I almost always avoid watching formal speeches live. You have to listen to a lot of verbiage before getting to the gist. I find it far more efficient to read the transcript afterwards, though that means I miss the nuances that the spoken words provide. But since Bush’s latest speech was highly advertised as showing a new way forward, I tuned in. You can read the transcript here. As far as I can tell, there was little that I would consider ‘new’ but this may be my fault for being a policy wonk and following this topic closely. Maybe others will find it new and hopeful.
[Read more…]

I have written before about how this government has steadily and stealthily taken away the rights that have been taken for granted. The latest atrocity, though seemingly minor when compared to the awful Military Commissions Act was done stealthily, by means of the infamous ‘signing’ statements, whereby the President issues a statement while signing a bill into law. Usually, these statements are meant to provide guidance to the executive branch on how to interpret the law. But Bush has used these statements to counter the intent of the law or even to assert new powers for himself.

I have already written about the loss of habeas corpus which Jeffrey Toobin also writes about in an article in the New Yorker.

We have already seen that the government is guilty of torturing those in its custody in the infamous case of Jose Padilla, where it is clear that the government’s goal is to destroy him as a human being. This new article explains why he was forced to wear blinders and sound-proof ear muffs on his way to see a dentist.

“From 1950 to 1962,” [Alfred] McCoy writes, “the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually – a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind.” This research amounted to “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.” This “black budget” research has never stopped and elements of it were rushed into practice after 9/11.

No need for thumbscrews, racks, phone-crank generators to the genitals or Black & Decker drills. This was “no-touch torture,” using extreme isolation and sensory deprivation to create confusion while establishing in the subject’s mind the sense that any pain is self-inflicted, that he had chosen the course that led to the pain he was suffering. All it required was extended periods of time and the total elimination of all stimulation and human contact other than that of the jailer and the interrogator.

Padilla spent 21 months in a South Carolina brig especially re-designed after 9/11 to handle interrogation cases like his. A 10- cell wing was devoted solely to Padilla. The windows of his cell were blackened, and he wasn’t allowed a clock or calendar.

McCoy says the no-touch torture chamber “has the theatricality of a set with special lighting, sound effects, props, and backdrops, all designed with a perverse stagecraft to evoke an aura of fear… The psychological component of torture becomes a kind of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies and inversion, in a plot that ends inexorably with the victim’s self-betrayal and destruction…”

“As a result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation,” the New York Times quoted psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty as saying, Padilla “has impairments in reasoning… complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.”

For more grim details of the inhumane treatment Padilla has received, see here. For other examples of torture by the US, see here

And now, after previously asserting his right to conduct warrantless wiretapping of phones, Bush has declared that he now also has the right to open people’s mail without a judge’s warrant. “That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.”

This further erosion of the rights of citizens will probably be ignored by a nation that is either apathetic to the loss of rights that earlier generations fought so hard to enshrine into law or so fearful of terrorism that they are willing to trade away all their rights for a spurious sense of security.

I found on the web this extended quote from Milton Mayer’s book They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 that shows how a similar creeping erosion of freedom happened at another time and place.

What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ . . .But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. . . .You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined.



It is a chilling reminder of how easily people be persuaded to accept things, provided they can be made fearful and the changes made gradually.

POST SCRIPT: Somalia update

The US Air Force has joined the Navy in carrying out operations in Somalia, against purported al Qaeda targets. The Ethiopian troops, already inside the country for a month are facing guerilla attacks, which are being urged on by Ayman al Zawahiri, who is using the Iraq and Afghanistan examples as rallying cries.

Concern is being expressed at the consequences of Ethiopia being seen as a US puppet. It does not help that Ethiopia is a Christian-led country in a heavily Muslim area. It is not hard to see how a US-Ethiopian alliance can be stigmatized as a new Crusade.

One of the things that often puzzles me about some public figures is how insensitive they are to what their words might seem to people who are suffering. Bush seems to be a classic case.

When questioned in December 2006 about how he is handling things, he says that “I’m sleeping a lot better than people would assume.”

