Empire Notes

May 12, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Palestine and the Future

I rarely write about Palestine, not because I don’t have my views, but because there is such a wealth of writing in English by people with great knowledge, long experience, and deep understanding; compare it, for example, to the extreme superficiality of almost all writing about Iraq.

But here we are at the 60th anniversary of the birth of Israel. It has occasioned and will occasion a flurry of predictable commentary from all sides of the political spectrum, as well as historical retrospection and narrative about the events of 1948.

And yet, for the future, I see little or no reckoning with the hard truths that any strategist for the Palestinian people will have to deal with.

There is analysis of the wretchedness of the current situation. Journalists and left intellectuals have written about the creation of the Gaza ghetto and the Israelis’ careful calibration of violence on the one hand and access to food and basic services on the other in order to maximally demoralize the population while provoking minimal reaction from the world – with stunning success so far. They have written about the corrosive effects of the political split in Palestine and about the reconstitution of Fatah as an American-backed, supplied, and trained militia. Pushed into the position of supporting the legitimacy of Hamas’s rule as a result of its victory in the 2006 legislative elections, few of them have written about the efficacy of Hamas’s rule or its utter hopelessness as a leader of Palestinian liberation.

Still, on the whole, there are two main strands of left analysis. One, by the two-staters, is that national liberation movements always win when they get the support of their populace and that establishment of a Palestinian state is inevitable. The other, by the one-staters, is that national-liberation-cum-civil-rights movements always win in the modern world and that establishment of a nondiscriminatory state for Jews and Arabs in all of Palestine is inevitable.

Even a fairly cursory study of the relevant history not only suggests otherwise but also brings into question the relevance of these models.

Consider civil rights movements. Ask yourself how things would have developed if African-Americans had spent decades fighting back violently against white oppression before launching the confrontational but nonviolent civil rights movement of the late 1950’s and 1960’s. If South Africa is your model, do recall that anti-white violence by the ANC was almost nonexistent. It’s not easy to reverse the course the Palestinians have already been down.

This is not to argue that nonviolent confrontation from the beginning would have been more successful; the first intifada was minimally violent (with deliberately enforced rules that rock-throwing was the limit), but, even though it accomplished a great deal, it failed.

And, indeed, had it been up to the south, it’s hard to imagine the civil rights movement would have succeeded. Depriving bus companies of their revenues and forcing sheriff’s offices to spend more money on dogs and firehoses was not enough of a cost to overturn the perceived benefits of a violently enforced racist order in the south; had it not been for the rather different role and perceptions of the federal government and the northern liberal establishment, King and his supporters could quite easily have been taken care of.

And, obviously, national liberation movements fail all the time. Over 95% of Iraqi Kurds favor a separate state, yet even in the chaos that Iraq has now become, that is unlikely to happen.

If you look at some of those that succeeded, you also see that one of the crucial conditions is that the cost to the oppressing power and its privileged population of allowing freedom or “freedom” has to be less than the cost of continuing the oppression. Algeria is the case that is closest perhaps to Israel/Palestine, because of the large number of French settlers, the pieds noirs, who owned almost all of the country and, in the end, lost everything. Had internal political infighting not reached the point where those same pieds noirs created a militant cryptofascist secret armed organization and tried to assassinate de Gaulle a dozen times, the outcome would have been very different.

Right now, a two-state solution, if it were on the horizon, which it’s not, would mean the Israelis controlling the part of the West Bank the Palestinians had the way they’re controlling Gaza now; not something to look forward to. The one-state solution is anathema to Israel’s majority Jewish population, who see it as an existential threat.

As far as I can see, only the Palestinians can change this calculus, but how is the big question.

Posted at 10:47 am.

May 5, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Sadr City and the Return of the Repressed Stupidity

Let me start with a big shout-out to the ILWU, for their 8-hour May Day strike in protest of the war. The dockers have always been there on the big political issues of the day and, even though so much has changed, that has not.

Those of you still among the dwindling minority that follows coverage of the war probably know that April was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers, with 52 dead, since last September.

But do you know the cause? I wonder. It’s true that it’s been mentioned in passing news briefs, but there’s been very little to underscore the significance of what’s going on.

