Another shot of ragged beauty for you, back in the days when an idol tore down his own graven image in public, clearing a path to keep the artist alive. Remarkable.
Hammersmith Odeon, London, February 1990: |
Various factors are complicating our ability to do substantial posts here at the moment, but we will return to more or less regular programming soon. Meanwhile, here are a few choice tidbits that cry out for more comment than we can provide right now.
1. Siege Replaces Surge
When is a withdrawal not a withdrawal? When it's an "encirclement." The indefatigable Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com points us to this rather obscure little gem from the Christian Science Monitor: "US forces withdrawing from Iraqi cities will move instead to encircle them." As Ditz notes:
The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the United States requires that all US combat forces leave Iraqi cities by the end of Tuesday. The US is going to be going along with the requirement, more or less, but those troops won’t be going far. According to Major General Robert Caslen, the commander of US forces in the north, the troops that are being pulled from the cities will be massing along the outskirts of the cities, encircling them in what the general called an attempt to replicate the surge strategy outside of the cities.
But come on, now. If there were say, 15,000 Chinese troops encamped outside your city limits, bristling with ordnance and overflying your neighborhood night and day with drones, attack copters and bombers, and barreling down your street with heavy weapons every time the local cops called them in -- wouldn't you feel sovereign? Liberated? Free? You know you would.
2. Plainview on the Potomac
Jeffrey St. Clair points out yet another progressive betrayal in full swing from the Obama Administration: the corporate bagmen and eager accomplices of landscape rape that the president has appointed to oversee his environmental policies: "Meet the Retreads." St. Clair makes the salient point that here -- as in so many other areas -- Obama's appointments speak far louder than his rhetoric:
Of all of Barack Obama’s airy platitudes about change none were more vaporous than his platitudes about the environment and within that category Obama has had little at all to say about matters concerning public lands and endangered species. He is, it seems, letting his bureaucratic appointments do his talking for him. So now, five months into his administration, Obama’s policy on natural resources is beginning to take shape. It is a disturbingly familiar shape, almost sinister.
It all started with the man in the hat, Ken Salazar, Obama’s odd pick to head the Department of Interior. Odd because Salazar was largely detested in his own state, Colorado, by environmentalists for his repellent coziness with oil barons, the big ranchers and the water hogs. Odd because Salazar was close friends with the disgraced Alberto Gonzalez, the torturer’s consigliere. Odd because Salazar backed many of the Bush administration’s most rapacious assaults on the environment and environmental laws. Odder still because Salazar, in his new position as guardian of endangered species, had as a senator repeatedly advocated the weakening of the Endangered Species Act. Salazar never hid his noxious positions behind a green mantle. Obama certainly knew what he was buying.
And as St. Clair details, Salazar is just the tip of the (soon-to-be-melted) iceberg.
3. Once More Into the Somali Breach
Barack Obama is also reviving the Bush Regime's strategy of direct intervention in Somalia -- and the Washington Post is dutifully doing its bit with this headline: "U.S. Sends Weapons to Help Somali Government Repel Rebels Tied to Al-Qaeda." It is of course superfluous in us to point out that the aforementioned rebels have consistently denied any ties to al Qaeda.
Which is not to say they are a bunch of sweethearts. But the rise of this faction of militant religious extremists is the inevitable (deliberate?) result of the bipartisan Terror War that the United States has been conducting in Somalia for years. With American backing, blessing -- and direct military support -- a coalition of Islamist factions that had brought the first measure of stability to Somalia in many years was shattered by foreign invasion and local warlords in the pay of the CIA. Some factions in the broken coalition were further radicalized by the brutal war that followed; others have sought compromise with the Western-backed transitional government. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians have died, and millions more have been driven into exile, ruin and terrible suffering -- and still the Great Game goes on.
4. Plan 9 From Outer Space
Finally, Stars and Stripes give us the quintessence of the American empire's oh-so-effective "counterinsurgency" strategy, with this quote from a U.S. officer toiling in the killing fields of the oh-so-good war in Afghanistan:
"I tell my men they have to be thinking warriors," Capt. Bobby Davis of Columbus, Ga., whose platoon went out to help the convoy, said the following day. "You have to be able to go out and talk to people and in the flick of a switch, like yesterday, to kill and then continue the mission — go out again and talk to people."