This is a curious thing to say, and extraordinarily insensitive when you think about it. After all, tens of thousands of US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed or injured as a result of his decisions. You would think that a person who had the weight of his decisions on his hands would worry at least a little about it and spend at least some time tossing and turning wondering how to improve the situation.

And yet, Bush goes out of his way to say that it does not bother him. What is baffling is why he would say it even if that is true. Surely he must realize that the families of the dead and injured US soldiers would expect him to not be so insouciant about it. Surely for the sake of sparing their feelings he would say that he does lose sleep wondering how to make sure their sacrifice was worth it. And yet, it seems to him to be more important to convey his own confidence that he is right than be concerned about how it might be perceived by others who are directly affected by his decisions.

In an interview with Buzzflash, Justin A. Frank, M.D., author of the book Bush on the Couch says that this is typical of sociopathic behavior:

A sociopath is. . .a person who can be very charming, but psychologically is so massively defended against experiencing guilt that he cannot feel empathy. If you don’t feel guilt, you can’t empathize, because you never can feel concern about having hurt somebody else, or anybody else suffering. Guilt reins in destructive behavior. But if you don’t have any guilt, you don’t have to feel any anxiety or anything that will hold you back in terms of being destructive or being hurtful. And that leads you to being unable to feel empathy, because empathy actually threatens your safety.

If you feel somebody else is in trouble, then you may feel you are obligated to do something about it. That’s something that is anathema to a psychopath, and it’s certainly anathema to Bush. So he is really incapable of feeling empathy. What he has figured out, with the help of his advisors, is to run as a “compassionate conservative” so he looks like a person who’s empathic. And his affability is what fooled a lot of people into making them feel that he really was connected to them, because he’s so charming. That is classic psychopathy.

This kind of insensitivity extends to other public figures. Recall former Secretary of State Madeline Albright saying in 1996 that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a result of the US-imposed sanctions was “worth it”, or the current Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice saying last month that that Iraq is “worth the investment” in American lives and dollars.

I am not naïve. When they say “worth it”, they are referring to their calculations about the willingness of the American public to continue to support their actions. And in Rice’s case, the families of the dead might feel even worse if they said the Iraq war was not worth it. But by saying these things in this way, they are insensitive to the fact that in the deals they have weighed and found satisfactory, the huge price involved being paid is by others. You would think that they would phrase their responses in such a way that it does not cause needless anguish to those actually paying that price through the deaths of their loved ones. Instead these political leaders come across as cold and callous and calculating.

In the early days of the Iraq war, Bush’s aides tried to portray a person who worried about the consequences of his actions. On April 2, 2003, as the initial invasion of Iraq was in full swing, aides tried to portray a president who “spends a lot of time stewing about the families of the slain, the safety of POWs and the flow of humanitarian aid into Iraq.” So far so good. But then they botched it by adding that “People who know Bush well say the strain of war is palpable. He rarely jokes with staffers these days and occasionally startles them with sarcastic putdowns. He’s being hard on himself; he gave up sweets just before the war began.” (my emphasis)

So Iraqi and American families are asked to sacrifice the lives of their loved ones for his war and in return Bush gives up sweets. Even when they try, they end up trivializing.

It has now been nearly four years since that war began. Iraqi and American lives are still being “sacrificed” and in his upcoming speech on a “new” policy in Iraq, we are told that Bush will call for an escalation of the troop levels in Iraq and emphasize the need for all of us to “sacrifice.”

I don’t believe that the sacrifices will be anything of the kind we normally associate with the word. We are not going to be asked to pay more taxes to fund an expansion of the war without driving up the debt. We are not going to have the draft reinstated. We are not going to be asked to tighten our belts and do without in any way. We are not going to be asked to do anything tangible because with Bush’s general job approval ratings now at only 30% and approval of his handling of Iraq at an astoundingly low level of 23%, it is unlikely that he will ask people to experience any real pain. When coupled with a very recent poll showing that “For the first time, more troops disapprove of the president’s handling of the war than approve of it. . .Barely one-third of service members approve of the way the president is handling the war”, it shows that the bottom has dropped out of Bush’s support for this war, something that he cannot help but realize.