The U.S. military is engaged in the most violent and protracted urban warfare since the great battles of 2004. As of a week ago, according to a government spokesman (who is most likely a Sadrist), 925 people had been killed in the offensive on Sadr City; by now, it must have climbed over 1000. This is a scale similar to that of the first major assault on Fallujah, back in April 2004.

And, indeed for all the much-vaunted brilliance of David Petraeus’s much-vaunted counterinsurgency strategy, this assault is distressingly similar to that one in strategy, tactics, effect on the civilian populace, and overall mindless stupidity.

The official reason given by U.S. military spokespeople for the assault is the need to “push back” the various mortar crews regularly firing from Sadr City into the Green Zone. In Fallujah, it was the need to apprehend the people involved in the killing of 4 Blackwater mercenaries and the subsequent desecration of their corpses.

In both cases, the cities were kept under a partial siege, with inflow of food limited and food prices skyrocketing. In this case even more than in Fallujah, the primary means is aerial bombing and artillery fire. On Saturday, firing at what they said was a Shiite militia “command center,” and at what locals said was a place of prayer for pilgrims and people whose relatives are in the hospital, U.S. forces missed and hit the Sadr General Hospital instead.

Both cases involve essentially a general assault on the populace with the supposed aim of apprehending or removing the ability to maneuver of small groups of men who can appear and disappear, moving with ease through the population of which they are a part. Just as with Israel’s war against Lebanon, this approach is the essence of futility. If you want it to work, you have to pound the population into complete submission.

The U.S. military high command might want to consider a few basic verities of the kind they themselves have been spouting in other contexts when talking about the new thinking behind the surge:

1. The population of Sadr City before the assault was about 2.5 million. Its population afterward will be about 2.5 million.

2. The population will blame the people who are bombing them for the assault, not the people who are resisting the bombing.

3. The bombing of the hospital will be viewed as deliberate by the population. As will the killing of civilians. These are, after all, predictable consequences of aerial assaults on densely packed residential areas.

4. The United States will end up with less influence in Sadr City, not more.

Why is the United States returning to the utterly stupid strategies of 2004, rather than the somewhat successful reasonably pragmatic ones of 2007?

For one, the strategy of creating your own militia to spark infighting among your enemies, which worked brilliantly in Anbar (largely because of the senseless savagery of AQI) and to some extent in the south (where the Awakening Councils consist of Shi’a tribesmen being rallied against the Sadrists) was out of the question in Sadr City.

For another, deaths from mortar fire in the Green Zone have symbolic significance – and also, guess where U.S. bigwigs spend their time.

More important, though, I think it is the natural hubris of the military mindset, especially when it’s a matter of Western neocolonials subduing the natives. If defeat is necessary for them to learn, by the same token victory causes them to unlearn: they decided, in the face of all the facts, that they could take Sadr out with a “knockout punch.”

The relative calm of late 2007 was likely as much of an anomaly as extreme violence of late 2006. Although there are questions about who should gain the credit for the drop in violence, it’s pretty clear who is responsible for the new upsurge: the United States.

Posted at 10:40 am

April 28, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Blame the Wogs

In a country apparently torn apart by recriminations over the Iraq war, it’s heartening that there is at least one thing we can all apparently agree upon: blame the wogs.

Unless you count well-fed suburbanites hoarding rice from Sam’s Club and Costco while the world is starving, there is scarcely a phenomenon more contemptible than the ridiculous ease with which Americans of all stripes blame the Iraqis for the troubles that we brought upon them.

These sentiments are expressed by the truly despicable, like Clintonista Rahm Emanuel, who had the gall, while calling for the Iraqi government to shoulder more of the financial burden of the counterinsurgency, to say, "We've put about $45 billion into Iraq's reconstruction . . . and they have not spent their own resources...They have got to have some skin in the game."

Leave to one side the fact that the United States only started serious spending on reconstruction when it became a matter of counterinsurgency, rather than simple humanitarianism, the fact that morally the United States owes Iraq far more, and the fact that one reason the Iraqi government doesn’t spend more of its own budget is that the war and occupation destroyed Iraq’s state capacity and it has not regenerated since, thus making it physically impossible to spend the bulk of its current windfall oil revenues in a socially useful way.

What kind of moral cretinism is required to suggest that the Iraqis, who have lost maybe 300,000, maybe 1.2 million, had 2 million flee the country and many more internally displaced, seen their social fabric wrecked and their food rations cut, to the point that there is scarcely a single family in the country that has not seen tragedy, need to have “some skin in the game?”

