost Iraq?), sure to happen should there be a Kerry presidency, and you have a combustible mix here in these United States.
While the heft of the unelected Pentagon has grown beyond all bounds and probably for the foreseeable future (short of a staggering, unexpected upheaval) beyond all restraining control, there is another no less unbalancing phenomenon at work. Our democratic system seems to be rapidly growing ever feebler, ever more constrained, as the present billion-dollar presidential election is making all too clear. In fact, if you think for a moment about our most recent candidates for president, amid a nation of several hundred million souls, doesn't it tell you something that all of the last four elections and this year's as well will have been won by a candidate who attended Yale University. In two of them (1992 and 2004), both candidates attended Yale. Yalies include the Elder and Younger Bushes, Bill Clinton (Georgetown and then Yale law school), and John Kerry. Add in two losing candidates from Harvard, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis (Swarthmore and Harvard Law School), and the only odd duck in the group is Bob Dole who attended Washburn Municipal University in Kansas.
Narrowing it down further, the present election is being fought out not just by two very wealthy Yalies, but by two men who belonged to the same tiny, ultra-hush-hush secret society, Skull and Bones, while at Yale. Now, I'm not especially conspiracy-minded -- or rather, while I believe that our world may be riddled by conspiracies, I'm not much for conspiracy theorists who, I suspect, are the last to know -- but such an "only in America" candidate-selection system certainly implies a kind of bankruptcy from a democratic point of view.
The fragility of our republic can be felt no less in the anxious discussions of touch-screen voting fraud and election theft that have migrated from the Internet to the op-ed pages of our major papers. Here are words that once would have been used in describing some Third World country, but now are increasingly attached to discussions of ours: stolen election, coup d'état, cabal, dynasty. Wouldn't it be a painful irony if, at the very moment when we were proven to be a failed military empire, in the "homeland" it was the republican parts of our system that were "paralyzed." What happens then, when the empire -- or simply the angry centurions -- return to NORTHCOM?

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of the The American Empire Project and consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture among other books.