| Hold Him to His Progressive Pledges: Make Obama Do It. Friday, 16 November 2012 By Marjorie Cohn and Jeanne Mirer, Counterpunch | Op-Ed ENTER TRUTHOUT.ORG President Obama declared in his victory address on election night, “Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated . . . We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” Those were powerful words. But they must be followed with action. When he thanked his campaign workers, the former community organizer spoke emotionally from the heart. He ran an incredible grassroots campaign, which must now be turned into a movement to work with Occupy and other progressive groups to effect real change. Glenn Greenwald warned in The Guardian that progressives are bound to be disappointed again in Obama because we will be under pressure to conform when our demand that he not agree to cut Social Security or Medicare as part of a “grand bargain” does not succeed. But recall that in 1940, the great labor leader A. Philip Randolph prevailed upon FDR to improve the conditions of blacks and workers. The President responded, “I agree with everything you have said. Now make me do it.” It is up to us to make Obama do it. How we get the President to do the right things are the challenges we face. What we do know is that those who mobilized to defeat Romney and Ryan should not demobilize. Those progressive constituencies that supported the President must come together to speak with one voice on key issues. During the presidential election, many progressives were hesitant to vote for Barack Obama. They could not forget that he bailed out the huge banks with no accountability for the white-collar criminals who wreaked so much havoc on our economy while at the same time providing no relief for those whose homes were being foreclosed. Nor could they countenance Obama’s use of drones to summarily execute untold numbers of people, including many civilians. Progressives were upset that Obama failed to close Guantanamo, continuing to hold many people in indefinite detention without criminal charges. We were outraged that the President wanted to look forward and not hold any of those who authorized and committed torture accountable. He neglected to mention poverty during the campaign, despite the fact that 42.6 million people live below the poverty line in the United States. Obama also deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants and continued the Bush policy of warrantless eavesdropping. Before the election, Marjorie Cohn joined Daniel Ellsberg, Cornel West, Frances Fox Piven, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower, Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen in issuing a call to progressive voters who were conflicted to ensure that we make defeating Romney a priority: “If you live in a close state, defeat Romney and his right-wing policies by voting Obama/Biden. If you live in a state where the outcome will be lopsided, you’re in a position to send a loud and clear vote of protest against Obama policies you oppose.” We “consistently challenged Obama policies (on civil liberties, war and bloated military spending, environment, potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare, to name a few)” but we knew “that the policies of a Romney/Ryan administration would be worse on many issues and better on none. Consider Romney’s recent vow to ‘change course’ toward even more war- mongering in the Middle East. Or their profound differences on abortion rights and Supreme Court picks.” The rest is history. President Obama was reelected handily, the only Democrat besides Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two terms with a majority of the popular vote. Women, gays, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, youth, and poor people understood the greater dangers of a Romney presidency. Obama prevailed in eight of the nine swing states. Although efforts to suppress the vote in communities of color in those swing states backfired, we know voter suppression is very real. Karl Rove & Co. used millions of dollars thanks to Citizens United to defeat Obama; luckily those dollars turned out to be ill-spent – on ads and not a comparable “ground game.” Maureen Dowd put it well: “Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama with the hope he will change.” With Obama’s reelection, we must do more than hope that Obama will change. We have a unique opportunity to demand Obama move in a progressive direction. The Affordable Care Act has survived so we can keep our kids on our health insurance policies until they turn 26, people with pre-existing conditions will not be denied insurance, and many who could not afford insurance before will be covered. But we must push for universal health care. Romney cannot pack the Supreme Court with more radical right-wingers. But we should pressure Obama to appoint true progressives to the highest court in the land. Romney cannot inflate military spending even more than the 20 percent of the U.S. budget it currently occupies. But we can demand a reduction in military spending, which adds significantly to the deficit, makes us no safer, and leeches money from education and health care. Whereas Romney sees workers as expendable when it comes to maximizing profit, Obama must see to it that union rights are strengthened. He must also acknowledge the major role unions, union members and union households played in organizing the ground game and for his reelection. The President must commit himself to finding ways, including using his executive authority, to create good jobs. Instead of Obama’s unprecedented targeting of whistleblowers, we must urge him to abandon the policies that led to the commission of war crimes that people like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning have exposed. It is one thing to be pro-choice. Obama must push to make coverage for abortion available in all federal health insurance programs. Obama took an important step when he issued an executive order preventing the deportation of young people who came to the United States before they were 16 and have lived here continuously for five years. In his second term, Obama should end discrimination and racial profiling by the Department of Homeland Security and