Lamar W. Hankins : How George W. Bush Aided the Terrorists

Mission accomplished! Have Bush's (and Obama's) policies boosted terrorist recruitment? Photo from Reuters.

How George W. Bush aided the terrorists
(According to the government)

Bush’s bogus war in Iraq; the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and “black site” prisons; waterboarding and other uses of torture; and the civilian death toll from drone strikes have all served as recruiting tools for Al Qaeda and the terrorists.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2013

Peter Hart, from Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, recently discussed the provocative idea that George W. Bush, as well as others in his administration, aided terrorism. This idea arises as a result of evidence introduced at the trial of whistleblower Private Bradley Manning.

To show that Manning’s unauthorized release of information about American actions during the war in Iraq had harmed the U.S. by encouraging attacks against the West, the prosecution did the following, as reported by The New York Times:

A prosecution witness in the sentencing phase of the court-martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning told a military judge on Thursday that Al Qaeda could have used WikiLeaks disclosures, including classified United States government materials provided by Private Manning, to encourage attacks in the West, in testimony meant to show the harm done by his actions... The witness, Cmdr. Youssef Aboul-Enein, an adviser to the Pentagon's Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism, said that WikiLeaks materials showing that the United States had killed civilians, for instance, could help Al Qaeda.

Aboul-Enein said, "Perception is important because it provides a good environment for recruitment, for fund-raising and for support for Al Qaeda’s wider audience and objectives.”

Hart suggests that “the potentially most damaging part of Manning's disclosures was that the war kills civilians -- and that U.S. enemies could use that fact to recruit others.”

The standard, then, appears to be, as Hart wrote: “the killing of civilians might rally people behind the cause of Al Qaeda.” Hart identifies the invasion of Iraq itself as the cause of all of the killing, but that just scratches the surface of the disclosures of horrendous acts that inflame hatred of the U.S. and lead to enhanced recruitment of people by Al Qaeda to commit acts of terrorism against both the U.S. and its allies.

When the horror of Abu-Ghraib was revealed, Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could not stop talking publicly about how horrible such practices were, always blaming anyone but the administration for the “stuff” that happens in war.

In his 2011 memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld seems to admit that Abu Ghraib atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers harmed the U.S. once they were revealed. Of course, Iraqis who were abused eventually would have been released and passed stories around of their horrendous treatment by U.S. troops, or their families would have revealed their abusive treatment.

It was the Bush administration that opened the prison in Guantanamo that has been one of the greatest aids to terrorist recruitment in the modern world, largely because the U.S. tortured the prisoners at that facility and held many who had done nothing wrong or adverse to U.S. interests. Earlier this year, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said that the Guantanamo prison “has become an ideal recruitment tool for terrorists.”

In an April article in The Atlantic magazine, Thérèse Postel, a policy associate in international affairs at The Century Foundation, wrote: “Guantanamo Bay has often been the focus of jihadist media and propaganda... Guantanamo Bay has become a salient issue used in jihadist propaganda.”

Of course, the jihadist use of Guantanamo as a recruiting tool can now be attributed to the Obama administration, which is responsible for the prosecution of Manning. Irony and hypocrisy know no bounds when it comes to government tyranny and abuse of power.

And we should never forget the “black site” prisons located in strategic places around the globe where U.S. prisoners were tortured at will (and still are). In 2005, the Washington Post reported:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement... The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

Other black sites have been identified as located in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. CIA interrogators in such overseas sites used "enhanced interrogation techniques," some of which are prohibited by the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and by U.S. military law.

Among the techniques used is "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he is drowning. For a time, waterboarding became a household word in the U.S. and around the world as the morality of the practice was debated. Although the U.S. is a party to the U. N. Convention, it has blatantly violated it, giving more reasons for Al Qaeda to attract new jihadist recruits.

Especially destructive to U.S. interests is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, known widely as drones, which can be armed with weapons to kill enemies. They have been used by the U.S. since 2001 when they were launched from Uzbekistan and Pakistan. One of the unfortunate effects of drone use has been the killing of civilians in large numbers. Attacks have been launched from drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

In 2009, a report from the Brookings Institute said that 10 civilians are killed for every militant killed in Pakistan drone attacks. Pakistani authorities have claimed that in 2009 alone, over 700 innocent civilians were killed by drone attacks and many more injured.

Armed drone use has grown dramatically since drones were first employed by the Bush administration. The killing of civilians by drones is widely acknowledged as a significant recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups.

If “the killing of civilians might rally people behind the cause of Al Qaeda,” then the worst perpetrator of actions that might harm U.S. interests is the government of the U.S. Of course, the government will not prosecute itself for aiding the enemy, but it will torture and punish low-level personnel like Bradley Manning for actions that it claims do what it has done.

But we know that governments can be far worse than what I. F. Stone said about them -- that all governments lie. We know, if we pay attention, that the U.S. government is duplicitous, sanctimonious, and deceitful, as well as given to lying on a regular basis.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : We Must Heal Our Wounded Vets

Wounded Army vet waiting for a prescription for anti-seizure medication at a Colorado Springs doctor's office. Photo by Michael Ciaglo / Colorado Springs Gazette.

We must 'heal the wounded':
The military’s abuse of enlistees

At this point, almost a decade since his last combat, it is unclear whether Jim will ever recover from his injuries. His treatment by the military has been callous and devastating for his family as well as for him.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2013

This Memorial Day my thoughts went back to about 10 years ago, when I learned as close to first-hand as one can get, short of being in the Army, just how abusive and uncaring the military establishment can be. A close family member was deployed to Iraq to fight in “Shock and Awe,” George W. Bush’s destabilizing effort to free Iraqis from the rule of Saddam Hussein. I’ll call him Jim.

Jim had been in Special Forces for most of his 18 years in the military. He had fought in the first Iraq War and had participated in many classified operations. His missions and training had caused him chronic pain and other long-term problems -- skin cancers, unexplained neurological symptoms, and a back injury that required surgery.

When Jim was deployed to Iraq for George W. Bush’s war, he had not fully recovered from his back surgery and had not been released for full active duty. He required regular pain medicine to cope with his recovery from the surgery. Nevertheless, he was sent to fight with his unit in Iraq.

During the worst of Jim’s pain, he sought a private doctor to prescribe pain medication so that he could avoid letting his command know how bad his back was. He did not want to appear weak. He was strongly motivated to continue to be a part of his unit. He knew that if he let his next-in-command know of his condition, he would no longer be allowed to continue in his Special Forces unit. His “band of brothers” feelings were strong.

About six weeks into his deployment to Iraq, Jim’s dependency on drugs for pain control became so apparent that he was sent home from Iraq before his unit returned. As I learned eventually, in addition to physical pain, Jim suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He had trouble sleeping, exhibited startle responses frequently both when asleep and when awake, had nightmares and flashbacks, was uncomfortable in crowds, had an uneven temperament, was often agitated, and had trouble concentrating.

Soon after Jim returned home, military doctors sent him to Walter Reed Army Hospital (now phased out of service) for another back surgery. I accompanied him for the surgery and stayed with him for several days afterward, including driving him home after he was released from Walter Reed. On this trip, I observed most of the symptoms mentioned above.

But these were the least of Jim’s troubles. Soon after returning to his base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, his command started court martial proceedings, intent on washing him out of the Army because of his dependence on pain medication. They wanted to give him a bad conduct discharge. After he hired (at great expense) a civilian attorney with extensive military law experience, his punishment became a general discharge. He was not allowed to retire, though he had 19 years in the service.

After he was discharged, he filed for VA benefits and another struggle ensued, during which he had to prove that his disability was service connected. His attorney proved his high fees were worth the cost. With much support also from his family, eventually, Jim prevailed and received VA benefits and continues his recovery from his 19 years in the military.

At this point, almost a decade since his last combat, it is unclear whether he will ever recover from his injuries. His treatment by the military has been callous and devastating for his family as well as for him.

