Without wishing to indulge in deep-fried conspiracy gobbling at this point, I will say that the revelations about the FBI's prior involvement with one of the suspected Boston attackers, apparently going on for years, are of great interest. Even more so in the light of the fact that a very large number of the terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks in the United States over the past two decades have turned out to have had significant FBI involvement, often in the form of outright provocation by FBI infiltrators, egging on and sometimes even planning attacks that were later "foiled" -- by the FBI.

This doesn't automatically mean that the FBI or other government agencies were "behind" the events in Boston; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes people do bad things without government prompting. But the consistent pattern of prior FBI involvement, in various degrees and at various stages, with people and groups that later go on to attempt or carry out violent actions cannot be ignored, and should be more thoroughly explored in this case. Particularly considering the fact the agency at first denied having any contact with the suspect -- until her mother outed them to the media. From CBS News:

Although the FBI initially denied contacting Tsarnaev, the brothers' mother said they had in an interview with Russia Today. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said her son got involved in "religious politics" about five years ago, and never told her he was involved in "jihad."

She insisted the FBI "knew what he was doing on Skype" and that they counseled him "every step of the way."

Tsarnaeva went on to say that "they were controlling him, they were controlling his every step...and now they say that this is a terrorist act." That may or may not be true; certainly if I were the parent of someone in this situation, that's what I would want to believe. But the now-established involvement of the FBI, as well as the probable involvement of both the American and Russian intelligence agencies with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, should not be ignored when the reasons and roots behind the Boston attack and its bloody aftermath are explored.

That said, it is of course very likely that these connections will be ignored, as the well-worn narrative of "good boys turned bad by Islam" hardens into conventional wisdom. This narrative might be the truth in this case -- but it also works to the advantage of so many powerful forces. This is true not just for those opposing immigration in the the United States (that bloody shirt is already being waved frantically by many American politicians and other high-toned peddlers of racial and ethnic enmity), but even moreso for all those in power structures around the world who profit -- politically and financially -- from the vast engines of a military-security complex gorging on the fear of Islamic terrorism. (Other kinds of terrorism -- particularly the far more constant and far more murderous attacks of state terrorism -- don't bother them too much.)

Most immediately, this incident will greatly strengthen the military-security apparat in the United States and Russia, helping further demonize Muslims in general for the American apparatchiks and Chechens in particular for the Russians -- especially all those opposed to the brutal rule of the Kremlin and its satrap in Chechnya. But every political power structure that feeds on fear -- and which ones do not? -- will benefit from the crime spree in Boston, whatever its origins.

Again, these are just speculations, drawing on the few facts that are known at present, and putting them in the context of recent history. Perhaps the Tsarnaev brothers were lone operators: tormented individuals emerging from the brutal and brutalizing background of invasion, repression, violence and murder that characterizes modern Chechnya, who then internalized this violence and hatred, and sought, in anguish, ignorance and error, to expel it by directing it outward toward some generalized enemy, a demonized Other. Perhaps not. Perhaps other psychological factors were at work that we know nothing of at the moment. Perhaps not. Perhaps some agency or other of some military-security apparat somewhere seized on these troubled individuals and turned them toward the agency's own ends, with results that were either intended or else slipped far beyond the agency's wishes or control. Perhaps not.

But I think there are deeper contexts to the case -- whether these are restricted to the twisting of individual psyches by the greater geopolitical and cultural forces that have done so much pointless violence to us all, and in particular to the direct targets of massive power structures, such as Chechnya or, latterly, the Muslim world at large, or whether there are more specific involvements of military-security apparatchiks in the development of this murderous tragedy. Yet, as already noted, we will almost certainly see none of these deeper contexts explored in the earnest postmortems -- by politicians, pundits, academics and self-appointed "experts" of every stripe -- in the weeks and months to come.

All condolences are due to the victims of the Boston bombing and their families -- and to all those victimized by violence around the world today.

This includes the 75 people killed in bomb attacks across Iraq, a commonplace occurrence since American invaders destroyed the country and deliberately sowed bloody sectarian strife there.

And the families of the 20 people killed by a bombing Sunday in Somalia, a country whose fragile peace was shattered by an American-backed foreign invasion, which included American bombings, American renditions and American death squads sowing -- what else? -- bloody sectarian strife.

And the captives in Guantanamo Bay being beaten and brutalized by a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, who is keeping dozens of men cleared for release even by the twisted, draconian "rules" of the gulag itself -- while he continues to kill people around the world -- without charges, trial, evidence, defense or warning -- by his own unchallengeable, merciless diktat.

And the families of the four unnamed, unknown people killed Sunday in Pakistan -- a sovereign nation allied with the United States -- in a drone attack by U.S. missiles: more corpses to join the thousands killed by coward-controlled robots in the Nobellist's savage campaign that is "radicalizing an entirely new generation" and inflicting psychological terror on hundreds of thousands of innocent people, day after day, night after night, without end.

And the dozens of people killed across Syria today, in a vicious civil war fueled by American-backed al-Qaeda affiliates armed and funded by brutal tyrants and global purveyors of sectarian violence -- America's beloved Saudi royals -- attacking a brutal Syrian regime once happily used as a proxy torturer in the American Terror War.

