The two women I heard speak today at a meeting of the coalition of Democratic clubs, Resolution Peace addressed the same urgent question.Now that I have finished celebrating the election of Obama, I must say that I am very concerned that his election has led to a fair amount of complacency in the anti-war movement. Sure, Obama plans to get us out of Iraq (after a year or two...), and meanwhile he plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Even if you are not a pacifist, even if you believe some wars are either justified or necessary, or might do more good than harm, this war falls into none of those 3 categories.
Even articles in Time magazine (hardly a progressive media) state that war in Afghanistan is un-win-able (as it was for every invader from Alexander the Great to the USSR). Afghanistan is more a collection of tribes than a united nation, and the land/topography as well as the cultural conditions are such that "victory" is not possible. So what will be accomplished? Many thousands of deaths of US soldiers and Afghani citizens, and a continuation of the huge waste of money that is so sorely needed here at home. Just so Obama can prove that he is neither "weak" nor a leftist?
I offer my prior article as my pro-Obama credentials. However, regarding his stance on Afghanistan, it is past-due time for the US anti-war movement to organize and resist the escalation of this newest "Vietnam." Rather than tip-toe on eggshells to avoid conflict with our beloved Obama, I hope that all those who, like myself, supported Obama's campaign with words, money and action, will now feel responsible to send a message to our friend Obama that war is not the answer; certainly not this war!
Obama may be the closest thing to Roosevelt in our lifetime. But there is no president then, now, or ever, who does not need to hear the loud and clear voice(s) of concerned citizens when he takes our money, our children, our conscience, our international reputation to war. Unlike the slow quiet involvement in Vietnam, the escalation of this war is public and publicized. What are we waiting for?
Phyllis Bennis of Institute for Policy Studies reminded us of Obama's declaration during the primary:She had a number of quite specific suggestions for the peace movement."I don't want to just end the war, I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."
Humaira Ghilzai, a Bay Area Afghan-American, works to improve conditions, especially for women and girls, through the Afghan Friends Network. She offered a history of the gradually improving conditions for women under previous governments (not the Taliban!) and reminded us that "change has to come from within and not from outside."
Several significant perspectives have become available recently.... recent estimates of coverage by major news outlets report that a scant 0.6 percent of reporting has been devoted to Afghanistan.
The whole article is worth reading. Robert Gates playing the part of Robert MacNamara, perhaps?In 1965, we misconstrued a region of temporary, tactical importance as being of enduring strategic value. President Lyndon Johnson's advisers had unfounded, naïve and unrealistic expectations of Vietnam's near-term potential to evolve into a modern social democratic constitutional republic if the United States put the "right people" in charge and provided a pile of cash and some "military assistance."
... Politicians frequently substitute a fascination with direct action in the form of air strikes or special operations killings for strategy. They see such action as a "cleaner" approach with its own logic, as well as tactics with less risk of U.S. casualties. But in the absence of a viable strategy with attainable objectives, direct action is problematic.
Pressure in the U.S. for an exit from Iraq built up gradually as people realized first that the war had been based on a lie and second that continued U.S. deaths served no useful purpose. It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will keep its promise of full withdrawal; no one should be surprised if the Iraqi civil war, on hold for the moment, breaks out again as the U.S. draws down.When the deputy director of Aqtash High School talks of the government, he isn't referring to Hamid Karzai's central government in Kabul. Nor does he refer to the provincial administration in Kunduz. "The Taliban are our government," Bashir says. "They have taken over our region, their commanders give the orders here."
... At least 10 girls' sections of schools located near Kunduz have been closed down in the last three weeks after receiving threats from the Taliban. Parents simply stopped sending their children to school because of the danger. ... Neither the German army, the Bundeswehr, nor the local police force are effective against the Islamist extremists. At the most, they can temporarily dislodge the Taliban, but they then move on to terrorize other areas where there are no German soldiers.
Most of all, though, the closures threaten one of the few successes that the Germans have had in Afghanistan. It is an achievement that has been repeatedly trumpeted by those in favor of continued engagement; hardly a German politician has refrained from mentioning how encouraging it is to visit a girls' school in Afghanistan. Now, though, the schools -- just like in the south where recent acid attacks against schoolgirls have hit the headlines -- have become a potent propaganda tool for the Taliban. Western troops, so goes the message, can't do anything to stop the Islamist fighters.
