I wanted to memorialize a remark that I made to Your Turn: Rites Of Passage:

I wanted to reply to two of the above remarks. They engage in breath-taking revision of history, and demonize “the enemy.” Hmm, come to think of it, isn’t the former required to sustain the latter?

The first remark:

“Be angry at W’s ineptitude - but where’s the anger at the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of Muslim political culture? Or is that acceptable? It’s a problem that existed long before Bush, and something his successors will have to deal with for a long time after he’s gone. It’s not ALL the West’s fault. But apparently it’s bad taste to say that.”

If anything, the historical record, at least for the past 50 years, is one in which the calculating depravity of the United States is on display. Mosadeq, anyone? Who funded the Madrasas? Who propped up the Shah, and trained Savak? Who paid for Hussein’s epaulets? The US, of course. Is the US in the Middle East for the love of humanity? That’s almost an obscene argument to make. Yet some do it. After all of the lies, it even has become the final justification of the Bush Administration.

“Do you get it yet? The people who engage in these acts are not helpless victims or freedom fighters who are seeking world peace - they’re ruthless murderers who are doing everything in their power to make life in Iraq living hell for their enemies whether they be American troops or their own countrymen of a different religious persuasion - apparently with your full support. Sleep well. … Put your hatred of GWB aside mong enough to see these people for who they are.”

‘Ruthless murderers’? Again? What planet have you been living on? Whose country is occupied by whom, once more, remind us? And for what reason? Just a brief refresher: when oil production in the US began to decline exponentially in 1970, that could have been a clue. Did the US change land-use policy? Did the US embark on a crash course to develop energy alternatives? Is the US approaching 10% wind energy generation, or 80% nuclear generation, as some countries are? No — quite the opposite: it embarked on the biggest suburban building spree in history, gobbling up arable land and fossil fuels with wanton disregard for the planet’s population. It is a brazen act of rapacity that history will not judge favorably. Weave yourself all of the Disney-fied, suburban, Leave it to Beaver, Judeo-Christian fantasies you want, but the truth remains. That, Marie, is why the mob is coming for your head.

The young couple in the picture: collateral damage, ‘the sorrows of empire.’

Posted by: rss | Mar 01, 2007 at 04:16 AM

I posted the following to Chicago Dyke’s CorrenteWire blog. It was in response to the kind of comment so typical of Karl Rove-esque (GW Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff) take-no-prisoners political “rhetoric” (to be polite in my characterization).

The comment to which I replied:

Funny
Submitted by Nudnik on Sat, 2006-11-11 00:17.

Funny how the Left and the Islamofascists celebrate and rejoice at the same things.

My reply:

The rule of law
Submitted by Robert (not verified) on Sat, 2006-11-11 04:47.

Odd how it had struck me until now that the best parallel was that drawn between those who have used extra-legal means to fight secular government; that is, between Republican Fundamentalist Christians in the United States, and the advocates of Islamic Jihad.

Facist? Tyrannical? What could be more so than the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the use of “extraordinary rendition,” torture, “pre-emptive” warfare, and now the latest juridical and constitutional outrage, the Military Commissions Act of 2006? Who could be more alike their extreme and brutal treatment of gays and women than those who seek to abolish abortion, to deny secular civil union to gays, and to deny equal suffrage to ethnic minorities as do American Fundamentalist Christians, Islamic Fundamentalists, and National Socialists? Who could be more alike in their strident nationalism, wrapped in the cloth of religion and mysticism and anti-scientism than these three groups? And who would be more repugnant to those who advocate the rule of law, one person one vote and universal suffrage, [constitutional] and secular government then those who proclaim the state to be the realm of God? Who but the National Socialists and their ilk would stoop to demogogic, divisive attacks, calculated through appeal to jingoist patriotism to fracture a society for the sake of political expediency? And who is most likely to resort to ad-hominem name calling, such as “Islamofascist,” “Cut-n-run Defeat-o-crats”?

And this is to leave aside the shear strategic and tactical stupidity displayed at every step on the road to the quagmire that is Iraq today by the Bush regime. The United States was never loved in the Middle East, given its tendency to support the most brutal and extreme, not least among them Al-Quaeda and Saddam Hussein, but it was not loathed by the breadth of society as it is today. It need not have been so. This is why some small portion of the American populus changed their minds about the Bush Administration, along with the simple administrative ineptitude, cronyism, and corruption display ed at home. No amount of childish name-calling will erase this record.

This opinion pretty much sums up my opinion of the Military Commissions Act:

There are many things that are deeply distressing about the Military Commissions Act of 2006. One of the most distressing is its deeply cynical attitude about law. The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law. And all the while he insists that everything he does is perfectly legal, because, the way the law is designed, there is no one with authority to disagree.

