Obama’s War & the Game
Obama’s WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER either.
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools.
– Ecclesiastes 7:5
The Game
“You lie!”
-Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC)
President Barack Obama is now under siege by a vocal right-wing – and I’ll name it, racist – attack. The glaring absence of traditional forms of respect for opponents by leaders of the right wing (disruptions, swastikas, guns, Joe Wilson’s planned “you lie” grenade)) is an intentional tactic of incremental dehumanization (a refusal of recognition) to re-conjure the stubborn and still substantial vestiges of overt racism and to tickle the subconscious negrophobia of a substantial portion of the American Suburban Middle Class (ASMC).
Provocations can fan that negrophobia into doubt about Obama’s ability to govern. It’s an appeal to the inherent “deviancy of Black, and Black inability to self-govern” notion that remains hegemonic in this ASMC demographic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to mobilize these same phenomena in her own campaign against Obama for the presidential primary before the last general election.
The pretext of the current campaign is “health care” policy, and the right-wing has a formidable material ally in the oligopolous insurance corporations (I don’t call them an industry, because they don’t make anything).
The tactic is simple and culturally familiar: football. It’s called “sack the quarterback.” The quarterback being President Barack Hussein Obama. So strategically, it’s a game of obstructionism; and ideologically, it’s a game of coded race-baiting. More basically, it’s a game. The Game. That’s important, because all policy and all elections are part of the Game.
I would say they employ la-tee-dah game theory, which the elite finances in academia; but the party heads on both sides are still playing football. It’s their national sport, and the ideational framework for their tactical thought process. When the health care thing is said and done, Obama will direct a field goal in lieu of a touchdown. He may fail that, too.
Policy fights and elections in the US system of governance inevitably lead to the birth of legislative and electoral monstrosities. During gestation, policy fights lead both sides of the policy debate into hypocrisy, lies, and evasions. The rules of the Game trump the principles, and they trump honesty. Clarity is replaced by winning as the ultimate goal of persuasive argument.
The moral and-or practical issue that may lay at the heart of any public debate is sublated into the Game. We call it “spin.”
This is how structural power operates. There will be no action, no decision, no change, that does not submit to the policy-game spin-structure. So the polarization of any social controversy around contradictory convictions mutates into tactical polarization that can only be expressed through legislative bodies via the two established party institutions.
In the run-up to the the decisive procedure of lawmaking or elections, the playbook for each side is standardized with competing talking points and arguments. These are not designed to represent any coherent world view or moral principle, but to score points. The points scored are shifts in polling data, these data themselves spun by the construction and presentation of the polls, not to debunk prevailing superstitions and prejudices, but to mobilize them to one’s side.
These are tempo-tasks; and the deadlines, boa-like, suffocate and swallow up integrity.
These point-scoring efforts are directed at a cyborg-spectator – the overworked, overstimulated, debt-ridden, distracted, dependent, partially-attentive public, in particular the politically-formidable American Suburban Middle Class (ASMC).
Critical discourse is dumbed down into soundbytes. Each side accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative. We get these ghastly bastardized terms, for just one example, like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” as the semiotic stand-ins for highly complex social phenomena, because our tactical polarizations – the Game – supersede our moral convictions… the personal place where we first felt concern and empathy.
The Game is on now. The operators are in charge, assessing the public as a thing to be manipulated, private-school Svengalis exploiting human suggestibility.
Policy begets evasion. The arguments are so shallow they wouldn’t float a match. Too many complexities and contradictions in that deep water. The public becomes the object of whole campaigns aimed at our suggestibility. The public has its attention focused on the Game, the spectacle, that is, the simulacra.
Nothing new, but we seem to forget this with some frequency, since we ourselves have submitted to the suggestion that nothing changes without the experts, without the technocracy, without the government. So don’t lose your convictions; just drain them of any depth. What is the difference between representation and simulacra? Well, what kind of question is that? We are abstracted without being aware that we have been abstracted, never involved directly in the practice.
The paradox of this dynamic has become clear in the last few days, as conservative columnist George Will has called for a major reduction of US military forces from Afghanistan. Even though he has been denounced by the neoconservatives as a traitor, Will’s argument against the war (he maintains all sorts of imperial prerogatives, like drone strikes, in his road map) is based on an instrumental analysis. This is not a war, he reminds the public, that can be won. Winning or losing. This is the instrumental criteria for the war. Right or wrong doesn’t enter into the equation, because the rightness of US military occupations – if they work – is is a widely shared imperial-cultural assumption.
On this count, he is right; and Obama – through the gamesmanship that won him the election – has painted himself into the corner of Lyndon Johnson, forcing him to live into the story, which he told the moderately-militaristic public during the election, that Afghanistan is “the right war.”
Will says the war is unwinnable. He is right, in my opinion. Obama says the war is winnable without defining what that looks like, and he is already extending tours and flying in thousands and thousands more troops, making Afghanistan what the military calls “a target-rich environment”… for anyone opposed to the US/NATO occupation. More bases to attack. More outposts to attack. More convoys to attack. More lo-slo aircraft to attack.
Oh yeah. Unconventional war does not play like football. The spectators can shoot you from the stands. You can put 11-hundred men on the field, and the spectators can still shoot you. And its the spectators’ ratios that go up. Because it is a “target-rich environment”.
Meanwhile. Obama has blood on his hands, more all the time. I know that’s a rude assessment, one that refuses the nuance of rationalization to those who still make an idol of Obama. Obama’s supporters during the election (I won’t call myself that, but I voted for him, as did a lot of other people, in solidarity with African America) are now being tacitly asked to accept a reformulation. The first formulation was Bush=war=bad. The counter-formulation is Obama=war=good.
Note how the issue “war” is sublated by the tactical exigencies of Democrat-Republican. There is no space left here formal opposition to military occupation of other countries, much less moral opposition to war. If any of us finds her/himself in these categories, we are – as the saying goes – shit out of luck. We are the skunks at the party… or at the two parties. George Will and I think this war cannot be won. I think making war is immoral. We will both become excomunicados, game-breakers.
George Will and the left-wing that is being called “spoiler” in the Democrats’ own health-care-policy drama have this in common. They are both reviled as spoilers by the gamesmen. Without these spoilers, however, any form of revelation will soon be petrified. We’d be completely at the mercy of the Rahm Emanuels and James Carvilles and Karl Roves of the world. Obama already is; and that is why I reiterate a claim I made after his inauguration. Obama is the most unfree person in the world.
He lives in a bunker, surrounded by his Svengalis… all the time… even in public.
Ain’t power grand.
The AFPAK War
I’m going to ask for my money back. I’ve seen this Afghanistan movie before. The first time, Vietnam was in the title.
As in an early scene from the Vietnam version, U.S. military officials are surprised to discover that the insurgents in Afghanistan are stronger than previously realized.
And our protagonist, Gen. Westmoreland — sorry, I mean McChrystal — sees the situation as serious but salvageable. As Westmoreland did with President Lyndon Johnson, McChrystal is preparing to tell President Barack Obama that thousands of more troops are needed to achieve the U.S. objective — whatever that happens to be.
As in Vietnam, uncertainty about objectives and how to measure success persist in Afghanistan. Never has this come through more clearly than in the fuzzy remarks of “Af-Pak” super-envoy Richard Holbrooke who has purview over Afghanistan and Pakistan.