It is a cretinism shared almost equally by some of the best and the worst in our society.

In Barack Obama’s Sunday interview with the odious Chris Wallace, when Wallace idiotically hectored him to say that as president he would give up his political decisionmaking power to the generals on the ground in Iraq, Obama correctly refused to make any such absurd commitment, but he did it thus: “what I will not do is continue to let the Iraqi government off the hook and allow them to put our foreign policy on ice while they dither about making decisions about how they are going to cooperate with each other.”

Patrick Murphy, the only Iraq veteran in Congress, said on the Colbert Report, “Stephen, the troops are heroes; they're doin' a great job, but it's the Iraqis that aren't working.”

Jon Stewart, who to his credit is one of the few public figures to have resisted this trend, most notably with a segment a couple of years ago called “Theya Culpa,” recently picked on a different set of Wogs. When Aram Roston was on the show, talking about his new biography of Ahmed Chalabi, Stewart tried to suggest that Iran wanted the war, so it fed Dick Cheney incorrect information through Chalabi, thus trapping poor America into a war it didn’t want.

Oddly, it is right-wing ideologues – not the racist Limbaugh types but some of the true-believer supporters of the surge -- who are the best on this, just as it is right-wingers who say that Arabs are ready for democracy and “liberals” who say they aren’t. Of course, the right-wing masses are the ones who blame Iraq for 9/11 and whose motto is “Exterminate the brutes!,” so the difference is just on the surface.

It is true that Iraqis bear some of the blame for the violence and chaos their country descended into – even though the overwhelming majority didn’t ask for this war. But it is truly disgusting to see comfortable people who haven’t the faintest idea of how to try to reconstruct a society that has been wrecked, to contend with the invasion of foreign extremists, to deal with a military occupation, and to do it all in a country already severely weakened and strained by three decades of totalitarian dictatorship and two of war and sanctions tut-tut over the Iraqis’ inability to turn things around.

Five years into a war that is by some indices the least popular in American history (a recent Gallup poll showing 63% who thought the war was a mistake topped the all-time high for the Vietnam War of 61%), the country is still resolutely endeavoring to learn nothing from this war. What better way than to blame the victims for the destruction visited on them?

Posted at 10:17 am

April 21, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Capitalism and the Global Food Crisis

In Haiti, the poor are eating mud pies, concoctions of mud, oil, and sugar, the only way some of them can now afford to deal with what they call “Clorox hunger,” a feeling of starvation so intense it makes you feel as if your innards are being eaten away by bleach. Across the world, from Haiti to Cameroon to Egypt to Bangladesh to Indonesia, rising grain prices have sparked food riots and social unrest.

In the past year, the price of wheat rose 150%, before retreating somewhat in the past few months so that it’s only up 80%; the price of corn rose 50%. Most remarkably, the price of rice has risen 141% since January.

Reportage and commentary has identified the factors going into this catastrophic price rise: a drought in Australia, the rising price of oil, growing demand for meat in India and China, and the sudden craze for biofuels.

For the most part, they have neglected to identify the underlying enabling factor – capitalism.

It is the genius of capitalism to take a good idea – use plants’ ability to fix solar power in order to create fuel that can replace the dwindling reserves of oil – and twist and torture it until it leads to crisis. Although, to be fair, some credit must also be given to the freakish inertia of the American political system and the massive stupidity it helps to produce in politicians and legislators.

First, capitalism requires that biofuel profit somebody, or it won’t be produced. Second, the combination of capitalism and the corrupt interest-driven politics of American agriculture dictate that those profited be a politically important constituency. The combination of the disproportionate importance of the Iowa caucus and the stranglehold that agrobusiness has over domestic policy formation on agriculture has led to the United States coming up with the most insane possible approach to biofuels – price supports for corn, the growing of which in this country involves massive use of oil directly and of petrochemical fertilizers. With easy profits to hand, corporations maximize production instead of minimizing waste, so that we end up paying subsidies to corporations to use up more oil.

At this point, one quarter of corn production in the United States goes to biofuel. Consider now the effects on the rest of the world. The United States has labored, especially in the last few decades, to create a world market in everything. NAFTA, which had nothing whatsoever to do with deindustrialization in Ohio, has eviscerated Mexican corn production and made the country dependent on imports of previously cheap American corn. Now, however, the Mexican consumer has to compete for that corn with oil companies that are effectively government-subsidized; it’s no surprise who wins.