Hearts and minds -- blow their brains out -- then hearts and minds again. Yep, that sounds like a winning plan, all right! Criswell predicts: another 25 years of road-building, switch-flicking and people-killing in the distant hills of Bactria. |
From the very beginning of the abomination that is the American war in Iraq, imperial courtiers have pushed the same line: every act of mass slaughter in the occupied land was actually an encouraging development -- a sign that the insurgents were "getting desperate," that "dead-enders" were launching last-gasp efforts, unable to derail the bounty of liberty and peace that America's paternal goodness had bestowed upon the Iraqi people.
This has held true from the first suicide attacks following George W. Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in the spring of 2003 and all through the mounting violence that has claimed more than a million innocent lives. The only exception was during the height of the genocidal fury of 2006, when the forces unleashed and empowered and assisted by the American occupiers carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against fierce resistance. The American elite suffered a slight wobble at that point, putting together a conclave of worthies in the "Iraq Study Group" to suggest ways to tamp down the raging PR disaster. (And that's all there was to the ISG plan; they were never going to pull out of Iraq.) The whole episose could be seen as yet another sorry chapter in the saga of the ghoulish, goonish family that somehow came to hold sway in American affairs for almost three decades, with Daddy Bush's factotums guiding the ISG, while Junior Bush brushed them off and consulted his own little circle of militarist agitators to find a way to continue the war but get it off the front pages.
This was, of course, the famous "surge," which saw a fresh influx of not-so-fresh American troops, blanketing the country and helping consolidate the gains of the ethnic cleansing campaign for the occupier's favored factions. The ultimate result was the violent demographic shift -- including the forced migration of 4 million people -- and mass murder that is the foundation of the American-propped Maliki regime. Its sole purpose was to ensure that the war continued, and that the American military presence could be more deeply embedded in the client state.
The levels of violence did drop from the horrific heights of 2006 and 2007 -- again, partly because the American-assisted ethnic cleansing had been so successful. (In much the same way, there was a significant drop in Nazi violence against Jews in, say, Poland -- after the Nazis had killed most of the Jews in Poland.) But the violence in Iraq never went away; the conquered land remained one of the most dangerous places on earth, and very few of the 4 million refugees felt safe enough to return home. (And in many cases, their "ethnically cleansed" homes were no longer available to them.) And of course, the million dead are still dead -- and the millions more maimed, broken, ruined, grieved and traumatized are still suffering.
And now that the Americans and their Iraqi clients have reneged on their payoff deal with the Sunni insurgents they bribed to keep quiet during the surge, we are seeing the inevitable "uptick" in violence (to borrow Joe Biden's atrociously dismissive term for the coming slaughter in Obama's Afghanistan "surge"). More than 150 people have been killed in just two bombings of Shi'ite sites in the past five days.
And right on cue, the Obama Administration trots out the same old platitudes: "Nothing to worry about, nothing to see here, things are just hunky-dorry, don't sweat the small stuff, it's all good." Or as Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell put it:
"Despite the fact that you've seen sporadic high-profile attacks still taking place in Iraq, the overall security climate is a good one and we remain at all-time lows."
"All-time lows" means that, on average, "only" a few dozen or more are murdered in war-spawned violence each and every month of the year. The Obama mouthpiece then tried to blame the "sporadic" mass slaughters on the "Status of Forces Agreement," which calls for American troops to withdraw from Iraqi cities by the end of June. This is all part of an overall "withdrawal" plan concocted by the Bush Regime and their client Maliki, and adopted, with only the slightest modifications, by Barack Obama as his own. Naturally, both the "withdrawal from cities" this month and the promised "withdrawal of all combat troops" from the country in August 2010 are riddled with "exceptions." For example, Americans will remain thoroughly ensconced in strategic points inside the city of Baghdad (not least in the massive Crusader fortress they are building in the Green Zone), while continuing to "assist" Iraqi military operations in all Iraqi cities. And of course, the long-range "withdrawal" plan will leave tens of thousands of American troops on the ground in Iraq -- again, "assisting" and "training" Iraqi forces.
The recent "uptick" (and yes, Morrell used that very word in his spin session) is just part of the endless ebb and flow of death that the bipartisan American war on Iraq has set in motion. These bloodsoaked tides will continue to "surge" across the conquered land as the years of America's military implantation drag on and on -- and no doubt for long afterward.
"But you know what they say, man: It's all good." -- Bob Dylan
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I.
