The opportunity cost of elections

During the 2008 campaign, tens of thousands of people turned out to volunteer on behalf of Barack Obama, staffing phone banks, raising funds and creating a network of likeminded individuals dedicated to a shared purpose (to a lesser extent, so did volunteers, as there were, for John McCain). But while a bedazzling amount of human and financial resources were displayed, no doubt, it’s not clear they were put to the best use, to put it mildly. Take your self-styled progressive who -- for whatever inexplicable reason -- thought the election of Obama would mark the advent of a brave new single-payer nation, the president abandoning his traditional role as commander in chief in favor of performing gay marriages in the White House Rose Garden. The fear -- and love -- of Sarah Palin can make people do all sorts of crazy things.

But what if those resources, instead of being dedicated to bringing one of two militaristic corporatists to power, were instead put to a better cause? What if, instead of relying on politicians as the middlemen, those who put so much time and effort in getting Obama elected in the hopes of achieving meaningful health care reform -- relying on politicians as the middle men, hoping they keep their lofty campaign promises -- had redirected those efforts to taking power into their own hands and bring affordable health care to their own communities? Given comparable resources to those put toward a frivolous and overhyped pursuit like an election, community groups could have instead begun the process of bringing affordable health care to their own neighborhoods, redirecting the misallocation of energy from empowering some politician toward a cause much more likely to bring tangible results.

What in economics is called an “opportunity cost” -- the inability to expend resources on one task after another is chosen -- is equally applicable to the field of politics: when activists band together on behalf of electing more and better politicians, they aren’t banding together to improve their own communities, clean up their own rivers, stop the next war. While one would hope connections made during election campaigns would persist afterwards, and that those involved in electing Obama would continue to work towards shared (though better) causes, the evidence suggests that a year after his inauguration much of that movement, insofar as it was, has disbanded. With the reality of power, much of the hopeful idealism -- or naivete -- of some during the campaign has evaporated; the organizing power of the Obama political machine severely hampered by the lack of enthusiasm for the president’s policies. With the collapse in peoples’ hope for change comes a commensurate curbing in the power of the groups that arose to support Obama, indicating that organizing power won't be around to help a neighbor during hard times.

My advice: next time around, instead of phone-banking for Obama, one should spend that time that would have spent trying to convince some Iowan the president really means it this time giving back to your own community -- you might actually see a few changes.

Dead foreigners: the price of healthcare reform?

To qualify as a respectable liberal, one must of course value the life of an American citizen over that of any foreigner. Oh, there’s the necessary uplifting rhetoric about promoting democracy and human rights abroad, the passionate arguments on behalf of the poor citizens of countries that inexplicably align with U.S. foreign policy objectives. But when it comes down to it, any good liberal will gladly take the technocratic thrill of a modest reduction in healthcare costs over the life of some poor bastard in Afghanistan.

Sound too harsh? Then perhaps you haven’t been reading Kevin Drum, a pundit who rose to fame as a liberal supporter of the Iraq war, demonstrating a reputation for foresight that has been impressing the blogosphere for years and landed him a gig with Mother Jones. In a recent post, he chides those perpetual adolescents that judge politicians by their policies, not their parties, and who fail to understand that we're all better off with a liberal committing war crimes than Sarah Palin. While noting -- correctly -- that those who supported Obama and honestly thought he would bring about fundamental change in policy only saw in the man what they wanted to see, Drum is concerned some of them have opened their eyes and might be feeling the temptation to leave Team Blue:

The striking thing to me, though, is how fast the left has turned on him. Conservatives gave Bush five or six years before they really turned on him, and even then they revolted more against the Republican establishment than against Bush himself. But the left? It took about ten months. And the depth of the revolt against Obama has been striking too. As near as I can tell, there's a small but significant minority who are so enraged that they'd be perfectly happy to see his presidency destroyed as a kind of warning to future Democrats. It's extraordinarily self-destructive behavior — and typically liberal, unfortunately. Just ask LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. And then ask them whether liberal revolt, in the end, strengthened liberalism or conservatism.

The striking thing to me is that Drum finds this opposition to Obama to be a bad thing, as if blind conservative support for Bush were something to admire and replicate, not something to abhor and repudiate. There is also some irony in his bemoaning the “liberal revolt” to LBJ on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, though it does clearly demonstrate the respectable liberal’s tolerance for mass murder -- hundreds of thousands of dead Vietnamese a necessary price for the Great Society back home; opposition to the purveyor of violence an act of myopic betrayal. In typical liberal fashion, though, Drum has plenty of rhetoric, in this case, “all sorts of complaints about Obama”:

He's been weaker on civil liberties than I'd like. His approach to bank regulation has been far too friendly to financial interests. I'm not thrilled with his escalation in Afghanistan. He hasn't moved as quickly on gay rights as I hoped. And he hasn't used the bully pulpit nearly as effectively as I think he's capable of. He could afford to attack obstructionism and conservative retrenchment far more directly than he has.

But that’s no reason “to turn on him,” opposition to the perpetuation of longstanding government policies reduced to a matter of personal support for some guy with a photogenic family. We must remember that the “national security community has tremendous influence; the financial lobby has a stranglehold; Obama told us explicitly during the campaign that he planned to escalate in Afghanistan”.

What our Exhibit A inadvertently illustrates, though, is that he too is one of those naive suckers who thought candidate Obama was the second coming (of Jesus or FDR, depending on one’s upbringing). The idea that Obama is in any way boxed in politically by Wall Street and the military-industrial complex implies a belief that his personal preference would be to oppose these interests’ agendas rather than promote them, which is not all that different from believing one of Santa’s elves shot JFK. Obama has show no inclination to impose those interests, with his actions -- and the tremendous amount the financial industry spent getting him elected -- in fact indicating quite the opposite.

However, despite failing to fulfill some of the lofty expectation of him, a corporatist healthcare reform bill, “the greatest piece of social legislation since Medicare” to the true believers, is reason enough to support the president, particularly if your career rests on steadfastly supporting the Democratic Party -- sometimes begrudgingly, sometimes with qualms, but always in the end. And hell, Obama told us he was going to needlessly kill a bunch of foreigners before he was elected, so can you really complain -- and aren't a few thousand dead people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia worth the extension of a few lives here at home (assuming the "reform" bill is implemented as its advocates presume)? This is what passes for respectable liberalism today; indeed, The Nation is running a perhaps even more offensively silly piece on how Obama is "stunningly similar" to MLK, by necessity refraining from comment on King's uncompromising (and inconvenient) call for an immediate end to the Vietnam war.