Haiti, similarly, used to produce its own rice, but the structural adjustment imposed on it in the mid-1990’s by the United States as a condition for allowing Aristide to return and for an end to the military reign of terror, made it a significant consumer of U.S. agrobusiness rice. Biofuel subsidies create incentives to produce corn instead of rice or wheat; this helps drive up the price of rice and wheat.

Finally, consider this: the market processes of setting a price where supply equals demand don’t have to be linear. If overall grain supply for food decreases by 10%, that doesn’t mean the price goes up by 10%. Depending on the shape of the demand curve, it could change by any amount. In a market made extremely tight by the various factors cited above, a small push from the change in biofuels policy created massive price rises, further helped along by speculation, just like tech stocks in the late 90’s or tulips in 17th-century Holland – just, this time, those speculators are literally feeding off of corpses.

Third World countries have finally responded, with price supports and bans on export of foodgrains. The World Food Program wants $500 million to deal with the immediate crisis. As of last week, though, its emergency appeal for $96 million for Haiti had netted only about $12 million. And do remember, when you see U.S. food aid reported, that 65% of that money is overhead and transportation costs, because of the corrupt, interest-driven requirement that food aid be produced in the United States; it’s a solution that’s part of the problem.

This crisis is undoubtedly a harbinger of worse to come if we don’t make systemic change; we may yet look back on the creation of a world market for food as among the most calamitous consequences of a century that saw more violence than any in world history.

Posted at 10:18 am.

April 14, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- No More Magic Obama

Hillary Clinton has finally done it. She has dragged Barack Obama into the mud and made sure that at least some of it will stick to him.

The shine is off Obama’s candidacy. He’s not magic anymore. Even if he becomes president, as still seems quite likely, he may never regain that remarkable ability somehow to bring out the better angels of human nature even from those who you would have sworn had bludgeoned said angels to death years ago.

Even though our politics differ greatly, I must say that I regret this. Yes, there were times it was annoying to watch him floating always a few inches above the ground, the living embodiment of the painless, effortless catharsis that so many white liberals wanted. But he frequently went beyond this to deliver actual insight.

After Obama’s remarkable speech, which did more to clear the air on race than any speech I’ve heard in decades, I said to myself, “It’s not just that he’s electable where people more openly to the left are not. There are some ways in which he’s better for the country.” Amazingly, the speech had plenty for you and me and simultaneously was, except for the right wing, universally praised in the media. This, even though he effectively equated black anger over racism with white working class anger over loss of economic stability; though any pollster could have told him this would anger whites, he stuck to it and it worked.

Time and again, Obama has created trouble for himself by acting like a thinking human being, rather than mindlessly parroting his talking points like politicians are supposed to do, yet the trouble has never stuck. Witness his unguarded remarks about Ronald Reagan, which provided such easy fodder for Clinton’s patented “misrepresent, oversimplify to roughly kindergarten level, attack” schema.

This time is different. He may well weather the damage he has done himself, but it will be in the politicians’ traditional way of moving on and hoping people forget.

One difference is that, unlike the remarks about Reagan, this time there is no deep insight or important analysis in his remarks. His remarks, about the working-class whites he is having trouble appealing to, “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. … And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” are true, but are a staple of economic populists like Thomas Frank or Jim Hightower, or, even, once upon a time, Bill Clinton.

More important, they’re just a half-truth. This is not for the utterly stupid reasons that Clinton and many mainstream media commentators have brought up – for example, that people just like to hunt. Obama wasn’t talking about why they have guns but why they cling to guns as a litmus-test political issue, even though nobody has ever tried to take away their hunting rifles. Mentioning religion was a misstep – although it is always the “heart of a heartless world,” it is too broad for his analysis. For the rest, he was spot-on in identifying the complex of beliefs that go together and in suggesting that those beliefs come to the fore and become dramatically more virulent because of the deindustrialization of the heartland.