Unfortunately, Jim’s story is not unique or even a worst-case example of what the military does to men and women who join up. Those in the armed servies suffering from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and PTSD are commonly dumped into the civilian sector without benefits -- no pension, no health insurance, no support.

According to the Department of Defense, these conditions together likely affect more than half a million veterans of the last 11 years of American wars in the Middle East. They represent about one-quarter of all those who have served during this period.

As reported by Dave Phillips in the Colorado Springs Gazette, what happened to Jim seems to be standard operating practice for today’s volunteer military:

After the longest period of war in American history, more soldiers are being discharged for misconduct than at any time in recent history, and soldiers with the most combat exposure are the hardest hit. A Gazette investigation based on data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act shows the annual number of misconduct discharges is up more than 25 percent Army-wide since 2009, mirroring the rise in wounded.

At the eight Army posts that house most of the service's combat units, including Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, misconduct discharges have surged 67 percent. All told, more than 76,000 soldiers have been kicked out of the Army since 2006. They end up in cities large and small across the country, in hospitals and homeless shelters, abandoned trailers and ratty apartments, working in gas fields and at the McDonald's counter. The Army does not track how many, like Alvaro, were kicked out with combat wounds.

Figures supplied by the Army Human Resources Command indicate that soldiers discharged for alleged misconduct rose by about 63% during the six-year span between 2006 and 1012. Mark Waple, a civilian attorney who handles military cases and a retired Army officer told The Gazette: "I've been working on this since the '70s, and I have never seen anything like this. There seems to be a propensity to use minor misconduct for separation, even for service members who are decorated in combat and injured."

Politicians are quick to declare our duty to provide support for our troops, including when they return. Last October, President Barack Obama called it "the single most sacred obligation this country has." More recently, Colorado Sen. Mark Udall said, "The American people have an unbreakable covenant with our veterans and we must provide them the very best health care."

But the military and the VA seem unable to provide that support and recognize that what we require volunteer service men and women to do leads directly to PTSD and often causes them to be wounded in ways that are not immediately apparent.

Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, told the attorney prosecuting two Marines for the murder of another Marine, “You can’t handle the truth.”

At least in part, what Col. Jessup refers to is the perceived need to do horrible things in the service of this country, as well as actually taking actions that would be perceived by most people as despicable -- killing children, bombing families going peacefully about their daily lives, destroying homes. Sometimes such deeds are purposeful, other times accidental. But all take a toll on the human psyche.

Our fighting men and women are not super humans, unfazed by what they do as members of the military. They are not playing video games for the highest score. They are placed in life-and-death situations in the service of their country.

What they do sometimes makes them lose their moorings. Sometimes it makes them sick. Sometimes it leads them to make wrong choices. No matter what some military leaders may claim, they are not weaklings or cowards if their mental and physical health deteriorates. They are human.

Twenty-two veterans of our wars commit suicide each day. That should be sufficient for anyone to understand how wrong it is to compel our military men and women to do what we have made them do, and then discard them.

It is long past time to start treating our service men and women as the sentient human beings they are. We should not expect more from them than the human mind and body can be reasonably expected to endure. When we do ask them to commit horrible deeds, we need to expect that some of them will not respond to their experiences well.

For these, and all the rest, we need a system that is compassionate, not one that is operated by the self-righteous and arrogant. We need to stop punishing people for the logical consequences of what we require them to do.

If our politicians really care about the service and sacrifice of our military members, they will change a system that is unfair, degrading, and inhumane into one based on what we know about human psychology, neurology, and physiology. We will stop treating these service men and women as automatons and recognize that what they have become is partly, if not largely, a result of what we had them do.

We will take some responsibility for their circumstances and do our best to make up for our own transgressions manifest in the tasks we gave them. It is the very least that should be expected of a great country.

As many veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan said one year ago at a rally in Chicago, it is long past the time that we should “Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, Stop the Wars.”

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : The Delusions of War Ten Years and Counting

Austin activist David Hamilton demonstrates against the Iraq War in December 2008. Photo by Sally Hamilton / The Rag Blog

The delusions of war ten years 
after the bombing of Iraq began

Only the willingly deceitful claim anymore that the war was for some noble purpose.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / March 20, 2013

For most of us, the last 10 years have not involved the personal agony of U.S. troops killed in Iraq (nearly 4500), wounded (perhaps as many as 100,000), suffering brain injuries (320,000), and suffering the psychological effects of war (about 250,000, counting those who served also in Afghanistan).

And we haven’t been affected by the more than one million Iraqis who died between March 2003 and August 2007 (according to the Opinion Business Research survey). Nor have we been affected by the over 2 million Iraqi refugees reported by the BBC.

Only the willingly deceitful claim anymore that the war was for some noble purpose. My activity against the war started in August 2002 when I first became aware of the propaganda from our government. I began writing then to Sen. John Kerry reminding him of the misadventure called Vietnam in which he had participated and about which he became a fierce critic.

Those exchanges were to no avail. Even a warrior who once saw the light could not resist the lure of an easy victory against Saddam Hussein’s pitiful forces that would assure the U.S. of all the oil we needed for the foreseeable future, give us a permanent foothold in the Middle East, and demonstrate our military might for the world to fear. What an easily deluded species we are.

Kerry’s justifications for voting for war in Iraq were not much different from the views of most of those who supported the war, but all those excuses amounted to little more than we should do it because we can and Saddam Hussein is a bad guy (a judgment I have no quarrel with).

That’s what powerful nations do. Kerry and all the others voted to give the President a power that Abraham Lincoln warned us against: "When you allow (the President) to make war at (his) pleasure, study to see if you can fix any limit to his power and disrespect."

Senator Robert Byrd got it right when he said during the debate on the war resolution that "...nowhere in this constitution is it written that the President has the authority to call forth the militia to preempt a perceived threat." And those words are just as relevant when applied to the weaponized drones that we are now using wherever the President wants to use them to kill the bad guys, along with 10 times as many innocent men, women, and children.

About the time I started communicating with Sen. Kerry and other politicians, I began an email correspondence with a group of friends and acquaintances. I considered it my Committee of Correspondence Against the Iraq War. My wife June and I joined Military Families Speak Out (MFSO).

Seven years earlier, our only child, after graduating from college, joined the U.S. Army, where she served at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, with the 101st Airborne for five years. At the start of the Iraq War she was in the National Guard. Her husband had been in the Armed Services for over 15 years. When the war started, he was in a Special Forces unit somewhere in Iraq, preparing for an expected 50 mph dust storm.

On March 24, 2003, we wrote a statement which I read to our city council in opposition to a resolution it was considering that featured praise for President Bush, while offering words of support for our troops. We asked the city council to do more for our troops, but it refused. Unfortunately, the San Marcos, Texas, City Council passed the resolution unanimously after many powerful and heartfelt statements by a handful of citizens opposed to this war, as well as the usual jingoistic support for the war by many other citizens.

Kerry, the San Marcos City Council, and many others proved that Hitler’s understudy Hermann Goering understood something vital about human psychology when he said in an interview over 65 years ago:

...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.

If anything, Goering overestimated the difficulty of convincing the American people to go to war.

It is worth remembering who was on that city council 10 years ago. It included the then-Mayor Robert Habingreither, our recent Congressional candidate Susan Narvaiz, Bill Taylor, Jacob Montoya (who quoted the Bible in support of the war), Ed Mihalkanin, Paul Mayhew, and Martha Castex Tatum. Their resolution was intended to show that war is patriotic.

But not one of these pro-war people, any other San Marcos supporter of the War in Iraq, or more than a handful of others around the nation has issued a public apology for their disastrous mistake in supporting this war, about which they had no doubts. Apparently none have crossed their minds, or perhaps they are incapable of honest reflection.