Salon executive editor Gary Kamiya has called out President Obama: What we are living is not a "war." This is no contest that can be won. We're living with our human insecurity and mortality. As individuals, if the terrorists don't get us, a profit-obsessed medical system, or the polluted planet, or simply individual exhaustion will. Individuals can only try to leave a society that is stronger and better for our having passed through it. Ambitious politicians have a similar responsibility, writ large: leave the country you seek to lead better and braver than you found it.Since 9/11, the word "terrorism" has been a totem, a quasi-religious myth, a nightmarish archetype that occupies the same place in our national imagination that "hell" did for the people of the Middle Ages. "Terrorism" blurs the boundaries of political and personal fear: It represents at once a thoroughly human evil to be hated and fought against, and the impersonal, fatalistic face of death itself. Terrorism is fate with a hideous face, like the White Whale that Ahab hates and tries to kill in Melville's "Moby-Dick." (Indeed, the Bush administration's unwinnable, endless, self-defeating "war on terror" is more than a little reminiscent of Ahab's obsessive quest -- which ends, it is well to remember, with the destruction of his ship and all of its crew save the narrator Ishmael.)
Because terrorism in our national imagination is simultaneously villain and nemesis, human and inhuman, the "war" against terrorism slips into becoming a war not just against fanatical jihadis but against our own death, against the very idea of death. As we accept this, repression of reality and the infantile fantasy of perfect safety -- in other words, cowardice -- become the driving forces of our lives.
... Once the argument is framed in these terms, Obama cannot win. By tacitly accepting Cheney's terms -- by shamefully proposing that we detain suspected terrorists indefinitely without real trials, or by refusing to release photographs of Americans torturing people in their control -- Obama has enabled and encouraged our diffuse national cowardice.
Like I said, I don't know much about the Koreas, but it certainly makes intuitive sense to me that maintaining a state of "war" that still festers over fifty years after the shooting stopped is no the way to find peaceful solutions.At root is the fact that the U.S. is still at war with North Korea. When two nations are at war, there is no room for mutual trust. And so the tit-for-tat games will continue at the cost of an opportunity to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, stabilize Northeast Asia, and divert critically needed resources to the people - not just in North Korea, but South Korea and right here at home.
What we fail to realize is how much this is costing: the millions of North Korean people who endure hardship for the right to be free from another U.S. military invasion, the millions of dollars and Korean won spent on further militarizing the Korean peninsula, the Cold War legacy in the form of National Security Laws in South and North Korea, and the millions of families who are still divided by war.
It's clear that the Six Party Talks were designed to fail. The U.S. entered the talks intending on denuclearizing North Korea, and North Korea entered with the hopes of normalizing relations with the U.S. What would actually break the deadlock is to give the North Koreans what they want: peace. It's about time President Obama actually practiced his rhetoric and gave peace a chance.
Yes -- that's true. But I wish he'd shown some recognition how gendered that perspective is. Women who opt out of the education path to employment have many less options -- they are a lot more likely to end up emptying bedpans than acquiring a skilled trade. Yes, I was an exception, but I know how lucky I was in a particular place at a particular moment.A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this. ...
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
There lurks in most of us, most of the time, a hope to know we are "of use," and to be recognized for our usefulness by some community. I'm less sure than Crawford that it is work itself that gives this satisfaction; perhaps the satisfaction is both more idiosyncratic and more social than we readily understand.You know what fucking kills me? Some times I really like being in the Army. ...there's nothing like doing your job well, like winning the esteme [sic] of people who wouldn't otherwise be your friends because you're good at what you do. Out in the civilian world, I can do this job, and I can rock it out there (and one day I will), but right now, I just want to do my job here. I want to [g]o to the sandbox [Iraq], provide the support I'm trained to, come back, and then be done with the Army. If they kick me out before I do what I've been getting ready to do, well, that'll be damn lame. I can do my job, I need to do it, fuck, I love to do it.
And yeah, I'm a transsexual. It all fits together somehow.
There's lots to quibble with in this; I imagine millions of Indo-Chinese and Algerians might have some questions about it. I could easily make a case that Europe abandoned empire only from exhaustion, ceding global hegemony to rising American power most unwillingly. Still, the idea deserves exploration that clamorous religious (ideological?) identification had to recede before more peaceful civilization became possible.The psychological mechanism was basic: group identity followed from group threat. Humans know who they are by whom they oppose. From tribalism to nationalism, this polarity shaped human responses, with the dynamic taking extreme form in Europe after Charlemagne. What began in the Crusades [Europe learning to define itself in opposition to Islam] reached a tragic pinnacle with the wars of the twentieth century. That Europe was both the instigator and victim of those wars was the precondition of its astounding conversion, begun at the end of World War II and continuing through the end of the Cold War -- a conversion that amounted to a recognition that the East-West battle was unwinnable.