It is a travesty of law under the forms of law. It is the accumulation of executive, judicial, and legislative powers in a single branch and under a single individual.

It is the very essence of tyranny.

F. William Engdahl offers commentary on the failure of the Bush/Wolfowitz Doctrine in an article entitled
USA’s ‘geopolitical nightmare’ and Eurasian strategic energy arrangements. Excerpts:

The Bush Doctrine of Rice had been fully delineated in 1992 in a Defense Planning Guidance ‘final draft’ done by then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, and known in Washington as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Wolfowitz declared then, that with the threat of a Soviet attack gone, the US was the unchallenged sole Superpower and should pursue its global agenda including pre-emptive war and unilateral foreign policy actions. An internal leak of the draft to the New York Times then led President Bush senior to announce it was ‘only a draft and not US policy.’ By 2002 it was officially US policy. The Bush Doctrine stated that ‘military pre-emption’ was legitimate when the threat was ‘emerging’ or ‘sufficient, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack.’

[…]

In the space of 12 months Russia and China have managed to move the pieces on the geopolitical ‘chess board’ of Eurasia away from what had been an overwhelming US strategic advantage, to the opposite, where the US is increasingly isolated. It’s potentially the greatest strategic defeat for the US power projection of the post World War II period. This is also the strategic background to the re-emergence of the so-called realist faction in US policy.

William Engdahl is author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,’ recently released by Pluto Press Ltd, London.

I’m going to take the liberty of quoting in full James Howard Kunstler’s take on the reaction of the US public to recent revelations (Are they revelations? Not to me — this all seemed patently obvious all along) about the Bush the Younger’s administration’s fabrications regarding Iraq.

But first, I should take credit for Kunstler’s thesis (er, just kidding): I was active in the San Francisco Bay Area student movement to stop the first gulf war. My reason for opposition? I thought that it was a blatant grab for oil. Hussein had invaded Kuwait, thus impinging on our “vital interest,” on which Kuwait has the misfortune of resting, hence, war. In retrospect, I think I was wrong, and Bush the Elder’s war, and refraining from conquering Iraq in toto, was masterful. Somebody in that adminstration had read the history of British imperial rule in Iraq, which certainly is more than can be said for the Bush the Younger administration. Moreover, we knew Hussein was about to get the bomb. As the apocryphal story goes, we had the receipts.

I do still think I was right about the bigger picture: building an entire economy to be precariously dependent on oil is not only foolhardy, it is morally offensive. Oh, and there is the minor problem of the people we tick off in the process. Some of them flew planes into the World Trade Center recently. On the other hand, their list of grievances stretches far beyond Mosadeq, or the Suez Crisis (events that despite their recency are light years beyond the American ability to grasp). I would guess the Crusades would be a good place to start, or maybe the Battle of Tours. The problem is made even less tractable by the radically different frames Islam and the West approach the world with. Islam is premodern, positively medieval in its tendency to frame all things religiously (this is, of course, a generalization); whereas the West — America, too, despite its popular religious froth — has largely abandoned religion as either an economic or political frame of reference. In America, the framework is largely class and race, both of which are principally products of modernity (modernity having begun with the English industrial revolution, and the French political revolution, more or less).

Anyway, I’m babbling in a less than scholarly way, as one is wont to do in this medium. I’m sure that there are far more insightful people around to describe things: Giovanni Arrighi, Edward Said, etc. So let’s turn to Kunstler. I might not agree with his overarching thesis, namely, that drive-in utopia is screwed with the end of the age of oil. The end of drive-in utopia part might be true, but energy is rather abundant in the universe. Being the Saudi Arabia of coal, the U.S., with China in lock-step no doubt, will happily condemn the planet to 10 million years of tropical delight in exchange for 500 more years of techno-topia. In any case, we’ll never get there: the Yellow river has taken on a nasty propensity for drying up one province before the ocean, the Amazon is just now being picked clean of wood, species diversity is collapsing, 3 billion people have neither sewerage nor potable water, and every god-damned jackass on the planet seems to have a kalashnikov. Egads, I make Kunstler look like a raging optimist. I just think he is sticking too fanatically to one idea — he’s making the zealot’s mistake of seeing the world through the keyhole of his own fabrication (or of M. King Hubbert’s making, in this case). Patriarchy, infidels, sinners, the bourgeoisie, darkies, honkies — pick your demon, and let your belief making machinery run with it. Ecce homo. Nevertheless, Kunstler, freed by his keyhole, perceives the American empire in its naked glory. To wit:

October 31, 2005
The cry across the land grows increasingly shrill: “THEY LIED TO US!”