I have long believed that there is no proposition, however idiotic, for which you cannot obtain about 10-20% support in opinion polls. For example, a recent Associated Press poll finds that 25% of Americans believe that 2007 will see the second coming of Jesus! (Jesus’ General astutely surmises that these must be the very same people who still approve of Bush’s handling of Iraq.) So Bush’s support has gone about as low as it can go. These editorial page cartoons pretty much sum up what people in general feel about the likely escalation (aka “surge”) that is to be announced soon in his speech.

In his much-hyped speech about what he is going to do next, what we will likely be told is to expect more of the same, apart from shifts in personnel. I expect to hear that the US occupation is going to be long and costly and that we must be patient and not expect any results from this ‘new’ plan for at least 18 months, which means that it will effectively last for more than two years, or until Bush leaves office and his successor is left to clean up the mess.

The ‘sacrifice’ asked of us will be to give up the right to criticize the actions of the worst president in US history.

POST SCRIPT: Misleading people about global warming

In August of last year, I wrote of how there were powerful economic forces that had a vested interest in creating confusion about global warming, in ways that were similar to how the tobacco industry tried to cloud the issue of whether smoking caused cancer.

It has now been revealed that:

ExxonMobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in a coordinated effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming
. . .
Alden Meyer, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ strategy and policy director, said in a teleconference that ExxonMobil based its tactics on those of tobacco companies, spreading uncertainty by misrepresenting peer-reviewed scientific studies or cherry-picking facts.

Dr. James McCarthy, a professor at Harvard University, said the company has sought to “create the illusion of a vigorous debate” about global warming.

The ExxonMobil executives do not care if future generations (even their own children and grandchildren) suffer from the effects of global warming as long as present profits are high.

Despicable.

I am by nature an optimist but frankly I do not see much good lying in wait in 2007. Peace shows no sign of breaking out anywhere.

In Sri Lanka, the conflict between the Tamil Tiger separatists and the government seems to be intensifying again, with the attempts at talks by the Norwegian mediators going nowhere.

The situation in Iraq shows no signs of easing and the idea of escalating the war there by sending in more US trooops seems to be the option that is being favored by Bush.

Afghanistan seems to be unraveling, with some analysts foreseeing increased strength for the Taliban and that the US will be defeated by the insurgency there.

All these things have been steadily worsening situations. What alarmed me over the break was a new conflict, the sudden invasion by Ethiopian troops into Somalia, to depose the government of the Union of Islamic Courts. At first blush, this seems like a regional conflict that has nothing to do with the US but in actuality the US is quite deeply involved in it and this recent development is not a good sign, since it indicates a further escalation.

To understand what is involved there, we first need to look at the map, which immediately shows why the US is concerned about what goes on there. Somalia occupies a very strategic position on the horn of Africa. It overlooks crucial bodies of water (the Red Sea and Arabian Sea) across which lie Saudi Arabia and Yemen and the Gulf states.

Then we need to look at the history of the country. Somalia has been a country with an unstable government for some time, battling with its neighbor Ethiopia, suppressing secessionist movements, and subject to periods of being ruled by military coup leaders like Mohammed Siad Barre (1970-1991), and after he was overthrown, being in a state of near anarchy, with warlords and clan leaders battling for supremacy.

In 2004 a truce was cobbled together and a shaky transitional government was formed by the warlords, but it failed to establish any security or provide basic services. In June 2006, this transitional government was overthrown by an Islamist group that seized control of most of the country and the capital Mogadishu. It crushed the power of the warlords and set up the government called the Union of Islamic Courts and managed to bring some sort of order and security. In many ways, the UIC reminds me of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a group that advocates enforcement of a strict Islamic code on its people but is also able to provide security and basic services. It puts the Somali people in the tough position of having to balance the disadvantages of strict religious rules enforced in all aspects of life against the advantage of security and the promise of a reasonably ordered society.

It is the UIC government that was routed by the Ethiopian armies over Christmas. Its followers have dispersed but not disarmed. The Ethiopian armies have restored the fragile transitional government that was dominated by the corrupt warlords that was routed by the UIC six months earlier.

