War

I subscribe via email to the Marijuana Policy Project Alert which comes from the Marijuana Policy Project. The Alert I received today has the title, Decriminalization campaign announces prominent endorsers and twelve prominent endorsers are mentioned. A video was also included with the title, Profiles in Marijuana Reform by Rick Steeves. Makes sense to me. Here it is, a bit over four minutes long:

How about some non-US spin on General Petraeus leaving Iraq? Ajazeera is a good place to start. Here’s a video discussed by Juan Cole this morning. Instead of the happy talk of victory that the US media would spin, Juan Cole quotes a more realistic statement by Gen. Petraeus himself:

‘ In a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Sunday, Petraeus said experience in Iraq shows it will take political and economic progress as well as military action to tackle increased violence in Afghanistan. “You don’t kill or capture your way out of an industrial strength insurgency,” he said.’

Click on the YouTube and watch the heavies! There’s quite a bunch there. Also, what sounds to Juan Cole (and me) like realistic reporting. Worth a three minute watch.

Juan Cole this morning has an excellent summary of where we are seven years after 9/11. His main point is that the original al-Qaeda is defeated. Usamah Bin Laden’s original voice hasn’t been heard from in four years, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man, is alive and kicking but is mainly playing wolf and offers no “genuine accomplishments in recent times save the ability of the top leadership to elude capture!”.

On the other hand, the Taliban in Afghanistan are increasingly strong but “do not pose the threat of international terrorism, though they may give safe harbor to individuals from abroad that do.” The locals in Afghanistan increasingly distrust the US and NATO as this Aljazeera video demonstrates:

Rather than sending more US troops to Afghanistan, “a fool’s errand”, we should realize that the locals are right and that more Afghan troops are the answer.

Hey! The Russians are the bad guys! That’s what this Fox News interviewer wanted to say to this 12-year old girl and her aunt, but all he could mumble at the end of the interview was, “Well, there are gray areas in war”. That’s because the girl and her aunt specifically blamed the president of Georgia for starting the war and thanked the Russians for saving her.

Hat tip to Juan Cole who concludes: Gee,that isn’t that master narrative in the US military-information complex.

I watched most of Bill Moyers’ interview with Andrew J. Bacevich last evening. What an eye-opener! I’d been aware of a lot about Bacevich (see my post from last year) but had never known what he looks like nor witnessed his strong personality in a video before.

I would sum up what he is saying as follows: we have become an imperial nation over the past thirty years because of the combination of our naivety and hubris about “freedom” and our craven commercialism.

A small group of us at the top has led the way into this economic, political and military pickle we’re now in, and he blames Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II all about equally, except of course that Bush II has really accelerated our decline, but we, the American people as a whole, bear equal responsibility for being oblivious and allowing this nonsense to go on. You could blame the media too.

He feels that no matter who is elected president, Obama or McCain, nothing much will change because we are already far down the road with this imperial state and certainly Obama does not appear to have deviated much from the status quo, evidence for this being he does not list Andrew J. Bacevich among his advisers.

Bacevich is a Professor of International Relations at Boston University, retired Army colonel, and West Point graduate who served in Vietnam and retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. He’s come out with a new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, which Moyers referred to in his interview with Bacevich.

He invokes Reinhold Niebuhr, that famous intellectual American theologian of the 20th century, in this paragraph given by Moyers from the first chapter of The Limits of Power:

The United States today finds itself threatened by three interlocking crises. The first of these crises is economic and cultural, the second political, and the third military. All three share this characteristic: They are of our own making. In assessing the predicament that results from these crises, THE LIMITS OF POWER employs what might be called a Niebuhrean perspective. Writing decades ago, Reinhold Niebuhr anticipated that predicament with uncanny accuracy and astonishing prescience. As such, perhaps more than any other figure in our recent history, he may help us discern a way out.

So what should we do on Nov. 4? I’d say hold your nose and vote for Obama. Here’s a paragraph from a comment by PacificCoastRon on Steve Clemons’ blog:

So: oppose Obama all you want up til Nov. 3rd, criticize him, hold him up to higher standards, advocate for the revolution you’d like to see, and call out the Democrats for the cowardly leeches that most of them are. But hold your nose to make sure you vote for him on Nov. 4th (or earlier if you can vote by mail), and get all your friends to vote for him, and get all your friends to make sure the Republicans don’t steal it again. then on Nov. 5th you can go back to being disappointed in Obama, and in pressuring him and criticizing him with all your might to guide him towards your vision of utopia.

The alternative, John McCain, is unthinkable.

One of my morning reads to capture the news and find out what’s going on in the world has always been Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. He’s got a great post this morning on the hysteria of the neocons over the Russian response to Georgian troops invading Ossetia. Here’s the closing paragraph of this short four paragraph read:

Watching the Bennetts and the Krauthammers get all jazzed up about Georgia as the new Afghanistan, with all the painfully awkward nostalgia and excitement of an 80s era Gilligan’s Island reunion flick is entertaining. But much less so when you realize these jokers might be running the government in six months.

Of course McCain is right in there with the rest of them, championing them in fact and sending his surrogates to Georgia. Well, we’ll see whether the whole thing doesn’t blow over in a couple weeks. I’ll come back here then with an update!

This is a new 5 minute video, Republicans and military men on John McCain, by film student Aaron Hodgins Davis with a soundtrack “Lux Aeterna” by Clint Mansell. It offers some opinions of McCain from his own party and military “comrades”, and it captures what a dangerous warmonger he really is.