For going on three years, the American public, especially on the political left, has been complaining that the Iraq War was some kind of a shuck-and-jive. The Bush government pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes. They ran a vicious propaganda operation. We were fooled by all those fairy tales about WMDs, Saddam and Osama, and African radioactive yellowcake.

Now, through the fog of the Valerie Plame affair and the indictment of Scooter Libby, the cry is reaching a crescendo: “THEY LIED TO US!”

Being a Democrat myself, and therefore nominally in opposition to Bush-and-Cheneyism, one has to contend with all sorts of embarrassing nonsense emanating from one’s own side. In Sunday’s New York Times op-ed section, for instance, Nicholas Kristoff wrote: “Mr. Cheney, we need a stiff dose of truth.” I’m sorry to tell you this Nick (and the rest of my homies), but what Jack Nicholson’s character said in that court martial movie some years back still applies: you can’t stand the truth.

If the American public could stand the truth, we would stop calling it the Iraq War and rename it the War to Save Suburbia. Of all the things that Bush and Cheney have said over the last six years, the one thing the Democratic opposition has not challenged is the statement that “the American way of life is not negotiable.” They’re just as invested in it as everybody else. The Democrats complain about the dark efforts by Bush and Cheney to cook up a rationale for the war. Guess what? The Democrats desperately need something to oppose besides the truth. If they would shut up about WMDs for five minutes and just take a good look around, they’d know exactly why this war started.

When the American people, Democrat and Republican both, decided to build a drive-in utopia based on incessant easy motoring and massive oil dependency, who lied to them? When tens of millions of Americans bought McHouses thirty-four miles away from their jobs in Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Dallas, who lied to them? When American public officials adopted the madness of single-use zoning and turned the terrain of this land into a tragic crapscape of strip malls on six-lane highways, who lied to them? When American school officials decided to consolidate all the kids in gigantic centralized facilities serviced by fleets of yellow buses that ran an average of 150,000 miles per year per school, who lied to them? When Americans trashed their public transit and railroad system, who lied to them? When Americans let WalMart gut Main Street, who lied to them? When Bill and Hillary Clinton bought a suburban villa in farthest reaches of northern Westchester County, New York, who lied to them?

You want truth, Progressive America? Here’s the truth: the War to Save Suburbia entailed an unavoidable strategic military enterprise. Saving Suburbia required that the Middle East be pacified or at least stabilized, because two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil is there (and in case you haven’t figured this out by now, Suburbia runs on oil, and the oil has to be cheap or we couldn’t afford to run it). The three main oil-producing countries in the Middle East, going from west-to-east are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. We had serious relationship problems with all of them at various times, and they with each other, leading at frequent intervals to a lot of instability in that region, and consequently trouble for us trying to run Suburbia on cheap oil (which they sold us in large quantities).

After nineteen religious maniacs from the Middle East, mostly Arabs (though unaffiliated officially with any state in their actions) flew planes into our skyscrapers and a big government building, we had to kick someone’s ass. We decided to start by kicking the ass of Afghanistan, where one particular mischievous maniac, Mr. bin Laden, had set up operations connected with 9/11. It wasn’t enough. We never could find Mr. bin Laden, Afghanistan wasn’t really in the Middle East, and whatever else they were, the Afghans weren’t Arabs. We had to find somebody else’s ass to kick to reinforce the idea that religious maniacs unaffiliated with any particular state could not pull off lethal stunts like 9/11 without bringing substantial pain down on their own home places. To put it plainly, we had to kick some Arab ass. We picked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Not because he had anything to do with 9/11– which we couldn’t pin on any Muslim nation — but because Saddam’s Baathist regime was Arab, and the same general religious brand as the guys who did 9/11, Sunni Muslim, and because Saddam had already proven to be a freelance mischievous maniac quite in his own right over the years, worth getting rid of, and most of all (from a strategic point-of-view) because Iraq was the perfect place geographically to open a US police station in the Middle East. It was right between those two other troublemakers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and setting up an American military presence between them, it was hoped, would moderate and influence their behavior, and discourage them from doing anything to interfere with the indispensable supplies of oil that we desperately required to run our beloved, non-negotiable Suburbia. It was even hoped, by a band of extreme idealists in the US Government, that in the process of setting up a military presence in Iraq, we could convert this troubled, fractious nation into a peaceful, cohesive, beneficent democracy, establishing a shining example, blah, blah. . . . But such is the nature of idealism.