Here is the danger. It is clear that the Ethiopian government, which is pro-US and whose powerful military is supplied by the US, is acting as a proxy for the US in this conflict, although they have their own goals as well. But Ethiopia has its own internal ethnic problems as well as a long-standing border conflict with its northern neighbor Eritrea (which broke away from Ethiopia in 1993) and its government has a reputation for brutality. Furthermore, Ethiopia has had wars with Somalia in the past so they are not likely to been by the Somalis as a disinterested party.

The Ethiopians have indicated that they will stay in Somalia as long as the weak transitional government needs them but the history of what happens to foreign invading forces who don’t leave immediately is not a pleasant one, as we should have all learned from the bitter lessons of history but which countries seem to repeatedly ignore.

What happens if the UIC supporters, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, regroup and wage an insurgency against the Ethiopian forces, as they have threatened to do? There are already signs that this is their plan. The ability of the Iraqi insurgency to hold off the US forces cannot help but encourage them in the belief that they can do the same to the Ethiopians. If the Ethiopians start sustaining losses in a guerilla war, what are the options available to them and the US? Have the Ethiopians withdraw, allowing the UIC to regain power in a country that has great strategic value? Or reinforce support for the Ethiopians and give them the green light to unleash massive casualties in an attempt to eliminate all UIC sympathizers? Or even directly send in US forces? The US navy is already involved and acting in concert with Ethiopian forces.

The ethnic and religious and clan politics of Somalia is, if you can imagine it, even more complicated than in Iraq. (See this excellent analysis of the Somali situation by Eric Margolis. Justin Raimondo also provides some useful background and history.) By throwing its support behind the corrupt and warlord-backed transitional government (the very warlords who were behind the killing of 18 US troops in 1993 that was dramatized in Black Hawk Down), the US has reversed course, deciding that the warlords it once opposed and hunted down are now its friends, or at least preferable to the Islamists.

If there is one lesson that Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught is to tread very warily into the sectarian disputes of other countries. The US in its seeming determination to prevent an Islamic government emerging in the strategic horn of Africa has, through its proxy Ethiopia, got involved in another dangerous and volatile situation that does not look at all good for the future.

I fear that the people of Somalia are going to end up like the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, constantly buffeted by outside powers in a geostrategic game. And the US is opening up a third front of involvement in an Islamic country even while the other two fronts are going badly.

Not a good way to start 2007.

(Due to the holidays, I will be taking a break from blogging.

Today’s is reprinted from a year ago, since I don’t think I achieved any of last year’s resolutions, although some I may never know due to government secrecy.

New posts will begin on Wednesday, January 3, 2007.)

A long time ago, President Nixon, descending into paranoia, maintained an “enemies list” that was leaked to the press. But Nixon had by then become so unpopular that being on Nixon’s enemies list was actually seen as a badge of honor. Humorist Art Buchwald expressed his outrage at not making the list, despite all the articles he had written making fun of Nixon. Buchwald said that as a result of this omission, his wife was being snubbed by society and he could not get the best tables in restaurants, which were being reserved only for people on the list. “What kind of government is this” he fumed “that does not even know who its real enemies are?”
[Read more…]

There might still be options that are good for the Iraqi people but to achieve them we would have to forego the idea that the US can continue to occupy and control that country. One such option is to begin withdrawing all US forces immediately in as orderly a manner as possible while spending a huge amount of money to help rebuild the destroyed infrastructure of that country.

The reasoning behind this argument is that although there are no guarantees that it will succeed, people who have something of their own that they would regret losing are more likely to want to preserve it. Nothing more surely drives people to destruction and violence than the feeling that there is no hope for the future and that things are just going to get worse. This is what results in people being apathetic and fearful about, or giving tacit support to, the armed groups roaming the country wreaking havoc.
[Read more…]

So what went wrong with the US plans for establishing a client state in Iraq? When historians look back on Iraq, they may well point to two key decisions: the first was to not go through the tried and true method of instigating a coup by military officers friendly to the US, and then after making the decision to mount an invasion, making the fateful decision in the immediate aftermath to disband the Iraqi army and the Baathist administrative structure that was running the country.

With the army and the Baathist structures still in place, it might have been possible to maintain order and stability in those crucial first few weeks after the invasion, to provide the Iraqi people with the day-to-day security they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein but without the political repression. Then once an orderly transition was achieved, it may have been possible to hand over power to a client Iraqi government that would allow the US considerable influence, but without the Iraqi people feeling that they were being directly dominated by a foreign power.