To the deans of the establishment left, the victims of U.S. wars and manless air strikes do not elicit the same sympathy they did for King, or for others with functioning consciences. Obama's escalation of the Afghanistan war, for instance, might be unfortunate, boneheaded even, but it's just another policy, and in Washington its impolite to allow a policy disagreement to get between friends -- and one typically doesn't call a friend a murderer. Something might appear morally wrong with accepting the escalated killing of poor people abroad in exchange for a hike in the minimum wage and a president who can articulate a coherent thought from time to time, but that's an opinion likely to confine one to the fringes of the political wilderness if expressed in polite company.

Intelligence-resistant columnists

Like most Americans, David Brooks has probably spent all of five minutes in the last decade thinking about Haiti. But like any good imperialist or New York Times columnist -- apologies if I repeat myself -- Brooks is not about to let his ignorance of the country and its people prevent him from drafting a sweeping assessment of Haitian society and the root cause of the nation’s crushing poverty and the widespread devastation wrought by the recent earthquake: Haitian society, of course. Being no Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, but rather a respectable conservative who no doubt dutifully sends money to his local NPR affiliate come pledge week, Brooks is careful to assure his readers, by way of the obligatory referencing of some other banal establishment political thinker, that he is safely within the mainstream -- he’s just pointing out an uncomfortable truth, is all. While we’re “supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures,” Brooks writes -- and anyone who has ever heard variations of those words from a drunk bar stool pundit can predict what comes next -- some cultures are just “more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.”

Space constraints preventing any discussion of the redeeming values of the Haitian people, Brooks reduces their culture to four attributes he believes caused the Earth’s tectonic plates to shift: “the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile”; “high levels of social mistrust”; “Responsibility is often not internalized”; and “Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.”

Gliding past Haiti’s history of colonialism, economic exploitation and U.S. military occupation with the glib observation that other nations with superficially similar histories are doing okay today, Brooks concludes that it is the culture of Haiti at fault for what may be as many as 100,000 deaths. Since they have shown themselves incapable of improving their lot during the 3 1/2 minutes the U.S. has respected Haiti’s sovereignty in the last 100 years, it is now time to take up the white man’s burden “promote locally led paternalism,” he says, noting “the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism”, which apparently involves repeating corporate P.R. jargon until it means something:

It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

Unbeknownst to the bespectacled armchair bombardier of the Times U.S. officials have already tried “intrusive paternalism” in Haiti -- during the two decades the U.S. occupied the country, an historical episode that, like U.S. support for the dictators who followed, Brooks never gets to mentioning. But as historian Hans Schmidt writes in his account of the 1915-1934 U.S. occupation of Haiti, undertaken to protect U.S. corporate interests by President Woodrow “sovereignty for white people” Wilson, American military officers themselves instituted a work program intended to goad the lazy, shiftless Haitian people into productivity. “This system, known as corvée, had its historical roots in the unpaid labor which French peasants owed their feudal lords and was strikingly similar to the corvée employed by the British occupation to dredge canals in Egypt in the 1880s and 1890s,” Schmidt notes. Those less prone to nuance might also refer to the system as slavery.

Besides violating the most basic human rights of those it was imposed upon, the system did achieve some successes, including “the construction of an impressive network of roads connecting major towns, with the greatest achievement being a 170-mile unpaved highway between Port-au-Prince and the northern center of Cap Haitien.” And indeed, the program was rigorous, with Admiral H. S. Knapp reporting to his higher-ups back in Washington that it “appears to be undeniable” that Haitians had been forced to work far from their homes and under armed guard, “marched to and from their work bound together.” Foreshadowing Brooks’ suggestion, the system also employed the talents of self-confident local leaders, who headed up some of the corvée labor groups and were known for having “practiced brutality on their charges,” which I guess shows the natives of Haiti are capable of quickly learning from their American betters. I’m guessing this probably isn’t the exact system our newly minted Haitian expert has in mind, though, but perhaps that’s only because he’s not aware of it.

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Other things Brooks neglects to mention in his column:

-- Hurricane Katrina, the fact that funding for New Orleans' levies were diverted to pay for occupying Iraq, and what that says about American society

-- The moral and philosophical case for why the very countries that have exploited and brutalized Haiti in the past should be empowered to fundamentally alter its society.

-- And why in particular a country like the U.S. that was the last of the major powers to renounce the notion that a man can own another man -- and which one angry Frenchman observed is a historical peculiarity for passing from barbarism to decadence without ever once knowing civilization -- is entitled to lecture anyone on culture.

From Heritage's lips to Obama's ear

The Heritage Foundation yesterday:

The U.S. government response should be bold and decisive. It must mobilize U.S. civilian and military capabilities for short-term rescue and relief and long-term recovery and reform. President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, who was already named as the U.N. envoy on Haiti, is a logical choice. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.

The news today:

President Obama has tapped George W. Bush, a prime target of Democratic criticism during the presidential campaign for his response to Hurricane Katrina, to help lead Haiti relief efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated the country two days ago.

Bush will join up with former President Bill Clinton, who is also the United Nations special envoy for Haiti.

'Unambiguous intelligence' unambiguously wrong

When the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran (pdf) was released, it was a blow to those within the Bush administration agitating for another preemptive war, as it declared that all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies had come to believe that Iran halted whatever design work on a nuclear weapon they may have once engaged in back in 2003 -- and most importantly, that there was no sign Iran had restarted weapons program since. At the time, this assessment was welcomed by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, each trying to out do the other in their scathing press statements denouncing the Bush administration’s bellicose rhetoric about a non-existent threat.

Here’s what candidate Obama had to say back in December ’07:

By reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapon development program four years ago because of international pressure, the new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy. The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president's suggestion of World War III serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the President any justification to use military force.

Come the taste of power, however, and oh my how times change. Funny how that works.

The New York Times, reprising its familiar role as conduit for anonymous White House officials leaking information too authentic and supportable to go on the record about, informed us earlier this month that six of President Obama’s “top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.”

According to the Times, that view came after the administration reviewed leaked documents -- presumably the debunked Times of London “nuclear trigger” story -- and information from defectors (comparisons to Ahmed Chalabi are unfair I'm sure). Importantly, the advisers conceded it was ultimately based on “their own analysis”, and not a “new formal intelligence not.” And of course it wasn’t, as I pointed out at the time, because it continues to be the view of the U.S. intelligence community -- which has a bureaucratic interest in playing up the threat of foreign foes -- that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.

That view was reaffirmed yet again today by the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Lieutenant General Ronal Burgess, who in an interview with Voice of America said there is no evidence Iran has decided to build nuclear weapons.

"The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true," he said.  "We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program.” In typical Pentagon -- and bureaucratic fashion -- Burgess didn’t rule anything out, though, echoing former boss Donald Rumsfeld. “The fact still remains that we don't know what we don't know,” he noted, adding “man” before presumably passing his bong to the bemused reporter.