-Ray McGovern full article
Ray McGovern is a former CIA analyst. I am a former special operations solider. We are both formers. We both remember Vietnam (and a series of other covert ops-military adventures).
Vietnam didn’t go well, ever, even when they told the most optimistic lies about it. Afghanistan has had hold of us since October 2001, and in the last couple of years, the war was expanded by the Bush-Obama CIA-run war in Pakistan. No point in spinning this, since everyone at least acknowledges that this is a war. It is one war, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan, the AFPAK War, which also now includes Iraq (in case anyone has forgotten, we ain’t out yet).
Tactically, the AFPAK War is an absolute disaster. Politically, it could become much worse. The country we are likely to destabilize in the region is Pakistan, nuclear-armed and sharing a hostile border with another nuclear-armed state, India. That’s the visible tip of the iceberg.
Let’s not lose sight of the original intent of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The military actions were part of the Bush administration’s attempt to embody the fantasies of neoconservative eggheads passing time in think tanks full of simulacra.
The main fantasy was that the US could mount a coup de main against the entire region. In the aftermath of this swift military success, the long-repressed desire for a more “western” life, complete with monetized elections and penetrable markets, would burst forth from the grateful populations, who would then happily accept the tutelage and supervision of American bureaucrats and technicians into perpetuity… with binding contracts for access to and control over the oil.
The invasions were also supposed to demonstrate US military invincibility and the futility of opposition. You can judge for yourself how that went.
Zany as this sounds now, using 20-20 hindsight, this seemed a perfectly credible plan in many quarters – including for the vast majority of the Democratic Party’s federal elected officials. The idea of this outcome was the main premise of the invasions, and it was explicit.
When this premise was dis-proven by the actual outcomes of the war, the decision was taken not to abandon the war, but to rewrite the premises, conduct triage, and drive on. The new premise was “if you broke it, you bought it.” Powell called it the Pottery Barn rule. Okay, so we didn’t push a button and transform Arabs and Muslims in other countries into Democrats and Republicans. But we are in Southwest Asia now; and if we leave, the results would be terrible because (a) it would compromise US security by giving mad geniuses safe havens from which to plan mass casualty attacks against the US, and (b) if “we” leave, there will be a horrible bloodbath between those bloodthirsty ignoramuses. The (b) point simultaneously mobilizes fake empathy and real racism; and it was the argument that the Democratic Party latched onto like a lifeboat. Antiwar was off the table.
[Anti-war emasculates, and emasculated parties cannot win. That's performance-art patriarchy, even if the prez were a biological woman.]
Liberal racism was never more apparent than in this unacknowledged orientalism: those people need “us” to show them how to be civilized. No mention of the massacre at Haditha, the systemic detainee abuse, the thrill-killing by mercenaries, the revenge destruction of Fallujah, or the organized rape-murder by a Marine unit of 14-year-old Abir Hamzah and the murder of her entire family. These facts did not fit with this ostensible civilizing mission (so they were treated as minor aberrations).
Afghanistan was put on the back burner by serial defeats in Iraq, tactical and political. Those defeats ultimately led to an internal withdrawal strategy by US troops (pulling turtle-like into massively fortified bases), focusing on Baghdad, and abandoning or buying off other regions. Geo-politically, this was followed by the most profound defeat of all, the rise of Iran as a key regional political actor, with only Iran’s partisans left as US allies in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, resources were stripped from the far more austere and tactically disarticulated operations in Afghanistan; and various Afghan forces arrayed against the US – in particular the Taliban – watched and waited. When the US was clawing its way out of the quicksand in Iraq, the Taliban began a series of tactical initiatives in the south. The US invaded Iraq in March 2003. By October of 2006, when I wrote “Reflecting on Rumsfeld” for Truthdig, I made the rather obvious point that “the Taliban now controls whole towns throughout the south.”
The Taliban has been on the move ever since; and they totally have the initiative right now.
This was the stage for Barack Obama to mount his campaign, and he committed himself early to weaseling on war. He couldn’t risk being male-baited as antiwar, but he had to be anti-Bush. Solution: Call Iraq the wrong war, Afghanistan the right war, and blame Bush for inappropriate emphasis.
A sensible tactical decision, given that most people in the US had never opposed the occupation of Afghanistan and most were turning against the debacle in Iraq. That the tables got turned on him with the so-called “success of the Surge” by Republicans was still insufficient to overcome the bitter public feeling against George W. Bush for not being a winner; and Barack Obama rode his campaign juggernaut into the White House with the Afghan monkey already on his back.
Barack Obama may have had a choice in this matter, I’ll contend… in some parallel universe. But whoever was going to be President of the United States did not have a choice, given the actual conditions. So President Obama never had a choice. These folks know political operations, and they know their constraints.
Antiwar emasculates, and Obama had had to overcome the race question enough to jump through the electoral hoops. Overcoming black stereotypes was edgy enough at this juncture, there could be no question of his martial masculinity. He had to show his balls as his bona fides. But there is another reason that President Obama has to stay at war.
War is necessary for our way of life.
No viable candidate for POTUS can be antiwar right now, because so many American voters secretly know that preserving our current way of life requires war. And we don’t know any other way of life.
Show balls to the public. Show balls to the military-intelligence establishment. Show everyone, I am a man who can kill.
Within hours of assuming office, Obama gave the green light to an attack by CIA armed aerial drones inside Pakistan that killed civilians. The war in Pakistan is not the Department of Defense’s show, but the CIA’s, a covert operation. The CIA war in Pakistan is ostensibly to deny refuge to anti-US/NATO fighters operating in Afghanistan; but the script always includes the urgency of stopping a Pakistani insurgency that might… drumroll, please, get hold of the Pakistani state’s nukes (though we are comfortable with states themselves, including ours, having them). No one remembers Cambodia these days, where we went after “sanctuaries.”
No change. Fear, fear, fear makes the world go ’round.
In the past few days, one NATO airstrike killed what appears to have been dozens of civilians who were grabbing gasoline from beached petroleum trucks. General Stanley McChrystal went to the site after days of furor to front for the delaying investigation and do damage control – no pun intended. American casualties are creeping up in serial efforts to dislodge the Taliban from regions they now control, north and south. The main highway, running between Kabul and Kandahar, is manned by Taliban checkpoints. The botched election is a grim joke in Afghanistan and a scandal before the rest of the world. And five days ago, troops from the 10th Mountain Division, acting on typically faulty intelligence, raided and rousted a hospital run by a Swedish charity… another PR humiliation, and another incitement to anti-American feeling in Afghanistan.
“I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal,” said Obama in March, “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Nicely alliterated, and there’s that obligatory masculine presidential balls-display, but it says exactly nothing about how to recognize and identify defeat. We don’t recognize it for ourselves in Iraq, but the US is being gradually expelled there… like the bodily evacuation of a chronically constipated person, but expelled.
When you can’t describe your objectives, there is always data. The public likes it, because it’s over-the-head reassurance that you are a genuine technocrat, somebody who might know what the hell is really going on. Obama is good in this role.
So how is it that white-righty George Will is calling out the “good war” in Afghanistan?
