Civil War in Iraq: The Goal of U.S. Policy?

The Bush administration's refusal to characterize the situation in Iraq as a civil war is understandable since it would then have to acknowledge a civil war as the net result of its invasion. The real question is whether or not this was an unforeseen by-product of our policy or, in fact, the goal all along. No one who had not drunk from the poisoned well of the Bush propaganda ministries could ever have found our stated rationale of "democracy building" anything but at odds with reality. It appears that the Iraqi operation can be counted as an enormous success. It has destabilized Iraq for the foreseeable future and has created the conditions for instability--if not expanded military operations--from Lebanon to Afghanistan. No U.S. president could put the lives of our men and women in harm's way with a policy that announced in advance that it had chaos and destruction as its goals.

Eyes on the Prize II

Reaction to illegal immigrants in receiving communities is in many ways, if not most, akin to that evinced by the migration in the post World War II years of African Americans from the South and, here in the Northeast, Puerto Ricans from the Commonwealth. These were internal migrations of people with the full rights (at least on paper) of citizenship. Both Black Americans and Puerto Ricans had the right to live wherever they wished. The story of what happened to hundreds of American cities in the North as a result of those migrations has yet to be told in full. “Block busting”, “white flight”, urban insurrections, riots, the era of “Burn, baby, burn!” have left a legacy that includes vistas of the South Bronx and East New York in Brooklyn resembling firebombed Dresden. Things are seemingly a lot calmer now. The era of the Black Panthers is over. There is no Bobby Seale or Stokely Carmichael or Malcom X to stir up discontent, no call to arms except in the lyrics of rap singers who, if they become violent, seem only to turn on one another. The objective conditions of many Black Americans have improved dramatically. Black Americans and the Latinos (mostly Puerto Ricans) who grew up alongside them are certainly not as invisible as they were in the pre-Civil Rights era that writers like Ralph Ellison and Piri Thomas describe in their writing. Few Black or Latino children would recognize the U.S. cultural landscape of the era before the Civil Rights movement. They would immediately sense the absence of Black and Latino newscasters, television personalities, and politicians; they would sense that there were far fewer sports figures and entertainers in the public eye; but they would also sense the absence in their everyday life of Blacks and Latinos in all the myriad jobs—in banks, in offices, in shops, delivering the mail, putting out fires or walking a neighborhood beat—whose presence we now take for granted but who are in fact present only as the result of a long struggle. Yes, for these reasons and many more, things are a lot calmer now. But the rioting that took place in Los Angeles as recently as the 1990s is a reminder that we are never far from a rekindling of the violence that was for a period of time so common in this country. Things are a lot calmer now. This in spite of the fact that U.S. citizens who happen to be black or brown suffer high unemployment, poor schools, inferior housing, a culture of violence, an illegitimate birth rate of 75% and far less aggregate wealth. Large cities broadcast news stories from their Black and Latino communities every night, stories out of housing projects and poor neighborhoods, stories chronicling the bleak symptoms of an unfinished revolution in the “post”-Civil War, post-Civil Rights Era America.

Eyes on the Prize

The rebroadcast of PBS’ Eyes on the Prize over the past weekend, some twenty years after its original appearance, has evoked in me (and no doubt others of my generation) a sense almost of disbelief: Did we have any sense of what was happening to this nation as those events were occurring? True, documentaries are narratives; they retell a story, telescope events and give them a dramatic form. What they document is not reality as lived so much as reality given meaning. Yet, I know I am not alone in being shocked at my inability to recall the shooting of thirty-five U.S. Marshalls by Southern rebels protesting the admission of James Meredith to the University of Alabama. Did the press cover this story—or suppress it? The voice of Julian Bond, the series’ narrator, intones that this event may be seen as “the last battle of the Civil War.” Yet, we know that this is not true, that the phrase has been used many times, to characterize many events, and that, most importantly, may be presently in reserve for some future event, since what the series makes clear is that the Civil War is still not over.

With Murtha's Defeat, the Lights are Already Going Out

News that Rep. John Murtha has been cast aside for another candidate is a signal that the Democrats still don't get it. The selection of Murtha would have been a clear signal that the party was prepared to move for rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Should they temporize on this issue and allow the U.S. presence to linger, they will seal their fate as a viable political party with a significant sector of the voting public, a public that clearly wants the bleeding in Iraq to stop. The Democrats are living on borrowed time. Evil in its own right, the war is the political right's and the large corporations' greatest weapon of mass distraction from the myriad other issues that require remediation following the long years of corrupt Republican rule. There is the environment and a host of other "quality of life" issues that range from FCC deregulation to disinvestment in the infrastructure to the evisceration of the union movement. If we are to be treated to endless hearings and investigations about the war and the treatment of prisoners to the exclusion of all other issues, there is little doubt that there will be another Republican in the White House in 2008 and the opportunity for meaningful reform will be postponed possibly for decades. U.S. politicians often treat elections as popularity contests rather than as mandates for substantive change. We didn't vote for you, boys and girls; we voted for you to get something done. Trent Lott and Steny Hoyer are place markers for business as usual. Really shameful.