Despite Burgess’ inability to know the unknowable, his unequivocal statement that Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has not seen any “indication” -- that is, evidence that would hold up under careful review, not what might fly in a newsroom -- Iran is developing nuclear weapons stands in stark contrast to the dubious leaks from the administration. In September, for instance, ABC News’ Jake Tapper reported an anonymous “senior administration official” as stating on a press call that the enrichment facility in Qom -- the one Iran reported to the IAEA and which Obama and friends later claimed to “reveal” at a dramatic press conference, the Western media dutifully misreporting the timeline of events ever since -- was undoubtedly for weapons purposes.

"‘Primary source intelligence,'" wrote Tapper, “meaning firsthand accounts and/or satellite imaging -- provided ‘unambiguous intelligence’ that this is a facility to enrich weapons-grade uranium, the official said.” Indeed, the facility doesn’t “make sense for commercial use,” said one official, but is the “right size” for enriching weapons-grade uranium. That Iran built it as a contingency enrichment plant should the chief one at Natanz be bombed as some U.S. and Israeli commentators and officials have suggested was apparently given little consideration -- at least that’s the message the officials sought to convey to the press.

The intelligence, as it turns out, isn’t so “unambiguous” if the Pentagon’s own spy agency doesn’t buy it. Anonymous administration officials disseminating sensational and hyped up accounts of foreign threats posed by scary and irrational enemies are what grab the headlines, though, a formula for selling news embraced since probably the earliest days of the printing press. Major outlets like the Times wouldn't dare publish an on-the-record interview with the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency regarding Iran's nuclear program -- why, that's small-market stuff better left to Voice of America and the Penny Pinchers of the world. The appearance of being an insider that comes from quoting "senior White House officials" and relaying the right narrative, not necessarily the most accurate but the one most conducive to establishment desires, is what matters most to your typical major media national security reporter.

With the Obama administration spinning tall tales about non-existent WMD programs to a credulous press, the parallels to the run-up to the Iraq war are obvious, even if the White House's idea of warfare is solely economic (or covert) at this point. Just don't expect to read about it in The New York Times.

My conversation with Iranian state television

A week ago I published a satirical article on this blog, “EXCLUSIVE: Obama orders air strikes on Guantanamo Bay,” intended to highlight the absurdity of people (I'm looking at you establishment liberals) condemning the Gitmo military prison and the government’s denial of habeas corpus to the “suspected terrorists” imprisoned there (and the others even the Obama administration concedes are innocent but whom they won’t release) while condoning extrajudicial killings by U.S. Predator drones in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This being the internet, that the piece is satire was of course lost on some, which probably says more about what people believe the U.S. government is capable of than anything else.

One such person is “Sarah”, employed by the Iranian government’s English-language news/propaganda service, Press TV, who emailed me yesterday with the subject line “Interview Request” after the piece was published over at Dissident Voice. Now mind you, the second paragraph of my piece quoted a supposed “senior White House official” as stating that the attack “killed a whole damn bunch of them there terrorist sons of bitches” -- “the sound of clinking glasses and celebratory gunfire audible in the background.” Further, the next paragraph said the men imprisoned at Guantanamo were there because they “were suspected of being Muslim” (well…) and having “maintained an interest in recruiting sheep to be suicide bombers.” Sheep. In other words, there were ample signs, I think, the piece was satirical -- in addition to it being categorized as “satire.”

With that in mind, here’s the email I received:

This is Sarah, Press TV's newsroom coordinator. Press TV is an English News channel being broadcasted from Iran. we just saw one of your articles "EXCLUSIVE: Barack Obama orders air strikes on Guantanamo Bay killing at least 220 detaineees" on the net. Would we be able to get you on the phone for an interview on this story? i would really appriciate it if you reply back soon and give me your contact number.

Regards

Sarah

Press TV's Newsroom Coordinator

www.presstv.ir

Being a bit of an asshole, I of course responded by sending my Google Voice number. About five minutes later I received a call from “Sarah” in Tehran, who conducted a fact check of my piece consisting of the question: “Is it credible?” Again, being a bit of an asshole, I assured her my sources were second-to-none and that the credibility of the piece was not in doubt, prompting her to invite me to appear on *LIVE* television in an hour. I naturally accepted. You should probably just listen to the conversation yourself:

A few minutes later I received another email from Sarah, this one in preparation for my coming appearance:

charles would you mind sending a brief profile about urself as well along with the pic, thanks

I quickly complied, sending along this bio -- “Charles Davis is a journalist based in Washington, DC, where he covers U.S. foreign policy. His work has appeared in highly credible publications throughout the world.” -- and this picture.

For those unfamiliar, that’s Emiliano Zapata, a prominent leader in the Mexican revolution, an advocate of land reform and decentralization, one of my idols for actually turning down political power rather than trying to seize it for himself (see a paper I wrote about him in college), and, as you can see, an all-around mustachioed badass. Unfortunately, I was informed that “it seems we can use black and white pics for the documentaries but only allowed to use colored pics for the live shots like news, let me see what happens…” This did not dissuade the folks at the Iranian regime’s international mouthpiece from persisting in their effort to get me on the air, though:

can we have u at the studio maybe? one of our studios is on M street in WDC, like around 9pm?

“Holy shit,” I thought, wondering how the hell I could pass myself off as a 90-years-dead Mexican revolutionary. I would also need to concoct a story -- and concoct I did, penning a tale of a CIA carrier pigeon “going rogue”, refusing to carry out its mission to inform the drone operators in Langley, VA, of their assignment to bomb Guantanamo Bay and instead flying to my apartment to spill the beans on the imminent attack, coming to me due to my “longstanding ties to the dissident carrier pigeon community.” Alas, YouTube stardom was not to be as Sarah apparently wisened up before I could tell my story on the air -- presumably because she read my Twitter feed -- never responding to my request for directions. Sigh.

War and climate change

My latest piece on an environmental issue that, as I found out, few seem willing to talk about:

Climate change has been branded a threat to national security, but a future global treaty addressing the issue is likely to exempt from regulation most of the greenhouse gases associated with overseas military activities and the world’s largest polluter—the U.S. armed forces—a fact some environmentalists are arguing will significantly undercut the effectiveness of such an agreement. The issue is potentially troubling for proponents of a treaty as it suggests that even as the Obama administration and leading Democrats push emission controls based on the perceived security threat posed by global warming, they are unwilling to address a leading contributor to the problem.

The preliminary climate change agreement announced in Copenhagen leaves unresolved many key questions, but there’s a broad consensus overseas military operations will continue to enjoy a major exemption under any eventual comprehensive, legally binding treaty. Indeed, both foreign diplomats and officials with most major environmental groups have been reticent to broach the subject for fear of alienating the U.S. government, which accounts for nearly half of global military spending.