What may be bothering George Will, and what makes me wearier than I can describe, is that Obama is making Rumsfeld-talk: metrics, the super-set of body counts. It means there is no clearly defined objective, no one person who can officially surrender, only graphs and scatterplots that walk off into an indefinite and bloody future.
First, we need to understand criteria. George Will’s criteria for winning wars are cribbed from Colin Powell’s old post-Vietnam doctrine:
—Is a vital U.S. interest at stake?
—Will we commit sufficient resources to win?
—Are the objectives clearly defined?
—Will we sustain the commitment?
—Is there reasonable expectation that the public and Congress will support the operation?
—Have we exhausted our other options?
—Do we have a clear exit strategy?
For reasons I have explained at length in other venues, I believe the Powell Doctrine is flawed, as well. Even McChrystal could tell Powell that there is a political field excluded here; though McChrystal shares the delusion that this field is both manipulable and controllable. It is manipulable. They did have something called an election. It is not controllable, as we just saw.
These tactical decisions are Obama’s choice, not just President Obama’s choice.
The Game has taken over his mind; and now all is lost.
Baudrillard, when describing the Jesuits’ groundbreaking contributions to political strategy, wrote:
It is in the Renaissance that the false is born along with the natural. From the fake shirt in the front to the use of the fork as artificial prosthesis, to the stucco interiors and the great baroque theatrical machinery… In the churches and palaces stucco is wed to all forms, imitates everything — velvet curtains, wooden cornices, charnell swelling of the flesh. Stucco exorcises the unlikely confusion of matter into a single new substance, a sort of general equivalent of all the others, and is prestigious… because [it] is itself a representative substance, a mirror of all the others [a general simulacrum -Manuel DeLanda]. But simulacra are not only a game played with signs (emphasis added); they imply social rapports and social power. Stucco can come off as the exultation of a rising science and technology; it is also connected to the baroque — which in turn is tied to the enterprise of the Counter Reformation and the hegemony over the political and material world that the Jesuits – who were the first to act according to modern conceptions of power – attempted to establish.
Games.
The above quote is the epigraph for the third chapter of Manuel DeLanda’s book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. In DeLanda’s book, he describes the effect of ubiquitous simulacra (simulations, specifically war games) on human interpretive skills. DeLanda makes a linguistic distinction between various forms of communication (signs), between counterfeit, replica, and simulation, and how those signs affect our perceptions of how the world works through games.
…[W]e saw how war games evolved in three stages: from variations of chess in the clockwork era (“counterfeit”), to games played on relief models of a real portion of terrains (“replica”), to computerized versions where maps and models have been replaced with digital images (“simulation”). We saw how the difference between fiction and reality was blurred with this last step, because the images with which war games are confronted (images on radar screens and computer displays) are essentially the same as those in a real crisis…
…There are many other examples of counterfeits, replicas, and simulations in the realm of visual as well as nonvisual communications. But for our purposes here, what matters is that in this century [20th -SG], intelligence agencies [including the DOD's -SG] have existed in a world of simulacra: not only do they exploit the power of images for the purposes of propaganda, they themselves live in a world of make-believe.
This is the delusional aspect of executive power, but the delusions are manifest in the conduct of the war. They are not the cause of war.
No matter how much we think the verbiage of war is the cause of war, the fact is that war is hard-hearted and expensive, and there is generally something material as the uber-incentive to actual war. There is nothing original in saying it, that this war is about energy. But for some reason — perhaps because it’s so obvious — it is quickly overlooked in how we talk about the war.
Energy War
This is a resource war, an energy war more specifically. That Energy War is an outcome, the offspring of the whole supra-structure of modernism. In 1973, Ivan Illich wrote in Energy and Equity:
It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.
You won’t make many friends in the suburbs by making this patently obvious statement. It’s analogous to correcting a rebellious adolescent; and it’s met with the same stiff-necked stupidity. Except that middle-class America (in particular) is exercising that willful ignorance in a way that is now undermining the very eco-energetic architecture of the planet.
Crude Oil Imports to US (Top 15 Countries)
(Thousand Barrels per Day)
Country
CANADA 2,001
VENEZUELA 1,119
MEXICO 1,099
SAUDI ARABIA 902
NIGERIA 769
ANGOLA 435
IRAQ 374
RUSSIA 305
COLOMBIA 286
BRAZIL 269
ALGERIA 232
KUWAIT 170
UNITED KINGDOM 154
ECUADOR 148
NORWAY 120
The United States is actually 23rd in the world for per capita oil consumption (distinguished from energy consumption), at 68 barrels a day. We are 6th in per capita energy consumption, but with a consuming population that far outstrips the four countries who use more per head: Canada, United Arab Emirates, Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar, and Luxembourg. In straight oil consumption, we are far and away number 1: over 28,680,000 (2007). Number 2, China, with a population of 1.3 billion souls, drinks merely 7,578,000 bbl/day. The largest oil consuming institution in the world is the United States Department of Defense (from Energy Bulletin):
The US Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest oil consuming government body in the US and in the world
“Military fuel consumption makes the Department of Defense the single largest consumer of petroleum in the U.S”
“Military fuel consumption for aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities makes the DoD the single largest consumer of petroleum in the U.S”
According to the US Defense Energy Support Center Fact Book 2004, in Fiscal Year 2004, the US military fuel consumption increased to 144 million barrels. This is about 40 million barrels more than the average peacetime military usage.
By the way, 144 million barrels makes 395 000 barrels per day, almost as much as daily energy consumption of Greece.
The US military is the biggest purchaser of oil in the world.
We are approaching a situation where we will fight for oil in order to have oil to fight for oil.
The oil is not in Afghanistan; but the region is. The main players are there, Russia, Iran, China, and of course Pakistan and India. We don’t merely consume energy, we compete for it with others. And we don’t merely get our way in the world, i.e., with the neoliberal Washington Consensus holding sway across the globe, by stationing troops abroad. Troops don’t have that capacity. The trick is, in that other game within which the Game is played — geopolitics. A US military presence in South and Southwest Asia is a strategic redeployment of the post-Cold War US armed forces designed to exercise the maximum leverage with the rest of the world. The status of friend and foe changes, but the constant imperative of preserving US power overall remains.
The imperial hand must remain on the tap.
If this fails, as the war in Iraq failed, and I think it will fail, then it is a marker of something more profound than a setback in a single place. It is the continued unraveling of American power and of the stillborn Pax Americana. Which means that things will inevitably change inside the US, and for the American Suburban Middle Class,
We unpacked the Game above. Now let’s try to unpack energy and the peculiar world power exercised by the American suburban middle-class. This is the terrain that the Game is played on.
The Middle Class
(1) The most powerful political bloc in the United States can be named inexactly but usefully, “the mostly suburban mostly white middle class.” Shorthand, the American suburban middle class. Abbreviation: ASMC.
(2) This ASMC bloc is financially, agriculturally, geographically, and psychologically dependent on the US’s highly entropic (energy-wasting) techno-social grid.