But he, along with Frank and Hightower and the rest, are wrong to suggest that the one causes the other. No, the “antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment” is a form of white identity politics and cannot be attacked simply by suggesting that you will go to Washington and fight the corporations. It thrives on economically driven resentment, but its roots are far deeper and go to the heart of people’s self-image; part of the reason many of the targets of this analysis rightly feel that it is condescending is that they know these ideas go deeper in them. Of course, even the old magic Obama could not have accomplished the miracle of going further on white identity politics than the few oblique remarks in his race speech and surviving politically.

Fortunately for him, Hillary Clinton’s maladroitness in telling a bunch of bitter people to wear smiley-face buttons she’s handing out may leave this one a wash; in the future, we will see a much more careful Obama. The nation’s political dialogue will be the poorer for it.

Posted at 10:49 am.

April 7, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Reflections on the "Surge"

The “surge” was always a strange animal, neither fish nor fowl. Predicated on the axioms of counterinsurgency theory, which stresses the need to spend years and to expend effort to keep pacified the areas you have just pacified, it promised massive results in “six to nine months” or perhaps a year and a half at most, results which would somehow remain even when the surge was over. Sold as “creating space” for Iraqi political reconciliation by decreasing violence, it for the first time made the U.S. military a necessary part of Iraq’s political infrastructure, thus obviating any incentive for Iraqis to deal with each other rather than try to manipulate the Americans for their own benefit – an effect exacerbated by the fact that key elements of the new strategy involved taking sides in Iraqi internal politics in a more open, aggressive and sustained manner than before.

The United States has managed, in a bizarre sort of alchemy, to transmute the Shi’a-Sunni conflict into, at least in part, a Shi’a-Shi’a conflict and a Sunni-Sunni conflict – and, most crucial for the American political scene, to transmute the anti-occupation insurgency largely into a pro-American anti-Shi’ite militia.

In part, these “successes,” if you wish to characterize them that way, are the product of prior failures. It was the widespread breakdown in security, starting not with the Samarra mosque bombing in February 2006 but actually perhaps a year earlier, that led to the unnamed Battle of Baghdad, waged with white-hot intensity from 2006 through mid-2007. According to congressional testimony from Stephen Biddle, perhaps the most astute analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Sunnis conclusively lost that battle. It was the first time the Sunni have lost a military engagement with the Shi’a and served as a wakeup call to many Sunnis who foolishly and arrogantly believed that a U.S. withdrawal would mean their certain victory over the Shi’a in the internecine clashes to follow. This, combined with the increasingly oppressive actions of al Qaeda in Iraq, which showed itself unable to protect the Sunnis from the Shi’a, led to an allegiance shift of the Sunnis, as soon as the United States showed that it was ready to be a credible player in Iraqi internal politics.

Simultaneously, the widespread fighting and ethnic cleansing, which went along, as it always does, with increasing access to resources from extortion and smuggling, served to further disorganize the already ragtag Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr. Local commanders popped up who ruled their areas with relative autonomy; no longer dependent on the centralized Sadrist collection of tithes, they could also get away with doing as they pleased.

According to recent congressional testimony of Nir Rosen, the best and at time only non-Iraqi fully unembedded investigative reporter in Iraq, it was partly to deal with this increasing fractionation and factionalization that Sadr called for a freeze on violent activities; the other reason was presumably fear that the heightened U.S. presence in Baghdad would lead to more open clashes with U.S. troops, something the Sadrists are poorly equipped to withstand. Sadr called that freeze in August 2007, the same month that the surge went from being a failure to being a success.

Perhaps the only unambiguous success of the surge strategy has been essentially forcing AQI out of al-Anbar province, although Anbar’s good news has been bad news for Nineveh province and its capital of Mosul. Even here, it is a success enabled only by the phenomenal failure that led to AQI’s incredibly high level of control in Anbar in 2006, something not at all to be expected for a group whose ideologies and ways of acting were so foreign to the populace.

Iraq has come back somewhat from its nadir of violence and there is reason to hope, even with the recent highly destructive assault on the Sadrists which may have claimed 700 lives, that it will not slip back to that level again. But it is worth understanding what U.S. procedures have been involved in that process and what alternatives that might have been as effective have been foreclosed.

In particular, without the United States pushing him hard, it’s difficult to imagine that Maliki would present the Sadrists with the absurd Hobson’s choice of disarming – and thus possibly being decimated and certainly losing their electoral base – or being excluded from the elections. It is not simply that the surge has failed to create political reconciliation; it has in fact set the stage for a whole new series of political conflicts.