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“It can be a bit of a delicate subject,” says a former senior Defense Department official who was deeply involved in the debate over the Kyoto Protocol. “We’re the largest military in the world and we’re going to be the most penalized if military emissions are counted, so that has to be considered.”

Read the rest.

UPDATE (1/9): From the comments over at Jon Schwarz's A Tiny Revolution:

An illegal war bound by law to be eco-friendly. The obvious irony aside, it wouldn't feel that right to me if it happened (in some alternate universe, where it actually could). While less emissions is always good, I find the imagery of a spectacled ecologist high fiving generals for butchering the local resistance in an environmentally friendly manner too disturbing. (Military sprays acid instead of bombs to cause less burning buildings! World applauds!)

The injustice of it all

Sometimes life just isn't fair, John Michael Farren must be thinking. A 57 year old former deputy White House counsel under President George W. Bush, Farren is sitting in jail now after allegedly attacking his wife after she served him with divorce papers, "arraigned on charges of strangulation and attempted murder and ordered held on $2 million bail." His former boss, on the other hand, a war criminal who not only attempted to but succeeded in killing of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan -- what happens to him? Dude gets a library and a long lifetime of triple digit speaking fees, assuming he makes it through the next bag of pretzels. Ain't that a bitch.

Not to say I told you so...

Back in September 2008, I wrote a piece for Inter Press Service examining the proposed policies towards Latin America offered by both John McCain and Barack Obama. What did I find?

WASHINGTON, Sep 3 (IPS) - With an election to replace an immensely unpopular president just weeks away, Republican nominee John McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama have both sought to distance themselves from the record of George W. Bush - but when it comes to Latin America, neither candidate promises a major break with the policies of the last eight years.

From maintaining the embargo against Cuba to expanding efforts to fight the war on drugs in Mexico and Colombia, McCain and Obama support most aspects of current U.S. policy toward Latin America. Indeed, outside of their shared pledge to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, there is little to suggest that either candidate would overhaul the Bush administration's approach to the region.

To be fair, though he isn't the progressive messiah some of his most feverish supporters once claimed he would be -- and the more delusional amongst them claim he is -- Obama has largely fulfilled the Latin America agenda he outlined during the campaign, minus that whole closing Guantanamo thing. Indeed, in a recent analysis of Obama's actual policy toward Latin America since taking office, "More Continuity Than Change," IPS' DC Bureau Chief Jim Lobe observes that, "Nearly one year after his inauguration, hopes that President Barack Obama would bring fundamental changes to U.S. relations with Latin American have faded badly":

[D]espite a promising start with Obama's appearance and pledge to pursue "engagement based on mutual respect" at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad last April, his administration has fumbled a number of issues in ways that have contributed to what appears to be the growing disillusionment.

Most recently, the administration abruptly reversed its demand – along with that of all of the Latin American states - that [Honduran President Manuel] Zelaya, who was ousted in a military coup d'etat last June be reinstated before the November elections. And the U.S. failed to consult and reassure its sister nations in advance about a new, 10-year accord with Colombia that gives Washington access to seven military bases around the country.

Don't call it a sellout, it was obvious for years.

The CIA's collateral damage computer algorithm -- revealed!

In October, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer wrote an excellent piece examining the Obama administration's increased reliance on unmanned Predator drones to do its killing in the ever expanding war on terror. Included in the article was this tidbit about the government's high-tech method for determining how much "collateral damage" -- innocent men, women and children killed by U.S. munitions -- is too much before some guy with a beer gut in Langley, Virginia, hits the trigger button on his Wii controller and sends them off into eternity:

Though the C.I.A.’s methodology remains unknown, the Pentagon has created elaborate formulas to help the military make such lethal calculations. A top military expert, who declined to be named, spoke of the military’s system, saying, “There’s a whole taxonomy of targets.” Some people are approved for killing on sight. For others, additional permission is needed. A target’s location enters the equation, too. If a school, hospital, or mosque is within the likely blast radius of a missile, that, too, is weighed by a computer algorithm before a lethal strike is authorized.

Well, thanks to a high-level source of mine deep within the U.S. intelligence community, I can now reveal a screenshot of the government's covert computer alogrithm. You math people out there try to make some sense of it:

Based on my reporting, this is a step up from the CIA's previous test for determining how many civilian deaths it should expect to incur from its actions: __________.

Bono: worst celebrity ever?

(U2 singer Bono, pictured right, coming to the aid of an unknown delusional man.)

Bono, the physical manifestation of all that is wrong with the world and the leader of some band called U2, has a column in The New York Times -- no seriously,  a column in The New York fucking Times, a followup to last week's op-ed from the Insane Clown Posse on the merits of a public option -- opining on that which is wrong in the world and how to make it right. As a rich rock star, one of the problems is obviously the internet and the power it gives people to make the enforcement of "intellectual property" laws an endeavor as laughably absurd as the intellectual argument for having them in the first place. As a great humanitarian, however, his argument is necessarily cloaked in the defense of the "fledgling songwriter" and the bus fare's worth of royalties they stand to lose out on because you don't feel like paying $18.99 for a Miley Cyrus album.

Rather than go on about by distaste for Bono, though, here's an article I wrote in college you can read that covers my feelings fairly well, subtly titled, "U2: The Word Band in the World?", the publishing of which in my school paper I'm pretty sure cost me an internship several years back with a major news company when the the woman interviewing me for the position turned out, to my great misfortune, to be a rather huge fan of the Irish rockers.

Obama administration 'analysis' trumps 2007 NIE on Iran

During the lead up to the 2003 invasion, the Bush administration infamously bypassed what they deemed insufficiently frightening intelligence about Iraqi WMDs coming from the CIA by creating their own unit staffed with political appointees, the Office of Special Plans, to deliver “raw intelligence” (think “Taxi Cab Confessions: Baghdad”) to the White House and the president’s speechwriters. The Obama administration, it appears, is now more or less doing the same thing, preferring the analysis of its political appointees to that of its intelligence services.

According to The New York Times, “Mr. Obama’s top advisers say they no longer believe the key finding of a much disputed National Intelligence Estimate about Iran, published a year before President George W. Bush left office, which said that Iranian scientists ended all work on designing a nuclear warhead in late 2003.” As a candidate, Obama praised the NIE as a sober reality check on the Bush administrations heated fearmongering on Iran. As president, however, he is relying not on that 2007 NIE -- the consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies -- but on his politically appointed advisers, people like United Against Nuclear Iran co-founder and National Security Council member Dennis Ross, who after “reviewing new documents that have leaked out of Iran and debriefing defectors lured to the West,” say “they believe the work on weapons design is continuing on a smaller scale.” As the official stenographers at the Times note, this review “did not amount to a new formal intelligence assessment” -- an oddity, for sure -- but was based rather “on intelligence reports, information from allies, and their own analysis”. In light of the Iraq war and the well-observed penchant government officials have for lying, it’s not asking too much to request that said officials cite something more verifiable then “their own analysis” when making a claim that will be used to justify further measures of economic warfare against another country, and make it that much more easy for Israel to claim justification should the Netanyahu government decide to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. It was too much for the Times reporters, though.