Jonathan Schwarz points out how that bastion of the "secular-humanist liberal media," CBS, edited the new release of Nixon tapes in order to protect the reputation of the national saint of Bible-believing conservatives, Billy Graham.
The latest release of White House conversations secretly taped by Richard Nixon shows the elite's favorite evangelist spewing venomous invective about Jews. Responding to Nixon's ostensible worry that America might be gripped by Nazi or Franco-style anti-semitism if Jews "don't start behaving," Graham replies with the time-honored wisdom that made him the confidant and confessor of presidents for generations:
Well, you know I told you one time that the bible talks about two kinds of Jews. One is called the Synagogue of Satan. They're the ones putting out the pornographic literature. They're the ones putting out these obscene films.
This is the bit that CBS snipped out of the conversation, leaving only an innocuous statement by Graham about Jews' "usefulness" to God. Schwarz also notes that Nixon's warning about Jewish behavior had nothing to do with Israeli militarism, as the CBS story claims; it was in fact a response to "Graham being angry about a rabbi criticizing a new attempt at widespread evangelism." Schwarz concludes:
The whole thing is well worth listening to if you're a connoisseur of the psychosis of the people who run this planet. My favorite part is the repeated tongue baths Graham bestows on Nixon, assuring him the country loves him and he may well be the greatest president in history.
II.
There is of course nothing really new in the latest tapes. Nixon and Graham's fascinating dialogues about Jews have already entered the public record. I first wrote about this issue more than seven years ago, in The Moscow Times, showing also how Graham also helped sow the seeds of anti-semitism in yet another of his elite charges: George W. Bush.
Picture this: the skulking ruler of a corrupt and vicious regime, hunkered down in his palace, besieged by the forces of good as he plots to unleash weapons of mass destruction on his "satanic" foes across the sea. Accused of war crimes and military aggression, he cynically turns to religion, often calling in the leader of the country's largest fundamentalist sect to lend "moral" support to the criminal regime. Together, the ruler and the holy man engage in frenzied diatribes against the enemies of the state, especially that sinister conspiratorial power lurking behind every eruption of evil in the world – the Jews.
A portrait of Saddam Hussein, raging desperately as he braces for the final reckoning at the hands of history's avenging angel, George W. Bush? No, it's just our ole pal Tricky Dick – Nixon, that is, not Cheney – back from the dead in White House tapes released this week: yet another star turn from the Founding Father of modern U.S. politics.
In the tapes, recorded in early 1972, we find Nixon hankering to hurl his nuclear thunderbolts at Vietnam – standard Cold War ranting for the apostate Quaker, who first suggested nuking 'Nam back in 1954. More relevant to the current scene is the Jew-bashing duet Nixon shares with the American elite's favorite fire-breathing evangelical, the Reverend (sic) Billy Graham.
Graham has – not to put too fine a point on it – sucked from the teat of American power for more than 50 years, lending his "moral authority" to various presidents (usually when they're in political hot water) then leveraging the resultant publicity into boffo box office for his stadium harangues around the world. He is perhaps best known in recent years for a miracle that changed the course of human history – saving the soul of the aforementioned angel, G.W. Bush.
Bush credits Graham with "planting the seeds" of fundamentalist faith in his pre-presidential person during a family gathering in 1985. Graham was visiting the Bush clan's luxurious compound in Maine, mooching free meals and sucking up to the sitting vice president, Daddy Bush. (Well, what else should a disciple of Christ be doing? Breaking bread with the poor or something? Get real.)
At that time, of course, young George was in wastrel mode, boozing it up and losing millions of dollars of other people's money in the oil companies Daddy's friends gave him to play with. But the meeting with Graham struck a chord in the lost soul, as Bush himself (or rather his ghostwriter) tells it, in properly hagiographic tones: "[Graham] sat by the fire and talked. And what he said sparked a change in my heart. I don't remember the exact words. It was more the power of his example. The Lord was so clearly reflected in his gentle and loving demeanor."
That divine emanation was somewhat occluded in the Nixon meeting, where Graham heatedly denounced "satanic Jews" and warned Nixon that the "Jewish stranglehold" on the national media "has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain." The Lord-reflecting preacher then gently and lovingly described how he turned the Jews' two-faced perfidy against them with wily Christian deception of his own.
"A lot of Jews are great friends of mine," Graham begins with gentle, loving sarcasm. "They swarm around me and are friendly to me, because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them."