the mass arrests and detentions of immigrants. He should also work on comprehensive immigration reform that includes a reasonable pathway to citizenship. We must hold Obama to his pledge to protect Medicare and Social Security no matter how tempting it may be to weaken them in the impending deal to prevent us from going over the proverbial but not real “fiscal cliff.” Obama should also be pressured to stick to his self- proclaimed mandate to make the rich pay higher taxes. To help prevent another economic meltdown, Obama ought to push for strong regulation, especially in the banking and financial sectors of the economy. A financial transactions tax on Wall Street, hedge funds, etc., targeted to job creation and infrastructure must be seriously considered. The United States is a key player in the global economy. But the free trade regimes we have followed have only promoted growing inequality in this country and countries with whom we trade. We need fair trade that includes protections for workers, human rights and the environment. In order to work seriously to protect our environment, Obama must push for a heavy tax on carbon emissions and major regulation of coal, oil and gas companies. He must demand transition to renewables before it is too late to stop the ravages of storms like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. During his first campaign, Obama pledged to immediately “let folks know” whether the products they consume contain genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) by proper labeling. He has not yet made good on that promise despite overwhelming public support for labeling GMO’s. Large corporations, including Monsanto, spent $50 million to defeat Proposition 37 in California, which would have required such labeling. Although Obama has resisted Benjamin Netanyahu’s demands that the United States draw a red line to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability, Obama has imposed punishing sanctions that are devastating to the Iranian people, and not necessarily targeted to the nuclear program, while not saying a word about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. He must not pander to the right-wing Israeli government on Iran or sacrifice the rights of Palestinians. After the election, Bill O’Reilly noted, “The white establishment is now the minority.” He was not talking about the white working class, but rather the white elite that has run our institutions since the country’s founding. O’ Reilly continued, “And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff.” These comments betray his racism and racial stereotypes because it was clear that the people he claimed “wanted stuff” were people of color. We need to reaffirm that all people have a right to live in a society in which the economy serves their interests, and that people are entitled to basic human rights. As stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights include economic rights – the right to a decent job, to organize and join unions, to a good education and quality health care, adequate housing, and to economic security when people become aged or disabled. While the President can always blame an obstructionist Congress for the need to “compromise,” the way he sets the terms of the debate will invariably determine the outcome. We know that President Obama, like any president of the United States, faces immense pressures from Wall Street (bankers), the Chamber of Commerce, the Military Industrial (Congressional) Complex, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the insurance, fossil fuel and gun industries. All of these lobbies seek to promote their own interests – including the rights of capital over labor, criminalization of broad segments of society, reliance on carbon-based energy sources and wars to obtain them. They aim to profit from health care and privatize as much as possible, and to ensure that people do not believe they have any entitlements to health care or social security. These are the many reasons to organize to make Obama do the right thing. But the burden is not only on the President. The burden is on us to organize the counter-pressure through all of the progressive constituencies. It is a challenge we must embrace. This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. |
| PEACE ACTION FOR A SANE WORLD is the nation's largest grassroots peace network, with chapters and affiliates in over 30 states. We organize our grassroots network to place pressure on Congress and the Administration through write-in campaigns, Internet actions, citizen lobbying and direct action. Through a close relationship with progressive members of Congress, we play a key role in devising strategies to move forward peace legislation, and as a leading member of United for Peace and Justice nd the Win Without War coalition, we lend our expertise and large network to achieving common goals. Real change comes from the bottom up. We are committed to educating and organizing at the grassroots level. PEACE ACTION / Youngstown is the local chapter in Youngstown OH, merging the organization's national mission with efforts to build community peace campaign programs, including neighborhood restoration and the arts. Together, we have the power to be the change we wish to see in the world. We won't wait for the bombs to drop. Sign the petition at National to prevent war with Iran. |
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| Palast's newest book, includes a 48-page comic book by Ted Rall, and a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Palast investigates Karl Rove, the Koch Gang and their buck-buddies. |