The article instead dutifully fulfills its role as an amplifier for the administration’s alarmist reading of Iran’s nuclear program, stating that claims it is civilian in nature are “roundly rejected by Western officials and, in internal reports, by international nuclear inspectors.” This, apparently, despite the fact that both the incoming and outgoing chiefs of the IAEA say they have not seen any evidence Iran is developing nukes, while the agency declares in its official reports that its inspectors have verified the non-diversion of nuclear material to such a purpose. No doubt the IAEA continues to raise questions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but that’s not to say it has accused it have being in outright violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty either, rather saying Iran’s actions have at times been “inconsistent” with the accord.

The Obama administration’s assessment also differs from what its own top intelligence official, Admiral Dennis Blair, testified to Congress earlier this year. It likewise contradicts a recent report from the Congressional Research Service on Iran’s nuclear program, which noted that the CIA and other intelligence agencies stand by the 2007 intelligence assessment finding Iran halted whatever nuclear weapons work it may have engaged in. Part of the problem lies in the ambiguities of the language the administration employs. While dimmer bulbs might make assertions liable to be challenged and proven wrong by events in the near future, like “Iran is building a nuke that will be completed in six months,” for instance, suaver propagandists like those employed in the Obama administration are more likely to accuse Iran, like they do in the Times article, of continuing to engage in work on a “weapons design” on “a smaller scale,” a claim that could conceivably apply to Googling “how to build a nuclear bomb”. It’s therefore exceedingly difficult to prove such a statement is a lie, even though the average reader is likely to interpret such an assertion as meaning Iran is actively building a suitcase nuke for delivery in Manhattan -- not an unintended effect, mind you.

The ultimate problem lies in the whole premise of seeking to block Iran not only from having a nuclear weapon, but from achieving the “breakout capacity” to build one should it so desire or continuing the undefined “smaller scale” work on a weapons design. At the heart of this endeavor, beside a desire to punish a country that refuses to accept Western hegemony (it certainly isn’t about human rights when Israel and Egypt are raking in the U.S. foreign aid), is a doomed attempt to suppress the spread of knowledge. The very medium that lets all those urban Iranians express their distaste for the ruling regime on Twitter is the one that pipes in their LOLcats, porn and, yes Virginia, designs for an atom bomb, courtesy the U.S. government. So long as Iran maintains a domestic capability to enrich uranium, a half-decent military capability and an internet connection, it could probably build a nuclear weapon at some point in the future -- but not without the whole world knowing about it, as it would need to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty and kick out international inspectors. A policy based on thwarting the inevitable -- the spread of knowledge, in this case of how to make a nuclear weapons -- is not one likely to be met with much success. But perhaps that’s the point.

'Obama orders air strikes on Guantanamo Bay'

WASHINGTON -- A series of U.S. predator drone strikes just after dawn this morning killed at least 220 suspected terrorists, many presumed to have ties with al-Qaeda, at the naval detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to two senior White House officials.

“We hit the jackpot,” said one official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. “We killed a whole damn bunch of them there terrorist sons of bitches,” the source said, the sound of clinking glasses and celebratory gunfire audible in the background.

The strikes come just days after the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Northwest Airlines flight by a 23 year old Nigerian man alleged to have received ineffective crotch bomb training in Yemen. President Barack Obama himself authorized the mission, according to the officials, upon receiving word that nearly half of the men based at the Guantanamo Bay facility were Yemeni nationals, some of whom were suspected of being Muslim and having maintained an interest in herding sheep, possibly in order to recruit them as suicide bombers.

In launching the attack, Mr. Obama has not only diffused a perceived threat to U.S. national security, but he has fulfilled a key campaign pledge to shutter the Guantanamo detention facility, which had become an object of widespread international condemnation. Meeting the pledge had proved difficult, however, in the face of congressional opposition, with GOP lawmakers and centrist Democrats seeking to block the planned release of the Yemeni men housed there to their native country, where they argued it would be more cumbersome and expensive to bomb them.

While the U.S.’s legal authority to imprison men and boys at the Guantanamo detention center has been a matter of some dispute, its right to conduct drone attacks against targets it deems potential threats has provoked little controversy either at home or abroad, at least in countries populated with white people. Indeed, even as Mr. Obama has overseen a significant escalation in drone attacks, authorizing strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, in addition to U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’s received a Nobel Peace Prize, a recognition of his efforts to promote peace through war.

Given international acceptance of the drone attacks, the Obama administration expects the same level of support for today’s strikes, which likewise took place on foreign soil -- as it happens, in a country deemed by the U.S. government to be a state-sponsor of terror. As one American official put it, “if we can kill ‘em without trial in Yemen, why the hell couldn’t we do the same a whole heckuva lot closer to our own shores?”

Though questioned by some human rights groups long considered hostile to freedom, the Guantanamo attack has been met with overwhelming praise from those who actually matter, with political analysts predicting a healthy boost in the Mr. Obama’s approval ratings among the general public as well.

“The president has shown that he’s tough, a regular blue collar guy not afraid to throw a few punches and kill a couple hundred bad guys trapped in cages when he needs to, which is really going to help him win those independents come 2012,” said University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato in an interview. “You can’t overestimate the electorate’s hunger for mass killing. Monday Night Football’s got nothing on Shock and Awe.”

Cable news commentators were similarly aflutter with praise for Mr. Obama. “Can’t you just imagine this guy’s masculine musk? I mean, I just want to douse myself in whatever his sweat glands are emitting,” said a visibly aroused Chris Matthews on his afternoon MSNBC program, Hardball.

But not all praised the president’s decision. In a fiery speech on the Senate floor, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Mr. Obama’s challenger during the 2008 election, denounced the administration’s approach to the war on terror as timid, “gook league” and lacking in theatrics.

“Why weren’t these men doused in acid and set ablaze amid fireworks and the loud and proud blaring of the national anthem? C’mon,” McCain thundered. “Why was there no consideration of the history books, here -- or pay-per-view? And frankly, my friends, why weren’t these men killed the moment our intelligence agencies learned they were actively living in the Middle East?”

A couple of other people also disagreed with the president’s decision, questioning the morality and wisdom of handing one fallible man the unilateral power to order the death of anyone he chooses, but no one really takes them seriously.