Graham chortles heartily when Nixon's toady and enforcer, H.R. Haldeman (the Karl Rove of his day) tells him to "wear a Jewish beanie" at an upcoming meeting with Time Magazine editors. And he yearns for a Nixon re-election later in the year: "Then we might be able to do something" about those nefarious Hebrews, says Graham.
As with Bush, Graham's potent spiritual seed found fertile ground in Nixon. "It's good we got this point about the Jews across," the president says after the meeting. "The Jews are an irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards."
This week Graham issued a most Nixonian reply to the taped revelations, saying he had "no memory" of the occasion, but even so, he "deeply regretted" comments he "apparently made" during the meeting. "Apparently?" Perhaps those "satanic Jews" doctored the tape, eh, Billy? As it says in the Gospels: "When the sins of thy past confront thee, always use a weasel-word to squirm thy way out."
These days, the elderly Graham is too frail to whack the Bible leather on the road anymore. His place has been taken by his son, Franklin, who runs the racket along the same old lines: hell-fire for the common folk, political cover for the high and mighty. Indeed, Franklin was called upon by the skulking ruler of yet another corrupt and vicious regime in January 2001, when he showered the Lord's blessing on the illicit inauguration of the unelected wastrel whom Daddy Graham put on the road to glory all those years ago.
Meanwhile, Bush is still faithful to his Imam's teaching. He believes Jews are damned to eternal torment unless they adopt his own pinched and primitive fundamentalist faith -- an opinion that once landed him in hot water with his less jihadic mother. Alarmed at her son's ignorant intolerance, she called – who else? – Graham to set Junior straight. Graham's response? "I happen to agree with what George says."
Well, he would, wouldn't he?
III.
Graham's janus-faced enmity -- supporting Israeli militarism while hiding what he "really feels" about Jews -- is still very much alive among the American elite. (And not just among the elite, of course.) The marriage of convenience -- or rather, the three-way orgy -- between Likudnik Jews and America's imperial militarists and Christian nationalists -- has obscured the fundamental hatred and distrust of Jews that underlies much of the nation's political discourse. For example, veteran cognoscenti have long known that "liberal media" is a code word for "the Jews" -- cast as wily, relentless corruptors of America's pure soul, with their promotion of immoral movies, jungle be-bop music, investigative journalism and what all. Indeed, in the subterranean American lexicon, the term "liberal" itself has long denoted a) Jews; b) uppity darkies duped by Jews, and c) white commies and race traitors in league with Jews to destroy America.
And if you think this template doesn't lie buried but percolating in the amygdala of America's cultural brain, then brother, you don't know these here United States at all. Of course, as with almost every anti-semitic elite down through the ages, there are also many "good Jews" around -- as Graham himself noted. In our day, these are the Jews who support America's imperial agenda and help keep down the "recalcitrant tribes" of the Middle East, in much the same manner as the American elite's illustrious forbears cleaned out those pesky redskins. In fact, with Israeli society now hurtling headlong into a quasi-fascist fortress state, there are probably more "good Jews" of this stripe than there have been in a long time -- perhaps ever.
But of course, most Jews are not imperial stooges or ethnic cleansers -- and these clearly belong to the "Synagogue of Satan" (with Noam Chomsky as High Priest, perhaps.) The American amygdala still pulses with a primitive fear response at the thought of these impure Others: Nixon's "irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards," still potently evoked by the masking term "liberal."
NOTE: One should not be fooled by the manufactured "tussle" between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations over Israeli "settlements," by the way. The bipartisan foreign policy elite of the United States do not give a rat's damn about how many Palestinian Indians are forced from their land, or how many Warsaw Ghettos the Israelis construct for their captives. If they did, they would not have sat idly by and watched the "settlements" grow like topsy throughout the so-called "peace process." Such rote displays of displeasure are just part of the game. Israeli nationalists get to look tough for their domestic political audiences; the Americans get to appear "even-handed," which in turn provides some cover for the brutal dictatorships they support in the region. Israel can then make "concessions" (insincerely offered, never carried out), which makes the American president look effective -- and casts Israel in a better light for the American audience. ("See, they listen to reason, they want to work things out.") It's a game that everybody wins -- except ordinary Palestinians.
If the Americans were serious about influencing Israeli policy on the "settlements" -- or anything else -- then they would move to cut off the nearly $3 billion a year the United States provides to fund Israel's war machine -- and its settlements. In politics, as in so much else, you must follow the money. And in American-Israeli relations -- as in so much else -- the money is not where the mouth is.