| ."Who Owns the World?" Oct 26th, '12 Excerpt from interview with Noam Chomsky by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. NOAM CHOMSKY: In a few weeks, we’ll be commemorating the 50th anniversary of "the most dangerous moment in human history." Now, those are the words of historian, Kennedy adviser, Arthur Schlesinger. He was referring, of course, to the October 1962 missile crisis, "the most dangerous moment in human history." Others agree. Now, at that time, Kennedy raised the nuclear alert to the second-highest level, just short of launching weapons. He authorized NATO aircraft, with Turkish or other pilots, to take off, fly to Moscow and drop bombs, setting off a likely nuclear conflagration. At the peak of the missile crisis, Kennedy estimated the probability of nuclear war at perhaps 50 percent. It’s a war that would destroy the Northern Hemisphere, President Eisenhower had warned. And facing that risk, Kennedy refused to agree publicly to an offer by Kruschev to end the crisis by simultaneous withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. These were obsolete missiles. They were already being replaced by invulnerable Polaris submarines. But it was felt necessary to firmly establish the principle that Russia has no right to have any offensive weapons anywhere beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R., even to defend an ally against U.S. attack. That’ s now recognized to be the prime reason for deploying missiles there, and actually a plausible one. Meanwhile, the United States must retain the right to have them all over the world, targeting Russia or China or any other enemy. In fact, in 1962, the United—we just recently learned, the United States had just secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Okinawa aimed at China. That was a moment of elevated regional tensions. All of that is very consistent with grand area conceptions, the ones I mentioned that were developed by Roosevelt’s planners. Well, fortunately, in 1962, Kruschev backed down. But the world can’t be assured of such sanity forever. And particularly threatening, in my view, is that intellectual opinion, and even scholarship, hail Kennedy’s behavior as his finest hour. My own view is it’s one of the worst moments in history. Inability to face the truth about ourselves is all too common a feature of the intellectual culture, also personal life, has ominous implications. Well, 10 years later, in 1973, during the Israel-Arab War, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. The purpose was to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was—so we’ve recently learned—he was secretly informing Israel that they were authorized to violate the ceasefire that had been imposed jointly by the U.S. and Russia. When Reagan came into office a couple of years later, the United States launched operations probing Russian defenses, flying in to Russia to probe defenses, and simulating air and naval attacks, meanwhile placing Pershing missiles in Germany that had a five-minute flight time to Russian targets. They were providing what the CIA called a "super-sudden first strike" capability. The Russians, not surprisingly, were deeply concerned. Actually, that led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first-strike launch just minutes before launch. Now, that’s after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone. Actually, it’ s a near miracle that nuclear war has been avoided so far. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the crises that led to that, especially Kashmir, remain. Both India and Pakistan have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, along with Israel, and both of them have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs, actually, until today, in the case of India, which is now a U.S. ally. War threats in the Middle East, which could become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers. Well, fortunately, there’s a way out of this, a simple way. There’s a way to mitigate, maybe end, whatever threat Iran is alleged to pose. Very simple: move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Now, the opportunity is coming again this December. There’s an international conference scheduled to deal with this proposal. It has overwhelming international support, including, incidentally, a majority of the population in Israel. That’s fortunately. Unfortunately, it’s blocked by the United States and Israel. A couple of days ago, Israel announced that it’s not going to participate, and it won’t consider the matter until there’s a general regional peace. Obama takes the same stand. He also insists that any agreement must exclude Israel and even must exclude calls for other nations— meaning the U.S.—to provide information about Israeli nuclear activities. The United States and Israel can delay regional peace indefinitely. They’ve been doing that for 35 years on Israel-Palestine, virtual international isolation. It’s a long, important story that I don’t have time to go into here. So, therefore, there’s no hope for an easy way to end what the West regards as the most severe current crisis—no way unless there’s large-scale public pressure. But there can’t be large-scale public pressure unless people at least know about it. And the media have done a stellar job in averting that danger: nothing reported about the conference or about any of the background, no discussion, apart from specialist arms control journals where you can read about it. So, that blocks the easy way to end the worst existing crisis, unless people somehow find a way to break through this. World-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Inst of Technology, Noam Chomsky Finish piece by entering link below DEMOCRACY NOW.ORG |
| Gregory Allyn Palast New York Times-bestselling Author...Freelance journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British newspaper The Observer. His work frequently focuses on corporate malfeasance but has also been known to work with labor unions and consumer advocacy groups. Notably, he has claimed to have uncovered evidence that Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Elections Unit Chief Clay Roberts, along with the ChoicePoint corporation, rigged the ballots during the US Presidential Election of 2000 and again in 2004 when, he argued, the problems and machinations from 2000 continued, and that challenger John Kerry actually would have won if not for disproportional " spoilage" of Democratic votes. |
Activists Cheer
Court's Ruling
Against Indefinite
Detention Law
Urge Obama not to appeal, and
senators to vote against it this
fall Sept 12th, 2012, New
York - Judge Katherine Forrest
today ruled that the so-called
"indefinite detention" provision of
the fiscal 2012 National Defense
Author- ization Act violates the
Constitution and issued a
permanent injunction against its
use.