I apologize for taking two long paragraphs to tell you the true origins of the War to Save Suburbia, but it was, after all, only two paragraphs, and the truth is sometimes not so simple. The American people have gotten exactly the war that they bargained for. The outstanding obvious question is not by what wicked and recondite means the War to Save Suburbia got started, but how come once started, we did such a poor job of resolving it, specifically why, after nearly three years, our vaunted technological mastery couldn’t get the electricity running more than a few hours a day in Baghdad, why we let squads of redneck moron enlisted personnel beat up on prisoners and videotape their own antics, and why we can’t even get the oil equipment in good enough shape so the Iraqis can sell us the oil we still need to run our non-negotiable way of life?

So, as a card-carrying Democrat and as a Progressive who would like to see his country successfully adapt to the changing realities of the world, I propose we stop making ourselves ridiculous by whining about being lied to, because we’ve only been lying to ourselves. We walked into the War to Save Suburbia with, as the old saying goes, our eyes wide shut.

Dave Rogers has a superb entry on what he argues was principally a failure of leadership before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.

What happened in the failures of government in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was not something intrinsic to the nature of bureaucracies or the public sector. What happened was a failure of leadership, a failure to renew and strengthen the shared faith that makes each of us a part of something larger, and hopefully, better than we are as individuals. What happened was a failure of leadership to keep faith with us.

How is such ignorance possible? It certainly is not excusable. It’s simply mind-boggling.

President Bush, in an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s Good Morning America on September 1st said:

I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded. And now we are having to deal with it and will.

Not only did President Bush lack a rudimentary command of facts regarding a critical area for which he is responsible (FEMA), he apparently is so clueless as to admit it on broadcast television. Not only is he venal, he is a fool.

Let me just spell this out for the unenlightened: The bus and airline brigade should have been commandeered by FEMA before Katrina made landfall. Get it? That is FEMA’s job.

I’ll be putting interesting links about the situation in New Orleans and Katrina below.

Bush’s Potemkin village, reported here:

The ‘Recovery Efforts’: Wherever Bush went yesterday, it seemed as though people were already hard at work rebuilding the affected areas. Unfortunately for Bush, there were a few foreign journalists at his photo ops, and they pulled back the curtain on what we saw on TV to reveal that the ‘work’ was staged for the media. Here’s a translation from the German news show web site.

Christine Adelhardt live from Biloxi:

“Two minutes ago the President drove by with his convoy. What happened here in Biloxi during the day is really unbelievable. All of a sudden the rescue troops finally showed up, the clean-up vehicles; we didn’t see those over the last days

Point Reyes National Seashore, California

here. In an area where it really isn’t urgent, there is nobody around, all the remaining people went to the city center.

The President is traveling with a press convoy, so they get wonderful pictures saying the president was here and the help will follow. The amount of this
catastrophe shocked me, but the amount of set-up that happened here today is at least equally shocking for me.

And there’s more, this time on the ‘recovery efforts’ in New Orleans, from War And Piece:

There was a striking dicrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president’s visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front

Point Reyes National Seashore, California

of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of ‘news people’ had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

Levee Repairs in New Orleans: As Bush flew around the skies above New Orleans, CNN began showing footage of a bulldozer and dump trucks working on the 17th Street levee, which was the maqin source of the flood waters in New Orleans. When Bush got ready to leave, he crowed that ‘progress is flowing.’ But according to Sen. Mary Landrieu, the crew that was working so hard yesterday left and apparently never came back:

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young and old - deserve far better from their national government.

Control of the Convention Center: Bush made a big deal of telling the nation that the icon for unrest and chaos in New Orleans this week - the New Orleans Convention Center - was secured by the time of his statement yesterday.

I’m pleased to report, thanks to the good work of the adjutant general from Louisiana and the troops that have been called in that the convention center is secure.

But as was pointed out this morning, a report by CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr directly contradicted Bush’s statement.

CNN’s Barbara Starr reports that there is “no indication” the convention center in New Orleans is secure. She reports there is still much unrest.

And the now-famous Fox News video of Geraldo Rivera inside the Convention Center showed how Bush’s idea of ’securing’ the center was locking the people in.

All of this information has turned up in one spot or another on the web since yesterday, but I wanted to put it all together in one spot for a reason. Bit by bit, parts of Bush’s trip were shown to be less truthful than we deserved. But when you look at the entire trip - and all of the deceit that went into each part of it - it’s an inescapable fact that from beginning to end the trip was a menu of lies and self-serving actions that didn’t do the region any good. In some instances, like the helicopter groundings halting rescue ops, the trip could conceivably actually killed more people.