P.S. If you want to hear what the "Synagogue of Satan" really sounds like in full flow, then attend the words of Sir Gerald Kaufman, standing up in Britain's House of Commons during Israel's brutal decimation of Gaza earlier this year. As the UK magazine Lobster notes, Kaufman "described the murder of his Polish grandmother by a German soldier and then said:
"My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as their justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count."
Compare that to the overwhelming pro-massacre majority in the U.S. Congress, which voted its "vigorous and unwavering commitment" to Israel during the slaughter. Or indeed, compare it to the eloquent response then-President-Elect Barack Obama made to the attack, which Israel conveniently ended just before his inauguration:
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 Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's program to seed the nation's university classrooms with covert students being secretly groomed for service in the security apparat: "Obama's Classroom Spies" (David Price, Counterpunch).
Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's plutocratic economic policy in his latest "financial reform" plan: "Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street" (Michael Hudson, also Counterpunch).
Disturbing news of the true fruits of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's plutocratic economic policy: "Goldman Sachs to Make Record Bonus Payout" (Guardian). Quoth the paper: "The biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history."
Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's inhumanity in the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp: "Military Attorney Major Barry Wingard Reveals Injustices Continue at Gitmo" (Buzzflash).
Disturbing news of Barack Obama's embrace -- and extension -- of the Bush Regime's claims of authoritarian powers: "In Stark Legal Turnaround, Obama Now Resembles Bush" (McClatchy).
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Professor As'ad AbuKhalil rightly notes the rank hypocrisy of Barack Obama's statement on the turmoil in Iran:
Obama has spoken: "The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights." There is so much that you can do with this statement. The hypocrite in [chief] is invoking an argument that he himself so blatantly ignores and will continue to ignore to the last day of his presidency. Does he really believe in that right for peoples? Yes, but only in countries where governments are not clients of the US. Will he invoke that argument, say, in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Morocco or Tunisia or Libya or Jordan or Oman, etc? Of course not. This is only an attempt to justify US imperial policies. And even in Iran, the Empire is nervous because it can't predict the outcome. But make no mistake about it: his earlier statement to the effect that the US can't for historical reasons "appear to be meddling" sets the difference between the Bush and the Obama administration. The Bush administration meddled blatantly and crudely and visibly, while the Obama administration meddles more discreetly and not-so-visibly. Tens of thousands of pens equipped with cameras have been smuggled into Iran: I only wish that the American regime would dare to smuggle them into Saudi Arabia so that the entire world can watch the ritual of public executions around the country.
I'd like to say an additional word about Obama's statement. When I saw that the president also invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. (“Martin Luther King once said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’”), I very nearly threw up. To quote an apostle of non-violence, who spent his last days standing with striking workers and railing against the American government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" because of its murderous war machine, when you yourself are in command of that war machine, spewing out Vietnam-style death (and "targeted assassinations") in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan; when you are striving with all your might to defend, shield and in many cases continue the heinous torture atrocities of your predecessor; when you are pouring trillions of public dollars into the purses of the financial elite while letting millions of workers go hang; and when you yourself have made repeated statements that you will never take any options "off the table" when dealing with Tehran, including the nuclear destruction of the Iranian people for whose liberties and well-being you now profess such noble concern -- well, that seems a bit much, if I may riot in understatement.
In other posts, AbuKhalil offers more good sense on the Iranian situation:
The hypocrisy [of Western media coverage] is quite stunning. They are admiring the dare of the population when the Palestinian population shows more dare. They are outraged at the level of repressive crackdown by the regime when Israeli crackdowns on demonstrations are far more brutal and savage? They are admiring the participation of women in a national movement, when Palestinian women led the struggle from as far back as the 1930s (see the private papers of Akram Zu`aytir). They are outraged that the Iranian government is repressing media coverage, when the Israeli government is far more strict: when it was perpetrating slaughter in Gaza few months ago, the Western press was not allowed any freedom of movement except the hill of death where Michael Oren led reporters to watch Israeli brutal assualt on the Palestinian civilian population from a distance.