Yes, let us remember the victims of violence today, those who died and those who live on in the scarred, tormented aftermath. Let us remember them in Boston, in Baghdad, in Mogadishu, in Guantanamo, in Waziristan --and in every corner of the world where the crippled souls who live by violence seek to impose their evil dreams on us all.

**Edited to update death count in Iraq.**

As the unfortunate atoms that were so cruelly knitted into the malevolent form of Maggie Thatcher now enjoy their sudden liberation, the London Review of Books unearths an unlikely prophet of old who clearly foresaw the dangers of mythologizing "Thatcherism" and allowing it to establish the framework for all future politics. This insightful figure, writing boldly in the name of all "radical, progressive spirits" seeking a better world, also perceptively identified the historical and geophysical fluke -- a situation that had nothing at all to do with Thatcher's rapacious, hard-hearted and wrong-headed policies -- which temporarily sustained the illusion that it was her economic "reforms" that "restored prosperity" to Britain.

As the LRB's Thomas Jones notes in the piece, how different the world might be today if this prophet himself had become prime minister! Surely he would never have succumbed to the mythology of Thatcherism, including its cynical, murderous penchant for totally unnecessary wars, but would have worked tirelessly to reverse its foul effects, which are still with us, and growing worse, today. O for what might have been!

As millions around the world mark the death of a god this weekend, let us add our voice to the chorus on this theme with a little number laid down back in ancient times (i.e., the last decade): End Times.

***

In other news, I am off to the frozen north of these islands for a bit, where I will be locked in tight and out of range, as the saying goes. In the interim, here is the latest column I did for Counterpunch Magazine. More later, if the fates allow.

THIS IS NOT THE AGE OF DEFEAT

This is the age of loss, not the age of defeat.

Drone strikes, kill lists, murderers and torturers approved for high office. Austerity for the poor, record profits for the rich.  Truthtellers shackled, liars lauded, ignorance exalted, cruelty and callousness gilded with righteous piety. Everywhere, goodness is driven to its knees, and this brutality is not decried but celebrated.

As in that age of iron that lowered over our forbears during dark night of the Thirties, you see faces once thought kind and kindred turn suddenly feral. Fear is behind it, but not just fear: also a self-hatred for what fear has turned them into, a self-hatred that cannot be borne and so is turned outward, thrown outward, into harsh projections of hatefulness, violence and desolation.

The avid embrace of what was once denounced, or the sad but “savvy” acceptance of the “lesser evil”: this is what we see at every turn today among ourselves, among those we thought were our own, and sometimes, maybe – when the lowering is darkest, heaviest – in mirrors as we pass. When the lowering is darkest, when the soul is lost. In them. In us.

This is the age of loss – but it is not the age of defeat.

What do you think goodness is? Some commodity, a material substance that can be wasted utterly, atomized, made inert? Do you think it is a thing, that can be destroyed, organic matter that can die? Do you think it is an idea that can lose its force, its coherence, its context, can be rendered quaint or antiquated by time’s passing, or by any suppression or negation? What do you think goodness is? Goodness is like fire: it is a process not an entity, not even a mental entity: it is process, it is relation, it exists only in the moment of its enacting, in the moment of ignition, of relation, where matter and energy become one, become nothing, become all.

Goodness is like fire, but it is not fire, because the matter it feeds upon is existence itself: inexhaustible, in all of its uncountable coalescences of innumerable elements – right down to the quantum switchings in the invisible cores: rising, decaying, recombining, rising again, decaying, recombining, on and on, in every direction, at every level, until the end of whatever time is, if whatever time is has an end.

Fearful, damaged creatures rule us. It is because they are more fearful and damaged than we are that they want to rule, that they aren’t content with mere images of projected self-hatred (like so many of their sycophants and followers). No, they must have the viscera in their hands, smell the overpowering stench of death, hear the wail of suffering, see the damage, the destroyed body that is the image of their own soul. They think that in this way what is fearful and damaged inside them will be expelled. But of course, the opposite is true; the hateful damage is only increased, exponentially, the rot grows deeper and deeper inside them.

This is what our politics is, this is what power is: the maniacal attempt to overcome relation -- to blot it out, stop the endless process, put out the fire, and impose a deadened stasis on the reality that pains them so.

But this is impossible to do, because the flame of reality cannot be extinguished. Individual points of consciousness can be destroyed – an abysmal, irreplaceable, inconsolable loss – but not the always-changing, rising, falling, recombining process that is reality. What do you think goodness is? Goodness is reality, it is Being itself. Evil is the attempt to quell reality, to quell goodness, to stop it, arrest it, indefinitely detain it, to beat it, terrorize it into submission, to assassinate it, sequester it, to make it go away somehow and stop reflecting back to us the damaged thing we have become.

But this cannot be done. It cannot be done. Goodness can lose, but it cannot be defeated. It can be balked, but it cannot be quelled. In every single moment of existence, the choice for goodness is there. Every single moment – the choice. And you can make it at any point, you can begin the process of accepting, enacting, igniting goodness at any point, even the darkest and most degraded.

Sometimes we don’t have the strength, of course. Sometimes we don’t know what’s working on us, turning us away from reality, the process, the flame, drawing us down into hatefulness, into the dead world of projection. Sometimes we know, but can’t control these forces. As I once wrote elsewhere (nothing new under the sun), “moments will be lost, moments will be won; this is the imperishable way.” This is the endless task of consciousness, of being alive in reality.

