In December 2001, 110 of 112 revelers at a wedding died, thanks to a B-52 and two B-1B bombers using precision-guided weapons to essentially wipe out a village in Eastern Afghanistan (and then, in a second strike, to take out Afghans digging in the rubble). The incident got next to no attention here. It wasn’t, after all, a case of American “violence,” but a regrettable error. No one thought to suggest that the invasion of Afghanistan should be shut down because of it, nor was it discredited due to that mass killing.
It had been a mistake. As would be the case with those other weddings obliterated by U.S. air power in Iraq and Afghanistan in the years to come. As were the funerals and baby-naming rites blasted away in those later years. As have been, more recently, the more than 60 children killed by CIA drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the funerals hit by those same drones, and the recently documented secondary strikes -- as in that December 2001 attack -- on rescuers trying to pull the wounded out of the rubble.
None of this, of course, gets significant attention here. Despite the pleas of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, few here suggest shutting down U.S. and NATO air operations in that country because of violence against civilians. There are few cries of horror for the eight Afghan sheepherders, none out of their teens, one possibly as young as six, who were killed by a NATO air strike in Kapisa Province just the other day. There are no major editorials or front-page media stories calling for the U.S. and its allies to mend their violent ways or change their policies because of them. It’s certainly not popular to suggest that such acts might discredit American policy abroad.
Yet, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit points out, “violence” within and by the Occupy movement in this country -- we’re talking about several sexual assaults in Occupy camps, a suicide, drug use, and a small amount of property damage, bottles thrown, and the like by outliers at Occupy demonstrations -- has in certain quarters somehow been enough to discredit the movement, even in some cases to paint it as a kind of living nightmare. Such violence, minimal as it might have been, instantly discredited Occupy on the American landscape.
This, mind you, in a society in which 14,000 murders were committed in 2011, in which more than 30,000 people died in traffic accidents, in which a recent Pentagon report indicated that violent sexual crimes in the military have risen by 64% since 2006 (95% against women, even though they make up only 14% of the force’s personnel). And yet somehow, neither weapons, nor cars, nor the U.S. military is discredited by such violence.
It would, in fact, be surprising to imagine that a movement whose camps actually welcomed, housed, and fed those essentially thrown away by this society would lack problems. In truth, Occupy should have been hailed for its assault on violence at every level in this society. Nothing could be more striking in Solnit’s piece than the statistic she cites on the remarkably unnoticed drop in violence in Oakland, California, in the weeks before Occupy Oakland itself was violently assaulted by that city’s police force. Tom
Mad, Passionate Love -- and Violence
Occupy Heads into the Spring
By Rebecca SolnitWhen you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them -- or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.
Until they did.
Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.
If all goes as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A. Only the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will ever filter back to our world.
After all, American war is heading for the “shadows” in a big way. As news articles have recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration’s global spear will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces. They are so secretive that they don’t like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog notes, “not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.” By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.
Although the special ops crew (66,000 people in all) exist on our tax dollars, we’re really not supposed to know anything about what they’re doing -- unless, of course, they choose the publicity venue themselves, whether in Pakistan knocking off Osama bin Laden or parachuting onto Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to promote Act of Valor. In case you somehow missed the ads, that’s the new film about “real terrorist threats based on true stories starring actual Navy SEALs.” (No names in the credits please!)
Of course, those elite SEAL teams are johnnies-come-lately when compared to their no less secretive “teammates” in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia -- our ever increasing armada of drones. Those robotic warriors of the air (or at least their fantasy doppelgangers) were, of course, pre-celebrated -- after a fashion -- in the Terminator movies. In Washington’s global battle zones, what’s called our “traditional combat role” -- think big invasions, occupations, counterinsurgency -- is going, going, gone with the wind, even evidently in Afghanistan by 2013. War American-style is instead being inherited by secretive teams of men and machines, both hunter-killers who specialize in assassination operations, and both of whom, as presented to Americans, just couldn’t be sexier.
And we’ll all be just so happy -- as a recent poll indicates we are -- with our robotic warriors and their shadowy special ops teammates, if with nothing else in our fraying world. They present such an alluring image of the no-pain, all-gain battlefield and are undoubtedly a relief for many Americans, distinctly tired -- so the polls also tell us -- of wars that aren’t covert and don’t work. So who even notices that, as Andrew Bacevich, bestselling author and (most recently) editor of The Short American Century: A Postmortem, points out, we’re being plunged into a real-life war novel that has no plot and no end. How post-modern! How disastrous, if only we have the patience to wait! (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses the changing face of the Gobal War on Terror, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Scoring the Global War on Terror
From Liberation to Assassination in Three Quick Rounds
By Andrew BacevichWith the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffuse. Without achieving victory, yet unwilling to acknowledge failure, the United States military has withdrawn from Iraq. It is trying to leave Afghanistan, where events seem equally unlikely to yield a happy outcome.