The media coverage in the US and UK proves beyond a doubt that increasingly the Western press has been serving as a tool for the various Western government. If the government cheers, the media cheer, if the government condemns, the media condemns, etc. And would the Western media ever be as unrestrained in its glamorization and glorfication of demonstrators and demonstrations in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Jordan as they are now? There are no claims of even covering a story anymore: it is merely how can we best help the beautiful demonstrators who are not bearded and whose women are more loosely veiled. This is not to say that the Iranian regime is not repressive and needs to be overthrown: far from that. But it is to say that the Iranian regime is as bad (in fact Saudi Arabia and Egypt are probably worse) and as unjust as the various Middle East governments that are supported by the Western governments and Western media. When Western media sit with Saudi and Egyptian leaders, it is as if they are sitting with a friend...
And for those who see the union-busting, privatizing Ahmadinajad as some kind of leftist champion of the poor and the oppressed, AbuKhalil notes:
The rift I sense between Iranian left and Arab left is due to some admiration on the part of some in the Arab left for Ahmadinajad: that really angers people in the Iranian left. (And I am here with the latter group in that regard. I find Ahmadinajad's rhetoric of disservice to Palestine).
And for those who see the hidebound sectarian Moussavi as some kind of champion of "Western-style" pluralist democracy, AbuKhalil has these observations:
I am very proud to be writing in a paper (Al-Akhbar) that is the only Arabic newspaper in the world that advocates for gay and lesbian rights. But the Western media are more impressed with a lackey of Ayatullah Khomeini who led the purges against leftists, Baha'is, and Jews in Iranian universities in the 1980s....
I can't support a movement that writes its signs in English, in order to please the White Man, and I can't be in the same trench with Fox News. Yet, I support the overthrow of a regime that fed its people foreign policy slogans and religious jargon and (along with Saudi Arabia) fought all manifestations of secularism, leftism, and feminism in the Middle East since 1979 (much earlier in the case of Saudi Arabia).
Finally, AbuKhalil takes on the racist undertones that have crept into some Western championing of the Iranian uprising, particularly Andrew Sullivan's implication that the Iranians are more "capable" of democracy than Arabs:
Andrew Sullivan responds to my critique ("As'ad AbuKhalil doesn't appreciate Americans' double standards [when he declares "why do Western media express outrage over a stolen election in Iran but they don't even feign outrage over lack of elections in Saudi Arabia?") by saying this: "Because Iran actually has a population capable of sustaining democracy; and Mousavi is as good as we'll get."
Oh, you have to do better than this. What does these cliches mean? That the population "is capable of sustaining democracy"? Hardly the case if you measure it historically: I personally don't believe in the inequality of people as you seem to do; and I don't belive in those culural arguments that assumes one culture is hostile to democracy while others are not. It is fascinating that Iran is largly Islamic so they can't invoke the non-Islamic arugment, but Iran has produced two successive forms of dictatorships, so the attempt to separate the genetic makeup of Iranians from the Arabs is historically flawed.
And the argument that Mousavi is "as good as we'll get" can't be reconciled with the history and presence of the man. Just yesterday, he released a statement that was dripping with religious demagoguery and was argument that his mission is really to prove the compatibilty of Islam with the republic. Mousavi does not miss an opportunity to to invoke the memory and teachings of Khomeini. People are forgetting that when Mousavi was prime minister and was engaged in a conflict with the then president Khamenei, Khomeini was invariably siding with Mousavi. So there is a history of close association with this so-called democrat with the teachings of Khomeini. Let us not kid ourselves: it is not about the charactertics of the population and not about the "as good as it gets" bogus argument: it is about cheering for anybody who sides against a government that oppoes the US.
In a world riddled with journalistic cant -- and thought-killing political and religious tribalism of every stripe -- AbuKhalil's perspective remains a most useful and astringent corrective. |
Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused,
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies.
But there's a woman on my block,
She just sits there, facing the hill.
She says, Who's gonna take away his license to kill?
--Bob Dylan
 There is, I understand, a popular cable television show featuring a "good" serial killer who has been taught by a kind mentor to channel his murderous psychosis toward socially worthy ends; i.e., killing scumbags who deserve to die but have somehow escaped the law. I often wonder if this show is actually a better mirror of the national psyche than "24," the "good torture" saga that in the Bush years was often cited by top administration officials, conservative pundits -- and Supreme Court justices -- as an insightful inspiration for national security policy.