But once the Iraqi military and administrative structure was summarily dismantled, like Humpty Dumpty it could not be put together again. With the levels of anarchy and civil war rising as a result of this power vacuum, this leaves the US in the current mess where it can neither stay nor leave without appearing to lose.

So who was responsible for that disastrous decision to disband the army and the Baathist structure? The actual order was given by Coalition Provisional Authority leader L. Paul Bremer but it seems like this was too big a decision to have been made on the fly by someone at his level. One has to suspect that it was signed off at the highest levels of government, at least by Rumsfeld and Bush, and going all the way up to Cheney.

But it has long been established that no one in this administration admits to any mistakes. We have never been told what they might have done differently knowing what they know now. With an almost religious certainty they insist that they made the right calls all the way down the line.

But this is belied by the fact that the rosy predictions of success in Iraq have proven to be tragically wrong. Consider these predictions, all made in 2003 prior to the war’s commencement:

* Feb. 7, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy: “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

* March 4, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a breakfast with reporters: “What you’d like to do is have it be a short, short conflict. . . . Iraq is much weaker than they were back in the ’90s,” when its forces were routed from Kuwait.

* March 11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars: “The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.”

* March 16, Vice President Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly, . . . (in) weeks rather than months.”

Now that things have started to go terribly wrong, those who enthusiastically supported the war and still think it was a great idea initially placed the blame on the media or the feckless allies of ‘Old Europe” like France and Germany for not bailing the US out its mess (the latter being a curious charge since those countries predicted that invading Iraq would be a mess) but those attempts did not gain any traction.

Now they have split into two camps as far as assigning blame goes. There are those who say that the administration has bungled the conduct of the post-invasion occupation and now blame Rumsfeld and even Bush. (See here and here.) But others cannot bring themselves to turn on their idols, so their fingers are being pointed at either the Iraqi or American people.

The Iraqis are being blamed for being ungrateful wretches who are actually going to the extent of attacking the very troops who overthrew Saddam Hussein. Some of the people who blame the Iraqis are even calling on the US to teach especially the ungrateful Sunnis a lesson by throwing all its support to those Shia forces that are engaged in killing Sunnis. Of course, this kind of shallow thinking overlooks the fact that many of the Shia (such as the followers of Muqtada al Sadr) are also hostile to the US presence and have carried out attacks on the US. Also the Shia tend to be friendly towards Iran so backing the Shia forces actually strengthens Iran in the region, which is hardly consistent with the grand goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein as the first step in a sweep through the Middle East that had Iran as the next target.

Those advocates who suggest that since the Iraqis are so ungrateful the US should simply encourage them to kill each other also ignore the enormous debt that the US owes the Iraqi people. The US helped Saddam Hussein come to power and actively supported him during the time of his internal repressions and in his tragic war against Iran. The US instigated and controlled the sanctions against Iraq from 1991 that reduced Iraq from a prosperous and advanced society to an impoverished one by the time of the invasion in 2003, resulting in the deaths of an enormous number of Iraqis due to the lack of food and medicine and other basic services. And the US has now, by its invasion in 2003, created conditions of anarchy and lawlessness and an additional huge number of deaths, as was seen by the Lancet study.

Those who are snarling at the Iraqis and calling for them to be punished for their ingratitude remind me of the psychology of people who take out their rage on their helpless pets or on infants who don’t stop crying. There is something about seeing oneself as being very powerful and yet not being able to get others to do what you want them to do that drive some people into an impotent rage and lash out destructively.

The other tack that is being taken is to blame the American people. This has happened before, during Vietnam. When wars don’t go well, it is tempting for those in power to say that it is because the people did not support it enough. The war was a great idea, the political and military leadership was perfect, but the people somehow let them down.

Stephen Colbert quotes and then hilariously satirizes those who takes this route, saying: “American people, you are losing this war. . .American people, you should be ashamed! The President went off and bit off a big piece of the Middle East, and like an eagle, brought it back to the nest, and he’s regurgitating it into your mouths. Why won’t you swallow? When history looks back at the actions of this president and the decisions he made regarding this war, you will go down as the most incompetent American public of all time.”

