The Petraeus Report
In military drill there is something called the preparatory command and the command of execution. These were the two commands, followed in lockstep by the press yesterday:
Prepare to kiss ass.
Kiss ass.
Or should I say David Petraeus’ ass, followed by a whole raft of retired generals who were immediately featured on the television “news” to re-spin the Petraeus’ spin, where he used the terms “al Qaeda Iraq” and “ethno-sectarian” about 2,000,000 times apiece in the space of a few hours.
Members of Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War, who had infiltrated the hearing room, were serially arrested when they took their turns shouting things like “How long will you listen ot these people?” and “Liar!” from the back of the room. God bless ‘em.
Rove and Rumsfeld are alive and well and re-embodied in a more media-friendly guise… the articulate, level-voiced General who, though he only went to combat when Bush invaded Iraq, has more fruit salad on his chest than any veteran of three previous wars.
Rove was in evidence with the preferred Rovian psyop, mantra-like repetition of the key phrases as a form of mass mesmeric suggestion… “al Qaeda Iraq” … “ethno-sectarian”… “al Qaeda Iraq” … “ethno-sectarian”… “al Qaeda Iraq” … “ethno-sectarian”… “al Qaeda Iraq” … “ethno-sectarian”…
…these to suggest the self-same thing we heard in the runup to the war, Iraq associated with 9-11 — oh!!! that’s today!!! Surprise!
…and of course, the war is an affair of those ethno-sectarian primitives (the former guerrillas who were handed Anbar Province have been re-spun into “tribal” leaders and sheiks”). The US occupation force (therein referred to as “coalition forces”) is just there trying to keep them from slaughtering each other, provoked as they have been by who? Oh yeah, “al Qaeda Iraq.”
That this representation is a bizarre caricature of occupied Iraq made it all the more appealing. Mobilizing the uniquely Orientalist ignorance of a media stun-gunned American public is classic Rove.
Rumsfeld’s ghost made its early appearance with the charts and graphs. Metrics, anyone? The Commander-in-Chief, in rallying the most revanchist sectors of his diminishing base, recently invoked Vietnam and the betrayal thesis: that liberal press and those left-wing hippies undermined the war effort, and if we could have killed just a million more Vietnamese, goddamit, we’d have won. With Rumsfeld’s metrics in Petraeus’ mouth yesterday, we have squared the circle with the simultaneous reincarnation of Robert MacNamara and William Westmoreland.
Light at the end of the tunnel, anyone?
No Rovian-Rumsfeldian tableau is complete without its diabolus ex machina — Iran naturally. Petraeus invoked Iran early and often, beginning with the now widely accepted and completely unsupported claim that Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi “insurgents.” This is one that provoked the arrest of a Code Pinker in the back benches, when she shouted “That’s a lie!”
She was right, of course. This phony claim, originated out of the Public Affairs offices of the Pentagon, has nonetheless become an article of faith with the “journalists” of the American fourth estate.
The most enjoyable and potentially redemptive aspect of the whole dog-and-pony show were the handful of Congress members who — under pressure from war-weary constituents and the polls showing rock-bottom approval ratings for the newly-empowered Democrats — lit into Petraeus with a vigor seldom seen in the hallowed halls of hearingdom.
Congressman Tom Lantos (D - California) assaulted the credibility of the adminisitration with an unusual enthusiasm, with — of course — a ritual denunciation of Iran, and called for immediate withdrawal of US forces. Fellow Californian Loretta Sanchez as much as called Petraeus and his co-conspirator Crocker liars.
Others wieghed in, along partisan lines mostly. Nothing shocking there, though my gut tells me that the California Democratic Party — holding within its embrace Barbara Lee, the sole Congressional dissenter against the resolution granting the Bush administration war-making powers — is thinking about its besieged national Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, now facing an electoral challenge from Cindy Sheehan… who I endorse here without any qualification whatsoever, even though I live on the East Coast. (Wanna stick it in their eye for once? Elect Cindy Sheehan.)