God, Zilla!

The Ultimate Occupation Failure

After watching the Senate hearings on C-Span this evening, watching the General and the State Department expert on Iraq twisting and turning, getting redder and redder in the face, repeating the same mantras, utterances without any link to reality, watching both Democratic and Republican senators looking more and more at a loss as to what to say, it finally dawned on me that there is an historical parallel to the war in Iraq. Like, Iraq, the parallel I have in mind was also costly in life and treasure and ended in dismal failure: the occupation of the American South after our own Civil War. What will happen after we leave Iraq? What happened in the South after the federal troops left? A reign of terror ensued that lasted into the lifetime of living Americans—that’s what happened. The only way that the freed slaves could have held onto the gains of the Reconstruction period was to have federal troops stay indefinitely, perhaps for generations. When they left, the Klan took over, the Black Codes or Jim Crow laws were put in place and African Americans lived lives little removed from their former conditions as slaves. The “Union” was preserved in name only.

The Ultimate Occupation Failure: II

The occupations we choose to focus on in the U.S. are the successful post-World War II operations in Germany and Japan. The problem with using Germany and Japan as models for Iraq is that they have exactly nothing to do with one another. We like our popular myth of exporting democracy and our images of G.I. Joes giving out smiles, Hershey bars and Lucky Strikes. It’s a Norman Rockwell image we are all comfortable with. The reality, however, is that the governing elites in Germany and Japan were happy to do all that the U.S. asked if they could be spared the profoundest fear they had—communist take-over. Fear of communism played a large part in the growth of militarism in both countries and was one of the major reasons for the war. It was out of fear of communist take-over that General Macarthur allowed Hirohito (who should have been executed as a war criminal) to maintain his empire—even if in a figure head role. With the cooperation of Germany and Japan, both nations became permanent bases of U.S. military power. The Japanese island of Okinawa is still a base for nearly 40,000 U.S. service personnel and the Japanese government "happily" foots the bill.

The Ultimate U.S. Occupation Failure: III

No, it is not Japan or Germany we should look to. It is the American South. Stay—perhaps for decades--and maintain semi-chaos, or leave and let the chips fall where they may. The fact is we can never leave Iraq without admitting it was a war based on deception, that it was a humiliation to this country, that it was a waste of tens of thousands of innocent lives, that we are aware that blood will flow and that the violence must take its course. There will be no miracle cure, no quick fix, and if the Democratic Party allows itself to get nickeled and dimed to death in some queasy compromise with these facts, the ultimate result will be the demise of the opposition party and political chaos here in the “homeland.” The only way to make Baghdad look like Tokyo or Bonn is to have Godzilla rise out of the Tigris river and force the Iraqis to look to us for protection—and then drown the place in dollars for about fifty years.

The Right Wing Rationale X: Hitler = Stalin = Communism = Socialism

In a review of a new biography of Rene Descartes published in The New Yorker this week (Nov. 20, 2006), author Anthony Gottlieb points out that Pope John Paul II “went so far as to suggest that the origins of Nazism and Communism are somehow linked to Descartes.” Right wing historians and intellectuals have repeated this equation practically since the moment Hitler came to power in Germany. Now, with the end of the cold war, the equation is repeated so often that it has taken on the trappings of what in football would be called a pile on, something equivalent to kicking a dead horse. There is, of course, a danger in rebutting this notion, namely, that one leaves oneself vulnerable to the charge that one is defending Stalin or that one is even a “Stalinist.” Nevertheless, I believe that this bit of casuistry is dangerous and needs to be corrected. During the whole of the 1960s and in the years since, I encountered many who would call themselves Marxists, but rarely, if ever, met a self-designated Stalinist. In fact, with the appearance of Nikita Krushchev onto the political stage, we saw the repudiation of Stalin’s regime by the Soviet Government itself. On the other hand, it was the same Nikita who pounded one of his shoes on a desk at the United Nations and predicted, “We will bury you.” He who laughs last… Although the Soviet Union appeared ultimately to have self-destructed, right wing intellectuals seem now in a hurry to bury communism so deeply that there can be no danger of its resurrecting itself. Will there ever be a better time? Yet even the right wing propagandists do not have the temerity to create an equation between Nazism and Communism as philosophies per se. Who has ever read a work of Nazi philosophy? Certainly Mein Kampf does not merit the term. So, if you can’t take on a whole philosophy, use the old straw man; make Stalin a symbol; then let that symbol stand for the philosophy. Crude, but, unfortunately for the sake of clarity of understanding, it works.