On advertising copy and a request for 2010

The ad says: "Try our product and lose 30 pounds, GUARANTEED!" The small print says, as of course it must: "*Your results may vary." Nope, no great political insight or impassioned indictment of American imperialism in this post, just an observation that those two statements don't really work together.

Anyway, happy New Year faithful reader(s?). And humanity, if you're out there: let's say we refrain from the whole war and exploitation thing we've been trying out for the last couple hundred centuries or so and give that do-unto-others nonsense a shot for, I don't know, a year?

UPDATE: Yeah, that request was swiftly denied.

US gov't report casts doubt on US gov't Iranian nuke claims

If you believed the politicians, one could be forgiven for thinking the end is nigh, the day fast approaching that the opposition-suppressing mullahs of Tehran can ignite a nuclear holocaust even their own president couldn’t deny, with Tel Aviv, Manhattan and Peoria, Illinois, tops on the target list. Inexplicably treated as a respected voice on foreign affairs on this past Sunday’s Meet the Press (brought to you by defense contractor Boeing), former House Speaker Newt Gingrich took time away from divorcing whoever his latest wife is to proclaim that “the Iranians have been lying consistently” about their nuclear program. “It's very clear the Iranians want to get nuclear weapons, [and] it's pretty clear the Iranians -- this current dictatorship will use them.”

And it’s not just the usual hawks on the right that are dusting off the arguments about a hostile Middle Eastern nation seeking weapons of mass destruction. Playing the role of Objective Foreign Affairs Reporter to Gingrich’s Elder Statesman, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell provided the unbiased analytical voice on why we all should be very afraid. “The Speaker is correct,” said Mitchell, a series of words that would have prompted immediate self-doubt in any grounded, rational thinker. Iran “is the biggest single threat, I think, that we face," she said, which if true speaks more to the relative security of the United States than its vulnerability, I think.

The Obama administration, took, has joined in on the fearmongering fun. "The Iranians have responsibilities to the international community to walk away from their . . . ballistic nuclear weapons program," White House spokesmen Robert Gibbs lectured in September, stressing the need for Iran to hand away its right to enrich uranium on its soil during the very negotiations Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- an accomplished fearmonger in her own right -- has herself declared won’t succeed. (At this point she is only raising the specter of imposing “crippling” sanctions on Iran rather than the possibility of its total obliteration, so perhaps that’s a baby step in the right direction.)

Obama, meanwhile, has at several turns asserted that Iran is "pursuing a nuclear weapon", convening a dramatic press conference in September to unveil the “secret” Qom nuclear facility that Iran itself had revealed days before to the IAEA, which has since inspected it. Fulfilling its traditional role as the printing press for the powerful, major media outlets dutifully ran with the story, informing the public that This Was It, the proof as-if-we-needed-it that Iran was up to no good, with ABC News' Jake Tapper penning helpful articles like this one, “Why Not Just Bomb the Qom Facility?”, which tellingly never ponders the unthinkable in serious Washington circles: the effect bombing radioactive facilities might have on the innocent Iranians you claim to care so much about. Such articles do drum up support for military action among the public, though, insofar as they suggest preemptive war -- and air strikes, boys and girls, are acts of war -- is just another ho-hum policy option for dealing with the supposed threat posed by Iran.

Congress, in typical me-too fashion, has also gotten into the act, with the House overwhelmingly passing a measure to impose sanctions on Iran’s gas imports, progressives and conservatives alike voting in lockstep to increase the hardship for the average Iranian over their government’s exercise of its rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the U.S. with its massive nuke stockpiles and plans to develop more is arguably itself in violation of.

There's a funny thing about those claims U.S. politicians and journalists seek to pass off as beyond dispute: the folks that make up the U.S. intelligence community -- the very people whose livelihood depends on their finding a never-ending series of foreign hobgoblins -- say Iran abandoned any nuclear weapons program it may have had nearly 7 years ago, issuing a high-profile National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in 2007 declaring just that, which both Obama and Clinton at the time praised as a welcome rebuke to the Bush administration. And the IAEA, whose inspectors are the ones actually on the ground in Iran examining its nuclear facilities, continues to verify that no enriched uranium is being diverted to a military program, with agency chief Mohammed ElBaradei declaring there to be "no credible evidence" of a covert weapons effort afoot.

But don’t take their word on the lack of a scary imminent Iranian thereat: even the Obama administration privately concedes it.

According to a report (pdf) just leaked from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a non-partisan arm of Congress, the White House’s own “talking points made public September 25, 2009, stated that the [intelligence] community still assesses that ‘Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.’’ Indeed, “On several occasions, the U.S. intelligence community has reaffirmed the 2007 NIE’s assessment that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program but is keeping its options open,” the report states. “For example, Leon Panetta, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, did so in May 2009. More recent press accounts have also reported that the community does not believe that Tehran has restarted its weapons program.”

The CRS' findings, which one should remember were available to every one of the lawmakers who blindly voted to impose yet further sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, continues:

Other factors also suggest that Iran may not have an active nuclear weapons program. First, the IAEA has resolved several of the outstanding issues described in the August 2007 Iran-IAEA work plan and has apparently not found additional evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Indeed, the agency has not discovered significant undeclared Iranian nuclear activities for several years (although, as noted above, the IAEA’s ability to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities has decreased). Second, Tehran, beginning in 2003, has been willing to disclose previously undeclared nuclear activities to the IAEA (though, as previously discussed, Iran has not been fully cooperating with the agency). Third, Iran made significant changes to the administration of its nuclear program in fall 2003—changes that produced greater openness with the IAEA and may have indicated a decision to stop a nuclear weapons program.

Fourth . . . Iranian officials have stated numerous times that Tehran is not seeking nuclear weapons, partly for religious regions—indeed, Khamenei has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, according to Iranian officials. A change in this stance could damage Iranian religious leaders’ credibility. Moreover, Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute of Strategic Studies argued in May 2008 that “given the pervasive religiosity of the regime, it is unlikely that Iran’s supreme leader would be secretly endorsing military activity in explicit contradiction of his own religious edict.”

Iran also has legitimate reasons for not wanting to rely on outsiders for fueling its nuclear reactors, having been screwed over by foreign suppliers in the past, the report notes. And Iran's claim that past attempts to conceal its nuclear procurement efforts were intended to evade Western efforts to deny it technology it had a legal right to under the NPT, not to develop nukes, is one “that appears to be supported by a 1997 CIA report." In sum, the CRS report is a calm and measured analysis of Iran's nuclear program which finds little justification for the bedwetting and warmongering that passes for serious debate on the Sunday morning talk shows. Don't hold your breath waiting for David Gregory to interview the author, though, as actual expertise in the field on which one wishes to opine is an almost certain disqualification.