The law would have allowed
the military to indefinitely detain
civilians -- even Americans --
without charge or trial if they
are accused of certain crimes,
or even associated with certain
criminals. The lead plaintiff is
writer Chris Hedges. He is joined
by six others, including Noam
Chomsky and Pentagon Papers
leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
According to plaintiff and activist
Tangerine Bolen, "The steady
assault on the US Constitution
was dramatically slowed today,
as Judge Katherine Forrest ruled
in our favor.
After eleven years of witnessing
a radical departure from democracy
and fundamental civil liberties and
towards increased authoritarianism
-- all under the guise of the war on
terror --we have a ray of hope and
reason to keep the faith: in judges
who stand with the Constitution,
in the rule of law, and in all those
who sacrifice so much to preserve
our liberties.
Today is a day to celebrate."
Court's Ruling
Against Indefinite
Detention Law
Urge Obama not to appeal, and
senators to vote against it this
fall Sept 12th, 2012, New
York - Judge Katherine Forrest
today ruled that the so-called
"indefinite detention" provision of
the fiscal 2012 National Defense
Author- ization Act violates the
Constitution and issued a
permanent injunction against its
use.
The law would have allowed
the military to indefinitely detain
civilians -- even Americans --
without charge or trial if they
are accused of certain crimes,
or even associated with certain
criminals. The lead plaintiff is
writer Chris Hedges. He is joined
by six others, including Noam
Chomsky and Pentagon Papers
leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
According to plaintiff and activist
Tangerine Bolen, "The steady
assault on the US Constitution
was dramatically slowed today,
as Judge Katherine Forrest ruled
in our favor.
After eleven years of witnessing
a radical departure from democracy
and fundamental civil liberties and
towards increased authoritarianism
-- all under the guise of the war on
terror --we have a ray of hope and
reason to keep the faith: in judges
who stand with the Constitution,
in the rule of law, and in all those
who sacrifice so much to preserve
our liberties.
Today is a day to celebrate."