The Right Wing Rationale XI: Hitler = Stalin = Communism = Socialism

In yet another reference to the Hitler/Stalin Equation, an unsigned review in The Economist this week (Nov. 11-17, 2006) of Norman Davies' Europe at War 1939-1945, one finds the observation that “The biggest and bloodiest struggle by far of the European war was between two gangster regimes whose awful treatment of their own people and neighbours is unmatched before or since.” Putting aside some doubts about whether even the horrors of the second world war can compare to the genocide performed on the native Americans and the African slaves who were brought to the Americas to replace their lost labor power, it is the first part of the statement that is interesting. “Two gangster regimes.” Hmm. This raises the spectre of two barbarians having a chance encounter in the forest and just having at it until one of them falls. Supposedly, Mr. Davies’ book serves to correct the impression here in the U.S. and apparently in England as well, that it was largely through Anglo-American sacrifices that the war was won. If so, this is no news to the left, which has always understood what the war was really about. Present day historians spend vast amounts of ink documenting Stalin’s evil ways, very little ink documenting the huge amount of support that Hitler received from the West while it was itself struggling to survive the Great Depression. And although the Soviet experiment certainly did implode due to its own internal weaknesses, (weaknesses which most Marxists outside of the Soviet empire themselves tirelessly chronicled), one should not overlook the fact that the U.S.S.R. was in a state of siege virtually from the moment of its inception and that terrified capitalists expended untolled trillions of dollars of their citizens’ wealth in their efforts to remove the threat. By equating Stalin with Hitler, more is at work than merely documenting a communist or socialist experiment under a “gangster regime;” the clear intention is to impugn communism and socialism in themselves.

The Right Wing Rationale XII: Hitler = Stalin = Communism = Socialism

In this country, the desperation to separate oneself from a Stalinist regime was evident even on the left. Thousands of left wing U.S. students who found value in the Marxist critique of capitalism and who looked to some form of socialism preferred to attach themselves to Mao. The little red book, the “Quotations from Chairman Mao,” was being read by student protesters here in the West more avidly than it was in the streets of Peking. Of course, Mao, too, can be rolled into the evil equation, as can any and essentially all Marxist leaders (elected or not, as we saw in the C.I.A. sponsored assassination of Salvador Allende). Practically within seconds of Mao’s death, China was once again under a regime in which “it is good to be rich.” A similar outcome is no doubt hoped for in Cuba as the vultures hover hungrily over Fidel Castro’s death bed. All of these political twists in the road have been accompanied by endless sectarian battles among leftists. From the old days of the Communist table in the City College cafeteria, texts have been flung back and forth. Lenin’s “Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” ended the argument for some; Trotsky’s collected writings for others. The American intellectual Sidney Hook spent a good part of his life repudiating the words he had inscribed in his essay “Why I Am a Communist”. Susan Sontag would endear herself to the right and alienate her erstwhile leftist friends by attacking American intellectuals as “soft on communism.” Yesterday’s anti-Soviet Marxists became the next day’s neo-conservatives. We still hear—yes, even now in the land of Hamburger and Oral Roberts universities—that U.S. campuses are hotbeds of Marxist thought.

The Right Wing Rationale XIII: Hitler = Stalin = Communism = Socialism

What the right wing understands is that ideas die hard. While a slew of right wing texts bear titles like “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism”, we see regimes friendly to Cuba rising in the Americas to the south. Even Daniel Ortega has risen out of his own ashes, dragging in his path ghosts of Iran-Contra and Gazal frames purchased on Fifth Avenue. It is important to keep in mind that our own nation was formed by founders who saw in Classical civilization ideals to emulate: republicanism, democracy, reason and humanitarian values. These ideas had to wait over a thousand years to be brought to life again while, in the interim, Europe evolved through a dark, theocratic age and a period of absolute monarchy. The right wing knows that the battle is not really quite over. And so, they must tell their version of history, tell it and retell it until it becomes accepted truth, received wisdom. “The poor shall always be with us” is a far more comforting text for them to take than “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.” There can be no heaven on Earth, just as Augustine knew that the City of God could not exist on Earth, that more than that, earthly pleasures are elusive, dangerous, and perhaps best not pursued at all.

