What it means when the US goes to war
By Chris Hedges
Troops, when they battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are placed in “atrocity producing situations”. Being surrounded by a hostile population makes simple acts, such as going to a store to buy a can of soda, dangerous. The fear and stress push troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed, over time, to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents.
Civilians and combatants, in the eyes of the… … … …
* * *
… … …War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in lusts and passions we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy lives. It allows us to destroy not only things and ideas but human beings.
In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to revoke another person’s charter to live on this Earth. The frenzy of this destruction – and when unit discipline breaks down, or when there was no unit discipline to begin with, “frenzy” is the right word – sees armed bands crazed by the poisonous elixir that our power to bring about the obliteration of others delivers. All things, including human beings, become objects – objects either to gratify or destroy, or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
Paul:
Outstanding article… How long will it take those who say “we can win if we want to” to learn this awful math? We say less are dying and call it a sign of victory is just around the corner. The reality is we have created a negative peace which cannot hold. A lull in the violence is not a sign of victory but of worse still to come. Now we want to attack Iran… This is madness, pure and simple madness…
Thanks for the great link Stan!
-Paul
8 June 2008, 8:34 amPaul:
How long will it take for us to learn this awful lesson? Just because less people are dying recently, does not mean victory is just around the corner. We have only created a negative peace which cannot last. And now they want to attack Iran…
Thanks for the article Stan.
-Paul
8 June 2008, 8:45 amLisa:
Dangerous Crossroads: Congressional approval before attacking Iran is no longer required
Representative Ron Paul says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed a section from a bill passed by Congress which would have barred the U.S. from going to war with Iran without a congressional vote, claiming she did so at the behest of the leadership of Israel and AIPAC…
…Paul’s allegation is corroborated by ‘The Asia Times’, which in another article published at the time says AIPAC was strongly against attaching “a provision to a Pentagon spending bill that would require President Bush to get congressional approval before attacking Iran. AIPAC was strongly against it because it viewed the legislation as taking the military option ‘off the table.’ The provision was killed.”
The article also cites Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, as saying [Pelosi's] decision was due to AIPAC.
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9393
21 June 2008, 1:38 pmLisa:
An interesting analogy:
American Mamlukes
M. Shahid Alam
Unlike the mamlukes, the senators and representatives in the US Congress are not captured as slaves from neighboring countries. In practice, however, their interests are so closely tied to those of their ‘owners’ – the corporations and lobbies – that they retain precious little interest in the concerns of the people who vote them into office. Indeed, when we examine the loyalty with which they render their services to their true ‘owners,’ the dead Ottoman emperors might well envy the system of representation that produces these American mamlukes.
Thus, two egalitarian systems – the Islamicate and American – had produced similar responses to the challenge of power from below: they instituted two close variants of the mamluke system.
Full article at:
http://www.globalcrisis.org.uk/NAEC/American%20Mumlukes.html
23 June 2008, 12:14 pmxenia:
re mamluk system article
a friend is writing their dissertation on the “slave” system, so i happen to know a bit about this… also, the devil daniel pipes made some academic career with this subject, demonizing islamic cultures. m. shahid alam’s severely conflating moments in time, as the 900s system was very different from 1550s, methods of recruitment and the populations involved were different, etc. also, the spelling “mamlukes” is 19th century british-orientalist, and will make someone who knows about this laugh. not that it matters so much here, but mamluk means owned, and ottoman turks did not really use this word…so, be careful if you want to spread the word about this one, as the details are a little “off.”
but for the purposes of drawing a rough tongue-in-cheek analogy, his article is fine, and people in the political system are certainly a kind of slaves, intimately tied to their owners. he’s right about military developments and nationalism europe (one can see he’s on firmer ground there in terms of his own differentiated knowledge) and from what i’ve seen elsewhere, he is a great guy.
24 June 2008, 2:40 amLisa:
Exposed: How Regan Made It Possible for Bush To Attack Iraq
Iran-Contra’s ‘Lost Chapter’
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
02/07/0-8 “Consortiumnews” — – -As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.
To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.
That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.
Under that compromise, a few segments of the draft chapter were inserted in the final report’s Executive Summary and in another section on White House private fundraising, but the chapter’s conclusions and its detailed account of how the “perception management” operation worked ended up on the editing room floor.
The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.
Full article:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20216.htm
2 July 2008, 8:06 pmLisa:
Global Suprasociety and Russia. The Soviet Counter-Revolution: Large-scale Subversive Operation by the West
“Diligently planned by certain forces in the West and artificially imposed on the Russians”
By Prof. Aleksandr Zinovyev
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9498
3 July 2008, 3:36 pmLisa:
Georgia, Washington and Moscow: a Nuclear Geopolitical Poker Game
By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, July 12, 2008
The Caucasus Republic of Georgia as nations go does not appear to be a major global player. Yet Washington has invested huge sums and organized to put its own despot, Mikhail Saakashvili, in the Presidency in order to close a nuclear NATO iron ring around Russia. Now US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in Tbilisi making sharp statements against Moscow for supporting the independent neighbor states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in essence blaming Moscow for an imminent war Washington has incited in order to bring Georgia into NATO by the December NATO Summit.