Almost all of both Democrats and Republicans in office 10 years ago were willing to both go to war in Iraq and fund it to the tune of over $812 billion, a figure that is still increasing at the rate of about $19,000 a minute -- more than $27 million a day.

Our military budget is more than the combined military expenditures of the next 14 highest-spending countries in the world. But Paul Ryan and other delusional politicians as well as many of our citizens who are screaming about deficits never said a word about the costs of war adding to that deficit. After all, wars are so patriotic, especially when God is on our side, that spending should not be a concern.

When most people sign up to serve their country in the military, they do so so because they want to protect the American people from attack by our enemies. They believe, as I do, that we should have a strong military to deter aggression against the United States and protect our shores, our homes, our friends, and our families from attack by foreign foes.

But many become disillusioned by the tasks they are required to perform. As one Gulf War Veteran put it: "American soldiers should protect America, not attack other nations." What our service men and women do not sign up for is to have their lives put at risk for the political ambition of a corrupt administration, or to fight wars of preemption in violation of the U.S. Constitution, international laws, and treaties.

Americans have not fought a war on our land for nearly 150 years. As a result, most of us do not appreciate what war is all about. That void has been filled by a recently published book about the Vietnam War by Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. It is based on extensive research in Vietnam War archives over the last 12 years.

In a review of the book, author Chris Hedges observes:

The almost unfathomable scale of the slaughter, the contribution of our technical, industrial and scientific apparatus to create deadlier weapon systems, implicates huge sections of our society in war crimes. The military and weapons manufacturers openly spoke of the war as a "laboratory" for new forms of killing. Turse’s book obliterates the image we have of ourselves as a good and virtuous nation. It mocks the popular belief that we have a right to impose our "virtues" on others by force. It exposes the soul of our military, which has achieved, through relentless propaganda and effective censorship, a level of public adulation that is terrifying.

Turse reminds us who we are. And in an age of expanding wars in the Middle East, routine torture, murderous air and drone strikes and targeted assassinations, his book is not so much about the past as about the present. We have worked, consciously and unconsciously, to erase the terrible truth about Vietnam and ultimately about ourselves. This is a tragedy. For if we were able to remember who we were, if we knew what we were capable of doing to others, then we might be less prone to replicating the industrial slaughter of Vietnam in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

One of the problems with having a volunteer military is that many people see those service men and women as disposable, to be used for whatever purpose the President has in mind. After all, they volunteered for military service.

Such a view is, of course, callous and indifferent to human life, and stands in stark contrast to the view of Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, who said, “If you join the military now, you are not defending the United States of America, you are helping certain policy-makers fulfill an imperialist agenda.”

To read a confirmation of this view by a U.S. Marine who fought in the second siege of Fallujah, go here.

I don’t claim to know all the truth about war, but I find the phrase “industrial slaughter” apt based on what some of our soldiers have revealed to me about our wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Mostly, what I try to do is question the actions of our public officials because I have learned that they are only as good as we require them to be. We haven’t been requiring much lately of our national leaders.

In spite of their deceit, ignoring of the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war, pandering to emotion, rewarding their supporters with ever more lucrative contracts and giveaways, manipulation of information about what they do, failure to adequately support veterans, failure to adequately equip our soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, and, finally, their ability to convince a majority that “War is Peace” and “Ignorance is Strength,” we continue to allow them to destroy all of the best values that we as Americans claim are ours.

If we don’t try to become informed and have the courage to act on that information, it doesn’t matter whether “Big Brother is Watching” or not. When we are complacent in our ignorance or cowardly in our actions, politicians can have their way with us without the need for Blackshirts. I hope that soon all our citizens can put aside brand loyalty, face the facts wherever they may lead, and act to hold public officials accountable, something this president is unwilling or unable to do.

After all the phony reasons for war in Iraq were found wanting, Bush and his neoconservative advisers and supporters resorted to saying that the venture was a humanitarian mission to free the Iraqis.

It is now obvious instead that it became a humanitarian nightmare, mainly because in the throes of American arrogance, our “leaders” never understood much about the culture of Iraq, the schism between the two main Islamic groups, the geopolitical relations between the Sunnis and the Saudis and between the Shiites and the Iranians, the desires of the Kurds for autonomy, the nationalism felt by most Iraqis, the hatred engendered toward the U.S. by years of sanctions and killings in the north and south no-fly zones, and the complete folly of occupation by foreign and hostile armies.

Now, some neocons (found in the American Enterprise Institute, for example) are claiming that despite all the lies that led us to invade Iraq, it was worth it because Iraq might have become like Syria, and what a mess that would have been. Such thinking is delusional, after-the-fact speculation based on nothing.

It is time for the American people to find and follow our own moral compasses and say that we will never again be led down the path of grotesque violence that creates its own kind of terror for both those we kill and those we pay to do the killing. But I fear that most Americans will not find their moral compasses. It is too convenient to ignore morality and legality when what we want most is to win and show the world who is boss.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Expanding the 'Iraq Syndrome'

Image from Democratic Underground.

Cooperation over conflict:
We need to expand the 'Iraq Syndrome'

As we reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military involvement abroad.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 20, 2013

In a November/December 2005 Foreign Affairs article, "The Iraq Syndrome," I argued that there would likely be growing skepticism about the notions that "the United States should take unilateral military action to correct situations or overthrow regimes it considers reprehensible but that present no immediate threat to it, that it can and should forcibly bring democracy to other nations not now so blessed, that it has the duty to rid the world of evil, that having by far the largest defense budget in the world is necessary and broadly beneficial, that international cooperation is of only very limited value, and that Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners are naive and decadent wimps."

Most radically, I went on to suggest that the United States might “become more inclined to seek international cooperation, sometimes even showing signs of humility.”

-- John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome Revisited,” Foreign Affairs, March 28, 2011

David Halberstam reported in his important book,The Best and the Brightest, that President Roosevelt directed his State Department to develop a position on what United States foreign policy toward Indochina should be after the World War in Asia was ended. Two choices were possible in 1945: support the Vietnamese national liberation movement that bore the brunt of struggle against Japanese occupation of Indochina or support the French plan to reoccupy the Indochinese states of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

As the Cold War escalated the United States rejected Ho Chi Minh’s plea for support for independence and began funding the French in their effort to reestablish colonialism in Indochina. When the French were defeated by the Viet Minh forces in 1954, the United States stepped in and fought a murderous war until the collapse of the U.S. South Vietnamese puppet regime in 1975.

Paralleling the struggle for power in Indochina, competing political forces emerged on the Korean Peninsula after the World War. With the Soviet Union and China supporting the North Koreans and the United States supporting a regime created by it in the South, a shooting war, a civil war, between Koreans ensued in 1950 and continued until an armistice was established in 1953. That armistice, not peace, continues to this day as a war of words and periodic provocations.

Political scientist John Mueller analyzed polling data concerning the support for U.S. military action in Korea and Vietnam, discovering that in both wars there was a steady and parallel decline in support for them. Working class Americans were the most opposed to both wars at every data point. Why? Because working class men and women were most likely to be drafted to fight and their loved ones the most likely to suffer the pain of soldiers coming home dead, scarred, or disabled.

Polling data from the period since the onset of the Iraq war followed the pattern Mueller found in reference to Korea and Vietnam. In all three cases levels of support for U.S. war-making declined as the length of the wars increased and casualties rose. The American people typically gave the presidents some flexibility when the wars started and the rally-round-the-flag phenomenon prevailed. But then resistance grew.

Throughout the period from the end of the Vietnam War until the 1990s, each presidential administration was faced with what foreign policy elites called “the Vietnam Syndrome.” This was a pejorative term these elites used to scornfully describe what they correctly believed would be the resistance to foreign military interventions that they periodically wished to initiate.

President Reagan wanted to invade El Salvador to save its dictatorship and to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. He would have preferred to send troops to Angola to defend the anti-communist forces of Jonas Savimbi of UNITA.