Pope Benedict saw moral rot in the fact that the magnificent churches of Europe were mostly empty, without asking why the world-historic European renunciation of violence (including the abolition of the death penalty, the condemnation of the abuse in marriage, the final end of colonialism, not to mention the Soviet empire's refusal to save itself through war) was accomplished by the generation that walked away from religion. Did that generation walk away from religion, and from Christianity in particular, because it was necessary if violence was to be fully left behind?
Practicing Catholic is that sort of book: thought-provoking for a wide variety of readers and ultimately gentle. By way of his personal story, Carroll makes a case that U.S. Catholics, despite the vigorous resistance of their religious authorities, have allowed their faith to evolve into a contemporary form that affirms the goodness of creation, creatures, and God Godself. It's been a tough ride, what with the Church's ongoing degradation of women, condemnation of birth control, and the hierarchy covering up for priests who abused children. But many have found liberation from a sin-obsessed self-hatred into a sustaining faith. Carroll's insistence that U.S. Catholic laity have managed this transformation is confirmed by recent polling. Despite the pope, There's a live and let live spirit in this.Catholics are more likely than non-Catholics to say that homosexual relations, divorce, and heterosexual sex outside wedlock are morally acceptable, according to an analysis by Gallup pollsters ...
That's an important question for a lot of us who are not now and never have been Roman Catholic.How does a church that claims to be unchanging change?
Okay -- so Mr. Coll says the U.S. has good intentions about the displaced people, but Pakistan resists us tromping around. All understandable, though it does seem it would have been simpler (and easier for a lot of Pakistanis) if the U.S. had been inclined to discourage the sort of military operation that causes a refugee crisis. I am not yet ready to believe we want to make Pakistan more unstable. I hope."A key aspect to the new strategy is to put more attention and resources toward Pakistan’s economic and governance challenges," Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to the region, told Congress last week. Yet Pakistan's prideful insistence on its sovereignty means, among other things, that the United States cannot provide relief directly to internally displaced civilians. Their fate will now depend on Pakistan's fragile and unpopular government, with support from charities and the United Nations; the Obama Administration must stand in the rear, urgently working its bellows.
That reads like a vigorous request for help from a member of parliament."It's our war against the extremes," says Marvi Memon, the most outspoken of the visiting delegation and a member of the Pakistan Muslim League. But she wants to know why the U.S. isn't doing more to aid the displaced persons. Why isn't there a number to call on television the way there was for the victims of Katrina? This week, the State Department had put in place a system for people to text $5 for Pakistani relief efforts. That morning, as Memon and the others in the delegation urged more assistance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood in the White House briefing room announcing a $110 million aid package.
He speaks of the rule of law. He promises to fix what he diagnoses as broken.... failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions ... failed to use our values as a compass.
Nonetheless, they conclude we are making more "militants" than we deter, substituting a technological tactic for a strategy against our enemies.Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent -- hardly "precision." American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan.
That is, any country employing this tactic better have damn good evidence that the particular individual targeted is guilty of a capital offense -- and avoid "collateral damage."The book argues that any targeted killing not directed against a legitimate military target remains subject to the law enforcement paradigm, which imposes extensive restraints on the practice. Even under the paradigm of hostilities, no person can be lawfully liquidated without further considerations. As a form of individualized or surgical warfare, the method of targeted killing requires a "microscopic" interpretation of the law regulating the conduct of hostilities which leads to nuanced results reflecting the fundamental principles underlying international humanitarian law.
In 2006, already too overextended to get directly involved, the U.S. took up blowing away suspected al-Qaeda adherents in Somalia. Those killings inspired a dialogue between lawyers in Slate's legal blog, Convictions (here, here, and here). In the last contribution cited, the author, Marty Lederman, observes:"I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here. There are authorities that the president can give to officials [and] he's well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority."