Elsewhere -- in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia, for example -- U.S. forces are busily opening up new fronts. Published reports that the United States is establishing “a constellation of secret drone bases” in or near the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula suggest that the scope of operations will only widen further. In a front-page story, the New York Times described plans for “thickening” the global presence of U.S. special operations forces. Rushed Navy plans to convert an aging amphibious landing ship into an “afloat forward staging base” -- a mobile launch platform for either commando raids or minesweeping operations in the Persian Gulf -- only reinforces the point. Yet as some fronts close down and others open up, the war’s narrative has become increasingly difficult to discern. How much farther until we reach the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin? What exactly is the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin? In fact, is there a storyline here at all?
America has a serious air pollution problem. Kathleen Hall Jamieson is hell-bent on fixing it.
"Air pollution," in this case, doesn't mean CO2, methane, or anything else in the poisonous cocktail of gases helping warm our planet. Jamieson, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor and long-time media critic, is talking about the error-riddled attack ads flooding the TV airwaves this campaign season, specifically the ones funded by super PACs, the juiced-up political outfits that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money as long as they don't coordinate with candidates. Jamieson wants to de-smog the airwaves, and her strategy amounts to a one-word formula: shame.
Sites like PolitiFact.com and Jamieson's own FactCheck.org already vet super-PAC ads for accuracy and fairness, finding them to be filled to the brim with misleading and sometimes flat wrong claims. Now, Jamieson wants to wave those fact-checks in the face of broadcasters around the country, especially in political battleground states, and use them to embarrass station managers into keeping false ads off the air. Legally, TV stations can't reject a federal candidate's ads, however misleading they may be. But ads from third-party groups, including super PACs? Fair game.
Jamieson admits that her super-PAC shame game is a long shot -- and then some. After all, the struggling broadcast industry stands to make the biggest of big bucks -- literally billions of dollars -- this election cycle. (The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which helped usher in super PACs, has proven to be a TARP bailout program for the broadcast industry, as she regularly says.) But Jamieson points to the work of advertising legend Tony Schwartz, who successfully used commercials to combat smoking and who even saved the John Jay School of Justice in New York, as evidence that shame can indeed spur change. "Our theory is you start with the lowest level -- 'Will you stop running this ad?' to the station managers -- then you escalate," Jamieson says. "There's some chance this process will make the stations insist on accuracy."
Why does Jamieson's plan matter? Because any new law regulating the flow of money in politics is dead on arrival in Congress, which means that the job of reining in deep-pocketed super PACs falls to people like Jamieson and her pie-in-the-sky plan. In the meantime, super PACs will dominate the airwaves and the owners of TV networks and stations will rake in the money. As Ari Berman -- who offered an anatomy of the American political landscape in his book Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics (just out in paperback with a new afterword) -- makes clear, it's the wealthiest of the wealthy, the ones who bankroll the super PACs, who are essentially going to be doing most of the talking this election season. Andy Kroll
The .000063% Election
How the Politics of the Super Rich Became American Politics
By Ari BermanAt a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation -- drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% -- electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .000063%. Those are the 196 donors who have provided nearly 80% of the individual contributions raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.
These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability.
If 2008 was the year of the small donor, when many political pundits (myself included) predicted that the fusion of grassroots organizing and cyber-activism would transform how campaigns were run, then 2012 is "the year of the big donor," when a candidate is only as good as the amount of money in his super PAC. “In this campaign, every candidate needs his own billionaires,” wrote Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Noam Chomsky’s latest TomDispatch post ends today, but TomDispatch, of course, goes on. In the coming weeks, expect new posts from Andrew Bacevich, Rebecca Solnit, Michael Klare, Nick Turse, Karen J. Greenberg, and other TomDispatch regulars as well as surprising new authors. Though this site works on the cheap, it unfortunately does take money as well as all the usual effort to keep things going. So consider this my small way of reminding you that your contributions to the site really do make a difference, that they help bring Chomsky and others to you -- a list of authors that I honestly believe any magazine would love to have -- three times a week with original, often unexpected views of how our American world actually works. Just consider, for instance, that TomDispatch has not only focused regularly on the government campaign against whistleblowers, including Bradley Manning, but that this site is probably the only one to have a whistleblower, Peter Van Buren, writing about whistleblowers!