| Must reads. Scroll down for. Vietnam Veteran Mike Hastle Arrested at Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza Hold Him to His Progressive Pledges. Make Obama Do It Truthout.org. You can Vote But Can You Vote for Democracy? Robt Shetterly Afghanistan: The Who Cares War? (Not Exactly, But It Fails the Real Definition of a Just War) Kevin Martin, Truthout| |
| "No matter how cynical you get, it's almost impossible to keep up." - Lily Tomlin |
| A Law Unto Itself - Decades of Political Tyranny at the IRS by KARL GROSSMAN May 16, 2013 President Barack Obama got it right and wrong Monday when he stated, “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous, it is contrary to our traditions.” He was right in declaring it was “outrageous” for the IRS to target conservative organizations for tough tax treatment. But he was incorrect in saying “it is contrary to our traditions.” For the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has for decades gone after organizations and individuals that take stands in conflict with the federal government at the time. This has been a tradition, an outrageous tradition. It is exposed in detail by David Burnham, longtime New York Times investigative reporter, in his 1991 book A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power. He relates how President Franklin D. Roosevelt likely “set the stage for the use of the tax agency for political purposes by most subsequent presidents.” Burnham writes about how a former U.S. Treasury Secretary, banker Andrew Mellon, was a special IRS target under FDR. During the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, he recounts, the focus of the IRS’s efforts “at political control” were civil rights organizations and those against the U.S. engaging in the Vietnam War. Nixon’s “enemies list” and his scheme to use the IRS against those on it is what the current IRS scandal is being most compared. History Professor John A. Andrew III in his 2002 book Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon—its title drawn from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s dictum “The power to tax is the power to destroy”—focuses further on this tradition. He tells of how John F. Kennedy administration’s “Ideological Organizations Project” investigated, intimidated and challenged the tax-exempt status of right-wing groups including the John Birch Society. Then, with a turn of the White House to the right with Nixon came investigations, he writes, of such entities as the Jerry Rubin Foundation, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Center for Corporate Responsibility. During the Reagan administration, I had my own experience with the IRS— ostensibly because of a book I wrote. Nicaragua: America’s New Vietnam? involved reporting from what was then a war zone in Nicaragua and in Florida— where I interviewed leaders of the contras who were working with the CIA to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government—and Honduras, being set up as a tarmac for U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. I visited a U.S. military base there. The book warned against a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua (subsequently decided against by the Reagan White House after the Iran-contra scandal). The book was published in 1985 and soon afterwards I was hit with an IRS audit. It would be more, I was informed, than my showing up at an IRS office. The IRS was to come to my house for a “field audit.” The investigator sat on one side of our dining room table and on the other side was me and my accountant, Peter Berger of Shelter Island. What would be an all- day event started with the investigator asking me to detail how much my family spent on food each week and then, slowly, methodically, going through other expenses. Then he went through income. He obviously was seeking to determine on this fishing expedition whether income exceeded expenses. He went through receipts for business expenses including restaurant receipts, asking who I ate with. He sorted through receipts for office supplies. By mid-afternoon, he had gotten nowhere. At that point, having been hours together, a somewhat weird relationship had been formed. And he began to tell me how his dream in college was to become a journalist. He expanded on that, and then asked:“Have you ever faced retaliation?” “What do you think this is?” I responded. He was taken back—insisting my name had come up “at random.” In the end, all he did was trim some of what was listed as business use of my home phone .Was I being retaliated against for the book I had written? One would never know. Recently, I ran into accountant Berger, now retired, and he commented about how that day at my house was the strangest IRS audit he had ever been involved in. The IRS has been beyond reform. Burnham writes in A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power that a “political imperative of not messing with the IRS” has become “close to being a law of nature almost as unbending as the force of gravity.” It is “rarely examined by Congress.” President Obama announced yesterday that the acting commissioner of the IRS was asked and agreed to tender his resignation as a result of the scandal. That’s a small start. Far more important is somehow ending the tradition of IRS political tyranny. Fundamental change in the IRS is called for. Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. |