(3) Geography limits the domain of the state, but the flows of energy, material, and signs (like money) that constitute that techno-social grid are inter-national. So the geographically-delimited state (the USA), led by [fill in the blank] cannot claim sovereignty and its prerogatives over many of the sources of those flows, nor can it exercise the kind of control the state is legally entitled to and granted at home. (see point 7 below for a reiteration)
(4) The levels of consumption required to maintain political quiescence among the ASMC are only possible because of those unequal flows of resources into the “core” and the export of waste and other disorders back to the “peripheries.” We get oil from the Persian Gulf and ship trash to Africa. Without this stuff, the way-of-life of this politically powerful demographic, the ASMC, will be destabilized.
(5) Destabilization of the most powerful political bloc (political identity) in the country constitutes a direct threat to the positions of those who exercise political power.
(6) Therefore, US political leaders have to find ways to ensure – even in the face of certain social or ecological catastrophe at some point – that the flows that keep the ASMC happy are maintained.
(7) Reiteration: David Harvey talks about the contradiction between the geographic logic of the state and the financial logic of capital. There is also a mismatch between the national logic of the state and the inter-national logic of war.
This is Catch-222. This is now Obama’s AFPAK War, his Energy War, our Energy War.
The ASMC remains largely unanalyzed, except by a few urban theorists – one of my faves being Matthew Lassiter and his study of sunbelt suburbia, The Silent Majority.
In that book, Lassiter shows how the ASMC perceives itself. ASMC by other names is a very real, very potent political identity. The Game operators in both the political parties know this, respect this, and kowtow to it. Note how the term “the middle class” is a shared word field for politicians of every stripe now. The ASMC is a self-conscious, self-replicating, active political identity. That is why it is the center of gravity for political maneuvering inside the US.
For the time being, the ASMC is content to support and idealize the state and its actions – including war. But their real interest is in survival-with-privilege. The ASMC sees no acceptable alternative to its status quo, and it is a class of people who have been disciplined to suppress their imaginations for everything except fantasy and entertainment commodities. The ASMC is also smart enough to know, in their secret private spaces, that they have lost the ability to survive without their global life-support-system. They literally do not know how to subsist. That anxiety suffuses them; and canny political operators know how to massage that anxiety into fear.
The ASMC is also quite intelligent enough to know that we need war to ensure oil. No reason to raise the topic in polite company, but they know it… we know it. The Masters of the Lie are salving our psyches with carbon-trading schemes, hybrid cars, and ethanol – believed mostly by people who call themselves liberal. Most of us, including the ASMC, have at least a sense that the truth is more cruel. Coal we have right here in the US, so we can shit all over West Virginia with impunity… prerogative of the state, you see. But oil! We can’t keep the cars rolling or agribusiness booming without that. We are so dependent that if we run short of oil, we can run short of food. The ASMC… is right. We can’t preserve our current way of life without an Energy War.
The zeitgeist is flying miles above the heads of Barack Obama or any other political leader. The reason the topic has to come up as “Obama” anything is there was a cult of personality that developed, and a lot of people hung their hearts on “change” they didn’t ever, really understand.
Now something called Obama is the issue we have to understand to understand the war.
Moral War
Standards are like paths picked through fields of equanimity, worn into hard wide roads over time, used always because of collective habit, expectation, and convenience. The pleasures and perils of picking one’s own path through the field are soon forgotten; the logic or illogic of the course of the road is soon rationalized by the mere fact of the road.
-Patricia Williams
George Will’s objection to the war in Afghanistan is that it is instrumentally flawed.
My objection is that it is a war. That moral objection doesn’t hold much sway in modernity; but we have already seen that the instrumentalists of the world, George Will with his columns or Barack Obama with his presidency, have far less power than they pretend, less still any freedom, and at the end of the day, they can only adjudge themselves based on the cold, dead criterion of instrumental success. They are compelled to win the Game.
So I register my personal objection to the war, explicit in my faith: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” My faith tradition is prophetic, from Isaiah and Zeremiah, et al in the OT, to Jesus and after. Dorothy Day and Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King are part of this prophetic tradition, too. Contrary to the popular understanding of this term, prophets serve a revelatory, not predictive, function.
Prophets do not align themselves with power, but speak truth it. Revelation is unmasking. It can’t be done when we tell partial truths in the interest of policy agendas and elections. What is prophetic is precisely what remains outside the Game.
Peacemaking is not practiced by power or through it. It stands apart from power in order to speak to it.
“[T]he logic or illogic of the course of the road is soon rationalized by the mere fact of the road.”
We need to get off the road.
BuddhalovesPaine:
I take issue with the idea that war is necessary for our way of life. Can I defend that with a 10 page report to defend my view. Hell no. I am not a college professor. I do know that the nazis once thought that lebensraum was necessary for the German way of life. Is that comparing Apples and Oranges? You say good bye I say hello.
The United States has made a huge effort in creating a “magnificent” military industrial complex. What if it would have put a similar effort in to living within an “energy budget”? We would not need to be in a position where we need to kill for oil. Would that route be (have been) risk free? Of course not.
As for needing to have control of oil to be in a position to fight a war, not just maintain an industrialized society. That is a fantasy land position. It would take huge amounts of oil for some combination of countries to build train and operate an invasion force. It would take far far less to resist that force. Does that statement need support. To me it is so obvious it stands on its own but I do not know who I am talking to anymore.
To say that the US can not make a plan to live with 50% of the oil that it used yesterday with in 3 years and 25% with in 10 years is a plain lie. If it were 1940 today and the Nazis had subs that avioded sonar detection the US government (military) would come up with a plan in 48 hours with how it would maintain the country with a minimum amount of oil and make sure that no one starved or froze to death in their homes to make sure that domestic tranquility was maintained. Things just need to be put in the correct perspective. But because our society, or military, does not have honest leadership things do not get put in the correct perspective.
Now it might be a good argument that no politicians who would enact the kinds of measures to that would need to be enacted to make the US a sustainable society could ever be democratically elected. Then we are screwed unless some people who think that they know what needs to be done are willing to try to take the law in to their own hands and succeed. If they fail we are screwed. If they are wrong we are screwed. But if they have the power to take the law in to their own hands that must mean that numerically they are quite numerous. If they are quite numerous it must mean that they have persuasive leaders. If they have persuasive leaders then why can they not become a majority?
It is probably stupid for me to comment on leadership. Am I an authority on leadership? According to the US military I have none. When I went through the ROTC advance course I not only got the lowest leadership scores in the battalion I got the lowest leadership scores in the history of ROTC up to that point. Now if my rants on the computer have caused anyone in the military to notice my rants in such a way that required that my charges be answered and not just ignored it has occurred to me that some could say that I am just a disgruntled former employee in need of revenge and recognition. Yes that charge is true, you get labeled a looser by people who are collectively speaking a bunch of complete hypocrites and nazis trying to pretend that they are heroic defenders of this that or the other thing and it I think that it would make any normal well adjusted person such as myself really angry to be ridiculed by such a system, and the people in it, only to get a living example of what moral derelicts the people in the system are, as shown by their behavior over the past years.
On one of the blogs at military.com some fascist wrote, no oil for pacifists. This person might be a PFC but it is a symptom of a complete lack of moral leadership in the military, and US society. Generals are responsible for this state of affairs and when they speak people listen. When I speak it is just like dust in the wind. Because I obviously do not understand the principles of leadership. For example rule number one, do not insult or talk down to the people that you wish to lead. I have been told by my society that no one should listen to me because I have not been elected to office I have not commanded armies and I have not spent 20 plus years running 40 miles across a deserts in a blizzard, carrying a 100 pound back pack and a (simulated) wounded soldier on top of the back pack.