Unfortunately, this is the backdrop. The 2008 elections, not the charnel house of American occupation in Iraq.
Behind all the panting about the “heroism” of US troops, and the “sacrifices” of military families who see that dreaded military in the driveway, this is mostly about political ambition and the family feud over which party will run the executive committee for Wall Street and the defense industries.
Not a single member of Congress yesterday cited the most recent extrapolation of Lancet Report showing that around a million Iraqis have been “sacrificed” by the occupation. In a typical US neighborhood with families averaging four, this would be represented by a funeral in every sixth house.
‘Spose I’ve said this before, but the target of our misbehaviors (at least Code Pink and IVAW were on hand to disrupt yesterday) must be the Democratic Party. They can ignore another protest fete on the National Mall, but they can’t ignore people occupying their local Congressional offices. These occupations to end the occupation need to become ubiquitous.
Last year, I shocked many colleagues by recommending they vote for Democrats across the board in 2006, but folks didn’t read the fine print. We needed to put these people in power to expose them. They were taking cover in the we’re-just-a-minority bunker. Now they are in the open, and the institutional rot as well as the class loyalties of the Democratic Party are on vivid display.
What we saw yesterday, aside from the Petraeus-Crocker Show, in the loss of good manners by a few Democrats, was a display of the latent power of a wakeful people. The Code Pinkers and Iraq Veterans Against the War represent a minority in American politics right now, just as anti-slavery advocates once were. But let there be no confusion; this minority — which numbers now in the millions — has the power to put its principles into action in an instrumental way: by threatening the fortunes of one of the ruling class parties in the United States on the issue of a criminal imperial war.
Misbehavior works. Delegitimate. Disobey. Disrupt.
Antifa:
The Democratic Party rank and file, and the Independent voters, and the newest crop of 20-something voters are experiencing a seismic disconnect from the Democratic Party. There’s just nothing to connect to there. The Dem leaders vote for the imperial agenda without fail, without any genuine hesitation.
Result: all kinds of public outrage, angst, despair, rage, resignation, cynicism, and two types of organized response from the populace.
One, exhortations and campaigns to work ever harder to elect ‘good’ Democrats “next time” which is inevitably going to end in the same kind of Democratic ‘traitors to their constituents and the Constitution’ that we elected in 2006. Reason: all elected Dems get 80% and more of their campaign funding from Wall Street — so they work for Wall Street. Once elected, they work within the broken system that is our thoroughly corporatized government. Once elected, they support the American business agenda, since that is the one and only means they see at hand to provide a good and safe life for Americans — and that agenda requires foreign resource wars, and the annual stripping away of the nation’s infrastructure and social resources in order to boost that ol’ Pentagon budget every October.
Two, complete disconnect. Civil actions in disregard of business as usual. Treating the two parties as the same party, and stopping the business as usual actions of both. Occupying offices, city streets, business and government institutions, vital infrastructure. Stopping the machine through direct civilian actions, since that is the only activity that brings actual response and results. These acts of civil insurrection and non-cooperation are only going to grow, and are going to prove highly effective at toppling the current crop of power mad politicians atop our government, and restoring some respect and simple observation of our Constitution.
Unfortunately, reform will only go so far as to get Americans back in their ‘comfort zone’ of having job security and plausible prospects of gaining the illusory ‘American Dream’ of two cars in the garage and chickens everywhere, or some such. Comfort, abundance, freedom.
Comfort, abundance, freedom. Those are not the same things.
But you can hardly convince an American that they aren’t.
11 September 2007, 10:56 amDeAnander:
@antifa you forgot Convenience. which is not quite the same thing as Comfort, nor as Abundance (a quality of the world which ruling elites delight in enclosing and destroying), nor Freedom.
A “convenience microwave meal” is not abundant, nor is it real comfort food, nor does it make us free. But as you say, you can hardly convince an American…
11 September 2007, 3:07 pmStan:
We have to convince some… just some… now. On many fronts.