| Friday, May 24, 2013 The Guardian Another Memorial Day in This Endless War As we pause to remember those who died for our freedoms, we are faced with the possibility of a 'forever war' by Amy Goodman Barack Obama salutes the coffin of a US soldier killed in Afghanistan at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, October 2009. (Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)In a remarkable but little-noticed oversight hearing last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee looked at "The Law of Armed Conflict, the Use of Military Force, and the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force". The 2001 AUMF is the act passed by Congress on 14 September, three days after the al-Qaida attacks on the United States. Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, opened his questioning of the military officials before him by stating: "Gentlemen, I've only been here five months, but this is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I've been to since I've been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today." King's statement followed the questioning by longtime South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who recently pushed to have the Boston bombing suspect – a U.S. citizen accused of a violent crime on U.S. soil – named an "enemy combatant," denying him his constitutional rights. Graham enjoyed unanimous agreement from the panelists to his series of questions: Do you agree with me that when it comes to international terrorism, we're talking about a worldwide struggle? Would you agree with me the battlefield is wherever the enemy chooses to make it? And it could be anyplace on the planet, and we have to be aware and able to act. The message was clear from the Pentagon: The world is a battlefield. The AUMF reads, in part, "the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." Only one member of Congress voted against that 2001 bill. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said from the floor of the House of Representatives: "I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. ... Some of us must urge the use of restraint ... and think through the implications of our actions today, so this does not spiral out of control." Clearly, Senator Angus King thinks things have spiraled out of control. As does journalist Jeremy Scahill, whose new book, "Dirty Wars," is subtitled, "The World Is a Battlefield." Scahill told me: "The concept of 'The World Is a Battlefield' actually is ... a military doctrine called 'Operational Preparation of the Battlespace,' which views the world as a battlefield. [If] the military predicts that conflicts are likely or that war is a possibility, [they] can forward deploy troops to those countries to prepare the battlefield. And under both Bush and Obama, the world has been declared the battlefield." His film "Dirty Wars," based on the book and directed by Richard Rowley, opens in theaters nationally this June. Close to 12 years later, the AUMF remains in force, giving the Obama administration and the Pentagon carte blanche to wage war, to occupy nations, to kill people with drone "signature strikes," based not on guilt but on a remote analysis of a suspect's "patterns of life". As these wars become increasingly hidden, it becomes even more important for journalists to go to where the silence is, to hold those in power accountable. Which is why the Obama administration seems to be waging low-intensity warfare on journalists at home, with dragnet surveillance of reporters to uncover protected sources, and targeting of whistle-blowers with unprecedented use of the espionage act. More than 100 prisoners at the US base on Guantanamo are engaged in a life-threatening hunger strike. Most of them have never been charged and are cleared for release, but remain in that American gulag, with no hope, no change. Memorial Day, while for many not much more than a three-day weekend, will be marked by many solemn ceremonies. At the time of this writing, the most recent US deaths in Afghanistan were two soldiers from the Pacific island of Guam, Sgt Eugene M Aguon, 23, and Spc Dwayne W Flores, 22, killed by a so-called improvised explosive device on 16 May. Unreported by the Pentagon are the hundreds of soldier and veteran suicides, which now account for more deaths than combat. The backlog at Veterans Affairs, as of May 20, was more than 873,000 benefits claims pending, 584,000 of which were pending for more than 125 days. Thomas Paine wrote in the March 21, 1778, edition of his pamphlet The Crisis, "If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of willful and offensive war ... he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column |
| Way Worse Than a Dumb War: Iraq Ten Years Later Phyllis Bennis on March 18, 2013 - The Nation Editor’s Note: This statement on the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War was signed by Phyllis Bennis, John Cavanagh and Steve Cobble (Institute for Policy Studies); Judith LeBlanc and Kevin Martin (Peace Action); Laura Flanders (GritTV); Bill Fletcher (The Black Commentator); Andy Shallal (Iraqis for Peace); Medea Benjamin (Code Pink); Michael T. McPhearson and Leslie Cagan (United for Peace and Justice); Michael Eisenscher (US Labor Against the War) and David Wildman. All organizations for identification only. It didn’t take long for the world to recognize that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq constituted a dumb war, as then Senator Barack Obama put it. But “dumb” wasn’t the half of it. The US war against Iraq was illegal and illegitimate. It violated the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and a whole host of international laws and treaties. It violated US laws and our Constitution with impunity. And it was all based on lies: about nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, about never-were ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, about Iraq’s invisible weapons of mass destruction and about Baghdad’s supposed nuclear program, with derivative lies about uranium yellowcake from Niger and aluminum rods from China. There were lies about US troops being welcomed in the streets with sweets and flowers, and lies about thousands of jubilant Iraqis spontaneously tearing down the statue of a hated dictator. And then there was the lie that the US could send hundreds