So why should I be angry. There are millions of other people out there who think and know that they have no influence on the course of the countries direction, but those people can be divided in to two groups, those that more or less agree with me and those who do not. If those who agreed with me had power I would not give a rats ass if anyone heard what I wrote. Those millions of little people that do not agree with me do not need to be heard because things have been going their way for decades. They may not perceive it that way though because when the consequences of their actions become known to them they do not recognize the true causes and effects but instead blame their troubles on something else. Does that statement need supporting examples because to me it is self evident.
9 September 2009, 7:25 pmBuddhalovesPaine:
The libertarians make a case that it is not necessary to spend a single dime to protect “America’s” oil supplies in the middle east. The arguments that they make which I do not care to list now sound quite convincing to me.
10 September 2009, 2:35 amThey take the argument a step further. Even if it were necessary to protect those oil supplies since the oil is distributing by institutions that seek to maximize their profits if the Chinese have a use for that oil that allows them to offer a higher price than US motorists the oil is not going to end up in US automobiles or tractors anyways.
So can the leaders of AMerica, who ever they are, be so uniformed that they have not heard libertarian critiques on this issue? Can they be so stupid that they do not see the sense of their arguments? If the answer to either of these questions is yes I would really have to wonder about the type of people who get admitted in to US military academies and the type of people that they graduate.
I think it is very likely that the answer to both those questions in NO. Do I need to document that by showing the SAT scores and GPAs of military academy inductees and the private schools that I imagine many have attended?
So if our wars were to protect our oil supplies in the first place such a policy would be a massive crime. The people that implemented it would be vile creatures who would deserve to have wooden stakes slowly hammered up their ass until it reached their heart. But then how much more vile is it if these wars are waged for something even more immoral than liquid energy supplies for the masses. If energy for the masses is not the motive is another motive possible?
One that comes to mind is to make sure than Exxon or whatever names current US oil companies go by have their hand on the spigot of the oil supplies. If that were the case then the people who implement such a policy are even more evil than Hitler himself. Did Hitler believe that he was acting in Germany’s best interests or only the interests of a few very powerful corporations?
Yet the history of what has happened in Iraq throws doubt on this potential motive. The Iraqi government has given the rights to exploit Iraq’s oil riches to other countries in addition to the US. So I wonder if there is not some motive for these policies that are so insidious that a great amount of effort goes in to making sure that they never get mentioned in public. Motives so insidious that they could only be desired by creatures who look and act like humans but actually are, in a literary sense, aliens with reptilian brains, who have imposed themselves over the native inhabitants of this planet.
If this is true their treachery is understandable.
We could know if they are killed and autopsies are allowed on what is left of their brains. If it shows that their brains were like ours we will wish that we had kept them alive long enough to do MRIs and CAT scans on their brains before, before, before, well shit as has been said before there is no fate that a human can imagine that is suitable for making them pay for the damage that they have done.
BuddhalovesPaine:
Uniformed, uninformed is there really a difference?
10 September 2009, 2:36 amRussell Woodward:
Yes, we need to as human beings before a global environmental cataclysm. We certainly need to before a global war cataclysm (http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22556). We need to so long as we can hold dear our faith in fundamental human being as a (tiny)positive aspect of this universe.
10 September 2009, 9:47 amBut we are, as you say, the weaker, the lesser in a militarized culture. So these needs must be met by whatever strength we can muster to face this death culture and all its ideologies, as Robert Jensen (http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22082) and you, and others reveal this crucible of our life and time.
Sean:
Clarity is replaced by winning as the ultimate goal of persuasive argument.
Indeed. Some of my wide-reading friends on the left-ish side of the political spectrum like to point to George Lakoff’s “Moral Politics” as important on the modern political debate. But an objective read of Lakoff shows that Lakoff is interested in winning arguments, not achieving agreement or clarifying problems and their solutions. Thus the debate IS the Game and the Game is not about improving life for anyone but those engaged in the Game itself.
10 September 2009, 10:21 amStan:
I posted this with a sense of urgency, the medical benefits and reform speech coming and all that; but I’d have like to had a good deal longer to explicate the sub-theses. Energy War grows more obsolete with every day, except for the general thrust of ocnclusion on the social relations of energy. It contained densely-packed information on actual ongoing events (what, 4 yrs ago); and of course people have changed positions, pieces have been moved on the grand chessboard, folks have dies, all that time’s arrow business.
It’s better that I did, I see now, by commetns here and at Huffingtonpost where I also posted to reach outside FS’s tiny orbit. The give and take of conversation is more valuable than one of my obsessive monologues.
The question of oil/energy is one that has been so mystified it takes more energy to set aside misconceptions than it does to describe the actual relations (like gender in that regard). I wasn’t very successful at representing the four-dimensional complexities, the idea of “overdetermination,” ie. The degree of abstraction required to have this kind of conversation is a minefield, too.
If I could render accessible the idea that money and high-quanta of commoditized energy stand in an inverse relation wherein money rewards the squandering of energy, and profit rewards actions that undermines our energetic architecture in its biospheric vandalism, then I’d be way ahead. But all these words are themselves each cloaked in its own mysitfications. We tend to seek linear explanations, because we need mnemonics to “hold those thoughts,” especially if we haven’t yet moved from information to concept. Nowadays, there is a constant flood of information, and so mnemonic memory becomes almost a survivial tool, a filing system… and we come to demand brevity, that things “come to the point.”
Conversations can move us further.
Aside from oil, the access to oil (which we currently have and will have for some time to come) is one issue, but control of future competitors’ access is more immediatley important. We have to go back to the end of the Cold War to figure out why Afghanistan, where there is little oil.
An imperial military needs bases in every strategic region, and this is a strategic region. At the end of the Cold War, the basis for site selection – force disposition – became obsolete almost overnight. So the military has to re-position.
The US military runs on gasoline, but it’s not access that dictates bases; it’s range. There has to be a base, or bases, from which to project force. You can’t fly from Fort Bragg NC to Kuwait with a fighter-bomber. Afghanistan is the only place left in the region who is too weak to keep us out.
But the objective hasn’t changed from Bush to Obama.
Bases.
11 September 2009, 6:24 amStan:
- Ched Myers, from the introduction of The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life, by Ross & Gloria Kinsler.
*
Debt figures heavily into our own conjuncture, and is the secret power that conforms that dangerous American middle class.
11 September 2009, 11:52 amMichael Anderson:
I used to think the “powers” would abandon the ASMC, as corporations find markets elsewhere—like China. But I see now that’s a consequence of “apocalyptic” thinking, and a [categorical] ignorance of Peak Oil. Society will go on in altered forms, as it always has. And the middle class will attempt to preserve its privilege, eventually, at all costs—what was the quote from the French general—”kill them all, and let God sort them out”.
I am starting to see the “real world” aspects of the ministry of Jesus, of being aware of the eternal nature of the Game, noting the changing tactics, and attempting to get your life on the right track, as history flows on like a river.
I would recommend a book, “Defying Hitler”, as a “man on the street” view of what happened to the middle class in that particular instance, over a long period (1914-38). The USA is not Germany, but people tend to react in similar fashion wherever they are, if you can get past cultural differences. The author left Germany for England in 1938, thus avoiding the end of the cross (he was also married to a Jew).