To overcome the resistance to launching what could become another Vietnam quagmire, policymakers had to engage in “low intensity conflict,” covert operations that would minimize what the American people could learn about what their government was doing and who it was supporting. Reagan did expand globally and sent troops to tiny Granada, but even Reagan’s globalism, militarism, and interventionism were somewhat constrained by the fear of public outrage.

President George Herbert Walker Bush launched a six-month campaign to convince the American people that military action was needed to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. Despite a weak endorsement of such action by the Congress, the American people supported Gulf War I because casualties were small and the war lasted only a month. During a press conference announcing the Gulf War’s end in February 1991, Bush proclaimed that “at last we licked the Vietnam Syndrome.”

Clinton knew better. He limited direct U.S. military action to supporting NATO bombing in the former Yugoslavia in 1995, bombed targets in Iraq in so-called “no-fly zones in 1998,” bombed Serbia in a defense of Kosovo in 1999, and used economic embargoes to weaken so-called “rogue states” throughout his eight years in office.

It was President George Walker Bush who launched long and devastating wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration used the sorrow and anger of the American people after the 9/11 terrorist acts to lie, deceive, aggress, and qualitatively increase the development of a warfare state.

As Mueller has suggested, an “Iraq Syndrome” had surfaced by 2005 as the lies about that war became public, the war costs were headed toward trillions of dollars in expenditures, and troop deaths and disabilities escalated. And of course an historically repressive society, Iraq, was so destroyed that U.S. troops left it in shambles with hundreds of thousands dead, disabled, and in abject poverty.

As we reflect on the 10-year anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War in March 2003, the madmen inside the beltway are talking about increasing U.S. military involvement in Syria, not “taking any options off the table” in Iran, and threatening North Korea.

Meanwhile the United States is beefing up its military presence in the Pacific to “challenge” rising Chinese power, establishing AFRICOM to respond to “terrorism” on the African continent, and speaking with scorn about the leadership in Latin America of recently deceased Hugo Chavez.

The American people must escalate commitment to its “syndromes,” demanding in no uncertain terms an end to United States militarism. Mueller’s call for a U.S. foreign policy that emphasizes cooperation over conflict motivated by humility over arrogance is the least the country can do to begin the process of repairing the damage it has done to global society.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Ron Jacobs : Raining Shock and Awe in Iraq

Image from Popular-Pics.com.

Raining shock and awe:
'Mission accomplished' in Iraq?

There was nothing good about this war unless you owned stock in the arms industry. Thousands of U.S. men and women were sent to Iraq over and over again to fight against an enemy that was essentially created by the U.S. invasion.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / March 20, 2013

The news had come overnight. U.S. planes were raining a shock and awe of murderous destruction on the people of Baghdad, rendering parts of the city into ruins. The residents hid in shelters if they could and prayed their children would survive.

Meanwhile, soldiers and marines clad in the desert-camouflaged fatigues of their respective branches, began their trek up various Iraqi highways shooting, hiding, and killing. The war they were bringing was not a new one, although this facet of it was. Previous engagements had been extremely one-sided, with deaths of the Iraqi “enemy” being more than 20,000 times greater than those of the invading U.S. in the salvo called Desert Storm; and 500,000 to perhaps 50 in the years between when the U.S. and Britain enforced their “no-fly” zone and sanctions against Iraq.

This new invasion would not be such a cakewalk, however.

One of the lasting images of Desert Storm is the carnage of the so-called Highway of Death. The photographs of this savage and criminal event show human corpses literally burnt to a charcoal crisp, rendered to ash by incendiary weapons and napalm by U.S. weaponry as the Iraqis who became these corpses retreated in defeat.

There were no apologies forthcoming from the command that ordered this massacre. As for the Pentagon and its civilian paymasters, the crows over their victory were appalling in their brashness and delight. As the Tao te Ching tells us: “He who rejoices in victory, delights in killing (31)." It can be argued that this epigram defined the U.S. mindset at the time. As we reach the tenth anniversary of the second U.S. attack on Iraq, perhaps the only solace we can take is that the sentiment described by it is not so popular as it was in 1991.

Back to those soldiers and marines on the road to Baghdad in 2003. By the third day of fighting, the casualties of the invaders were rising. Yet, there was little to indicate anything but another devastating massacre perpetrated on the Iraqis in the name of liberation.

Indeed, by May 1, 2003, George Bush felt confident enough to stride onto the deck of the U.S. Navy carrier Abraham Lincoln in a flight suit straight out of central casting and announce to the world that the U.S. military had accomplished its mission. In a public relations episode that would be mocked for years, Bush boldly told those listening that the U.S. and its allies (read Britain) had “prevailed.”

Less than two years later, U.S. casualty numbers were climbing and the media commentators who had championed every move George Bush had made since September 12, 2001, were beginning to mildly question his war. The Iraqi resistance was becoming better organized and was more than just a few thousand angry Baathists and Sunni citizens who had lost power in the wake of the Hussein government’s overthrow.

It would not be long before various terror organizations began their own war against the occupation troops and, eventually, their Shia cousins.

In the months that followed, the acronym IED became a familiar one to Iraqis and Americans. Humvees and body armor became part of the common parlance too, especially in relation to the lack of the latter for U.S. troops, despite the billions of dollars being spent to protect the generals and their civilian counterparts inside the relatively luxurious air-conditioned buildings of Baghdad’s Green Zone.

There was nothing good about this war unless you owned stock in the arms industry. Thousands of U.S. men and women were sent to Iraq over and over again to fight against an enemy that was essentially created by the U.S. invasion. Defense spending in the United States went from around $450 billion to almost a trillion dollars between the years 2003 and 2010, when the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Iraq was completed.

Most of that money went straight into the war industry’s profit columns. These increases are replicated in many other countries, as well. Those who argue that the only reason for this war was to improve war industry profits have a lot of fuel for their argument in those figures alone.

The invasion and occupation of that nation remains a vile and reprehensible stain on the U.S. national conscience, or at least what remains of it. Those officials, politicians, and military officers who planned and fought it; the CEOs, board members, and major stockholders of the corporations and banks that profited from it; and the sycophantic media who trumpeted it as shamelessly as Goebbels championed Hitler’s heinous deeds; all of them deserve their own special trial before a jury of those whose families they killed, maimed and otherwise destroyed.

Unfortunately for those survivors, the only justice these sociopaths might ever find will be in their afterlife, if such a thing exists. We can’t change that past. We can prevent such a thing from happening in the future. Don't forsake the opportunity.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Important Truths Behind an Anti-War Slogan

Image from deepforest.org.

'No blood for oil!' 
Important truths behind 
an anti-war slogan

Underneath the complex relationships and shifting strategies, the obvious question lingers: If the Middle East were not home to the largest reserves of the most easily accessible oil in the world, would we have gone to war in Iraq?

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / March 19, 2013

I have never been big on chanting, which means I have spent lots of time at anti-war protests shuffling uncomfortably, mouthing words that others are shouting out.

“What do we want?” JUSTICE! (and a quick end to the chanting, please). “When do we want it?” NOW! (or as soon as possible, please).

Part of my discomfort no doubt comes from the fact that I’m tone-deaf with no sense of rhythm (have I mentioned that I’m a white guy from North Dakota?). But there’s also my frustration with condensing a complex analysis into a chantable sentence (have I mentioned that I’m a nerdy professor?).

Still, chants are part of political rallies, and I’m part of political movements that rally. So, I try to use the slogans as a starting point to explore issues in more depth. One of the most important of those chants from anti-war rallies of the past couple of decades is “No blood for oil.” On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that slogan remains as important as ever.

Sophisticated and/or respectable people tend to reject the underlying claim as crude and/or unpatriotic. How can anyone believe in such a simplistic explanation, that wars are fought for oil? How could anyone imagine the United States pursuing such a crass and greedy goal?