of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars worth of weapons across the world to wage war on the cheap. We didn’t have to raise taxes to pay the almost one trillion dollars the Iraq war has cost so far, we could go shopping instead. But behind these myths the costs were huge—human, economic and more. More than a million US troops were deployed to Iraq; 4,483 were killed; 33,183 were wounded and more than 200,000 came home with PTSD. The number of Iraqi civilians killed is still unknown; at least 121,754 are known to have been killed directly during the US war, but hundreds of thousands more died from crippling sanctions, diseases caused by dirty water when the US destroyed the water treatment system and the inability to get medical help because of exploding violence. And what are we leaving behind? After almost a decade the US finally pulled out most of its troops and Pentagon-paid contractors. About 16,000 State Department-paid contractors and civilian employees are still stationed at the giant US embassy compound and two huge consulates, along with unacknowledged CIA and FBI agents, Special Forces and a host of other undercover operatives. The US just sold the Iraqi government 140 M-l tanks, and American-made fighter jets are in the pipeline too. But there is little question that the all- encompassing US military occupation of Iraq is over. After more than eight years of war, the Iraqi government finally said no more. Their refusal to grant US troops immunity from prosecution for potential war crimes was the deal-breaker that forced President Obama’s hand and made him pull out the last 30,000 troops he and his generals were hoping to keep in Iraq. But as we knew would be the case, the pull out by itself did not end the violence. The years of war and occupation have left behind a devastated country, split along sectarian lines, a shredded social fabric and a dispossessed and impoverished population. Iraq remains one of the most violent countries in the world; that’s the true legacy of the US war. We owe a great debt to the people of Iraq—and we have not even begun to make good on that commitment. The US lost the Iraq War. Iraq hasn’t been “liberated.” Violence is rampant; the sectarian violence resulting from early US policies after the 2003 invasion continues to escalate. Of course we didn’t bring democracy and freedom to Iraq—that was never on the US agenda. The failure to “liberate” Iraq cannot be the basis for assessing the war. The real assessment must be based on whether the war achieved the goals that the Bush administration and its neo-conservative, military CEO and Pentagon profiteering partners established for this war: Consolidating permanent US control over Iraq’s oil. Nope, US oil companies are just some of the myriad of foreign oil interests in Iraq’s oil fields. Leaving behind a pro-US, anti-Iranian government in Baghdad. Hardly, Prime Minister al-Maliki is barely on speaking terms with anyone in Washington. Guaranteeing permanent access to US bases in Iraq. Not even close, all but two of the 500 plus US bases and outposts were either closed down or turned over to the Iraqi military. Ensuring that a post-war Iraqi government would allow the US to use Iraq as a jumping off point to attack Iran. No way, despite continuing billions of dollars of our tax money, the Iraqi government today is allied more closely to Iran than the US. In the buildup to the war, too many media, government officials, academics and others allowed fear to curb their tongue or their eagerness to curry favor with those in power to stifle their speech. This remains a crucial lesson as we stand up to the escalation of Obama’s drone war and continue to challenge those who call for war against Iran. The war in Iraq began with significant support, with many people accepting the false claims that this new war would bring security to a still-frightened US public. But that support did not last long. Within the first years, pro-war assumptions had been reversed, and by the end, the anti-war movement and escalating casualties had turned around public opinion so thoroughly that overwhelming majorities admitted the war in Iraq was wrong and should never have been fought in the first place. And this war showed us our power. It proved the possibility of globalizing opposition even before the war began. The mobilization of February 15, 2003, when the broad United for Peace and Justice coalition joined with allies around the world on the day the world said “No to War!” February 15 created what The New York Times called “the second super-power,” ready to challenge the US drive towards empire. Our movement changed history. While we were not able to prevent the invasion of Iraq a month later, that mobilization proved the illegality of the war. It demonstrated the isolation of the Bush administration, pulled governments and the United Nations into a trajectory of resistance, helped prevent war in Iran and inspired a generation of activists, including some of those who, eight years later, would create the Arab Spring in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The US troops left behind a devastated, tortured Iraq. What they didn’t leave behind is one dollar for reparations or compensation. That battle still lies ahead. The US war in Iraq may be over, but we owe an apology to all those who suffered from the war. And that apology must be grounded in recognition of our enormous debt to the people of Iraq, a debt for which compensation and reparations are only a start. Our real obligation, to the people of Iraq and the region and the rest of the world, is to transform our government and our country so that these resource-driven wars, shaped by lies and fought for power and for empire, whether in Iran or somewhere else, can never be waged again Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/173396/way-worse-dumb- war-iraq-ten-years-later#ixzz2UK5b0Fvc |