Blaming the American public for defeat in Iraq by citing their lack of support does not really make sense since the loss in public support for wars (In Iraq as in Vietnam) usually occurs after the military campaign has gone sour. But what this argument seems to be hinting at is that even though the war is currently going really badly, so badly that the American public is fed up with it, there is something new that could be done that would dramatically change the tide of events, but cannot be put into practice because the public will not support this new push. The problem is that this brilliant new idea, often dramatically described as “one last shot” or “turning point” is never quite specified or is so outlandish (“Triple the number of troops in Iraq” or “Drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq/Iran so they know we mean business” or “Round up all the militants and throw them in prison or kill them”) that it falls outside the realm of reality. Pushing for ideas that are not likely to be accepted enables its advocates to position themselves to avoid blame since they can then say that if only their idea had been followed, the war could have been won. Keeping alive the vague idea that other options exist enable the warmongers to delude themselves that theirs were the right decisions, but were foiled by poor execution or lack of will.

The brutal reality is that there are no good options left in Iraq that would constitute a ‘victory’ in the sense that the Bush administration envisions. And this brings us to the current options that are being floated to ‘turn things around’ in Iraq.

Next: The battle for rhetorical supremacy

POST SCRIPT: Iraq petition

Here is an online petition that you can sign that calls for an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

One of the things that always puzzled me about the Iraq war was the decision that was taken immediately after the fall of Baghdad to disband the Iraqi army and send them all home. This was a radical break with past US policies because the standing armies of other countries have always been the key element of past US attempts at changing the governments of other countries.

It is no secret that the US military industry provides a vast amount of the hardware for foreign armies. A large fraction of the warplanes, tanks, ships, armaments, and the other paraphernalia that foreign armies love to accumulate are sold to them by the US. On one level, this can be seen as a huge taxpayer subsidy to the defense industry. Much of the US taxpayer provided ‘aid’ to other countries (and this also applies, on a smaller scale, to other major weapons suppliers such as Britain and France) comes in the form of funds that are designated for weapons purchases that have to be bought from the aid ‘donor’ countries. So essentially much of US taxpayer ‘aid’ money ends up with US defense contractors, by being used by the foreign military to purchase US-made weapons.

But there is more to this transaction that just money and weapons transfers. When a foreign military purchases US weapons, it allows the US to build links between the foreign armies and the US military. Their officers need to be trained to use the weaponry and so form links with US trainers, to the extent of coming for regular visits to the US (such as to the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA) and having US military and defense contractors visit those countries. The net result of such exchanges is the building of close relationships between the US and the foreign military, and this allows the CIA to relatively easily penetrate their ranks and either recruit agents or identify people they think would be sympathetic to US interests.

Having such links is valuable when the government of that country does things that the US strongly disapproves of because then the US can use those friendly officers to engineer a coup against the government and take over the reins of power. Since the military culture is to follow the command structure, the presence of a senior military person taking over the government enables the government to marshal the armed forces in support and crush any opposition to the coup by using brute force. The backing of the armed forces enables them to immediately take over the newspapers and radio and TV stations, arrest or kill opposition figures, and impose martial law and curfews until they have consolidated power over every aspect of that society.

This is what happened in Iran in 1953 when President Mossadegh was overthrown and Reza Pahlavi (the Shah of Iran) was brought in to rule, in Vietnam in 1963 when Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown by the military, in Indonesia in 1965 when President Sukarno was overthrown by General Suharto, and in Chile in 1973 when President Salvador Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet, just to name a few of the more recent cases. Many of the military officers who supported Pinochet were graduates of the School of the Americas.

This was such a smoothly working system that it is not clear why it was not repeated in Iraq when Saddam Hussein went against US interests. After all, Hussein himself had achieved considerable power (though not the leadership) as a result of a coup in 1968, and finally took over in 1979 after forcing the 1968 coup leader (and later President) Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr to resign. There is evidence that Saddam Hussein was himself supported by the CIA from the early 1960s until the first Gulf War in 1991.