These more enlightened folk will allow, and even encourage, critique of the invasion of Iraq -- maybe the military campaign was ill-conceived and poorly executed, maybe the intelligence about weapons was fraudulent, maybe plans for the so-called democratizing of Iraq were naïve -- but they scoff at the idea that the United States would go to war over the most crucial commodity in an industrialized world. Certainly anyone who suggests countries fight over energy resources is out of touch with reality, right?

That’s what conservative commentator Bill Kristol suggested when it was widely circulated that former U.S. senator and new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel had said in 2007, “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

Kristol described “this vulgar and disgusting charge” as a “far-left trope” so ludicrous that mainstream opponents of the war had renounced it. Indeed, Hagel didn’t defend that statement during the confirmation process, and the Obama administration wasn’t eager for a debate of this crucial question.

So, conservatives demand ideological allegiance to the idea that the United States is a uniquely benevolent great power that doesn’t go to war for economic reasons, and centrist/liberals play along, sometimes repeating the same “mainstream trope” and other times remaining strategically silent.

Whether some policymakers internalize this mythology so thoroughly that they believe it -- and no doubt some do -- the rhetoric doesn’t prevent the United States from acting on the long-term goal of maximizing influence over the region.

This control doesn’t follow the old European colonial model; the United States didn’t invade Iraq to rule by force permanently or to take direct possession of its oil industry. Instead, policymakers over the years have patched together a patchwork that changes tactics as necessary. That’s why the United States strongly supports both the fundamentalist Islamic monarchy in Saudi Arabia and the Western-oriented Israeli government that occupies Arab land.

We back brutal Middle Eastern dictators as long as they advance our policy goals, and then express horror at their crimes when they get uppity (for example, our quiet alliance with Saddam Hussein when he was attacking Iran in the 1980s ended when he invaded Kuwait in 1990).

But underneath the complex relationships and shifting strategies, the obvious question lingers: If the Middle East were not home to the largest reserves of the most easily accessible oil in the world, would we have gone to war in Iraq? Would so much of U.S. military power in recent decades have been focused on the Middle East if the main export from the region were figs?

I ask ordinary people this question all the time: Why do U.S. policymakers care so much about the Middle East? Whether the audiences are young or old, conservative or liberal, the answer is always the same: Oil, of course.

While it may not be polite to admit this in sophisticated and respectable circles today, U.S. policy in the Middle East since the end of World War II has been about maintaining a flow of oil and -- just as important -- a flow of oil profits that is advantageous to U.S. economic interests, especially as defined by elites.

That doesn’t mean there is a single clear policy in every moment. But scare tactics about weapons of mass destruction and empty rhetoric about promoting democracy are cover stories, used by Republicans and Democrats alike, to justify the U.S. military presence in region.

Whether it’s WMD in Iraq or a nuclear weapons program in Iran, the players change and the script stays the same -- to quote former President George H.W. Bush, “What we say goes.” On the heels of military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States these days has a harder time dictating terms; Obama isn’t pushing new aggression, but neither is he arguing for a significant shift in policy.

Our industrial world runs on oil, and it won’t be easy to reshape that world to wean ourselves off this dirty and dwindling fuel. There’s no guarantee that we can even do it, and there’s no use pretending that the flow of Middle East oil doesn’t matter as we struggle to face these realities.

But to bolster our commitment to the difficult work needed for the transition to a sustainable energy system, we can start the process by acknowledging that the quest to control the flow of oil and oil profits has meant death and destruction in the Middle East, leaving us neither safe nor economically secure.

On moral and practical grounds, future policy should be guided by a simple principle: No blood for oil.

This article was also posted to and first published by the Austin American-Statesman.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue (City Lights, 2013). His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : What Have We Learned From the Iraq War?

President Obama shown speaking to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C. Photo by Gerry Broome / AP.
Lessons we should have learned from the Iraq War

After all the phony reasons for war in Iraq were found wanting, Bush and his neoconservative advisers resorted to saying that the venture was a humanitarian mission to free the Iraqis.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / December 28, 2011

By one measure -- the announcement by President Obama that the War in Iraq is over -- that war has finally come to an end. But it remains to be seen how long that country will be destabilized, dysfunctional, and at war with itself, after the phony, deceptive, and precipitous actions the George W. Bush administration took nearly nine years ago when it introduced “shock and awe” as a simple war, a virtual cakewalk for the mighty U.S.

In light of what we know now (and should have known then), it is difficult to see that war as the “success” President Obama called it.

At least 2 million Iraqis have been displaced within their own country, and another 3 million elsewhere -- a total of 20% of the country. Some reputable demographers have estimated that over a million Iraqi civilians were killed during the war, along with over 4,400 U.S. servicemen and women.

Inexplicably, the U.S. will maintain an embassy in Iraq, the largest in the world, with 15,000 people in it; pay nearly 10,000 mercenaries to continue operating in Iraq; and maintain an unknown number of drones, which will fly out of Iraq to wherever they are deemed useful to U.S. control in the region.

And we have not yet fully accounted for the atrocities our military committed, nor have those Americans responsible for authorizing torture been brought to justice.

The lead-up to the war (which I opposed vigorously beginning in the late summer of 2002, as Bush and his neoconservative cronies started their fear-based propaganda offensive to soften up the American public) followed a familiar plan to sell the war. It was a plan explained in an interview over 60 years ago by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s understudy:

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.

But, after all, 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.

If anything, Goering overestimated the difficulty of convincing the American people to go to war. On March 24, 2003, the entire San Marcos City Council, under the leadership of then Mayor Robert Habingreither, and including our now newly-minted Congressional candidate Susan Narvaiz, Bill Taylor, Jacob Montoya, Ed Mihalkanin, Paul Mayhew, and Martha Castex Tatum, adopted a resolution that was intended to show that war is patriotic.

So strong was the war-induced patriotism that only a few people opposed the resolution and the war. But not one of these pro-war people or any other San Marcos supporter of the War in Iraq has issued a public apology for their muddleheaded mistake in supporting this war, about which they had no doubts. Apparently none have crossed their minds since.

By way of disclosure, I had a personal reason, as well as political and humane reasons, for opposing the war. My son-in-law, who was then in Special Forces, was sent into Iraq with the first wave of U.S. fighters. To see his life risked for the phony, illegal, and unconstitutional excuses of the Bush administration was almost more than I could bear.

One of the problems with having a volunteer military is that many people see those servicemen and women as disposable, to be used for whatever purpose the President has in mind. After all, they volunteered for military service. Such a view is, of course, callous and indifferent to human life, and stands in stark contrast to the view of Karen U. Kwiatkowski, a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, who said, “If you join the military now, you are not defending the United States of America, you are helping certain policy-makers fulfill an imperialist agenda.”

To read a confirmation of this view by a U.S. Marine who fought in the second siege of Fallujah, go here.

Historian Andrew Bacevich provided recently a slightly different view: “...a Churchillian verdict on the war might read thusly: Seldom in the course of human history have so many sacrificed so dearly to achieve so little.”

The people of the United States have become, in large part, adherents of both imperialism and a view of exceptionalism which holds that the U.S. has the right to tell the world what to do in the name of furthering democracy and American interests. What this view actually furthers is economic dominance through military might.

Many in the U.S. give lip service to supporting the troops, but this sentiment is largely a cover to allow people to feel good about using our servicemen and women as pawns in a giant reality-based, death-inducing chess game. Few of these war supporters have been as passionate about fully funding veterans health care (including mental health care) and rehabilitation as they have been about sending our service members to war.

In a recent statement, the Iraq Veterans Against the War wrote,

Our fight in Iraq has cost the nation nearly 4,500 American lives and left about 32,000 physically wounded plus tens of thousands more suffering from psychological trauma. Every 36 hours, an American soldier commits suicide, and a staggering 18 veterans take their own lives every day. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are attempting to transition into civilian life during one of the worst economies in our nation's history... The challenges facing our veterans and service members are just beginning...