The Western media has either ignored the growing tensions in the strategic Caucasus region or has intimated, as suggested by Condoleeza Rice, that the entire conflict is being caused by Moscow’s silly support of “breakaway” republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In reality, a quite different chess game is being played in the region, one which has the potential to detonate a major escalation of tensions between Moscow and NATO.
Full article:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9564
12 July 2008, 1:26 pmLisa:
Russia’s “New Order” of security relations incorporating the US, Russia and the European Union
The Medvedev proposal
by F. William Engdahl
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the current US Presidential campaign, aside from the studied avoidance of any serious proposals to address the worst economic depression since the 1930’s, is the fact that both major party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, have to date been stone silent on the most pressing issue of future war or peace, namely the steps taken by the Bush-Cheney Administration to encircle Russia with a new Iron Curtain of NATO member states, including strenuous efforts to push Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and to establish an advanced nuclear missile defense system which, from a standpoint of military strategy, far from defense, puts the world on a hair-trigger to nuclear holocaust in the few years ahead.
In this context, it is equally disturbing how the Western major media and the Washington Administration have chosen to ignore what might be a last glimmer of hope for diplomatic resolution of a looming nuclear war by miscalculation. The present policy of the Bush Administration genuinely can be called Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, as in the brilliant Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove.
Full article:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9641
22 July 2008, 11:40 amLisa:
The Geopolitics of Iran: Holding the Center of a Mountain Fortress
July 14, 2008 | 1007 GMT
By George Friedman
To understand Iran, you must begin by understanding how large it is. Iran is the 17th largest country in world. It measures 1,684,000 square kilometers. That means that its territory is larger than the combined territories of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal — Western Europe. Iran is the 16th most populous country in the world, with about 70 million people. Its population is larger than the populations of either France or the United Kingdom.
Under the current circumstances, it might be useful to benchmark Iran against Iraq or Afghanistan. Iraq is 433,000 square kilometers, with about 25 million people, so Iran is roughly four times as large and three times as populous. Afghanistan is about 652,000 square kilometers, with a population of about 30 million. One way to look at it is that Iran is 68 percent larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with 40 percent more population.
More important are its topographical barriers. Iran is defined, above all, by its mountains, which form its frontiers, enfold its cities and describe its historical heartland. To understand Iran, you must understand not only how large it is but also how mountainous it is.
Full article at:
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics_iran_holding_center_mountain_fortress
Downloadable pdf:
24 July 2008, 7:17 pmhttp://web.stratfor.com/images/writers/GeopoliticsOfIran.pdf
Lisa:
Sorry about the link above. The article is now linked to a “members only” page. However, the pdf file is still available. I’d post the whole article, but it’s rather long, and there are maps which wouldn’t show. Try to get the pdf while you can.
25 July 2008, 5:11 pmLisa:
America’s Outrageous War Economy!
Pentagon can’t find $2.3 trillion, wasting trillions on ‘national defense’
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
Last update: 7:27 p.m. EDT Aug. 18, 2008
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) —
Yes, America’s economy is a war economy. Not a “manufacturing” economy. Not an “agricultural” economy. Nor a “service” economy. Not even a “consumer” economy.
Seriously, I looked into your eyes, America, saw deep into your soul. So let’s get honest and officially call it “America’s Outrageous War Economy.” Admit it: we secretly love our war economy. And that’s the answer to Jim Grant’s thought-provoking question last month in the Wall Street Journal — “Why No Outrage?”
There really is only one answer: Deep inside we love war. We want war. Need it. Relish it. Thrive on war. War is in our genes, deep in our DNA. War excites our economic brain. War drives our entrepreneurial spirit. War thrills the American soul. Oh just admit it, we have a love affair with war. We love “America’s Outrageous War Economy.”
Americans passively zone out playing video war games. We nod at 90-second news clips of Afghan war casualties and collateral damage in Georgia. We laugh at Jon Stewart’s dark comedic news and Ben Stiller’s new war spoof “Tropic Thunder” … all the while silently, by default, we’re cheering on our leaders as they aggressively expand “America’s Outrageous War Economy,” a relentless machine that needs a steady diet of war after war, feeding on itself, consuming our values, always on the edge of self-destruction.
Full article:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/why-we-love-americas-outrageous/story.aspx?guid=%7B0D31C880%2D32CD%2D4BA1%2D8133%2D329EA57CB069%7D
19 August 2008, 12:28 pm