(And “goodness” here does not mean “goodiness” or righteousness or any kind of bloodless, lifeless thing. Goodness is the impulse or action that moves in relation, the impulse or action that does not abstract, exploit, dehumanize the other, does not solidify them, but moves, flows in empathetic relation to them. You can have a hell of a good time in that kind of flow.)

In any given age, the lowering clouds can bear down more heavily than in others. Ours is indeed a very hard age, another age of iron. It is an age of loss, of grievous loss – but it is not the age of defeat. Reality remains, the process goes on, the choice for goodness is always – always – there, no matter what.

It turns out that I have become, of all things, a print journalist again, for the first time since I was turfed out of the Moscow Times (and let go by the Bergen Record) many yonks ago. By the kind offices of editor Jeffrey St. Clair, I am now a regular columnist for the new Counterpunch monthly magazine, alongside such stalwarts as Mike Whitney, Kristen Kolb, Christopher Ketcham and St. Clair his own self. I've been associated, off and on, with Counterpunch for more than 10 years, so I'm well chuffed, as the Brits say, to be asked to take part in the new venture.

The latest issue -- featuring a most apt, droned-up, Obamaized take on Blind Faith's iconic album cover -- is out now. (See here for details.) My first column, from earlier in the year, is below.

***
The Whole Damn Camel
“I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken” – Bob Dylan

Surely the re-election of Barack Obama has, at long last, put the kibosh on the hoary notion that the “Professional Left” poses any kind of threat or counterbalance to the malignant spread of empire, within and without. Slice the timeline any way you like –10 years, 20 years, 30 years – and you’ll still come up with the same sad salami: a political world shifted so far to the right, so deep in the pockets of Daddy Warbucks, General Ripper and Elmer Gantry that even Boss Tweed might blush for shame. This is what the Prof-Left has to show for its decades of working diligently within the system.

Of course, America’s hard-right turn (or reversion) to militarism abroad and Hobbesianism at home is not solely the result of the Left’s egregious failures; far from it. It’s a brew made up of many poisons. And yes, failure can be honorable at times. But there is nothing honorable about what happened to “progressives” in Campaign 2012.  After years of consciousness-raising – unmasking atrocities, tracking corruption, decoding propaganda, speaking truth to power, etc. – where did the Prof-Left end up in November? Supporting a lawless, cynical, corporate-coddling warmonger who has taken the tropes of imperial sway to their logical conclusion, their final solution: the arbitrary, unchecked power of life and death, not only over the grubby barbaroi but even over his own subjects. As the scripture saith, our professional progs strained at a gnat – but swallowed the whole damn camel.

Nowhere was this betrayal of principle more naked than in the very arena which, we were told, had “transformed” politics forever, shattering the old paradigms and giving unprecedented voice and power to reform and resistance: the progressive blogosphere. Yet here the cognitive dissonance was so jarring that it hurt just to look at it.  (God knows what it must felt like inside those conflicted craniums.) Here you found stern denunciations of White House death squads, drone wars, whistleblower persecutions, corporate whoredom and other outrages standing cheek-to-cheek with gushing paeans to presidential cool, testy rebuttals of Tea Party attacks, minute nit-pickings over polls and soundbites, and sage tactical advice to ensure victory for … the same man they were simultaneously slating for murder and repression. For all their “savvy” caveats and subtle nuance, their Chomskyean parsing of narrow moral choices in a brutal power system (Democrats, said one prominent progblogger, are "2% less evil," so one must support them), in the end, the netrooters were as avid as David Axelrod in their partisan plumping for more drones, deaths, deportations, drilling, drug warring and all the other draconia wielded happily by Obama in his first four years.

This is a “movement” that has finally collapsed beneath the weight of its own incoherence. You cannot denounce state crime while supporting its perpetrators. Or rather, you can – but you will look like a fool. You will look like someone who has nothing to offer beyond a pallid, unprincipled tribal loyalty to a clapped-out party of bloodstained bagmen. And all the “ordinary people” out there whose consciousnesses you are trying to raise will sense this hollow core, this estrangement from reality. They will know you have no answers for the suffering they endure in a heartless system, that you can provide no understanding of what the system is doing to them – because you are part of the system, you speak its language, you play its games, you support its crimes, you cheerlead for its criminals. Why should they listen to you? And so the people you seek to help and enlighten turn away – to those whose certainties, however false, seem more coherent; or to ever-more frantic, frenetic diversions; or to a grim, ground-down, burnt-out , grudging acceptance of a system that seems inescapable, more like a natural order than a hell of our own making.

I certainly don’t exempt myself from this critique. (Except maybe for that 2012 criminal-supporting thing.) For 35 years now, in print and on line, I’ve been doing the same kind of consciousness-raising and outrage-recording described above. (And I must confess that for too much of that time, I also hewed to the “2 percent” line that induces moral blindness when the criminals ride donkeys, not elephants. The hardest consciousness to raise is always one’s own.) But the 2012 election seems to me to represent a milestone of sorts, or a turning point or – hell, why not? – a new paradigm. Decades of dissent – not just pallid progblogging or Beltway-liberal lobbying, but the real deal, down in the trenches, courageous, unsung, dedicated – has not slowed the imperial juggernaut, whose depredations are more brazen, more entrenched and more accepted, even celebrated, than ever. Something ain’t working. The tongues are all broken. The message is not getting through.