War: a laughing matter

Religion and politics are not recommended topics of discussion at the American dinner table. The aerial bombardment of innocent foreigners to be followed, perhaps, by the invasion and occupation of their land, on the other hand, is a matter of casual debate, water cooler talk, just another policy option to elite opinion makers, the prospect bandied about in newspapers and on TV with a solemnity usually reserved for the latest Yankees trade rumor. Even the arguments for war are trodded out with as much conviction and moral suasion as an ad for Ovaltine or a Medicare-qualifying motorized scooter, with former Democratic staffer, humanitarian interventionist and head of a fancy-sounding university “non-proliferation” center Alan Kuperman offering in The New York Times the marvelously weak case for war with Iran on the basis that, hey, it could work at disabling their supposed nuclear weapons program -- actually citing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to demonstrate the effectiveness of U.S. military action -- so, uh, why the hell no give it a go? All we have to lose are a few thousand dead Iranians.

The idea of killing innocent foreigners is also always good for a laugh. Even prior to 9/11, The Day Everything Changed, I recall a girl at my high school donning an uproarious “Nuke Iraq: Just Do It” t-shirt parodying the Nike slogan, an hilarious call for the nuclear annihilation of a people thousands of miles away who had never done the U.S. any harm worn as proudly on her chest as a teenager in a non-psychopathic country might wear a shirt displaying an allegiance to some popular band, perhaps. While the genocidal humor may be forgiven as the antics of an unthinking adolescent not considering its implications -- and I for one am willing to absolve one from much of the blame for views expressed under the influence of a Pennsylvania public school -- some children never grow up, peddling their juvenile interpretation of the world and morning shock jock approach to foreign affairs into gigs as highly paid political advisers and commentators.

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb, a former campaign spokesman for John McCain, is one such particularly bloodthirsty and brutishly dumb example of the perpetual adolescent approach to foreign affairs, suggesting in a blog post today -- in a line he later thought better off -- that President Obama maybe ought to declare war on Japan if newly elected Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama remains in office, or something. You see, “Hatoyama is proving to be a major problem,” Goldfarb writes, pointing to bipartisan agreement on that score (hardly a selling point, I'd think). The source of the friction? Hatoyama’s desire to reassert Japan’s independence from the U.S. and transition it away from its current client-state status, manifested in the new prime minister’s interest in possibly removing American forces from their base in Okinawa rather than relocating them on the island, and his rather well-supported assertion that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has been a failure, a statement apparently beyond the pale ever since Obama himself embraced the surge.

Though the whole problem might be resolved should scandal bring down his government, “if Hatoyama does stay in place and continue on this course, well, perhaps Obama can look to FDR for inspiration in how to deal with troublesome Japanese leaders,” Goldfarb wrote, a line since disappeared from The Weekly Standard blog but still viewable on Google News and other sites. FDR, of course, faced with a very different and expansionist Japan, imposed an oil embargo against the import-dependent country in the months preceding Pearl Harbor. After the attack, he declared war on Japan -- all measures Goldfarb implies the U.S. government should apply to modern Japan because its new leader appears unwilling to act as the editors of The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post would like: as the governor of a de facto overseas American protectorate, a Guam with cooler gadgets. Question that setup and Goldfarb's first instinct is to call in the 101st Airborne.

The scary thing? Goldfarb's rants are merely less refined variations on the concerns of much of the foreign policy establishment, as evidenced by this Post article detailing anonymous "concerns" regarding Japan's new leader on the part of U.S. officials and allies -- the official leaks offering cataclysmic predictions for the security of Asia as a result of the new Japanese government's rather overdue steps towards asserting greater sovereignty over its affairs. Be comforted in the knowledge that no one in the U.S. government is seriously contemplating war with Japan, though: as FDR demonstrated, it doesn't have any oil. Now Yemen, on the other hand . . .*

[*Yemen is actually rapidly running out of oil. Neighboring U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia, which has been bombing parts of Yemen in recent months, still has a rather lot.]

Our police state and theirs

Torture. Extrajudicial killings. Arbitrary detention. The United States and Iran have a lot in common, really. But there’s a key difference: while the Iranian regime tends to undertake its crimes against humanity within Iran, the U.S. does it _all over the world_, from Lithuania to Egypt, and condones and/or enables countless more abuses on the part of its allies. Predictably, though, rather than discuss that uncomfortable truth politicians and major news outlets in America take a keen interest in Iran’s human rights abuses while only mentioning, say, “Gaza” if they mispronounce the name of their kids’ favorite musician -- it helps focus attention on the next Hitler du jour instead of America’s own shaky relationship with the rule of law, providing an easy opening for some shameless moral exhibitionism on the part of the ruling class and its media parrots.

Take State Department spokesman Philip Crowley’s statement at a press briefing on Wednesday that "Iran is increasingly showing itself to be a police state.” Now, there is no question the Iranian government has a horrendous record on human rights. And we are right to laugh when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's attempts to equate the two, as it would be ridiculous to at all suggest that Iran’s record is in any way comparable to that of the United States. Indeed, their records are as far apart as could be -- after all, here in the U.S. we imprison people at a per capita rate three times that of Iran (pdf), with more than one in 100 American adults behind bars.

And while using illegal drugs is liable to get one thrown in prison in these United States, something called PBS (an acronym for a terrorist organization, most likely) reports the Iranian government has been “remarkably pragmatic” with regard to its drug policy, funding needle exchanges and methadone clinics rather than private prisons for a steady supply of non-violent drug offenders like some other countries. Further, though the U.S. government admits to having had more than 100 of its prisoners die in its custody -- many murdered during the course of one of those infamous we-were-just-defending-freedom “harsh interrogation techniques” -- the Obama administration has generally decided to "look forward, not backward" on such crimes, whereas Iran is set to prosecute a dozen officials in the deaths of several opposition protesters (though let's be honest, both countries would never go after the big guns -- something in common!). And, of course, the U.S. committed the ultimate human rights violation and war crime with the invasion of Iraq, killing at a least a quarter million people and driving millions more from their homes in the name of WMDs, or democracy, or . . . something (in the last two centuries Iran has invaded no one). So again, really, it would be terribly unfair to conflate Iran’s human rights record with that of the United States, with its almost 2.5 million people held as cattle behind bars.

(It should be said, though, that U.S. officials, unlike their swarthy counterparts, are careful not to violate any statutes when they torture or kill someone, a task made a bit easier when the state’s finest legal minds all agree that arbitrarily defined “enemy combatants” are not “persons” under the law.)

But! You know, those Iranians! Don't they know all civilized nations turn to private security firms to do their dirty business?