Many thanks to those of you who have already contributed in 2012! Your generosity astounds me. If others of you care to do so, please visit the TomDispatch donate page by clicking here. (My new book, The United States of Fear, remains available, autographed and personalized, to anyone who contributes $75 or more.) Remember as well that, if you are an Amazon.com customer and visit that site via a TomDispatch book link like this one to buy anything whatsoever, we get a modest cut of your purchase price at no extra cost to you. Tom]
On Tuesday, Part 1 of Noam Chomsky’s piece on American decline, “‘Losing’ the World” was posted at this site. It can be read by clicking here. Now, Part 2 begins. When you’re done, you might check out Chomsky's earlier TomDispatch piece, “Who Owns the World?” which could be considered a companion to this one. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Chomsky offers an anatomy of American defeat in the Greater Middle East, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The Imperial Way
American Decline in Perspective, Part 2
By Noam ChomskyIn the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” continued to mount elsewhere. In the past decade, for the first time in 500 years, South America has taken successful steps to free itself from western domination, another serious loss. The region has moved towards integration, and has begun to address some of the terrible internal problems of societies ruled by mostly Europeanized elites, tiny islands of extreme wealth in a sea of misery. They have also rid themselves of all U.S. military bases and of IMF controls. A newly formed organization, CELAC, includes all countries of the hemisphere apart from the U.S. and Canada. If it actually functions, that would be another step in American decline, in this case in what has always been regarded as “the backyard.”
Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries -- Middle East/North Africa -- which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Control of MENA energy reserves would yield “substantial control of the world,” in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.
To be sure, if the projections of a century of U.S. energy independence based on North American energy resources turn out to be realistic, the significance of controlling MENA would decline somewhat, though probably not by much: the main concern has always been control more than access. However, the likely consequences to the planet’s equilibrium are so ominous that discussion may be largely an academic exercise.
The Arab Spring, another development of historic importance, might portend at least a partial “loss” of MENA. The US and its allies have tried hard to prevent that outcome -- so far, with considerable success. Their policy towards the popular uprisings has kept closely to the standard guidelines: support the forces most amenable to U.S. influence and control.
Favored dictators are supported as long as they can maintain control (as in the major oil states). When that is no longer possible, then discard them and try to restore the old regime as fully as possible (as in Tunisia and Egypt). The general pattern is familiar: Somoza, Marcos, Duvalier, Mobutu, Suharto, and many others. In one case, Libya, the three traditional imperial powers intervened by force to participate in a rebellion to overthrow a mercurial and unreliable dictator, opening the way, it is expected, to more efficient control over Libya’s rich resources (oil primarily, but also water, of particular interest to French corporations), to a possible base for the U.S. Africa Command (so far restricted to Germany), and to the reversal of growing Chinese penetration. As far as policy goes, there have been few surprises.
Back in May 2007, I stumbled across online sketches at the website of a Kansas architectural firm hired to build a monster U.S. embassy-cum-citadel-cum-Greater-Middle-Eastern command center on 104 acres in the middle of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. They offered an artist’s impressions of what the place would look like -- a giant self-sufficient compound both prosaic (think malls or housing projects) and opulent (a giant pool, tennis courts, a recreation center).
Struck by the fact that the U.S. government was intent on building the largest embassy ever in the planet’s oil heartlands, I wrote a piece, “The Mother Ship Lands in Iraq” about those plans and offered a little tour of the project via those crude drawings. From TomDispatch, they then began to run around the Internet and soon a panicky State Department had declared a “security breach” and forced the firm to pull the sketches off its website.
Now, more than five years later, we have the first public photos of the embassy -- a pool, basketball court, tennis courts, and food court to die for -- just as the news has arrived that the vast boondoggle of a place, built for three-quarters of a billion of your tax dollars, with a $6 billion State Department budget this year and its own mercenary air force, is about to get its staff of 16,000 slashed. In a Washington Post piece on the subject, Senator Patrick Leahy is quoted as saying: “I’ve been in embassies all over the world, and you come to this place and you’re like: ‘Whoa. Wow.’ All of a sudden you’ve got something so completely out of scale to anything, you have to wonder, what were they thinking when they first built it?”
The answer is: in 2004, when planning for this white elephant of embassies first began, the Bush administration was still dreaming of a Washington-enforced Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East and saw it as its western command post. Now, of course, the vast American mega-bases in Iraq with their multiple bus routes, giant PXes, Pizza Huts, Cinnabons, and Burger Kings, where American troops were to be garrisoned on the “Korean model” for decades to come, are so many ghost towns, fading American ziggurats in Mesopotamia. Similarly, those embassy photos seem like snapshots from Pompeii just as the ash was beginning to fall. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the news is similarly dismal with drawdowns and withdrawals suddenly the order of the day. Something’s changing. It feels tectonic. Certainly, we’re receiving another set of signs that American imperial plans on the Eurasian mainland have crashed and burned and that the U.S. is now regrouping and heading “offshore.”
What a moment then for Noam Chomsky to weigh in on the subject of American decline. (His earlier TomDispatch post “Who Owns the World?” might be considered a companion piece to this one.) For him, a TomDispatch first: a two-day, back-to-back two-parter on imperial hegemony and its discontents. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Chomsky offers an anatomy of American defeats in the Greater Middle East, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
“Losing” the World
American Decline in Perspective, Part 1
By Noam ChomskySignificant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated -- Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out -- “anything that flies on anything that moves” -- a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.