Posted at 10:44 am.

March 31, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- The Battle of Basra

It seems as if the fighting in Basra – and in Nasiriyyah and in numerous neighborhoods of Baghdad – is winding down, after claiming over 350 lives. It remains to be seen whether this violence will impact the much-quotes “success of the surge,” the dominant storyline in the U.S. media even though it was outdated even before the latest round of clashes.

The past week should remind us that one of the main elements of the “success of the surge” was actually Moqtada al-Sadr’s decision to order his Jaish al-Mehdi to stand down; no doubt, this was partly out of fear of the U.S. military and its heightened presence in Baghdad, but it was a responsible action nonetheless. Unfortunately, Sadr’s reward for his restraint was to be targeted in an attempt to rout his forces out of some of their strongholds in Basra.

The consensus among media reports seems to be that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is behind the assault, a claim that is questionable at best. Reports have also tended to indicate that the offensive involving 30,000 members of the Iraqi security forces was targeted at all “militias” in Basra, but this is nonsensical to say the least: as an anonymous British military official quoted in the Times by James Glanz says, 16,000 of those members were from the Basra police, “which have long been suspected of being infiltrated by the same militias the assault was intended to root out.”

The fact that the Badr militia is the militia associated with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which is the dominant party in the Iraqi government, still seems difficult for many to internalize, as is the fact that organizations rarely order assaults on themselves.

So this was unquestionably an assault on the Sadr militias alone, and it clearly grows out of the fact, an open secret, that the British presence in Iraq is at this point just for show. The 4000 remaining troops, camped out near Basra airport, have not been withdrawn because Gordon Brown doesn’t want to embarrass the Americans, but Basra itself had been abandoned to a three-way fight between the Badr, Sadr, and Fadila militias, a fight that has much to do with organized crime and control of oil-smuggling revenues.

The other major antecedent to the conflict, as far as I can tell, is a sense of triumphalism in the Bush administration, General Petraeus, and diverse other sectors of the military, combined with an urgency to carry out major operations while troop levels in Iraq are still elevated.

Though the assault is portrayed as a decision by al-Maliki, into which the United States was dragged because of its overt commitment to the Iraqi government, I can’t imagine why. Many seem to have forgotten that Maliki, like Ibrahim Jaafari before him, owes his position to Sadr. The United States backed Adel Abdel Mahdi in both cases, and was forced to come to a compromise when it was clear that it could not strongarm enough Parliament members to get its way.

Of course, gratitude in a civil war is generally short-lived, but it’s hard to see why Maliki, a member of the Dawa Party, would feel that he has a dog in this fight.

On the other hand, the United States military has in the past few months upped the intensity in its attempt to clear Mosul of al-Qaeda in Iraq and presumably other insurgent groups, and, despite the talk about counterinsurgency and how it usually takes a decade, seems to think it can clear much of Iraq of its enemies very quickly. Furthermore, there has been a clear change in the U.S. willingness to coerce the Iraqi government; indeed, after their new alliance with Sunni insurgents and Saddam-era Ba’athist tortures (like Colonel Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, the current police chief of Fallujah), many Americans are actively hostile toward the government.

The untold story of the surge is the evolution of the Americans into a major player in the internal politics of Iraq. Early on, they had a huge impact on daily life, but largely remained above the fray; now, they’re right in the middle, making deals, creating some alliances, destroying others, deciding which groups to strengthen and which to weaken. This is an essential part of counterinsurgency and is a feature, not a bug, of the new strategy. Unfortunately for Iraqis, it means not only more distortion of their politics, but more of a reason for the major Iraqi players not to reach a modus vivendi that could lead to a stable peace.

Posted at 10:29 am

March 24, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

Despite the gusher of coverage regarding various sermons by Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor, little serious attention has been given to Wright’s actual claims. Defenders of Obama find them uncomfortable and want them to go away, and opponents dismiss them as bigotry, crackpottery, and America-hating.

Some of them indeed are crackpottery. The idea that AIDS was developed by whites as an instrument of genocide against blacks is idiotic. While African-Americans retain a healthy skepticism against the government, in an unfortunately large portion this skepticism has crossed the line into paranoia.

The part of Wright’s sermon that got the most attention, however, is undoubtedly where he mentions Hiroshima and Nagasaki and various other crimes of the United States and says that the 9/11 attacks were simply “chickens coming home to roost,” and calls for God to damn America.