So why did the US not go back to its old playbook and find a cadre of junior and senior Iraqi officers who were friendly to the US to stage a coup against Hussein? One possibility is that they tried to do this and failed. It may be that Hussein, himself a protege of the CIA, knew only too well how it operated and was able to ferret out those officers whom he perceived as potential threats and eliminated them.

Another possibility is that the US was after bigger fish this time and that it was not really that concerned with Iraq itself except as a gateway to the grander prizes of Iran and Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Installing a puppet leader in Iraq via a military coup would merely give it control over that country’s oil supplies but would still leave Iran under a government the US did not control, Saudi Arabia in the hands of a friendly but unstable oligarchy, and Egypt with a future that was uncertain once the current strong man Hosni Mubarak dies or is overthrown or leaves office.

The ultimate goal may have been to achieve control over all these countries and though them the entire Middle East. At least this was the vision presented to the Defense Policy Board, “a committee of foreign policy wonks and former government officials that advises the Pentagon on defense issues,” that was headed by leading neoconservative Richard Perle in 2002 when it was briefed on this grand world view by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand corporation analyst who used to work for Lyndon LaRouche.

So perhaps it was this vision of Middle Eastern dominos (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt) falling one by one to US power and influence, giving the US total control of the world’s major oil reserves, and at the same time neutralizing all the potential threats to Israel, that led the US to abandon its old policy of coups to change disliked regimes and go for the big invasion of Iraq as a dramatic show of US power. This would also explain why the attempts to form a broad UN military coalition for the invasion of Iraq (like that done for the first Gulf war in 1991) were so half-hearted. This long-term strategy was meant to establish exclusive US control of the Middle East in order to control the destiny of rival economic powers, and thus having other major powers come along for the invasion of Iraq would not be desirable.

It is probable that this heady vision of remaking the political map of the world led the Bush administration to indulge in wishful thinking, to actually believe that they would achieve a quick victory in Iraq and be greeted as liberators, and that a grateful Iraqi public would welcome them and quickly set up a new government friendly to the US that would allow the US to maintain a huge military presence. With the crippling sanctions dismantled, the US would then be able to use Iraqi oil revenues to create a prosperous country, and that combination of US military power and rapid improvement in the lives of the Iraq people in a stable country with relatively free political structures would be the trigger for the people in neighboring countries to realize that they could have something similar. They would then also rise up against their own governments, confident that the massive US presence in nearby Iraq, along with the other major regional power Israel, would support them and deter their governments from retaliating with a brutal crackdown.

All this is admittedly speculation on my part, though not without evidence. But one can see how it could be a heady brew to a visionary with particular a type of ideology, such as the neoconservatives. Such ‘big picture’ people tend to see things in terms of the grand sweep of history. They are almost always so convinced and entranced by the magnificence of their own vision that they think that others will immediately embrace it too, and they do not want to listen to naysayers who see potential problems. They feel that they are on the crest of a wave of history that will sweep away all opposition, both domestic and foreign.

But if this surmise of mine is true, then that plan ganged seriously agley, as the poet Robert Burns might say.

Next: What went wrong with the grand plan?

Now that the Iraq Study Group report [.pdf] has been delivered with great fanfare, there is a curious sense of anticlimax as various people ponder what is to be the next step in Iraq. As I suspected it would, the White House distanced itself from the report’s recommendations since it essentially repudiates the premises of its current policy.

It seems clear to me that what we are going to witness in the near future is not any substantive changes in policy but we will see changes in rhetoric, in the way that the war is packaged. Hence it is probably a good time to closely examine the rhetoric of the debate.

The president speaks repeatedly of not willing to listen to the defeatists and says that the US will stay until “victory” is achieved and “the job” is completed.
[Read more…]

In the previous post, I suggested that as the competition for resources becomes more acute, it is likely that military force will be increasingly used in a brutally transparent manner in order to maintain the current inequalities in consumption rates. This was not simply a guess on my part. It is based on historical precedent.

In 1948, George Kennan of the US State Department wrote what has since become a famous memo outlining in frank and stark terms what he saw as the main issue facing the United States in its newfound post-world war II role as the dominant economic and military force. He was officially writing about Asia but his analysis extends beyond that.
[Read more…]