So what now? At this point, all I know is that I don’t know – which is, so they say, the beginning of wisdom. And that’s what I want to do in this column: begin again, re-think, see more, learn more, get away from the camel-swallowers and my own calcifications, and meet our new reality head-on.

All forms of political media -- in print, on line, on the air -- have been awash in recent weeks with retrospectives on the tenth anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Amidst the mountainous heap of drivel and falsehood such an occasion inevitably produces among the vast and vapid army of analysts who happily spend their days chewing the cud of whatever happens to be the conventional wisdom of the day, there have been a few outstanding pieces that put this continuing war crime in stark perspective.

One of the better short pieces I've seen on the subject comes from -- of all people -- an actual Iraqi. Sami Ramadani, a dissident forced into exile by Saddam, has been one of the most insightful observers -- and vociferous opponents -- of the atrocities inflicted on his country by Western elites and their local collaborators (including, of course, for many decades, Saddam Hussein). From the Guardian:

Ten years on from the shock and awe of the 2003 Bush and Blair war – which followed 13 years of murderous sanctions, and 35 years of Saddamist dictatorship – my tormented land, once a cradle of civilisation, is staring into the abyss.

Wanton imperialist intervention and dictatorial rule have together been responsible for the deaths of more than a million people since 1991. And yet, according to both Tony Blair and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the "price is worth it". Blair, whom most Iraqis regard as a war criminal, is given VIP treatment by a culpable media. Iraqis listen in disbelief when he says: "I feel responsibility but no regret for removing Saddam Hussein." (As if Saddam and his henchmen were simply whisked away, leaving the people to build a democratic state). It enrages us to see Blair build a business empire, capitalising on his role in piling up more Iraqi skulls than even Saddam managed.

As an exile, I was painfully aware of Saddam's crimes, which for me started with the disappearance from Baghdad's medical college of my dearest school friend, Hazim. The Iraqi people are fully aware, too, that Saddam committed all his major crimes while an ally of western powers. On the eve of the 2003 invasion I wrote this for the Guardian:

"In Iraq, the US record speaks for itself: it backed Saddam's party, the Ba'ath, to capture power in 1963, murdering thousands of socialists, communists and democrats; it backed the Ba'ath party in 1968 when Saddam was installed as vice-president; it helped him and the Shah of Iran in 1975 to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement; it increased its support for Saddam in 1979…helping him launch his war of aggression against Iran in 1980; it backed him throughout the horrific eight years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered, in the full knowledge that he was using chemical weapons and gassing Kurds and Marsh Arabs; it encouraged him in 1990 to invade Kuwait…; it backed him in 1991 when Bush [senior] suddenly stopped the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan…"

But when it was no longer in their interests to back him, the US and UK drowned Iraq in blood.

…We haven't even counted the dead yet, let alone the injured, displaced and traumatised. Countless thousands are still missing. Of the more than 4 million refugees, at least a million are yet to go back to their homeland, and there still about a million internal refugees. On an almost daily basis, explosions and shootings continue to kill the innocent. … Lack of electricity, clean water and other essential services continues to hit millions of impoverished and unemployed people, in one of the richest countries on the planet. Women and children pay the highest price. Women's rights, and human rights in general, are daily suppressed.

And what of democracy, supposedly the point of it all? The US-led occupying authorities nurtured a "political process" and a constitution designed to sow sectarian and ethnic discord. Having failed to crush the resistance to direct occupation, they resorted to divide-and-rule to keep their foothold in Iraq. Using torture, sectarian death squads and billions of dollars, the occupation has succeeded in weakening the social fabric and elevating a corrupt ruling class that gets richer by the day, salivating at the prospect of acquiring a bigger share of Iraq's natural resources, which are mostly mortgaged to foreign oil companies and construction firms.

Warring sectarian and ethnic forces, either allied to or fearing US influence, dominate the dysfunctional and corrupt Iraqi state institutions, but the US embassy in Baghdad – the biggest in the world – still calls the shots. Iraq is not really a sovereign state, languishing under the punitive Chapter VII of the UN charter.

Yes, it has certainly been, as Barack Obama memorably characterized it, a "remarkable achievement." It is also, more and more, a forgotten "achievement." America's amnesia regarding the war crime in Iraq and its continuing ramifications -- not only the repression and death still going on there, but also the catastrophic impact of this atrocity on America itself, including the tsunami of suicide, homelessness and PTSD among its soldiers, and the back-breaking costs of this orgy of corruption and war-profiteering -- is indeed remarkable. It is no longer a reality -- a living, anguished, ongoing human tragedy -- but simply fodder for commentary, for partisan point-scoring, for barroom blather. This has always been the case with our misbegotten wars of imperial domination (for an especially acute and egregious example of our chronic amnesia, see this review of Nick Turse's new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam), going back to the 19th century. And the "paradigm-changing" iadvent of the internet has done nothing to change that; despite today's easy access to unprecedented levels of information about the realities of the Iraq war (and other high crimes and atrocities), the amnesia and willful ignorance remains as profound as ever.