Now, I don’t think it’s a good idea to call for God to damn anyone or anything, so let’s leave that part aside. For the rest, though, this remains the issue of all issues on which it is impossible to have a rational discussion in this country.

But let’s attempt one anyway.

Let us act for a moment as if the United States belongs to the universe and is a subject of the same sorts of causal processes that apply to the rest of said universe.

Well, then, I don’t think there is any serious causal link between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing or numerous other atrocities committed by the United States and the 9/11 attacks. It is true that, at least early on, al-Qaeda recruiting videos mentioned Hiroshima and Nagasaki among their list of U.S. crimes, but this is not a serious part of anyone’s motivations.

On the other hand, it is undoubtedly true that U.S. support for the Israeli occupation has created tremendous resentment and hostility against the United States; among Arabs, the occupation itself has led countless people to join armed resistance organizations, commit or support acts of terrorism, etc. Starting in the 1980’s but really accelerating in the 1990’s, especially with the manifest iniquities of the Oslo process, many Arabs started translating the hostility toward Israel to hostility toward the United States. As you can see from Marc Lynch’s excellent book, Voices of the New Arab Public, by the late 1990’s the sanctions on Iraq were another source of said hostility. Bin Laden was one of the earliest leaders to try to use that to recruit people for war on the United States.

Most important, the United States’ heartless and cynical manipulations in Afghanistan , in which 1.5 million Afghans died as a casual byblow of an attempt to “kill Russians” and bleed the Soviet Union for free, of course lead to 9/11. That anyone can think otherwise about an enterprise that caused the creation of al-Qaeda (which originated as a database set up to organize information about the huge stream of Islamic extremists sent with the aid of the Saudi government to fight in Afghanistan) is just ridiculous.

Now, people’s revulsion toward this analysis is not based on factual claims, but rather on the emotive content of the words. Call it “blowback” and nobody with any sense will disagree or be offended; call it “chickens coming home to roost,” which means exactly the same thing, and everyone will be up in arms.

The real thing that bothers people about these arguments is a perception that someone is claiming that the horror of 9/11 was deserved. Lincoln could say in his Second Inaugural that the far greater horrors of the Civil War were deserved because of the sin of “the bondman’s 250 years of unrequited toil” and people bought copies of the speech by the million and passed them around.

Although that is the greatest speech given by any American president, such views don’t really make sense absent some sort of religious framework; no one who is not religious could argue that those 3000 people should have died for the nation’s sins.

The real point of the moral part of this argument should be simply to make people understand that 9/11 was not some transcendent evil to which normal rules of analysis and logic or normal rules of reasonable response don’t apply; after all, we have done worse to others, often without their doing anything in response because it wouldn’t have been rational for them to do so. This ought to imply in turn that there are various things we shouldn’t do in response because they wouldn’t be rational (before one even gets to moral arguments).

It’s a real shame that the country still isn’t ready to understand these elementary points; if it did, perhaps there would be more attention paid to the steadily worsening situation in Afghanistan.

Update: After a member of the United Church of Christ wrote to me, I realized that the way this article is written gives a misimpression about what I'm saying. To begin with, the article's not really about Wright. Although his remarks are the "hook," what was mostly in my mind was the mainstream criticism of various remarks and imagined remarks by secular leftists after 9/11. In particular, the analysis of the "chickens coming home to roost" claim is not meant to suggest anything about what Wright was actually thinking when he said it, simply to analyze the claim in general.

Furthermore, at the end when I say only a religious person could conceivably claim that the 3000 dead (actually slightly less) of 9/11 were appropriate sacrifices, I had long forgotten Wright. If you read the transcript of his post-9/11 speech (which, by the way, does not include the "God Damn America" part -- that's a more recent speech), you can see that he does not make this claim directly or indirectly. In using the word "religious," I was thinking of Lincoln, who does make the claim explicitly -- and you can, of course, add in people like Jerry Falwell and many tinpot pastors further to the right than him, who again made the claim, not regarding U.S. crimes abroad but because of "sins" like tolerating homosexuals.

This is not to defend Wright, since I think some of the things he said are not defensible, but just to correct any misimpression about his statements I may have made. Of course, comparing him, as some moderates like to do, with people like John Hagee is ridiculous. I don't suppose Wright would ever say that it is the Jews' disobedience to God that caused the pogroms, the oppression, the Holocaust, etc., which is standard fare for Hagee's ilk.