Military Families Speak Out, of which I am a member, recently wrote, “Over $800 billion was wasted on this war that never should have started while our legislators squabble over budget cuts to the Veterans Administration, Social Security, education, and other necessary social services.”

While a majority of the American public may have come to realize the futility, if not the madness, of the War in Iraq, along with its unspeakable violence, there is no evidence that most of our citizens have understood that we are just a few weeks or months away from another manipulation by our “leaders” to involve us in another war (in Iran), while we still have not extricated ourselves from Afghanistan, a war that is over 10 years old.

There is no evidence that we now understand -- better than we did nine years ago -- that our elected officials, both in Washington and at City Hall, do not possess any special wisdom, in spite of their intelligence, that should guide us in such endeavors.

After all the phony reasons for war in Iraq were found wanting, Bush and his neoconservative advisers and supporters resorted to saying that the venture was a humanitarian mission to free the Iraqis.

It is now obvious instead that it became a humanitarian nightmare, mainly because in the throes of American arrogance, our “leaders” never understood much about the culture of Iraq, the schism between the two main Islamic groups, the geopolitical relations between the Sunnis and the Saudis and between the Shiites and the Iranians, the desires of the Kurds for autonomy, the nationalism felt by most Iraqis, the hatred engendered toward the U.S.by years of sanctions and killings in the north and south no-fly zones, and the complete folly of occupation of others by a foreign and hostile army.

From his perspective as an Army career officer and historian focused on international relations, Andrew Bacevich has concluded about the War in Iraq,

The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington's decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft.

With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is US.

It is time for the American people to find and follow our own moral compasses and say that we will never again be led down the path of grotesque violence that creates its own kind of terror for both those we kill and those we pay to do the killing.

But I fear that most Americans will not find their moral compasses. It is too convenient to ignore morality and legality when what we want most is to win and show the world who is boss.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Joan Wile : Granny for Peace Welcomes Iraq Withdrawal

Members of Granny Peace Brigade at Lincoln Center. Photo from the New York Observer.
As Iraq troops come home:
Peace granny is 'cautiously optimistic'

By Joan Wile / The Rag Blog / October 26, 2011

NEW YORK -- The news hit me like an electric shock. Was this for real? I stared at the words on the TV screen in disbelief: "President Obama says all U.S. troops in Iraq will be home by the end of the year." That meant that 41,000 troops will be leaving Iraq.

This welcome announcement was somewhat tempered when further news reports produced the information that on January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas. There will also apparently be a "significant C.I.A. presence," according to The New York Times.

What was I to make of that?

Since the fall of 2003, my anti-war grandmother friends and I had been struggling, demonstrating, petitioning, organizing, yelling, marching, traveling, with one singular objective -- to end the illegal, immoral war and occupation in Iraq causing so much death and destruction. We later added ending the war in Afghanistan to our agenda.

When we first hit the streets, we were a small minority and met with anger. Most Americans backed the war. CNN promoted it like it was the latest blockbuster action movie, and the public cheered as the news channel repeatedly showed the fires ignited by our bombs lighting up the Baghdad sky.

I began Grandmothers Against the War with a vigil in front of Rockefeller Center with just two of us nervous, shivering old ladies on Jan. 14, 2004. Gradually, more and more people joined us -- mostly grannies, but also Veterans for Peace and other lone individuals sick about the war. We endured hecklers who would shout such things as "Traitors" at us. One of our Vets for Peace almost got into a fist fight with a particularly obnoxious and persistent passerby.

But, we kept on, heartened that more and more of the crowd gave us thumbs up and yelled "Thank you" as the public began to realize what a debacle our occupation was. Foreigners, in particular, applauded us -- an Italian man came over to us one day and kissed all 24 grannies standing there on the cheek.

We decided to ramp up our opposition when we became aware that the Bush administration was impervious to the growing public outcry to end the war. Eighteen grandmothers, me included, tried to enlist at the Times Square recruiting station on Oct. 17, 2005, in order to replace young people in harm's way for a lie.

Actually, none of us had grandkids in the military. We did it as a matter of principle on behalf of America's grandchildren. We figured they were entitled to long lives like we had all enjoyed and should not be forced to endanger their lives and limbs for an unjust cause.

When we were denied entrance into the recruiting station, we sat down on the ground and refused to move. The police arrested us and took us to jail. We knew we were entitled to peaceably dissent, but the cops apparently didn't! After a six-day trial in criminal court, defended by eminent civil liberties attorney Norman Siegel and his co-counsel Earl Ward, we were acquitted. The resultant world-wide publicity put the peace grannies on the map, and I like to think that our action was perhaps the first significant anti-war protest with legs.

And, that was just the beginning. We launched a mind-boggling series of actions and never paused -- even only three days ago, the Granny Peace Brigade, an outgrowth of Grandmothers Against the War, held a silent vigil at Lincoln Center which received wide attention from the media.

Over the years, we went on a 10-day trek to Washington, D.C., traveled abroad to speak before peace groups, sent 100 grannies to lobby 100 U.S. senators, orchestrated colorful marches across Brooklyn Bridge, performed a whole show written and performed by us, and did numerous other creative actions (it's all chronicled in my book, Grandmothers Against the War: Getting Off Our Fannies and Standing Up for Peace.

I must say, painfully, that though I enthusiastically supported President Obama during his election campaign, I became disillusioned and disappointed at his failure to bring our troops home from both Iraq and Afghanistan. At times as I stood in front of Rockefeller Center, often in heavy rain or blazing heat, I would wonder if there was any point in putting myself through such discomfort. I began to feel discouraged and doubted these wars would ever end in my lifetime. I fully expected to be out there standing on Fifth Avenue until the day I died.

But, now, with this hopeful and unexpected news, I feel that perhaps it's all been worthwhile. I like to think our granny efforts have been part of the pressure that contributed to Obama's decision. I don't know the political maneuvers behind his move -- maybe it has to do with tangled foreign policy machinations I can't begin to understand. Maybe it's designed to help him get reelected. Or maybe -- just maybe -- he did it out of sheer moral principle. I like to think that is his main reason, anyway.

Of course, the more urgent matter is Afghanistan. He says he will bring them home soon. My long immersion in the anti-war struggle, however, has taught me that we can't count on his doing so unless we keep the pressure on him to end that occupation as well. It will inevitably end some day, but more quickly if we stay mobilized. We can't clap our hands with joy, unfortunately, until it does.

For now, I will be cautiously optimistic. Dare I say "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, with reservations, as far as the peace grannies are concerned?

I dare.

[Joan Wile is the author of Grandmothers Against the War: Getting Off Our Fannies and Standing Up for Peace (Citadel Press, May 2008) This article was originally published at Waging Nonviolence. Read more articles by Joan Wile on The Rag Blog.]

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Alice Embree : The War is Over

Dude. The War is over. President Obama visits with Iraq war veterans and their families at Fort Bliss, Texas, August 31. Photo from AFP.
(But don't tell the GI's at Fort Hood)
THE WAR IS OVER!

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / September 1, 2010

So do your duty, boys and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die
I declare the war is over

-- Phil Ochs, 1966

See photos, Below.

KILLEEN, Texas -- As Barack Obama declares the end of “combat operations” in Iraq, the haunting refrains of Phil Ochs’ “The War is Over,” reverberate through my psyche. Isn’t this the second time a U.S. president has said the Iraq war is over?

We are seven years into the Second Bush Iraq War. Fifty thousand troops and that many contractors remain in Iraq. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (3rd ACR), a combat regiment, just deployed from Fort Hood to Iraq. The war’s not over.

It’s not over until the troops are home and the contractors' checks can’t be cashed. The war’s not over for the Iraqi people until depleted uranium no longer poses a neonatal threat. It’s not over until Iraqi hospitals, electricity, and water are at least back to the levels of operation under Saddam Hussein, or better, back to the levels of operation prior to sanctions. The war’s not over until the five million displaced Iraqis can return home. It’s never over for the families of one million Iraqi dead.