So here we are. Ten years on from the frenzied paroxysm (or was it an orgasm?) of mass violence -- which was itself the culmination of years of the bipartisan war-by-sanctions that American officials have openly acknowledged killed more than half a million Iraqi children -- what is the central "moral" issue of our national politics today? This once-unimaginable, horribly depraved and obscene question: Should the president be allowed to murder any American citizen he chooses, or should there perhaps be be some kind of secret Congressional oversight of the secret killing program? (The idea of restricting the president's power to kill any filthy foreigner he chooses is not in question anywhere in our national politics, of course; Rand Paul wasn't filibustering against that idea. No, any debate on the "ethics" of state murder is restricted to its application to Americans, who, as we know, are the only fully human beings on the face of the earth.)

Given the current trajectory of our plunge into barbarism, I predict that in just a few years we'll be "debating" whether the president has the right to stick the severed heads of "terrorists" on spikes outside the White House, or if the heads should be passed around discreetly to members of the relevant Senate committees before being dumped in the ocean.

Glenn Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at my old alma mater, the by-god, orange-bleeding University of Tennessee, has responded to the "lefty lies" in a recent post here, taking me to task for mischaracterizing one of the tropes he trotted out during his incessant cheerleading for the military aggression in Iraq back in the day. I quoted his 2006 remark about "more rubble, less trouble" as a handy tag to encapsulate the neocons' notion of "creative destruction" -- using violence and war to re-shape the Middle East to their ideological tastes. I thought Reynolds would have been tickled to be the poster boy for his fellow propagandists, but I guess I was wrong. Anyway, here's what I said:

The aim of this deeply evil program, one supposes, was to achieve the "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocon savants who provided the "intellectual" framework for the Hitlerian act of aggression. True to their Trotskyist roots, they longed for the cleansing fire of war and ruin to clear the ground for their fanatical, world-shaping dreams. (Unlike Trotsky, of course, they never led troops in the field or put their own lives on the line.) Or as that deep thinker Glenn Reynolds once put it, gleefully: "More rubble, less trouble."

Now Glenn says this was a terrible twisting of his far more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the war crime he cheered for. As he puts it:

"…what I was actually saying in the quoted but not linked post was that if we failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we might wind up pursuing a “more rubble, less trouble” policy at the expense of democratization. There was no glee."

So let's go to the quoted -- but now linked! -- post. His original 2006 piece was sparked by a tide of criticism aimed at Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the war, which was then in its third year, and beginning its slide into the horrific, American-abetted hellstorm of sectarian strife that was the subject of my post last week. Glenn then quotes a number of people who rebut the criticism of poor, heroic Rumsfeld, including this anonymous commenter, who declared:

"The ball is in the Iraqis' court. We took away the obstacle to their freedom. If they choose to embrace death, corruption, incompetence, lethal religious mania, and stone-age tribalism, then at least we'll finally know the limitations of the people in that part of the world. The experiment had to be made."

Glenn likes that idea, but expresses his frustration about the "three-year rule" which is "well-known to U.S. planners -- U.S. voters will support a war for three years, but then get antsy for a conclusion. This attitude may be bad, especially as applied to 'messy small wars,' but it's a reality." (Yeah, ain't it a bitch that people can't send their sons and daughters off to die in endless, pointless exercises in war profiteering without getting all antsy about it after a few years? I mean, come on: if a he-man cheerleader is willing to waggle his pom-poms for decades without moaning about it, why can't these stupid widows and widowers and orphans and parents give up their loved ones more cheerfully? Really; it's almost as if the pathetic American people aren't even worthy of the deep thinkers and cheerleaders who provide these wars for them.)

Glenn goes on:

"On the other hand, it's also true that if democracy can't work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a "more rubble, less trouble" approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can't make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?"

We should probably adopt a 'more rubble, less trouble' approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. ("Should probably": weasel-wording worthy of a guardhouse lawyer -- or even a tenured professor. Never have the courage of your convictions; always leave yourself an out. "I didn't say we should kill the homeless guy and take his money, your honor; I said we should probably kill the homeless guy and take his money. So it's not my fault!") In 2013, he dials this back a bit, now writing that we "might wind up" pursuing the more rubble, less trouble approach if countries don't accept the "democratization' we impose on them at gunpoint. I suppose "might wind up" is a little less prescriptive, more nuanced than "should probably" -- but let's leave the weasel-wording to the lawyers.

Later, as clarification, Glenn added this to the 2006 post:

The "more rubble, less trouble" phrase refers to what Victor Davis Hanson calls a kind of "punitive isolationism" that I think we'll see if we give up in Iraq -- and that was presaged by the Clinton Administration's cruise-missile-based antiterror policy. It's what I hope to prevent, not what I hope to see, and it's the likely consequence of doing what the lefties want in foreign policy.

In other words, it is far better to invade a country in an act of unprovoked military aggression and murder thousands upon thousands of innocent people in massive doses than it is to murder innocent people piecemeal with missile strikes. (Or in our super-modern techno-utopia, drone strikes.) Now, some people might say there is something slightly wrong with both of these approaches. Some people might find the idea of murdering innocent people in any fashion as part of a militarist agenda of "power projection," domination and war profiteering that sows hatred and retribution around the world while bankrupting one's own people and stripping them of their liberties to be, well, not OK. But for Reynolds and his ilk, there is no alternative, no other way for the United States to conduct its affairs, no other goal for our national life: there is only the way of war and dominance. Anything else is not even imaginable. So the only choices available are wholesale murder or a more boutique approach. I admit there is a fine strategic distinction at work here -- at least for those who embrace the principle of murdering innocent people to maintain a "unipolar world" of American dominance -- and I did not fully appreciate Reynolds' devotion to murder en masse. He likes people to die and rubble to bounce only in a certain way; if I left the inadvertent impression that he liked to see people die and rubble bounce in any old way, I apologize.