That same Marty Lederman was appointed by President Obama to the Office of Legal Counsel. Does he still think law might have something to do with the drone program? Do we think so?... apart from questions of detainee treatment and the like, the American public, press, and legislature appear to be completely oblivious to the idea that questions of war and military force raise any legal issues at all. It's not as if the public is indifferent to questions of whether and when military force is appropriate. To the contrary: It's simply that it seems never to occur to anyone that law's got anything to do with it.
The conjunction of old law written for a very different society (we don't do "well regulated militias" anymore, boys) with blustering machismo that makes gun flaunting a sacred right of true Amurrican patriots is bullshit.To the frustration and discouragement of many Democrats, House and Senate lawmakers and aides say it now appears likely that President Obama will this week sign into law a provision allowing visitors to national parks and refuges to carry loaded and concealed weapons.
The notion that humans -- however numerous we've become and however thoroughly we exploit the planet's resources -- could make the place uninhabitable is just too unbelievable to sink in. After all, such a development is outside human experience.For each three degrees that local temperature rises above normal, Americans become one percentage point more likely to agree that there is 'solid evidence' that the earth is getting warmer.
There's lots of reason to believe Javaid Iqbal was abused. In June 2003, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine testified about his investigation of detentions of suspected immigrants before a Judiciary Committee hearing:was kept in solitary confinement at the center, denied medical care and subjected to daily body-cavity searches, beatings and extreme temperatures. He said that he had been called a terrorist and a “Muslim killer” and that he had lost 40 pounds during six months in the special unit.
Several thousand immigrant men, mostly Arabs or Pakistani, were drawn into a mad vortex of suspicion in the months immediately after 9/11 -- from the point of view of their communities, they were simply disappeared.... we concluded that the evidence indicates a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the MDC [Metropolitan Detention Center] against some September 11 detainees, particularly during the first months after the attacks and during intake and movement of prisoners. This generally consisted of slamming some detainees into walls; dragging them by their arms; stepping on the chain between their ankle cuffs; twisting their arms, hands, wrists, and fingers; and making slurs and threats such as "you will feel pain" and "you're going to die here."
Ooops. There we go again with the bombs. Furthermore:The Taliban create Islam anxiety in the West not only because they hosted al-Qaeda but also beause they dislike foreigners, oppress women, and practice extreme Puritanism. Westerners confuse the social conflict between urban and rural society in these two countries with mere terrorism and tend to assume that the deployment of military might by a praetorian state against tribal and rural peoples is synonymous with a war on terror. In fact, good policymaking would recognize the legitimate social and economic discontents of the rural population and seek to redress them with well considered aid programs instead of bombs.
Nor he goes on to point out, has the government of Pakistan. These people don't recognize the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And they are not necessarily a danger to us.It's a fool's errand. These rugged regions along the Afghan border are thinly populated by Pushtun tribesmen who are interested in reducing their isolation from the outside world only if they can see a benefit. ... The tribes' segmentary politics, whereby they pursue internal feuds with one another, can quickly be put aside to unite against a grasping or belligerent outsider. This makes the tribes a formidable obstacle to heavy-handed forms of governance imposed from the outside. Even the British Empire at the height of its power never subdued them.
Pakistan is a huge country, with an area the size of the states of California, Oregon and Washington, and a population of about 170 million people. It has a prosperous urban middle class that is sick of both military dictators and corrupt politicians. This democratic group drove the last military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, from office, forced the reinstatement of a deposed chief justice of the Supreme Court, and is proud of the country's freely elected government if perhaps not entirely happy with their political leadership.September 11 was launched not from Khost in Afghanistan but from Hamburg in Germany, not by tribal persons or seminarians [Taliban] but by engineers trained in the West. Even in their heyday in the 1990s, the Taliban were seldom directly involved in committing international terrorism. The conflation of Pushtuns, and their love of relative autonomy, with Talibanism frequently obscures the local politics that drive militancy.
Actually, I think Obama, like all politicians, tells falsehoods all the time on policy issues. To take one example, I don't think he is a "fierce advocate for equality of gay and lesbian Americans." Past behavior belies this. Instead, I think he knows what he has to say to stay well positioned on LGBT issues and he will do some fraction of it for us, if it doesn't him cost too much. I don't consider that sort of posturing to be "lying" from a politician. Actual "lying" occurs when the politician asserts important things that are substantively untrue, knows it, and believes that the false statement is nonetheless necessary. Like Walsh, I think that was what we saw yesterday.For the first time in his presidency, I had the sick feeling that Obama was lying in his remarks on the photos...