The war’s not over for the U.S. soldiers returning with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), or those who have lost limbs or the use of their limbs. It’s not over for the families of the more than 5,000 U.S. military men and women who died in Iraq.

On Sunday afternoon, August 29th, Dr. Dahlia Wasfi spoke to a packed crowd at the Texas State Employee Union’s meeting hall about the human catastrophe of U.S. policy in Iraq. As an Iraqi-American, she speaks with eloquence about her father’s place of birth. With her medical background, she brings disturbing details to the discussion of civilian casualties. She minces no words in describing the occupation.

Under the façade of liberation and democracy, U.S. troops seized the country, securing the oil fields, the Ministry of Oil, the Interior Ministry (CIA), and taking the lives of thousands of people. Iraq’s rich culture, history, and valuable assets were left vulnerable to stealth and destruction. In the years since [March 19, 2003], the lack of security, jobs, electricity, and potable water have made life for Iraqis unbearable... Our obligation to the people of Iraq, to the people of America, and to the rest of the world is the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American troops and mercenaries from Iraq.

Go to www.liberatethis.com for more on Dr. Dahlia Wasfi.

On Monday morning, August 30th, a press conference in Killeen, Texas countered the claim that the Iraq war is over. Killeen is the home of Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base. Rep. Lon Burnam of Fort Worth joined Dr. Dahlia Wasfi and representatives from Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Texas Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, CodePink Austin, and the Peace and Justice Support Network of the Mennonite Church at Killeen’s Under the Hood Café.

The common message was that the war continues. Rep. Lon Burnam got directly to the point highlighting the costs of the Iraq debacle.

The Killeen Daily Herald noted, in extensive coverage of the event, that

Burnam said he was tired of officials using the "financial back of us working folks" to fund conflicts, and quoted a 1953 speech by President Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

In 1966 when Phil Ochs wrote his song, the Vietnam War was not over. In fact, it was far from over. In 2010, despite pronouncements from the Oval Office, the Iraq war is not over. The families of Fort Hood’s 3rd ACR can attest to that. And there is still another war raging in Afghanistan.

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist and organizer, a former staff member of The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement. She is active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project.]

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi speaking on the Humanitarian Catastrophe of U.S. Policy in Iraq, Austin, August 29, 2010, Texas State Employees Union. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Dr. Dahlia Wasfi addresses media at Under the Hood press conference, August 30, 2010. Photo by Heidi Turpin / The Rag Blog.
Texas Rep. Lon Burnam of Ft. Worth at Under the Hood press conference. Photo by Heidi Turpin / The Rag Blog.
Under the Hood Press Conference. Seated (l-r): Dr. Dahlia Wasfi (Iraqi-American peace activist), Larry Egly (Mennonite Church), Leslie Cunningham (Texas Labor Against the War); Standing, Jim Turpin (CodePink Austin), Jack Prince (Veterans for Peace), Alice Embree (The Rag Blog), Jasmyne Thomas (Fort Hood military family member), Jeff Gernant (Iraq Veterans Against the War). Photos by Heidi Turpin / The Rag Blog.
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Bob Feldman : Brent Snowcroft and the Roots of the Iraq War

Bush I's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. Photo from The Washington Times.
'Liberating Kuwait' and targeting Saddam:
Twenty years of war against Iraq

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2010

This August marks the twentieth anniversary of the Republican Bush I White House’s August 1990 decision to send U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia and covertly start working for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime in Iraq, under the pretext of “liberating Kuwait.” Yet, according to the 2010 World Almanac, as recently as late 2009, Kuwait was still “ruled by the Sabah dynasty” and “nearly half the population is non-Kuwaiti... and cannot vote.”

Coincidentally, when the Iraqi troops of the now-executed Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, a former member of the corporate board of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s Santa Fe International U.S. subsidiary -- Brent Scowcroft -- just happened to be the Bush I White House’s National Security Affairs advisor.

And, according to a Feb. 2, 1991 New York Times article, it was the presentation of Scowcroft -- who was also the vice-chairman of Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s Kissinger Associates influence-peddling firm -- at a National Security Council meeting on Aug. 3, 1990, “that made clear what the stakes were, crystallized people’s thinking and galvanized support for a strong response” to the Iraqi military occupation of Kuwait.

After learning that Iraq troops had entered Kuwait, Scowcroft “returned to the White House and informed Bush,” according to the 1991 book The Commanders by Bob Woodward. Scowcroft then “called an emergency meeting of the deputies committee by securing video links and chaired it himself from the Situation Room.”

At the emergency meeting, according to The Commanders, Scowcroft “pressed for more action,” proposed that a squadron of 24 Air Force F-15 fighters be offered to Saudi Arabia immediately and “called a National Security Council [NSC] meeting for first thing in the morning.”

The former board member of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s Santa Fe International subsidiary then went to sleep in his White House office at 4 a.m., awoke 45 minutes later and “by 5 a.m. was at Bush [I]’s bedroom door” with an executive order to be signed that froze all of Kuwait’s foreign assets -- except for the overseas special interests of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation [KPC].

This executive order insured that little of the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s foreign wealth would end up in the hands of the Iraqi government while Kuwait was occupied, and that the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC would be able to continue its normal commercial operations outside of Kuwait.

After the initial White House National Security Council meeting of Thursday, Aug. 2, 1990, was held, according to The Commanders, “Scowcroft was alarmed” because no immediate military response was agreed upon. A second NSC meeting was therefore held in the White House the following morning, on Friday, Aug. 3. And at this second NSC meeting, according to The Commanders, the following happened:

Scowcroft stated that there had to be two tracks. First, he believed the United States had to be willing to use force. Second, he said that Saddam had to be toppled. That had to be done covertly through the CIA, and be unclear to the world.

Responding immediately to this policy recommendation of the former Kissinger Associates vice-chairman,“Bush ordered the CIA to begin planning for a covert operation that would destabilize the regime and, he hoped, remove Saddam from power,” according to The Commanders.

After Scowcroft’s proposal to respond to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait by sending a few hundred thousand Pentagon troops to Saudi Arabia had been implemented in August and September of 1990, the Emir of Kuwait then visited Bush I in the Oval Office on Friday, Sept. 28, 1990. And, according to Bob Woodward, “Scowcroft joined them for the hour long meeting” and “though the Emir did not directly ask for military intervention to liberate his country, Scowcroft could see that that was his subliminal message.”

Perhaps one reason why Scowcroft was able to detect the Emir of Kuwait’s “subliminal message” that the U.S. military should be used to put the Al-Sabah royal dynasty back in power in Kuwait, was that Scowcroft had apparently received payments from Santa Fe International in 1984, 1985, and 1986 for sitting on its corporate board -- after the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC had purchased Santa Fe International in 1981 for $2.5 billion.

According to The Commanders, by Fall 1990 “Scowcroft had become the First Companion and all-purpose playmate to the President on golf, fishing and weekend outings,” and by early October 1990 “Scowcroft told [then-Secretary of Defense] Cheney that Bush wanted a briefing right away on what an offensive against Saddam’s forces in Kuwait might look like.”

On Oct. 11, 1990, the Pentagon plans to launch a military offensive against Iraq were given to Bush [I]. And, at a 3:30 afternoon meeting on Oct. 29, 1990, Bush met with [then-Secretary of State James] Baker, Cheney, Scowcroft, and [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin] Powell in the White House Situation Room where, according to The Commanders, “Bush and Scowcroft seemed primed to go ahead with the development of the offensive option.”

The Commanders also indicated that by Dec. 17, 1990, Scowcroft was eager to begin the bombing blitz of Iraq, despite all the subsequent pre-Jan. 16, 1991 Bush [I] Administration talk of how eager it was to have its then-Secretary of State Baker talk face-to-face with the Iraqi foreign minister, in order to avert a war:

It was obvious to [then-Congressional Representative] Aspin that Scowcroft had lost his patience with diplomacy... Saddam was jerking everyone around. There was no reason to deal with him, Scowcroft said. War would take less time... Scowcroft said. He was now convinced that war would be a two-to-three week solution...