Off the record, I didn't talk to you

The words "off the record" are thrown about so often in Washington that it's sometimes evident the employer of the phrase is unfamiliar with its actual meaning, instead just habitually repeating savvy-sounding jargon they heard their colleagues or the serious-looking people on TV say. Other times it seems its sheer arrogance -- or perhaps a genuine lack of awareness -- at play, like when an aide to Senator Barbara Boxer declared his comments during a panel discussion before hundreds of policy wonks and energy industry officials were not to be reported by any member of the press.

The latest case clearly falls in the former category: Seeking a comment from an industry trade group for a story, I emailed the group's spokeswoman asking her if she'd like to weigh in. Moments later, I got a response declaring that -- "OFF THE RECORD" -- her organization was declining to comment. Try conveying that in a story.

"A request for comment from the group was received."
"Asked to comment on the controversy, the group's spokesperson responded."
"A spokeswoman for the group replied to a request for comment. Or didn't."

Tempted to go with, "A spokeswoman for the group, responding to a request for comment, became incoherent", I settled with, "A spokesperson for the group declined to comment." I'm confident the journalism gods (gods . . . ha!) won't be sending a lightning bolt my way.

History, as told by the U.S. government

"We think we have a strategy that will create the space and time for the Afghans to stand up their own security forces and take responsibility.  But we're not going to be, you know, walking away from Afghanistan again.  We, we did that before, it didn't turn out very well.  So we will stay involved, we will stay supportive, and I think that's exactly the right approach."

-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Meet the Press, December 6, 2009

Advocates for a “strong” foreign policy of U.S. empire, beyond suffering the ills of projection and overcompensation, possess a remarkable capacity for ignoring inconvenient aspects of history. That is, while those of the bomb-them-‘till-their-free school of thought can point to a long list of countries and conflicts where they argue an American intervention could have prevented massive loss of life -- Rwanda, Darfur, etc. -- they are remarkably unconcerned with any of the negative consequences befalling a policy of constant war (such as the establishment of permanent and sizable constituency directly benefitting from empire and armed conflict that might agitate for wars not always on the basis of Samantha Power’s superior moral sensibilities) or the demonstrated failings of past U.S. interventions (Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Iran, Iraq...). Conveniently, these are often the same people ordering the bombs to be dropped in the first place.

So when Hillary Clinton, alluding to the presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan before 9/11, suggests that was a result of the U.S. “walking away” from the region, she’s conveniently gliding over more than a decade of American arms and funding that went to groups we now collectively label “the Taliban” -- and a few folks, like Osama bin Laden, that would later on make a name for themselves turning their fire against their former patrons -- as one would expect from a person in her position. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who as a high-ranking CIA official helped direct funding to the Afghan mujahideen beginning in 1979, has made the same self-serving claim, arguing the the hypothetical actions the U.S. did not take in Afghanistan are more responsible for its present state that the demonstrable, having-actually-occurred actions successive American administrations did take. For those who gain power and prestige from the maintenance of a global American empire -- people like Gates and Clinton, and the countless hangers-on at Washington think tanks and within the State and Defense bureaucracies -- it serves one’s interests well to contrast make-believe accounts of interventions that could be with the less than holy interventions of the real world.

Preferring a fairy tale straight out of Hollywood, Gates and Clinton neglect to mention the very real blowback that came about as result, not of some policy of backwards isolationism, but imperial Cold War proxy fighting aimed at undermining the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan by arming and funding -- via the always reliable Pakistani intelligence service, financial backing courtesy of our theocratic friends in Saudi Arabia -- many of those we now call the Taliban and al Qaeda (who, mind you, are not the same thing). Rather than a failure to build more schools and playgrounds following the Soviet exit, it was a proactive U.S. policy aimed at strengthening the mujahideen with money and arms that ultimately led to their being strengthened. One needn't possess a PhD in international affairs to grasp that cause and effect. The staggering number of Muslims the U.S. government has killed since the late 1980s has only further strengthened those groups by fueling opposition to the United States, often labeled "anti-Americanism" by the media as if it were some sort of irrational religious phenomenon and not a perfectly understandable reaction to American policy in the Middle East.

As becomes more obvious the more you observe those in power, it simply pays to be blissfully unaware -- or to appear that way -- if one wishes to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Consider Gates’ comments rejecting there being any historical comparison between the Soviet and American occupations of Afghanistan:

"First of all, the Soviets were trying to impose an alien culture and, and political system on, on Afghanistan.  But more importantly, they were there terrorizing the Afghans. They killed a million Afghans.  They made refugees out of five million Afghans.  They were isolated internationally.  All of those factors are different for, for us, completely different.  We have the sanction of the U.N. We have the sanction of NATO.  We have the invitation of the Afghan government itself.  We have 42 military partners in Afghanistan."

Boiled down, Gates' defense of the U.S.-led war is this: we’ve got more friends, which I doubt would pass good old St. Augustine’s litmus test. And spoken by a man who oversees another U.S. war that has created five million refugees and, by some accounts, led to the deaths of more than one million people -- to say nothing of the very real death and destruction U.S. policy has wrought on Afghanistan in the last decade alone that Gates so blithely elides -- the remarks are offensively asinine. Again, though, that’s just par for the course, to be expected.

And given the historical illiteracy of much of the major media's celebrity journalists, why should Gates be bothered with repeating uncomfortable truths that don't help the preferred U.S. narrative? It's not like he will ever be challenged on his history, certainly not by the likes of NBC's David Gregory, whose idea of a tough question is asking Gates -- no joke -- "Is failure an option in Afghanistan?" Well, David, no it isn't, I suppose. Practicing real journalism isn't one either, from the looks of it.

A tax for the military-industrial complex

British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou is famous for arguing that governments should correct perceived "externalities" imposed upon society by the production some good -- think pollution from a coal plant -- by imposing taxes on the producer of said good that, ideally, should be commensurate to the damages caused by the product. Keeping with that logic, it follows that if one thinks wars are something inflicted on society by people like defense contractors, generals and the living dead elder statesmen, then it ought to be they who pays for said wars. So when politicians propose imposing a new war tax on wealthy Americans to pay for the war in Afghanistan, I can't help but think they're a bit off the mark.

First: imposing a new progressive tax on the rich does not a "just war" make. Taxing the rich might please one's liberal sensibilities, but given that money will be used to inflict death and destruction upon innocent Afghans, sacrificing their lives just so some executive at Goldman Sach's pays a few more cents to the IRS would make one kind of a dick. Second: while I grant there's probably a good deal of overlap, a true Pigouvian tax would be one imposed on Lockheed Martin, those who voted for the Iraq war resolution (and those who approve funds for a military escalation in Afghanistan) and the staff of The Weekly Standard, not just the rich in general. Since I'm assuming such a tax would have to be awfully high -- too high for senior fellows at AEI and Brookings -- it would of course also necessitate the return of debtors' prisons, an unfortunate but necessary stick to go along with the carrot of endless war and appearances on Meet the Press, I think.