So now the US (along with the UK and France) is at war with Libya.

I find it incredible that the US goes so casually into war, as if bombing a country was just another foreign policy option. Now the government does not even go through the bother of making up lies to justify its actions of the kind that we were regaled with in the run up to the Iraq invasion, such as weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, haven of terrorists, etc.

The US has used its superior airpower so routinely and frequently that in one sense what is happening in Libya not new. The list of countries that have been bombed by the US is long and growing longer by the day. (This is an old list and does not include Pakistan.)

Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-1961
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Iran 1987
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1993
Bosnia 1994, 1995
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-05
Afghanistan 2001-05

Because the US can use its air power with little risk of casualties, aerial bombardment has become the preferred option when the cry goes up to ‘do something, anything’ when some conflict arises somewhere but it is not at all clear what needs to be done or indeed if the US should do anything at all. This kind of war is loved by some liberals and Democrats who resent being seen as wimps. So they love it when they get a chance to launch so-called ‘humanitarian wars’ that involve just bombing, such as in the Balkans when Bill Clinton was president and now in Libya with Obama. These bombing campaigns seem to make the War Party elites giddy with pleasure as they see so-called ‘smart bombs’ attacking their own chosen ‘bad guys’. NPR’s Tom Gjelten is already gleefully talking about the heavy damage inflicted, living up his reputation as the correspondent from National Pentagon Radio.

What is slightly new is that in Libya the US has decided to intervene in a civil war. It has now seemingly decided that it can intervene in a civil war in a country if it does not like the way that war is progressing. But civil wars are always messy and who is in the right and who has legitimacy is rarely clear. What is the current intervention meant to achieve? It seems to have as its purpose to prevent Gadhafi’s forces from retaking some of the cities held by the rebels, so the US has essentially sided with the rebels. But who are the rebels? What do they stand for other than being against Gadhafi? Or is that alone good enough to support them militarily? Suppose the air campaign does succeed in creating some sort of stalemate between the two sides. Then what? Surely the three western countries are now pretty much committed to removing Gadhafi from power and thus will be uncomfortable with a stalemate. There is an inexorable logic to these campaigns. They start out attacking military targets. Then when that fails to achieve the desired results, they target infrastructure such as power and water supplies. And when that fails they go for outright terror by hitting high visibility targets in urban areas. All these things ruin a country and produce huge numbers of deaths. (Josh Marshall shares some of my other concerns about the Libyan intervention.)

Let’s not forget that Libya is a relatively prosperous country and has the highest Human Development Index of all the countries on the African continent. This index is a composite measure of wellbeing, especially child welfare, and is based on life expectancy, literacy, education, and standards of living. Will a sustained bombing campaign throw it into poverty? Remember that Iraq used to be one of the most developed countries in the Middle East before the sanctions and war took effect, making it impoverished.

The US has already come under charges of hypocrisy in attacking Libya while not doing anything about the parallel situations in Yemen and Bahrain. While the US and other countries bomb Libya because of its harsh response to an actual rebellion seeking to militarily overthrow the government, it ignores the killing of non-violent demonstrators in the streets of Yemen and Bahrain by those governments. Normally the mainstream media is so deferential to the US government that they never ask these kinds of embarrassing questions about why there are such obvious contradictions in its policy. And they can avoid doing so because the uncomfortable parallel usually occurred in the past and thus can be dumped conveniently into the memory hole. But in this case it was unavoidable because the rebellions in those other countries are going on at the same time. It is interesting to watch people who support the Libyan attacks try to avoid answering the question of why the two situations are treated so differently, even though Bahrain is using foreign troops (most from Saudi Arabia) to attack its own people.

Meanwhile Saudi Arabia has banned all demonstrations but that country is immune from any repercussions from the US for anything. After all, fifteen of the nineteen people directly responsible for the attacks of 9/11/2001 were from Saudi Arabia. If the fifteen had been from (say) Syria, that country would have been bombed the next day.

The real problem is that the constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war is now completely ignored. The framers of the US constitution (Remember that document? Kept in the national archives? Supposed to protect the people from authoritarian rulers?) recognized that war was a deadly serious business and that going to war was not a decision to be made lightly. They were well aware that the Executive branch and the president would use wars to further their narrow and selfish goals if they could, so they gave the power (Article 1, Section 8) to declare war to Congress so that an exhaustive debate by the people’s elected representatives would take place before such a momentous decision was made.