That same week in December 1990, Scowcroft told Saudi Arabia’s then-Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, that “Basically the President had made up his mind” and that the diplomatic efforts to avoid war undertaken by the Bush Administration were “all exercises.”

Nearly a month later, on Jan. 16, 1991, the bombing of Iraq was begun by the U.S. government and, according to The Commanders, about 20 Tomahawk missiles “were preprogrammed to hit Saddam’s presidential palace, the main telephone exchange and Baghdad’s electrical power-generating station” -- in the name of “liberating Kuwait.”

And around 100,000 people in Iraq were apparently killed by the U.S. War Machine during the first few months of its 20-year war against Iraq in early 1991. In addition, at least 849 U.S. troops were either killed or wounded during the first few months of Gulf War I.

During the next 10 years more than 9,600 of the U.S. soldiers involved in the first Gulf War, who “were often required to enter radioactive battlefields unprotected and were never warned of the dangers of Depleted Uranium” weapons, reportedly also died, according to Project Censored’s Censored 2004 book. Another 1.5 million people in Iraq, more than half of them children under the age of five, also died during the next 10 years as a result of the economic sanctions that the U.S. government imposed on people in Iraq, as part of its continuing economic warfare against Iraq.

Meanwhile, in “liberated” Kuwait, after the Al-Sabah Dynasty was restored to power there, its government executed or tortured hundreds of its political opponents and began to violate the human rights of Palestinians living in Kuwait in the early 1990s. And in 1997, the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC earned an additional $997.5 million by selling 35 million shares of the common stock of its Santa Fe International subsidiary on the global stock markets, while still keeping a controlling 69 percent of all Santa Fe International common stock in KPC hands.

Then, in 2000, the KPC’s wholly-owned SFIC Holdings (Cayman) Inc. sold another 30 million shares of its Santa Fe International common stock for big money, reducing KPC’s holdings of Santa Fe International’s stock to 39 percent. Yet that same year KPC was still given $15.9 billion by the United Nations for alleged “damages” related to the 1990 Iraq’s military occupation of Kuwait.

And in September 2001 , KPC’s Santa Fe International subsidiary agreed to merge, in a $3 billion stock swap, with Global Marine, to create the world’s second-largest offshore drilling contractor, GlobalSantaFe -- with the KPC owning 18 percent of GlobalSantaFe’s stock in early 2002.

But after GlobalSantaFe repurchased 43.5 million shares of the GlobalSantaFe stock owned by KPC’s SFIC Holdings subsidiary for $799.5 million in 2005, the percentage of GlobalSantaFe stock owned by the Al-Sabah Dynasty’s KPC was reduced to around 8 percent. And two years later, KPC’s GlobalSantaFe (through another merger) became part of the Transocean offshore drilling contractor that owned the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig that BP leased -- which has recently created a lot of environmental destruction after it exploded, killed some oil industry workers, and began spilling a lot of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, in March 2003, the neo-con Republican Bush II Administration (with the support of AIPAC and other pro-Israeli government lobbying organizations in the United States) escalated the U.S. government’s war against people in Iraq.

And since the U.S. War Machine began bombing and occupying Iraq again in a big way in March 2003, about 1 million more Iraqis have been killed, along with at least 4,732 more U.S. troops -- including at least 413 more U.S. soldiers from Texas killed in Iraq since March 2003. In addition, at least 31,882 more U.S. troops have been wounded in Iraq since March 2003 — including at least 3,059 more U.S. soldiers from Texas wounded in Iraq since March 2003.

Yet 20 years after Scowcroft apparently recommended that the CIA be authorized to begin planning for a covert operation, “which would be unclear to the world,” that would destabilize the Baath regime in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power -- in violation of international law and the United Nations Charter -- as part of the U.S. government’s effort to “liberate Kuwait,” most people in Kuwait still do not have full democratic rights.

Amnesty USA’s 2010 Annual Report For Kuwait, observed that “formal political parties remained banned” and “critics of the government and ruling family were harassed” in Kuwait in 2009. And as Priyanka Motaparthy of Human Rights Watch noted in a recent July 21, 2010 Foreign Policy Focus article:

Last month, prosecutors began the trial of Mohammad al-Jasim, a journalist accused of endangering national security. Jasim, trained as a lawyer, is one of the government's most vocal critics and has faced more than 20 separate charges for libel and slander of government officials based on his writings and public statements...

Based on the government's most recent charges, which elevate charges to national security offenses, Jasim spent 49 days in pretrial detention, including a brief stay in a military hospital following a weeklong hunger strike, before he was released on bail. At his trial, which resumes in September, he will be forced to defend himself from charges that he was "instigating to overthrow the regime" and attempting to "dismantle the foundations of Kuwaiti society."

These accusations initially stemmed from 32 entries on his well-known Arabic-language blog Mizan, where Jasim has lambasted the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the government and called for Kuwaiti Emir Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah to follow through on his promises of democratic reform... Following calls for his release in the local media and demonstrations by activists, the government issued a gag order prohibiting the press from covering his trial. Although Jasim has since been released from detention on bail, the ban on media coverage continues.

...While members of parliament and civil society groups are pushing for further change, Kuwait's emir and key members of his family still hold the power to block any reforms.

Jasim's prosecution is part of a steady encroachment over the past year on Kuwaitis' freedom of expression, the right to assemble peacefully, and the right to criticize public officials' performance. In October 2009, prosecutors charged two members of parliament with slander -- the first for criticizing the prime minister, a member of the ruling family, and the second for accusing the health minister of corruption. Each was convicted and fined more than $10,000...

In March, the government arrested and deported virtually overnight more than 30 Egyptian nationals who supported former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed El-Baradei, an advocate of political reform in Egypt and possible presidential candidate. The Egyptians, many of whom were longtime residents in Kuwait, had simply organized a meeting to discuss his campaign...

Khalid al-Fadhala, the head of Kuwait's National Democratic Alliance... was also recently prosecuted for criminal libel and slander of the country's prime minister based on comments he made during a public rally accusing the prime minister of money laundering...

“...Kuwait's activists and media remain under threat. When it comes to freedom of the press, and its approach to human rights more broadly, too many Kuwaiti decision-makers focus on superficial attempts to polish their country's reputation abroad, while ignoring vital legal protections. When challenged, the government falls back on arguments of state sovereignty, essentially ordering international actors to mind their own business...

But the government remains skittish and highly sensitive to criticism, whether from foreign governments, international actors, or local activists and writers. As Jasim's case demonstrates, these individuals have borne the brunt of its response, including aggressive criminal prosecutions for slander and defamation directed at those who comment on the work of government officials, crackdowns on public gatherings, and gag orders on the local media...

Scowcroft, meanwhile, has, in recent years, been a “principal member”/president of The Scowcroft Group influence-peddling firm, “whose principals and network of consultants reach into government and businesses worldwide” and whose clients include “industry leaders in the telecommunications, insurance, aeronautics, energy, and financial products sectors; foreign direct investors in the electronics, utilities, energy and food industries; and investors in the fixed income, equities, and commodities markets around world,” according to The Scowcroft Group’s website.

And, coincidentally, another “principal member” in Scowcroft’s firm is former CIA Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt, who “managed more than one-third of the CIA’s globally deployed personnel and nearly half of the CIA’s multi-billion-dollar budget,” “spent many years abroad as a member of the Clandestine Service,” “served as Senior Intelligence Advisor to President George H.W. Bush as a member of the National Security Council team from 1990 to 1993,” and “as head of America’s Clandestine Services... led the CIA’s operational response to... September 11, 2001,” according to The Scowcroft Group’s website.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

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