Nowhere in my recollection of recent history is there any mention of any kind of “Jubilee” towards society in general, although we certainly see the twisted Corpo “bailout” all over the news. And, it looks like all the “you lie!” hubbub will be [another] convenient distraction from the actual failure of healthcare and AFPAK war….although it will be another emotional straw man/false argument diversion for the ASMC.
11 September 2009, 1:19 pmSean:
Stan– as to “why Afghanistan,” how about these points?
* Opium poppy crops
* Key strategic location for pipelines to transmit oil and gas
* Symbolic “enemies” who are convenient excuses (al Qaeda, Islam, and a people who refuse to bend to outsiders’ wills) for invasion and displays of force/power/militarism
Whenever the USA’s leading people (those who hold political policymaking authority) decide the time is ripe for projecting military power around the world, a convenient enemy is required. Typically it has been an enemy whose native military power doesn’t include big weaponry — Grenada, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Phillippines. Choosing a more powerful adversary increases the likelihood of a “World War” and presently the US economy isn’t suited to such a broad-based wide-ranging effort… is it?
The CIA has long used drug smuggling and drug transactions to obtain money and/or leverage in foreign nations. Meddling in Afghanistan’s opium poppy production, or gaining control over it, would give the CIA even more power for global black market opium and heroin trading.
I agree with you about bases – clearly by the ongoing example in Iraq, base construction yields quite a few benefits to certain members of the American powerful. It creates profiteering opportunity for engineers, construction companies, logistics companies. It results in new strongholds from which power may be projected locally, instead of from more distant locales. It creates a physical presence, which yields vague sociopolitical rewards of the psychological oppression sort — i.e., “we are in control here” sorts of psychological pressure on the natives. And last, in the most cynical viewpoint, American bases might be attacked in retaliation for their construction/location, which gives a pretext for further military power projection.
My understanding is that global gas/petroleum businesses have long wanted to run pipelines across Afghanistan, but have been thwarted by the Afghani people, who are effective guerrilla warriors in their native mountainous terrain.
11 September 2009, 1:48 pmStan:
War, like every other project of the state, is multiply influenced and multiply determined. But the influences and determinants are not themselves the outcome of a person or persons, but of systemic self-organization and replication. Individuals simply do not have that much power to predict or steer outcomes. They have to position themselves within an existing structure and dynamic to exercise power; and even then the purpose and direction of that exercise of power is supra-individual.
The POTUS is an extremely constrained position — looking over its shoulder at domestic crises, the party, the opposition party, key strategic allies, key enemies and potential enemies, law, finance, public fads and opinions, etc etc etc. But the main responsibility of that job now is to maintain US power; while the main job of the POTUS as leader of a party is to maintain the domestic power of that party, ie, elections. These are the sharks, and the rest are pilot fish.
12 September 2009, 4:50 amjohn steppling:
great piece, stan. (here is something related, i wrote….http://www.bestcyrano.org/?p=3684)………
12 September 2009, 9:11 amBuddhalovesPaine:
You have to be careful with this statement, disparities of wealth are not natural. Ignoring the question of income for the moment just think about spending habits. Two people have the same income, one owns a trailer house because she loves to travel, another owns a nice house because she does not like to travel. The result is a very quick disparity of wealth. Another owns a trailer house but collects and refurbishes classic cars another level of wealth has been created. But if people can not own means of production the idea of getting rich just to get richer in a never ending cycle will not be possible.
12 September 2009, 2:41 pmI also keep in the back of my mind that a highly regulated capitalist system might be the best that mankind can achieve. Things might not get better than Finland or Switzerland or something in between.
I had to laugh at that. We have several dozen US credit cards but only one European Credit Card. At dinner yesterday my communist friend said that if German capitalists had bin in charge this latest financial meltdown would have never happened. He told me this story about when he was working in a Mercedes factory as a young man in the 60s he made friends with a another young man whose father was a millionaire. He asked his friend who was a university student working in the factory over the summer, why he worked for a few Marks an hour. His friend said, because he wanted a car. His father WAS paying for his college education but a car was a luxury so if he wanted that he had to pay for it himself. The point was that German capitalists are more responsible than US capitalists. Well I have to go, I am getting booted off and out.
steve:
So what are we in the anti-war movement going to do, if (or when) Obama invades pakistan? Commit mass suicide? Threaten to vote republican? One of the problems with our having been more an anti-bush movement than an anti-war movement is once the hated enemy is gone, the coalition collapses. How many Democrats will come out to protest a war led by a leader they identify with? If the protests against clinton’s war with serbia are any indication, not very many.
12 September 2009, 4:52 pmStan:
Which is the way things are… always a good starting point.
Since the handful of folks here are unlikely to change things tomorrow, maybe we could at least increase our power of discernment on this global conjuncture. For myself, I wonder where the real unravelling of the Obama cult of personality (OCOP) has begun. Polls tell us little more than the fact that his support is fading. My own hypothesis, implied above, is that good ol’ American negrophobia (shared by whites and honorary whites!) has begun to replace the vague hopes of those who were last in the fold of the OCOP. When a guy like Bush is popular (like after 9-11), the eventual cog-dis between rhetoric and action is attributed to a slick poltician who burned us. When it’s the black guy, explanations start tending toward incompetence… then fear.
The collapse of the antiwar movement is a myth, I think. There never was an antiwar movement. There were multiple antiwar formations, with multiple background agendas, and they all piled onto the anti-Bush bandwagon because that was the easy shared target. When we had close to a million on the mall Feb 03, there was more backward shit than you can imagine salting the crowd, including the “wrong war” thesis that Obama latched onto. We were all gaming. Once the game was won (in the last two elections), and the common ground in our agendas dissolved, we all went home. I was neck-deep in this stuff; I remember all our strategy discussions. What we did accomplish was to set the stage, discursively and organizationally, for Obama’s ambush of the Clinton machine… an unintended consequence.
On that discursive front now, we see the health care debate and racialism disguised as the resurgence of red-baiting (something we’ve seen in the south time and again, the twin-threat of negro-power and communism). Hey, why invent new tactics while the old ones still work. The new twist is how a kind of vague libertarianism has found a home in this mix, because the lack of direct black-baiting has given them plausible denial of overt racism.
This “debate” has also shifted public attention off the war at exactly the time when casualties are mounting and the US lines are being stretched (the most basic tactic of any insurgent force), now into Pakistan. If I were a Taliban commander, I would strongly encourage any action that deepened the involvement of the US in Pakistan.
Lay a rubber band on the table and try to cut it with a knife. Now stretch the rubber band and just barely touch it with the knife. See the difference? When the pressure is increased by overstretch, the casualty-prevention takes priority over “operations other than war” OOTW, the military calls it, like civil affairs. The relation between occupier and occupied then takes a turn for the worst and increases recruitment of partisans against the occupiers. This is the counter-insurgency death spiral. Obama has already inagurated it with his own “surge.”