What is most remarkable about all this, of course, is Reynolds' unspoken, unquestioned -- and perhaps unconscious -- assumption: that the United States must go on invading countries that 'threaten us' (in completely unspecified ways -- or, as with Iraq, in completely falsified ways). This is simply a given: we should attack countries to bend them to our will. The only question in the mind of well-wadded cheerleaders like Reynolds is whether we give these backward countries three years to get with our program, or -- if they are less wealthy and secular than Iraq was before we got there -- we should just go ahead and reduce them to utter ruin.

I don't really think my "lefty lies" mischaracterized the cheerleader's basic position, either then or now. To put it in plain terms like we use back in Tennessee: Reynolds does not give a shit how many dirty foreigners we kill in our "messy small wars." If they give up early after we invade them and don't make "trouble," fine; if they make trouble, then we "should probably" reduce them to rubble. In the former case, we'll kill lots of people on the front end; in the latter case, we'll kill lots of people all the way through. I'm sure that Professor Reynolds, as an enlightened and educated guardian of the values of Western civilization, would far prefer the somewhat lower body count of the first instance; but if we "wind up" having to take the second approach -- so what? Who cares? The important thing is that our right to invade other countries and impose our will on them -- to the immense profit of a small elite (and the giddy goosebumps of our war cheerleaders) -- must not be questioned or thwarted in any way.

That said, with hand on heart, I apologize (or rather, I "should probably" apologize) for characterizing Reynolds' evocation of the "more rubble, less trouble" doctrine as "gleeful." In truth, I have no idea what emotion he was feeling when he wrote that phrase. In fact, I now believe there were probably tears of sorrow dropping on his keyboard as he contemplated the tragic necessity that makes good, decent, democratizing Americans kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people in pointless wars fought on falsified premises. It's so sad that the dark, backward races and recalcitrant tribes of this wicked world force the noble denizens of the shining city on the hill to take on the terrible duty of waging aggressive war. So I hope Professor Reynolds will forgive me for my unwarranted editorial interpolation in this regard. I know now that war cheerleading is a grim and weighty task, not a gleeful thing at all, and I am sorry indeed if I have added to his great burden and made his poms-poms even heavier.

**

P.S. Of course, one might say that Reynolds has actually produced his own mischaracterization (dare one call it a "righty lie"?) of another writer's position. Having read my post -- with its criticism of the Iraq War and its cheerleaders -- Reynolds automatically assumes that I am some sort of Obama apologist. (The binary worldview of our deep thinkers evidently can't handle the idea that some people can oppose senseless murder and plunder no matter which political party directs it.) Glenn writes:

But then, more rubble, less trouble is now the Obama Administration’s approach  … so maybe I should take that as praise, not criticism. After all lots of things that were once decried are now okay since it’s Obama doing them.

And that's exactly right: Obama has indeed taken the course Reynolds said America "should probably" adopt if the "experiments" in Iraq and Afghanistan fail -- as they have done, in the most gruesome fashion. Obama has adopted, deepened, entrenched and expanded almost every evil policy, foreign and domestic, that he inherited from his predecessor -- a fact I have "decried" here for years. In terms of Terror Warring, corporate coddling, liberty quashing, entitlement slashing, recalcitrant tribe-killing and such, Obama is very much the same as Bush, often more so. And of course, Reynolds is also right to point out that many if not most "lefties' are indeed praising policies they once decried.

But then again, these policies are ones that Glenn himself has cheerleaded for all these years. So why doesn't he get his pom-poms out for the Big O? It seems that Reynolds, for all his professorial distinguishmentation, is himself a captive of the same dull-witted dynamic, the same binary tribalism, that he rightly "decries" in these "lefties": if the "other side's" guy is doing it, it's wrong; if "our guy" is doing it, it's OK.  Of course, one hates see the distinguished name of Beauchamp Brogan -- or indeed, of Glenn's own father, Charles Reynolds, an anti-war dissident of some note (and a former teacher of mine in days of yore) -- associated with such fear-ridden, closed-off, third-rate thinking. But in this "low, dishonest decade" (or rather, this low, dishonest century), what else can you expect?

Our guest blogger today is the younger John Milton -- before he ossified into the hidebound figure caricatured so devastatingly by Robert Graves in his remarkable feat of cross-gender ventriloquism, Wife to Mr Milton. As Colin Burrow points out in the latest London Review of Books, before Milton became Milton, there was an open, questing poetic mind, intoxicated with Spenser, alive with "calling shapes, beckoning shadows, airy tongues" -- and with what Graves himself once  called "the single poetic theme of Life and Death." As Burrow notes:

The quintessential early Miltonic moment is one in which a series of participles weaves all the world together and creates a rapturous arrest of temporal process ... :

‘The melting voice through mazes running;
Untwisting all the chains that ty
The hidden soul of harmony.’

Now that is a voice -- once known, lost, echoing ahead -- worth following until the world's end.

As'ad AbuKhalil points us to this rather eye-boggling -- and revealing -- passage from AP's obituary of Hugo Chavez:

Chavez invested Venezuela's oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world's tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.