And that’s the bottom line with this administration. It always has been. Bush, Rove, and the rest of them will go to any measures to get their version of the truth out. and if a few of the little people happen to die in the process, it’s no skin off their noses. All of America should know what the true bottom line is.

You are being lied to, and lives have been lost because of it.

A paramedic’s experience during Katrina’s aftermath:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

LA Fire Department Earthquake Preparedness Handbook.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Real conservatives believe that the state should do a few things that no one else can do - defense, decent public education, police, law and order among the most obvious - and leave the rest to individuals. Funding FEMA and having a superb civil defense are very much part of conservatism’s real core. It’s when government decides to reshape society, redistribute wealth, socially engineer, and take over functions that the private sector can do just as well that conservatives draw the line. The reason I’m mad as hell over Katrina is precisely because I’m a conservative and this kind of thing is exactly what government is for. Bush in this sense is not now and never has been a conservative. A man who explodes government spending but can’t run a war or organize basic civil defense is simply a fiscally reckless incompetent. If this were a parliamentary system, we’d have a vote of no confidence. Instead we have three years of more peril.

Dave Winer opens a discussion on possible knock-on effects of Katrina (see the comments). My response to a poster in Winer’s comments section:

I find the suggestion that those who were too poor to leave New Orleans are somehow to blame for their fate before Hurricane Katrina to be not merely disingenuous, but morally outrageous. How can this malefic ignorance pass for informed debate? Have those who are suggesting this forgotten the origin of the kernel of surplus capital in the U.S.? On whose backs do these privileged, self-assured, truculent schmucks stand? On the backs of slaves, of course.

And don’t tell me that “it’s been 150 years since slavery was outlawed”: we all know perfectly well that the North American position of comfort and advantage, its household wealth and imperial corporate dominance, is a direct product of this heinous era. So, too, is what we’re seeing in New Orleans today. No just, sane society permits what just happened in New Orleans to occur.

So maybe that’s my contribution to this thread: for a moment, the jingoistic bunting has been pulled aside, and the self congratulatory glow of nationalistic nostalgia is fading. It was doing so already, amidst Mesopotamia’s ethnic, religious, and, above all else, anti-imperialist slaughter; but seeing the fractured, steaming meat at the center of the American heart can’t help but make the delusion evaporate faster. And what more poetic, prophetic place than the Louisiana Superdome for this to have transpired.

Good God, my heart goes out to those who were stranded there. This should never have happened — we had the means to prevent it, and we did nothing. I am outraged, I am appalled, my heart is broken.

Wikipedia has the best overall summary that I’ve seen.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune is providing excellent, accurate coverage.

The Interdictor is the blog of a NOC employee who has been working in a downtown New Orleans building for the duration of the storm and crisis.

Doc Searls has an excellent set of links on the situation.

For balance, here’s a pretty good countervailing argument thread to Kunstler.

The SFGate.com (e-child of the newspaper San Francisco Chronicle of Hearst fame) ‘Culture’ blog has an entry describing A Family in Baghdad, the on-line journal of

Faiza Jarrar [sic] [who] is an engineer in her 40s who has three sons: Raed, Majid and Khalid. They all write blog entries…

A recent entry:

# posted by faiza @ 8:46 PM

Wednesday, June 22nd , 2005

Good evening….

After we studied the case of the Afghani village, we kept working as small groups, or as a whole class, searching for a solution to that small society, as all the circumstances surrounding it were difficult and complicated…

The question is: How do we develop society, while peace and stability do not exist?

I think it would be an imposable task, and however we tried to find the solution from one side, we would collide with the facts on the ground; like the occupation, the people’s hatred of it, their rejection to cooperate with any organization offering assistance, as if they are saying: Do not beautify the portrait of the occupation, so you can say… they did this and that… we do not want them here, we need them to get out first, then we can start developing the society…

I found the same situation in Iraq since the occupation…. At first people believed that the occupation came here to help them, then they found out that the occupation had an agenda of its own, which has nothing to do with the welfare of people, or their stability, as if they are telling the Iraqis: Collaborate with us to eliminate each Iraqi who rejects our presence…then we shall give you water, electricity, jobs, and stability…..

This is the story in Iraq… people lost their confidence in the good intentions of the occupation army, there is no real evidence that they want to bring peace in Iraq, and leave the country, everything indicates that they want to remain here forever.

And the country is being destroyed, day by day…..

We are losing years of our lives, the souls of Iraqi men and women, the revenues of the Iraqi oil, we get nothing, and nothing prophesies a better future…we only lose, lose, and lose….

We hear beautiful, honeyed promises… with nothing real on the ground of reality.