Certainly it often seems that concept of "Dexter" has been writ large in what we are now pleased to call our "Overseas Contingency Operation" -- in preference to the old Bushist term, "War on Terror," or the admirably straightforward locution once favored by Donald Rumsfeld: "The Long War." (Couldn't we just combine the two and call it the "Long Overseas Contingency Operation" -- i.e., LOCO?) For whatever else LOCO might be -- sustained campaign of plunder and profiteering; reckless dice game for geopolitical domination; massive dose of Viagra for an ageing militarist/media elite -- it is, most assuredly, a license to kill: serially, savagely, and best of all -- the psycho-killer's dream -- without accountability.
On Friday, an internal investigation by the Pentagon into the American airstrike with B1 bombers on villages in Afghanistan's Farah province in May was released. [For more on the attack, which Afghan officials say killed more than 140 civilians, see "Tales of Yankee Power."] As McClatchy reports, the Pentagon -- which at first denied that any civilians were killed -- now admits outright that it sure enough killed 26 civilians...and might well have actually blown 86 hunks of collateral damage to smithereens.
This comes after weeks of high-octane weaseling from American officials -- including the grand LOCO warlord himself, General David Douglas MacArthur Petraeus, who at one point announced that he had video proof that our boys had only been killing dirty rotten terrorist ragheads hidden amongst so-called civilians who might have been giving the insurgents shelter and who anyway like to lie about how many of their family members get killed in these essential raids -- or words to that effect.
Needless to say, this documentary evidence has not been forthcoming: much like the documentary evidence that Colin Powell once promised would show the world that the 9/11 attacks had come from Afghanistan, with Taliban complicity. This dossier of "evidence" -- i.e., the supposed casus belli justifying the entire American military operation in Afghanistan -- has never seen the light of day, and never will. It was just like the murky photograpsh and sinister-looking vials that Powell later waved around the UN to "justify" the invasion of Iraq: a PR prop, part of "rolling out the product" to sell a war already planned.
In any case, the atrocity in Farah was so glaring, the death count was so high, and the eyewitness accounts of the true nature of the attack and its aftermath were so credible, plentiful and multi-sourced that the Pentagon was forced to concede at least some ground to reality -- even though our "Good War" leaders seem to think that "only" murdering 26 civilians is OK. Hey, it coulda been 146, they shrug, with a charming, aw-shucks Dexterish grin. And anyway, it's all in a good cause, right?
And although Afghan officials are standing by the higher death count, the American military brass has already decided that no one will be disciplined for killing the 26 and quite possibly 86 innocent human beings slaughtered in the operation. Hell, our boys actually did themselves proud! As Reuters reports:
The U.S. military is unlikely to discipline troops involved in a deadly air strike in Afghanistan that heightened tensions between Washington and Kabul, the top U.S. military official said on Thursday.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. troops handled themselves well during the battle last month against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan's western Farah province....
"At least in my review, I found nothing that would lead to any specific action along the lines of what you're asking," Mullen said at a Pentagon briefing when asked it disciplinary action might be considered.
"Civilian bloodbath? So what?" That pretty much says it all. So if you've got an insatiable lust for killing your fellow human beings, there's no need to get some dinky job in a stateside police department, confining yourself to a piecemeal, penny-ante kill-rate. No sir. Get with the LOCO program instead, and you can murder wholesale, worldwide, without fear of retribution -- indeed, with the praise and support of the highest authorities in the land. Hey, it's boffo box office in the Homeland. They can't get enough of that kind of stuff in the shining city on the hill.
Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he's fulfilled.
Oh, man is opposed to fair play,
He wants it all and he wants it his way.
But there's a woman on my block,
She just sits there, as the night grows still.
She says, who's gonna take away his license to kill?
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Iranian academic Ali Alizadeh points out an important fact missed by many who see nothing but sinister American manipulation behind the post-election protests in Iran: that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's economic policies -- touted as a possible reason that he expanded his vote total by 10 million over the last election, a bounty ostensibly harvested from the grateful rural poor -- are actually much more in line with his old nemesis, George W. Bush. As Alizadeh notes (via the Angry Arab):
It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees.
The trope of a singular American hand guiding a million-headed puppet in the streets of Iran seems a bit odd anyway. There is of course little doubt that the imperial security apparat will try to make hay from the turmoil; but the American militarists have already made it clear that they prefer a victory for the incumbent Ahmadinejad; after all, without a readily demonizable figure as the public face of Iran, their unquenchable lust for conquering Persia becomes that much harder to consummate. As Steven Zunes notes, the grim-visaged rightwing avenger Daniel Pipes spelled it out in a recent jowl-flapping at the Heritage Foundation, proclaiming that "he would vote for Ahmadinejad if he could, because he prefers 'an enemy who is forthright, blatant, obvious.'" (Well, don't we all? And as with so many other enemies of peace, liberty -- and sanity -- Pipes himself fits the bill quite admirably. One always knows exactly where that po-faced squeaker of pips is coming from.)