But the Executive branch has usurped that function on its way to creating an authoritarian state and the spineless Congress is only too willing to give up this prerogative since it enables them to avoid taking responsibility for making a decision and they can then waste their time on trivialities and carp from the sidelines about tactics.

You would think that on issues that should be politically neutral (like climate change and evolution) there would be tendency for the views of political liberals and conservatives to converge with increasing education as the essential facts and arguments become better understood. And in general, you would be right, except for the US. Here it seems that ideology trumps facts and reason.

David Lindorff, who has been following this story closely, reports on the background to the deal that resulted in the acting CIA chief in Pakistan being freed.

The chances are slim to none that Davis will face any serious investigation in the US for his actions, despite assertions by US government officials to the contrary.

It looks like Obama has stopped paying even lipservice to his ringing promise during his election campaign to close down Guantanamo. Glenn Greenwald points out that his excuse (repeated by many of his supporters) that the Congress forced him to back down is the kind of political sleight-of-hand that Obama is becoming increasingly good at.

It is true that Congress — with the overwhelming support of both parties — has enacted several measures making it much more difficult, indeed impossible, to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the U.S. But long before that ever happened, Obama made clear that he wanted to continue the twin defining pillars of the Bush detention regime: namely, (1) indefinite, charge-free detention and (2) military commissions (for those lucky enough to be charged with something). Obama never had a plan for “closing Guantanamo” in any meaningful sense; the most he sought to do was to move it a few thousand miles north to Illinois, where its defining injustices would endure.

The Daily Show points out the obvious.

Cartoonist Ted Rall envisages Obama’s kinder-gentler Guantanamo, while Tom Tomorrow captures Obama’s political expediency.

He talks about the current situation in the Middle East and the US.

I like the bit towards the end where the interviewer asks him why, at the age of 82, Chomsky has not mellowed!

Keep fighting Noam! You are an inspiration to us all.

(Thanks to Norm)

The CIA station chief jailed in Pakistan for the murder of two people has been released after the victims’ families pardoned him (something apparently possible under Pakistani law) after receiving an undisclosed amount of ‘blood money’ as compensation.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich sent a letter to the Defense Department in response to their stalling for over a month on his request to visit Manning.

My request to visit with Pfc. Manning must not be delayed further. Today we have new reports that Manning was stripped naked and left in his cell for seven hours. While refusing to explain the justification for the treatment, a marine spokesman confirmed the actions but claimed they were ‘not punitive.’

Is this Quantico or Abu Ghraib? Officials have confirmed the ‘non-punitive’ stripping of an American soldier who has not been found guilty of any crime. This ‘non-punitive’ action would be considered a violation of the Army Field Manual if used in an interrogation overseas. The justification for and purpose of this action certainly raises questions of ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ and could constitute a potential violation of international law.

Dennis Kucinich has the decency to protest the treatment of Manning. Contrast this with the weasely behavior of John Kerry and his feeble attempt to find excuses for the appalling treatment of Bradley Manning.

This US senator from Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, is rapidly proving himself to be a totally vapid politician, notorious for sonorously going on and on during Senate hearings, who seems to be more fond of hearing his own voice than of standing up for anything. Here is Kerry during Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings when his introductory comments went on for so long that she looked like she would fall asleep.

Then there was the time when it was discovered that multimillionaire Kerry, married to an heiress, owned a $7 million yacht but avoided paying Massachusetts taxes by keeping it in a neighboring state.

But a far worse example was in 2007 he continued to blather on, and even attempt to joke, while Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student who questioned him at a public meeting, was wrestled to the ground by campus security offices and tasered even though he had done nothing to merit such harsh treatment. (This was the famous ‘Don’t tase me, bro!” incident.) Kerry did not do anything even as the student’s screams of pain reverberated through the auditorium. You can see the horrifying video.

To some extent I can understand politicians acting cynically, and even criminally, for personal gain, even if I do not excuse them for doing so. What I truly despise are those politicians like Kerry for whom it would cost nothing to do the right thing (like ask for decent treatment of Andrew Meyer and Bradley Manning) but do not have the common decency to do so.