On the political front, we have to see politics for what it is — power, not elections. When we relate to elections, we have to think about how we relate in ways that exercise the strengths we have against the weaknesses of the system. The disaffected left wing that has heretofore voted Democrat has now come up against an existential dilemma. They cannot not be responsible, and so they are faced with a choice. Re-surrender that power to the Democrats (and therefore the system), or actualize the latent power they have to call the Democratic Party bluff, then organize an extra-electoral fight against whomever gets elected in 2008.
The most basic element of that “relating” with regard to elections is losing our fear of Republicans. We can know what they do, and what they will do, and that it will have bad consequences. But to fight the system, we need to accept these realities — decrying them where we must — without transsubstantiating them into fear. Evading the contingent evils of Republican power by perpetuating the power of the class they represent through self-containment is perpetuation of the systemic evils of imperial-patriarchal exterminism.
I know this is a very “tactical” mindset. But the people that both those parties represent most consistently are consciously and aggressively at war against humanity. We didn’t choose a war; but we are in it, and the stakes have never been higher. Our failure to recognize this is the first failure that then leads to the others.
There are no “ways out” for humanity that are not through a lot of bad consequences. That’s just the circumstance we have been born into. Evading them reflexively is a recipe for inaction; and this is a crime of omission against future generations.
11 September 2007, 5:50 pmJanet W:
The Code Pinker who called out, “That’s a lie!” to Petraeus’ lie about the Iranians is Leslie Angeline, a Bay Area woman who went to Iran on a Global Exchange trip, fasted for 23 days this summer to get Senator Lieberman to meet with her and a young Iranian man (she was successful), and has been touring the East Coast with an emphasis on Connecticut (Lieberman’s state) with her message of “diplomacy not bombs.” Much easier to stop a war before it starts than to stop it once it’s going, as we are all seeing in the 5th year of our collective nausea, fatigue and grief over Iraq. Leslie is a great example of one person who, with a little help from her friends, is doing something, living her values and finding out that life “after” what passes for “normal” isn’t bad at all, just hard sometimes.
Leslie inspires me to do more, which is why I’ll be with other Code Pink buddies in a meeting with Senator Feinstein’s state director today, pushing hard for no more war funding and certainly raising the issue of no more support for Feinstein if she doesn’t — I’ll never vote for her again anyway. I totally agree with Stan’s analysis; as long as the Democrats can basically say to us, “What’cha goin’ do: vote Republican?! Bwah-hah-hah!”, then we have no leverage over them and no path to move forward. We’ve got to MAKE our path from now on, supporting the few good Democrats when we can, but being ready to challenge, unseat and even recall the Democrats who are not doing the right thing in this time of crisis. No more excuses. They either perform, or they get called out on it, quick, hard and often — and they get dumped in the next election.
12 September 2007, 12:29 pmRK:
I have never posted on a blog before. My wife and I do medical/development (clean water etc.) work primarily in Haiti. That among other things helps me to enjoy the macro-sociology discussed here.
Does anyone have any comments relating to electronic rigging of elections? Being from Ohio(home of Diebold and some really odd statistical voting irregularities)and working in Haiti I have seen some really odd stuff go on with elections that seems probable only with electronic “management” of tallies.
12 September 2007, 1:30 pmMark:
The rigging of elections, by electronic means or by just putting a gun to someones head, has been going on ever since there have been elections. The Diebold phase is only a recent tactic.
The “gun to head” tactic is what works the best. It works in the US quite well. Of course here we don’t have armed thugs at the polls to scare people into voting for the “right” candidate. We have public relations firms and political operatives like Karl Rove. They have enjoyed considerable success employing barely concealed threats masquerading as campaign ads.
And the American people buy this bullshit en masse. I don’t think that electronic voting of the Diebold variety will really catch on. Many states and counties have already said “no.” The Diebold scam was just a way to launder a bunch of Federal election money through another cock-a-mamie republican “business.”