My god, to think such evil once walked this earth!

Earlier, AbuKhalil had this take on Chavez's death:

I have never been a fan of Chavez but I am much less of a fan of his enemies and critics in the West or in the East. ...  Chavez allowed opposition media (many of which were funded or supported by the US government no doubt) but the New York Times commented (in its most silly obituary of the man) that he compelled opposition media to carry his speeches.  Wow.  That is something that is not done in the various dictatorships that US supports and cuddles, which don't allow any vestiges of opposition media.  Chavez was certainly more democratic in his rule than China, Russia, and all the Arab dictatorships and Central Asian dictatorships that the US supports, funds, and arms. but he was turned in the media as a twin of the North Korean dictator.  This comes to show you that the standards of Western governments and media have nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with 1) defiance against US will; 2) with the extent to which [a] regime allows multinational corporations to exploit and steal in a particular nation.  Chavez's championing of the poor was certainly offensive to Western governments and media.  That we know.

We do indeed. I recall the NY Times' first story on the death (since updated), which told us that Chavez -- elected four times against full-throttled opposition in democratic elections vetted by international observers -- won his power by "tapping into the resentments of his country's poor."

Their "resentments." Obviously, the poor of Venezuela -- a vast majority when Chavez was first elected -- were full of "resentment" at their subjugation at the hands of a monied elite. They didn't feel justified anger at their plight, they were not motivated by common human aspirations to secure a better life for themselves and their children; no, it was only "resentment" at their more deserving masters that drove them to support a man who -- dast one even say it? -- did not worship at the altar of America's imperial greatness. There could no other reason for such uppity behavior.

There were also rich pickings in the NYT's many other bashings of the dead man -- such as William Neuman's declaration that Chavez left behind "a bitterly divided nation in the grip of a political crisis" or Rory Carroll's crocodile-teared lament for "the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state institution" in Venezuela. One can only say that these New York sages should perhaps take a gander southward toward the Potomac if they want to see political crisis, dysfunction and blight writ far larger -- and deeper and more destructive -- than anything Chavez could have wrought in his country.

Oh well. The incessant denigration of the majority of humankind by rulers and their sniveling sycophants has been going on since the first whips were laid across the backs of slaves building dolmens and gathering flints. Maybe one day our idiotic race will get tired of it.

Or does that sound -- OMG! -- resentful?

The truth-telling of the imprisoned Bradley Manning continues to bear rich fruit, even as he faces a lifetime in prison for acting on principle to save innocent lives and prevent his country from staining itself further with war crimes. This week, the Guardian released a special investigation into the hideous regime of torture that the United States imposed and empowered during its years-long rape of Iraq.

The Guardian report draws on the trove of documents that Manning gave to Wikileaks (and the now diplomatically "sequestered" Julian Assange) to provide new details on the direct links of America's highest officials -- including the bipartisanly adored and now much mourned retired apparatchik David Petraeus -- to the torture of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In many ways, of course, it's hardly a revelation that American forces were deeply involved in torture during the "extraordinary achievement" (B. Obama) in Iraq. Some cranks have been writing about it since the earliest days of the invasion -- as in this piece, from August 2003:

Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."

Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo – perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" – aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

There were many, many more where that came from, from many sources, as the mosaic of horror built up, fragment by fragment. Unfortunately, America's multifarious war crime in Iraq is news that stays news -- because awareness of the depth of evil we wrought there has scarcely penetrated the American public consciousness. And of course, the Wikileaks documents give more form and substance to the piecemeal parceling of earlier truth fragments.

The Guardian pieces focus on the long lineage of the American way of torture, as represented by the figure of James Steele, a Special Forces offer who made his bones in the torture racket during the murderous American-backed, American-trained, American-funded "counterinsurgency" campaigns in Latin America during the 1980s. Steele has a little pal back in those days by the name of Davy Petraeus; later, the two worked cheek-by-jowl in Iraq to foment a hell on earth of sectarian violence and state terror.

In June 2004 Petraeus arrived in Baghdad with the brief to train a new Iraqi police force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Steele and serving US colonel James Coffman introduced Petraeus to a small hardened group of police commandos, many of them among the toughest survivors of the old regime, including General Adnan Thabit …With Steele and Coffman as his point men, Petraeus began pouring money from a multi-million dollar fund into what would become the Special Police Commandos. According to the US Government Accounts Office, they received a share of an $8.2bn (£5.4bn) fund paid for by the US tax payer. The exact amount they received is classified. With Petraeus' almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele's field expertise in counterinsurgency the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force.

One more element would complete the picture. The US had barred members of the violent Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army from joining the security forces, but by the summer of 2004 they had lifted the ban. Shia militia members from all over the country arrived in Baghdad "by the lorry-load" to join the new commandos. These men were eager to fight the Sunnis: many sought revenge for decades of Sunni-supported, brutal Saddam rule, and a chance to hit back at the violent insurgents and the indiscriminate terror of al-Qaida.

Petraeus and Steele would unleash this local force on the Sunni population as well as the insurgents and their supporters and anyone else who was unlucky enough to get in the way. It was classic counterinsurgency. It was also letting a lethal, sectarian genie out of the bottle. The consequences for Iraqi society would be catastrophic. At the height of the civil war two years later, 3,000 bodies a month were turning up on the streets of Iraq — many of them innocent civilians of sectarian war that ignited on both side.