And as we noted here late last month, the American security apparat seemed to be intervening on Ahmadinejad's behalf, with a stepped-up terrorist campaign by the militant Sunni extremist group, Jundullah -- just one of the terrorist organizations inside Iran now on the American payroll:
...the attack on the Zahedan mosque serves a confluence of interests. For it comes not only at a strategic location but also at a strategic time: just two weeks before the Iranian presidential election, with the hardline incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing a strong challenge from two reformist candidates.
Of course, the very last thing that the militarists in Washington and Israel want to see is the election of a moderate in Iran. They want -- and need -- Ahmadinejad, or someone just like him, so they can keep stoking the fires for war. A moderate president, more open to genuine negotiations, and much cooler in rhetoric than the loose-lipped Ahmadinejad, would be yet another blow to their long-term plans. Because the ultimate aim -- the only aim, really -- of the militarists' policy toward Iran is regime change. They don't care about "national security" or the "threat" from Iran's non-existent nuclear arsenal; they know that there is no threat whatsoever that Iran will attack Israel -- or even more ludicrously, the United States -- even if Tehran did have nukes. They don't care about the suffering of the Iranian people under a draconian, repressive and corrupt regime. They are not worried about Iran's "sponsorship of terrorism," for, as we've seen, the militarists thrive on -- when they are not actively fomenting -- the fear and anguish caused by terrorism. This fear is the grease that drives the ever-expanding war machine and 'justifies' its own ever-increasing draconian powers and corruption.
No, in the end, the sole aim of the militarist policy is to overthrow Iran's current political system and replace it with a regime that will bow to the hegemony of the United States and its regional deputy, Israel. There is no essential difference in aim or method between today's policy and that of 1953. (Except that the regional deputy in those days was Britain, not Israel.) What they want is compliance, access to resources and another strategic stronghold in the heart of the oil lands -- precisely what they wanted, and got, with the installation of the Shah and his corruption-ridden police state more than a half-century ago.... To lose a fear-raising (and fundraising!) asset like Ahmadinejad now would be a bitter disappointment.
And what better way for an incumbent president to stand tall before the voters than to rally the nation around him in the face of a horrible terrorist attack? A mosque full of Shiite worshippers, blown to pieces, with photos showing the blood of the innocent martyrs splattered on the ruined walls? This serves the interests of all the major players in the great geopolitical game: the Iranian hardliners, the American and Israeli militarists, the Jundullah extremists.
Moussavi -- a long-time paladin of Iran's ruling establishment, a conservative who was once a hardline prime minister himself, closely aligned with the Ayatollah Khomeini (America's own "Great Satan" of yore) -- is hardly the pliable stooge sought by the Potomac plotters. Of course, as we noted earlier this week, this fact doesn't necessarily make him a Jeffersonian hero of human liberty, either -- an Aung San Suu Kyi of Iran. The corporate media's portrayal of the Iranian uprising is indeed a lazy slotting of chaotic reality into neatly defined, "color revolution" stereotypes; but their misjudgment needn't be compounded a comparable stereotyping the other way. (The corporate media's false depiction of Moussavi as a "liberal" has ironically been seized upon by some American dissidents as proof that he is a color-revolution cut-out for Western interests, even, as some have described him, an "Iranian Ahmad Chalabi." If he were a returned exile who had spent years in the pay of the CIA, that might be true. But that is not the case. Again, it is no endorsement of Moussavi to point out these facts.) As Alizadeh notes, the crowds appearing at the protest rallies are
made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).
As I noted the other day, no one knows how the current turmoil will turn out -- or how the various power-players, including the many elite factions inside Iran and the many vultures circling outside, will attempt to mold the chaotic reality to their own advantage. But it seems to me that the circumstances in Iran cannot be forced into any simplistic template. For while it is true that the American imperium does indeed seek to exert its influence everywhere and always, it does not and cannot engender and control every event on earth. We risk partaking of the courtiers' own hubris -- and their mythology of American exceptionalism -- if we make that automatic assumption. |
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Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque 