Let’s not forget that there is a neighbor nation here that is also at the center of a controversy (one not yet hyped by the media like health care) and that is Iran. Iran’s internal difficulties have incapacitated its ability to form a coherent foreign policy vis-a-vis the US at exactly the time they most need to respond to the Obama administration’s quiet overtures. And Obama’s time is running out, because the AIPACers and war mongers are all seizing onto claims that Iran could develop a bomb within a year (the good ol’ tempo task). Each day that passes creates more pressure on Obama to do things like strangle-sanction Iran and prepare plans for a preemptive strike. This will drive Iran further into alliance with Russia (probably the reason Netanyahu is believed to have run off to Moscow on Sep 7), who has said it will wipe its behind with any sanctions regime against Iran, who they have been courting for both the SCO and a natural gas OPEC. Russia may already be covertly sending Iran S-300 anti-aircraft missiles that could queer any pitches by Israelis in the future to launch a clean strike against Iran.
I pooh-poohed the notion that the Bush administration was going to attack Iran, because they were so vastly overstretched in Iraq, and their only allies in Iraq were pro-Iranian. It is much easier to imagine a scenario where the Obama administration gets tripped into such an adventure, expecially by Israel, who doesn’t trust Obama and would welcome the opportunity to force him off the fence and back into the camp of his staff Zionists (this is apparently a huge controversy within the administration, yet unresolved).
And so the bifurcations multiply.
As to movements and such, the best I can figure is for people to keep seeking and telling the truth about this war in Afghanistan. For myself, I will never join another institutionalized movement that “games” this. How can we stop wars and rumors of war? We can’t. Not now. We haven’t demystified it yet.
14 September 2009, 6:27 amSean:
@ BuddhalovesPaine –
I wish I found your post more persuasive. But it seemed like it depended on a starting point that isn’t well-founded. And its centerpiece was an even less-well-founded conclusion about highly-regulated capitalism. I think if you want to persuade me about capitalism in general and a highly regulated isomer of that general theme, you need better examples, more facts, and an admission of flaws and weaknesses. Every time I encounter something that is highly-regulated, I encounter giant quantities of corruption in as many guises as humanity can imagine. Anyone who thinks America is not highly-regulated is avoiding reality! Merely pointing to a disparity in credit card offerings doesn’t prove a relative lack of regulation.
I wish your post were better argued.
14 September 2009, 10:03 amMichael Anderson:
I am generally not a fan of Maureen Dowd, or MoDo, as she is called. But in this particular column she nailed it on the head, and in the nation’s “paper of record”…it needed to be said to the American public at large. One can hope for some unintended consequences here, and maybe some honest, more discerning discussion around dinner tables.
I can only imagine what awaits an Eastern, Liberal, WOMAN who tells the truth about white male perceptions of negro-power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1252987200&en=294d3085ac11979c&ei=5087
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html?_r=1&bl&ex=1252987200&en=294d3085ac11979c&ei=5087
14 September 2009, 10:59 amJim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
Hi Stan,
Just back from China where I taught a graduate course in Economics and gave lectures in various venues (will send papers and lectures given to use as you wish and also they are on my website) and dropped in to see the latest wisdom shared. I just love this metaphor of the rubber band:
” Lay a rubber band on the table and try to cut it with a knife. Now stretch the rubber band and just barely touch it with the knife. See the difference? When the pressure is increased by overstretch, the casualty-prevention takes priority over “operations other than war” OOTW, the military calls it, like civil affairs. The relation between occupier and occupied then takes a turn for the worst and increased recruitment of partisans against the occupiers. This is the counter-insurgency death spiral. Obama has already inagurated it with his own “surge.”
This is the “positive feedback” noted in non-linear dynamics, dialectical materialism and chaos theory: Internal decay in imperial centers leads to increasingly desperate and reckless forms and levels of imperial power projection, which lead to increasing resistance in the “periphery” (a law of history where there is oppression there will eventually be resistance) with even former allies joining the ranks of new insurgents, leading to further desperate and reckless imperial power projections and overreach, coupled with increasing vacuums into which even allies move and gain global shares of markets, investment outlets and strategic resources (e.g. “Cold War is ‘over’; Japan and Europe won”), leading to increasing fiscal/financial crises in the metropolitan center of imperal overreach and internal decay, and, as well, among the sub-immperial powers, leading to even more desperate and reckless imperial power projections…And like Vietnam and the fool that tries to “recover” sunk costs, not only the phenomenon of “the more acquired, the more to lose, and thus the more reckless to protect what is threatened”; but also the more a loss is seen as a dangerous and threatening signal or indicia, to exiting and potential future adversaries, of the de facto and essential non-omniscience, non-omnipotence, non-omnipresence of an imperial paper tiger (“The Vietnam Syndrome”)…
Take care and good to see you keeping on keeping on Stan…
Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi
14 September 2009, 5:02 pmSean:
@ Michael Anderson –
I don’t think Ms Dowd is in any position to know the truth on that score, given that she leads a very comfortable life of a highly paid pablum purveyor. Of course one can count on Ms Dowd to drip hellfire on any Republican or anyone to the right of Obama, and she will deliver on that score time and again. But is anything really as simple as Democrat good, Republican bad? (outside the narrow, privileged, “liberal” world of Ms Dowd, I mean).
Whether there is a segment of America who do not want to see a Black president is irrelevant right now, because Obama is not ruling as a Black man, he is ruling as our 44th President, no matter what his skin color and no matter what continent and what country and what race his father hails from. Raising Obama’s blackness seems to me an escape valve, in which “liberals” like Ms Dowd are able to prove “I’m not racist!” by castigating the racism that is more overt in others than it is in herself. What matters right now has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with Obama continuing, solidifying and even expanding the horrors of Bush/Cheney. A cynical man such as myself is inclined to conclude that the very reason Obama was given the nod for the Democrats in 2008 was because a lot of very guilty-feeling White folks would refrain from criticizing Obama because a lot of people who imagine themselves “liberal” have an over-reaction to wrongdoing by any upwardly mobile Black American, provided the Black in question is a Democrat of course.
One of the reasons I enjoy the comment threads here is that I don’t read much of that naive, partisan bickering from a “liberal” perspective where everyone blames “rethugs” and the like for what ails America. From where I sit, however, Ms Dowd’s linked column reads a lot like that sort of partisan bickering, the type that does more to make the complainer feel elevated for pointing at the racism in others. So Ms Dowd now feels enlightened and superior for calling Joe Wilson a cracker. And her readers nod their heads in agreement, also feeling the same sense of enlightened superiority for concluding likewise about Joe Wilson.
And all the while the amazing “post-racism America” of POTUS 44 continues on as if a Klan Kleagle were elected POTUS.
Seems to me there’s a bit of detached objectivity missing from Ms Dowd’s column. But even more disappointing is the fact that what could have been a milestone for Black Americans — our 44th POTUS being half-Black — has yielded nothing more than a highly corrupt Administration that is even worse than its White, Republican predecessor in every way I can measure.
For a more honest read of the “progress” that is POTUS 44′s placement in the White House, I suggest visiting Black Agenda Report.
14 September 2009, 9:00 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi:
Am looking at your site, and read (early this A.M.) the article on critical thinking—a good way to start a day. Great stuff, and should be required reading in secondary schools (at least). Much material there, and we need it—thanks.