It appears that many of the so-called ‘porno scanners’ are recording up to ten times the radiation emissions that they are advertised as providing.

Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security claims that it can unilaterally implement a policy of strip searching all air travelers without any prior public comment or getting approval from any higher authority.

Under the guise of fighting terror, we have created an out-of-control monster in the DHS. All these abuses can be traced back to the odious USA PATRIOT Act that was rammed through after 9/11.

Authoritarians are quick to exploit any scare to further infringe on our rights and liberties under the guise of keeping us safe.

(via Progressive Review.)

While deficits and a large national debt are not good things in the long run, it is not the case that it is the greatest problem right now. What is clear is that they are being used as weapons by the oligarchy to strip people of their basic rights and benefits and destroy public services in order to further enrich the few obscenely wealthy people in this country.

Paul Craig Roberts looks at the numbers and argues that we are witnessing a great rip-off.

Rachel Maddow explains what is happening in Michigan as emblematic of what is going on nationwide, which is the wholesale assault on democracy itself. (Thanks to reader Norm.)

As is often the case, what I see happening in the US has precursors in Sri Lanka a few decades ago. In Sri Lanka, elections used to swing back and forth between left-of-center and right of-center political parties, with the range being much greater than in the US. As a result, the government’s economic and social policies would change every few years. Since we had a British parliamentary system, governments would sometimes get a landslide, which would later be reversed.

In 1977, the right-of-center party won by a huge landslide. Its autocratic leader decided that he wanted to play for keeps and create a new system that would entrench his party in power indefinitely so that his policies would not be reversed. Using his huge majority, he forced through major changes in the constitution and government and elections and the judiciary system to make it hard for another pendulum swing to occur and reverse his policies, and that even the judiciary would not be able to rein in the anti-democratic measures.

It worked, at least for a while. But eventually people got tired of the government and its corruption and voted in the opposition, despite the rigged system. And now the other party is using those very same powers to entrench itself and its cronies in power. But because of the weakened democratic system and the removal of safeguards, corruption is now endemic and political thuggery and intimidation commonplace.

The lesson in this? It is that we are entering a new phase in politics in the US. The people who are attacking unions and undermining the public sector and the watchdog role of government are playing for keeps. They too want to change the rules of the game so the oligarchy has total freedom to do what it likes and that there will be no going back. They are using the ignorant tea partiers as a wedge to claim popular legitimacy but the tea partiers will be tossed aside once they have served their purpose. The tea partiers will realize only too late that they vociferously cheered on the very people who will turn around and destroy them.

The Democratic Party is too feckless to vigorously fight this assault on democracy, because they are also, with a few rare exceptions, part of the oligarchy. The Democratic Party will only do the right thing if they are forced to do so by an angry public. This is why the mass demonstrations of ordinary people occurring around the country are so important. In the March 2011 issue of Z Magazine, Paul Street quotes the late, great historian Howard Zinn:

There’s hardly anything more important that people can learn than the fact that the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeteria, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.

Street also quotes C. Derber in his book Hidden Power (2005):

The leading agents of significant policy change in U. S. history have not been parties glued to the next election, but social movements that operate on the scale of decades rather than two- and four-year electoral cycles. Political parties have historically become agents of democratic change only when movements infuse the parties with their own long-term vision, moral conviction, and resources.

We have to support the demonstrations in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan and elsewhere that are opposing this attempt to radically reshape the democratic structure to allow total control by the oligarchy.

Commenter Matt alerts me to the fact that State Department spokesperson P. J. Crowley has been forced to resign following his criticism of Bradley Manning’s treatment.

Although I have strongly criticized Crowley in the past, I find it odd the reasons why people in high positions in government are fired. You can brazenly lie and torture and even kill people and yet escape punishment and even be commended as long as you faithfully espouse the party line. But say what you feel in an unguarded moment, even to a small group and in a private capacity like Crowley did, and you are done for.

In Crowley’s case, I wrote a few months ago that I wondered whether he ever looked in the mirror and wondered how he could have sunk so low. It looks like he did.

The abusive treatment of Manning is becoming a bigger and bigger millstone around Obama’s neck.

UPDATE: As I expected, Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the Crowley case.