Again, it's been known for years -- to anyone who wants to know -- that the vicious sectarian civil war in Iraq was deliberately seeded and pushed by the Pentagon brass and their White House bosses. [For an in-depth look, see Ulster on the Eurphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq.] As the Guardian investigation confirms, Petraeus was hip-deep in the process. The aim of this deeply evil program, one supposes, was to achieve the "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocon savants who provided the "intellectual" framework for the Hitlerian act of aggression. True to their Trotskyist roots, they longed for the cleansing fire of war and ruin to clear the ground for their fanatical, world-shaping dreams. (Unlike Trotsky, of course, they never led troops in the field or put their own lives on the line.) Or as that deep thinker Glenn Reynolds once put it, gleefully: "More rubble, less trouble."

What happened, of course, was the opposite: more rubble meant more trouble, and the shallow fools and blithering incompetents who comprise the American leadership class lost control of the situation. The carnage was so horrific that it threatened to damage the whole war-profiteering enterprise; why, there were even a few timorous calls among some quadrants of the elite suggesting that maybe it was time to begin thinking about considering the idea of mulling over at some unspecified point in the future the vague possibility of maybe thinking about considering the possibility of ending the war sometime, maybe, somewhere down the line. This tinkling trickle of potential opposition was quickly quelled, however, with the great googily-moogily "Surge": another invasion with thousands of American troops, more bribes for Sunni extremists, plus months of maniacal, American-backed "ethnic cleansing" to help Shiite collaborators eke out a victory in the civil war.

In one of the many blood-dark ironies of the war, Petraeus was put in charge of the murderous effort to stem the sectarian violence he had been fomenting at Washington's command. When the killing levels were no longer at historically unprecedented levels but were merely the worst anywhere in the world, the "surge" was proclaimed a great triumph, and Petraeus was the bipartisan hero of the hour.

(Speaking of bipartisan, let us not forget the Bush Regime bloodbath in Iraq was preceded by the murder of upwards of a million innocent Iraqis -- including an officially admitted total of 500,000 children -- in the ruthless sanction regime imposed by the good ole Big Dawg himself back in the 90s.)

But while he was showering in accolades on Capitol Hill, this is what the system installed by Petraeus and Steele and their Washington masters was doing back in Iraq:

The commandos set up a network of secret detention centres where insurgents could be brought and information extracted from them. The commandos used the most brutal methods to make detainees talk. There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman took part in these torture sessions, but General Muntadher al Samari, a former general in the Iraqi army, who worked after the invasion with the US to rebuild the police force claims that they knew exactly what was going on and were even supplying the commandos with lists of people they wanted brought in. He says he tried to stop the torture on several occasions, but failed and fled the country.

"We were having lunch. Col Steele, Col Coffman, and the door opened and Captain Jabr was there torturing a prisoner. He [the victim] was hanging upside down and Steele got up and just closed the door, he didn't say anything – it was just normal for him."

He says there were 13 to 14 secret prisons in Baghdad under the control of the Interior Ministry and used by the Special Police Commandos. He alleges that Steele and Coffman had access to all these prisons and that he visited one in Baghdad with both men. "They were secret, never declared. But the American top brass and the Iraqi leadership knew all about these prisons. The things that went on there: drilling, murder, torture. The ugliest sort of torture I've ever seen."

According to one soldier with the 69th Armoured Regiment who was deployed in Samarra in 2005 but who doesn't want to be identified: "It was like the Nazis … like the Gestapo basically. They [the commandos] would essentially torture anybody that they had good reason to suspect, knew something, or was part of the insurgency … or supporting it, and people knew about that."

... Neil Smith, a 20-year-old medic who was based in Samarra, remembers what low ranking US soldiers in the canteen said. "What was pretty widely known in our battalion, definitely in our platoon, was that they were pretty violent with their interrogations. That they would beat people, shock them with electrical shock, stab them, I don't know what else ... it sounds like pretty awful things. If you sent a guy there he was going to get tortured and perhaps raped or whatever, humiliated and brutalised by the special commandos in order for them to get whatever information they wanted."

He now lives in Detroit and is a born-again Christian. He spoke to the Guardian because he said he now considered it his religious duty to speak out about what he saw. "I don't think folks back home in America had any idea what American soldiers were involved in over there, the torture and all kinds of stuff."

Through Facebook, Twitter and social media the Guardian managed to make contact with three soldiers who confirmed they were handing over detainees to be tortured by the special commandos, but none except Smith were prepared to go on camera.

"If somebody gets arrested and we hand them over to MoI they're going to get their balls hooked, electrocuted or they're going to get beaten or raped up the ass with a coke bottle or something like that," one said. He left the army in September 2006. Now 28, he works with refugees from the Arab world in Detroit teaching recent arrivals, including Iraqis, English.

"I suppose it is my way of saying sorry," he said.

But as we have seen in all the recent media hoopla around the 10th anniversary of the invasion, none of criminals in charge of the war crime, or the savants who promoted it, or the media sycophants who "stovepiped" the lies of the warmongers to the public, or any member of the political-media elite who by direct or collateral hand were complicit in this war crime have ever apologized for what they have done -- much less been made to suffer the slightest discomfort or inconvenience for it.

As for Steele himself, he left Iraq after helping set up the torture apparatus and went into -- what else? -- the oil business.