15 September 2009, 7:51 amSean:
Amen to that, Michael. Jim, the Critical Thinking article is excellent. I especially liked Point 2 about author bias. I have been blasted many times for questioning author background, but I do it anyway because my time spent as a litigator taught me that the person’s background and bias will tell you more than the overt words the person chooses — and even will tell you how to read the words chosen! Thanks for linking to your blog, and thanks to Michael for referencing the article.
15 September 2009, 9:28 amStan:
FULL
17 September 2009, 8:08 pmmark:
I’ve been a big Tariq Ali fan going back a few years. Two of his books; “The Clash of Fundamentalism” and “Bush in Babylon” I’ve read and re-read several times. He has a recent one called “The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power” that is quite timely to our present situation. Anyway, after reading “The Duel” and then seeing Asif Ali Zardari now being the Pakistan president……well it’s just fucking unbelievable.
And then of course the pandering, arrogant statements coming from the Obama administration in regard to
18 September 2009, 1:15 pmSEAsia/Pakistan………anyway………IMHO most of the people in my little circle of friends who were supporters of Obama (In various ways) and voted for him, we all kind of new in our heart of hearts that the similarities of the two parties far outnumber the differences. And all of the ramifications of such a concept well, it’s really kind of breathtaking to see and hear this stuff just emerge right before our eyes. Not that I’m surprised……It’s the level of duplicity and obsequiousness toward the money changers that’s kind of stunning.
Vero:
Re: “Disparities in wealth are not “natural” but the result of human sin”
John is a brain surgeon, Pete is a truck driver. The disparity in the wealth is due to sin? I am an employee, and my employer, the owner of the company, worked hard and is intelligent, and built a multi-million dollar business–that is necessarily the result of sin? “For you have the poor always with you; but me you have not always.”
A useful distinction is that between poverty and misery. Also, between ill-gotten wealth and well-earned wealth. It goes without saying that it is a virtue to be generous, but not necessarily is it a vice to have wealth. Men and circumstances vary enormously.
18 September 2009, 1:40 pmCurt Kastens:
I do not know if this is the proper thread to raise this question but I wonder why enlisted men and NCOs are still be convicted for refusing to take part in wars that the US government was unable to convict 1LT (and future president) Watada of. What can be different about the circumstances other than the rank of the people involved?
19 September 2009, 4:39 pmCurt Kastens:
It has been very easy for me to condemn people who follow orders to go to Iraq.
19 September 2009, 5:47 pmI have been more reluctant to condemn those who go to Afghanistan. Yet that seems to be the central front right now.
So my policy will be, condemn the war but not those who go. The thing is those who go to Afghanistan are way more than likely to have served in Iraq. So the vast majority of those who go to Afghanistan are already condemned anyways.
We can not forget about Iraq because we are still there and until the last soldier leaves we have to assume that the US government has no intention of pulling them all out.
We also can never forget that America is hugely indebted to Iran, regardless of who is in power there. Israel on the other hand is hugely indebted to the US. It is both practical and moral to drop the bitch and make the switch. I mean it…..in many different ways.
Sean:
Vero, it looks to me like the difference between the two supposed types of wealth is merely how comfortable you are with how the wealth was achieved.
It also looks to me like you assume every superior in a workplace has earned that superior position by real meritorious work… while my experience in many work settings is radically different, nearly opposite that view.
Essentially it reads to me as though you are making excuses for disparities in power in a capitalist system. If that’s not what you’re doing, maybe you would be kind enough to explain how I’m drawing the wrong conclusion.
21 September 2009, 3:38 pmStan:
Here’s the latest on the administration’s inquiry into torture:
from Ray McGovern:
FULL
We’ll see soon enough whether Obama reins in Hollder or not. The covert ops establishment is writhing, pissed off, and scared. A lot of high-profile future inmates out there if Holder goes forward.
22 September 2009, 6:02 amStan:
Another from CP, this on Obama’s Afpak War.
FULL
And here is the Ann Jones piece on the same subject, worth a look.
This issue of the war has become, of a sudden it seems, Obama’s truest albatross — the health care thing will come and go as it comes and goes. A lot of former Obama supporters, it seems, are becoming very vocal and pissed off about the war. There’s no Congressional vote that will make that go away. The game may be changing for Obama; and we may have pronounced the antiwar movement dead… prematurely. The public seems, with the wolves howling around their own campfires, to be in no mood for ghastly, expensive wars. And the Afpak War is going to get more ghastly and expensive still.
Obama better be looking into the history of another General to better understand Stanley McChrystal. Westmoreland.
22 September 2009, 4:23 pmJim Craven/Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi:
Thanks to Michael and Sean for your comments. That article, publised in a legal journal, was originally entitled Separating the Pepper from the Fly Shit but that title did not take off. My articles I wrote and presented in China are also on my website.
Stan, I hope you are doing well. As usual, anything of mine you may find has merit, please use as you wish.
take care,
Jim/Omahkohkiaayo i’poyi
23 September 2009, 5:21 pmStan:
Seems like a fine title to me, Jim. (:
24 September 2009, 4:43 amStan:
Wasserman on BHO and LBJ.
28 September 2009, 2:59 pmCurt Kastens:
A far far more ghastly mistake would be to attack, or order or allow Israel to attack, Iran.
28 September 2009, 3:24 pmSean:
@ Curt Kastens —
I think we’d better prepare for a ghastly occurrence then. I think we’re going to see both the USA and Israel attacking Iran before Obama’s 4-year term is up. I would really like to be wrong about that, though.
28 September 2009, 9:35 pmStan:
McChrystal leaks a warning of defeat, as leverage on the President and against that President’s constituents, who increasingly are turning their backs to the war.
29 September 2009, 11:27 amTimothy R. Anderson:
I’m gonna mis-spell some words in this comment but that hopefully
will not overshadow the point of it………
I for one am sick of the attention paid to individuals such as Libya’s leader Mohammar Quadafy and film director Roman Palonskiy.
That’s what I saw on cable news television last night. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
There are at least two countries in this world currently that
are being impacted by the “foreign policy” of the USA’s government.
Afghanistan is one http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-bombing30-2009sep30,0,6106493.story
and Iraq is the other.
Pardon me for being all ” I Could Run Cable TV Better” -y on all
of you all, but it’d be nice, just for one month, say, if the television news channels of the United States Of America actually
reported on persons, places and things that impact thousands, millions of Americans. Instead what we get is the Cults Of Personalities.
Sad.
Timothy R. Anderson
29 September 2009, 2:14 pmStan:
Another on McChrystal’s stunt.
29 September 2009, 7:08 pmTimothy R. Anderson:
Loads of this stuff, it should be said, goes on with millions and millions of Americans left unaware of any of it.
My local newspaper does not publish photographs of wounded American military servicemembers. Ever. Period.
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/archive-5/?pagemode=print
When the White House had President George W. Bush in it, from early 2001 to early 2009, it was an era of the USA’ s military putting itself in distant lands and failing to leave. NOW, when the White House has President Obama in it, it is STILL the era of the USA ‘s
military remaining in distant lands and failing to leave.
For all the bluffing and bluster available to be heard on commercial
talk radio these days, the Democratic Party IS STILL much like
the Republican Party. Willing to borrow vast sums of money to pursue
a foreign policy that is the opposite of what this nation once had
as its guiding principle.
Timothy R. Anderson
5 October 2009, 12:34 pm