This dangerous ICE does not refer to thin ICE on a lake but instead refers to the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency, the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security. This ICE is dangerous because it has used fear of 9/11 to construct an enormous bureaucracy, independent of the legislative and judicial branches of government, justified solely for the purpose of fighting the war on terror but instead is used in an escalating undeclared war on illegal immigration. ICE has lately developed an insidious and clever “fast-tracking” scheme which on May 12, 2008, handed down to illegal immigrants 130 man-years of prison time based on bogus charges at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa.

I had heard about this at the time but hadn’t fully realized the seriousness and inhumanity of the operation until I saw this post on Missy’s blog, If You Don’t Know About This … You Should, and read the 20-page report by Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas who was a Federally Certified Interpreter at the US District Court for the Northern District of Iowa.

As if breaking up families with children wasn’t enough, men and women were driven to court like cattle in separate groups of ten, “shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through”, unable to understand the trumped up charges of social security fraud and identity theft leveled against them. All they knew was that they had paid up to $300 each for the right to work at the meat packing plant. Most never knew what a social security number meant or whose identity they were supposed to have stolen. Here are the last two paragraphs of that report:

“When the executive responded to post-9/11 criticism by integrating law enforcement operations and security intelligence, ICE was created as “the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” with “broad law enforcement powers and authorities for enforcing more than 400 federal statutes” (1). A foreseeable effect of such broadness and integration was the concentration of authority in the executive branch, to the detriment of the constitutional separation of powers. Nowhere is this more evident than in Postville, where the expansive agency’s authority can be seen to impinge upon the judicial and legislative powers. “ICE’s team of attorneys constitutes the largest legal program in DHS, with more than 750 attorneys to support the ICE mission in the administrative and federal courts. ICE attorneys have also participated in temporary assignments to the Department of Justice as Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys spearheading criminal prosecutions of individuals. These assignments bring much needed support to taxed U.S. Attorneys’ offices”(33). English translation: under the guise of interagency cooperation, ICE prosecutors have infiltrated the judicial branch. Now we know who the architects were that spearheaded such a well crafted “fast-tracking” scheme, bogus charge and all, which had us all, down to the very judges, fall in line behind the shackled penguin march. Furthermore, by virtue of its magnitude and methods, ICE’s New War is unabashedly the aggressive deployment of its own brand of immigration reform, without congressional approval. “In FY07, as the debate over comprehensive immigration reform moved to the forefront of the national stage, ICE expanded upon the ongoing effort to re-invent immigration enforcement for the 21st century” (3). In recent years, DHS has repeatedly been accused of overstepping its authority. The reply is always the same: if we limit what DHS/ICE can do, we have to accept a greater risk of terrorism. Thus, by painting the war on immigration as inseparable from the war on terror, the same expediency would supposedly apply to both. Yet, only for ICE are these agendas codependent: the war on immigration depends politically on the war on terror, which, as we saw earlier, depends economically on the war on immigration. This type of no-exit circular thinking is commonly known as a “doctrine.” In this case, it is an undemocratic doctrine of expediency, at the core of a police agency, whose power hinges on its ability to capitalize on public fear. Opportunistically raised by DHS, the sad specter of 9/11 has come back to haunt illegal workers and their local communities across the USA. ”

” A line was crossed at Postville. The day after in Des Moines, there was a citizens’ protest featured in the evening news. With quiet anguish, a mature all-American woman, a mother, said something striking, as only the plain truth can be. “This is not humane,” she said. “There has to be a better way.””

The immigration raid was described at the time by the local TV channel:

As Missy points out, the blogger Border Explorer has been continuously reporting on these events. This five-minute video by the Sojourners, linked from Missy’s blog, captures the real impact of the devastating immigration raid on this town:

The big question is what can be done to combat this sort of thing in the future, to limit the growing power of the DHS/ICE? Can the next administration act? Can Congress? Clearly, a great deal of immigration reform is needed immediately. How can this be done?

Listen to how this MSM guy named Dan tries to make an issue out of General Clark’s remarks! It’s a theatre of the absurd! This MSM guy Dan won’t give up trying to extract a story out of this, trying to prove that General Clark attacked MSM darling John McCain’s war record. What lengths won’t the MSM go to to pitch Repuglican talking points! Absurd! I is pissed again. HAHAHA

A number of weeks back, in mid-February in fact, I caught a person named Mark Perry on C-Span II talking about his new book, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace. This takes you back to World War II and the efforts to stop Hitler. It seems that Perry thinks highly of both Marshall, a great leader, and Eisenhower, who later became President, and perhaps is best remembered for his warning us about the Military-Industrial complex. The warning wasn’t heeded of course.

But what I’m leading up to is in Perry’s talk, which can be found here, he does not have very much nice to say about war. In fact, at one point he admits that he would now pull all our troops home from overseas spots around the world, and greatly reduce the size of the Military-Industrial complex which, as he says, is way too bloated.

So, here’s basically a conventional military historian saying we should emulate the Ron Pauls, Denis Kucinichs, and Mike Gravels of the world in terms of foreign policy. Pretty radical for an apparent centrist. Of course, this is all in a dream world and won’t happen — I mean the bringing back of our troops from around the world and the slashing of the size of the Pentagon.

Over and out.