Armistice Day: On "Cutting and Running"

The rhetoric of “cutting and running” must be abandoned. The only rational course of action is for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq no later than the end of this year. Rather than being the sign of weakness that all of the war’s advocates and apologists suggest, it would in fact be a sign to our own people and to the people of the world of the strength of this nation’s democratic processes. Representative John Murtha’s plan to have U.S. forces “redeployed” should be adopted immediately. The newly elected Democratic congress has a very short time in which to turn this country around. It is what the people of the country asked for through the ballot box. Should the chaos that some predict will take place in Iraq occur, we can always offer humanitarian aid to a sovereign Iraqi government. All of the predictions of disaster we heard prior to our leaving Saigon are deeply ironic in light of the fact that the nation of Vietnam is now a favored tourist destination for Americans. We can leave Iraq now with dignity—or we can wait too long and make a humiliating retreat from the rooftops of Baghdad. A timely withdrawal is the best way of honoring those who have already fallen or been injured in the name of a policy even its former advocates now admit was misguided.

MacArthur in Color

Upon re-reading my post of November 1, the text of General MacArthur’s radio broadcast from the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, my eyes kept straying back to the color photograph of the event. It occurred to me that in all the years I have seen references to that famed event—either in photographs accompanying text or in film documentaries—I had never before run into a color photograph. I chose it from among the better known black & white images when it turned up on a Google images page. As a recent PBS series, something titled “World War II in Color”, makes clear, there is something eerie, almost alarming, about seeing color photographs of the war when one has spent a lifetime with thousands of embedded black & white images chronicling the war. The PBS documentary reveals that the color footage of the war was largely suppressed, or more accurately, “classified”, until recently. In fact, alone among the services, the Marine Corps battles were shot exclusively in color but then released only in black & white versions. War strategists in Washington may have decided that color just made war too real. Of course, they were right, as all that color footage from Vietnam broadcast on new Sony Trintrons in the 1960s would later prove. And as the highly censored images from our post-Vietnam battlefields continues to prove.

Democratic Victory

The election has proved to be more a democratic victory than a Democratic victory. The pressure is now on the Democrats and the long term viability of the two-party system. The party members who have just been elected ran under a party banner that represented an almost unanimous stand in favor of the war in Iraq and in favor of the Israeli attack on Palestine and Lebanon. Their comfort with taking stands on other issues having to do with the plight of the working class in this country and on issues of the environment and corporate power in the full awareness that their votes would not carry—and therefore not matter—has now been disturbed by a cri de coeur from a majority of voters. No more posing; they will have to walk the walk rather than talk the talk. If this country is ever to be saved, it will be because of the attitudes of common U.S. citizens who are decent, have an essential sense of fair play, and who will not allow themselves to be pushed too far. They believe the story of a nation marked by a commitment to freedom and human rights. So, to the newly elected majority party, congratulations. But don’t drink too much champagne ladies and gentlemen; you’ll have to keep your head about you if you’re not going to be back in your law offices by 2008. There are millions of decent citizens who will be watching you carefully. And this may be your last chance.

The Right Wing Rationale IX: Election Day

Well, it looks like we are going to find out by the time the polls close tonight whether the right wing gravitation to more and more fascist tinged policies will be deflected a bit even if it is too late to entirely reverse the curve. It has been a frightening ride up until now as more and more power has been invested in corporations, and the oligarchs, in an effort to consolidate that power, demonstrated a complete lack of inhibition about unleashing the dogs of war and some of the uglier elements in our society. As is always the case with the patrons who make policy for “the greater good,” who proceed as if “the end justifies the means (there is more than a little fondness for Stalinesque leadership among this type),” the lesser evil(s) can be formidable indeed. This is particularly true when one rules via a coalition of thugs in suits, Elmer Gantry style demagogues and the vast spectrum of zealots who have always been part of the U.S. landscape and are often difficult to distinguish from outright bigots. Gone since the Reagan era, perhaps even since Goldwater’s infamous “extremism in the defense of liberty” speech in 1964, are the so-called moderate Republicans. The Northeastern Establishment may still rule, but it rules from behind the wizard’s screen, and that is always dangerous. Like New Testament Pontius Pilates, their hands are clean. Unlike Pontius Pilate, they will remain for all time anonymous entities to all but a handful of Americans. Southern good ol’ boys, Western cowboys, the prim and the pious will do the dirty work. As recent events have vividly illustrated, this coalition, like the crowd on the Mississippi river boat in Melville’s The Confidence Man, will occasionally harbor an honest individual. More likely, however, these children of less than patrician roots will succumb all too easily to corruption—financial as well as sexual. Or, more correctly, be less facile when it comes to keeping their misdeeds a secret. So, now that the contract with America seems to have developed some serious flaws, the other party will return—unless, of course, Americans are a lot less committed to democratic government than they so loudly proclaim…or we see some egregious ballot box tampering.

"We have had our last chance."

A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war. Men since the beginning of time have sought peace.... Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural development of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh. (Words spoken by General Douglas MacArthur in a radio broadcast delivered after accepting the Japanese surrender on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri.)