13 September 2007, 10:02 pmThe Buffalo In Da' Midst:
Mark said: “The “gun to head” tactic is what works the best. It works in the US quite well. Of course here we don’t have armed thugs at the polls to scare people into voting for the “right” candidate. We have public relations firms and political operatives like Karl Rove. They have enjoyed considerable success employing barely concealed threats masquerading as campaign ads.
And the American people buy this bullshit en masse.”
The fellow I transcribe news for (posted to archive.org & my site), had this to say (audio) about the ‘flowering’ of American fascism this morning:
[September 14 2007] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Wading Through The Propaganda Of The Past - The Post-WWII ‘Intellectual Flowering’ Led (At The Time) To A Discussion Of “How A Civil Society Like Germany Could Turn To Fascism?” Now We Have The Answer! [In Full]
14 September 2007, 11:22 amDeAnander:
Suivez l’argent!
footnote
Not like this is anything new –Newly released internal CIA documents assert that former president George Herbert Walker Bush’s oil company emerged from a 1950’s collaboration with a covert CIA officer.
Bush has long denied allegations that he had connections to the intelligence community prior to 1976, when he became Central Intelligence Agency director under President Gerald Ford. At the time, he described his appointment as a ‘real shocker.’
But the freshly uncovered memos contend that Bush maintained a close personal and business relationship for decades with a CIA staff employee who, according to those CIA documents, was instrumental in the establishment of Bush’s oil venture, Zapata, in the early 1950s, and who would later accompany Bush to Vietnam as a “cleared and witting commercial asset” of the agency.
In commerce as in hunting, war, and other predatory activities, possession of secret information equals advantage. Possession of state secrets — the very existence of a Security Apparatus engaged in secret activities — creates opportunities for unfair advantage in commerce. So it is not surprising that always, insiders with personal and venal connections to power get access to secret information, then act on it to pursue advantage in commerce: someone knew to place all those put-options on airline stock in the days leading uo to 9/11/01, and someone knows (or thinks he knows) that the fate of Iraq is ethnic partition.
The only solution to this chicanery is… 1) to have fewer secrets — i.e. glasnost, and less criminality perpetrated by governments — and 2) to punish (with asset-stripping and a ban on any participation in government) any individual who profits from the abuse of confidential info, or who provides such info to others who use it for profit. The important words here are for profit; whistleblowers who reveal dirty secrets out of outraged conscience should be praised not punished…
14 September 2007, 6:46 pmMichael Anderson:
Just read this on globalresearch.ca:
What now???
TEXT OF THE EXECUTIVE ORDER
July 17, 2007
Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,
I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability FULL TEXT
Moderator’s note: If you have really long posts and a link, give us a taste, then link it. Thanks.
15 September 2007, 2:03 pmThe Buffalo In Da' Midst:
That’s the executive order the Bush administration is using to attempt a seizure of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s foreign assets/property (and I’m sure a number of smaller ‘financial fish’ as well)
16 September 2007, 12:40 pmMona Hall:
I was the 70 year old lady who kept screaming “No” when the police pulled me down to the floor and dragged me out of my seat. I couldn’t believe that they singled me out when there were other code pink ladies (even one on a chair next to me) who were saying that the whole process was a sham! He wasn’t even sworn in, for God’s sake!!!! And then I saw afterward that Skelton and Duncan Hunter we spoiling for a fight and wanted all of us out of the room, even though we are American citizens and have a right to attend these hearings under the first amendment.
I was dragged off to jail and shackled to the wall for 8 hours with no food or water, then taken to a steel cell somewhere else, where the only thing we had to it on was as steel bed. I had my fingerprints taken and a mug shot, just like I was a criminal. (I’m sure Larry Craig was treated much better). Up until this point I had never even had a parking ticket. Now I have to come back to Washington DC for a hearing before a judge to answer charges that I still don’t know what they are. God bless America!!!! And this is the democracy we are exporting to other countries and that our sons and grandsons and daughters and granddaughters are dying for. Bull crap!!!!!!!!
29 September 2007, 4:02 pm