I do urge people who are interested to actually read the transcript I linked to; you will certainly find that, along with an occasional statement that is objectionable or whose tone is questionable, analysis similar to that made by many secular left intellectuals after 9/11 and an admirable call for restraint and peace, and for self-examination before worrying about the beam in your brother's eye.Posted at 3:23 pm.

March 17, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Nothing Ever Happens in Macondo

A lot can happen in five years. Children who were in 7th or 8th grade during the invasion of Iraq are now deciding whether or not to enlist and be sent to Iraq to kill or die.

Iraq itself has been changed beyond recognition, irrevocably altered. Depending on which study you believe, 400,000 to 1.3 million have died of violence, perhaps 25% of them at the hands of American soldiers. Over 4 million have lost their homes, half of them now refugees in foreign lands. The middle class is eviscerated and, given the collapse of the educational system, is not likely to recover in a generation even if peace is restored. So quickly have events accelerated that there are now stories that a new generation, having seen the results of the nation’s descent into religious insanity, is growing up with an attitude of cynical contempt for clerics and anyone who invokes Islam to tell them what to do.

And yet here in Macondo, nothing has happened and nothing will ever happen.

According to the Pew Center’s latest “News IQ” poll, only 28% of those surveyed could tell within a thousand how many American soldiers had died in Iraq – the one thing about the Iraq war that a (slim) majority of the American public used to have a handle on. Unsurprisingly, this decline in the most basic of knowledge tracks a virtual cessation of news coverage in Iraq; from an average of 20% of the news in the first half of 2007 and 15% over last summer, it is now 3% -- and likely to stay that way at least until after the election.

Iraq is already receding into the hazy glow of memory, like Vietnam, Korea, the War of 1812. And, even though this is a remarkably screwed-up attitude toward a war that is still raging, with levels of violence still roughly half what they were at the nadir of 2006, this wouldn’t even bother me that much, if only …

If only we had learned something from the war. Not about the difference between Sunni and Shi’a, not about the volatility and susceptibility to fanaticism of the Middle East, but about a heart of darkness closer to home.

It is true, of course, that some people have learned some things. Peter Beinart, who got a $600,000 book contract on the basis of an article claiming that the Democrats had lost the 2004 election because they were too pacifistic – after the most militaristic campaign by a Democrat in recent memory – ended up writing a mealymouthed book that opposed the Iraq war and suggested that America lead by moral example, like Truman did (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the brutal counterinsurgency in Greece, the Korean War). Insane triumphalist hawks have become moderate cautious hawks.

But if you want to understand just how little we have learned overall – not individuals, but the people who craft the narratives that end up dragging all of us into them – check out the New York Times’ Sunday March 16 retrospective on the Iraq invasion. It reads like a self-parody – L. Paul Bremer, Richard Perle; Danielle Pletka and Frederick Kagan, neoconservatives with the American Enterprise Institute; Kenneth Pollack, whose book “The Threatening Storm” was mailed by the State Department to liberal intellectuals and opinion-makers all over the country to convince them of the case for war; two retired generals, a Marine lieutenant, Anthony Cordesman, long-time hawkish military consultant for network TV turned national-security-based critic of the war, and the centrist dean of the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton.

Not only do Iraqis not exist for the New York Times, neither do real critics of the war and America’s role in the world.

But if you want to learn powerful lessons like good intentions are not enough or Arabs are too crazy for democracy, that’s the place for you.

The Vietnam War caused a moral crisis for a large number of Americans; the Iraq War has created a moral smugness that the rest of us are not George Bush and Dick Cheney. The Vietnam War created a revulsion against the status quo of U.S. foreign policy and even, for some, against the internal operation of U.S. society; the Iraq War has created a fervent appreciation of the status quo, symbolized in the newfound appreciation for Bush the Elder, one of the most immoral and cynical presidents we’ve ever had. The Vietnam War delegitimized the military as an institution and drew massive criticism of the military-industrial complex; the Iraq War has led to an almost unprecedented valorization of the military and no attention to the military-industrial complex even as the military budget has metastasized.

It’s not that we’ve learned nothing; I predict that for some years to come there will be no new military adventurism, unless you count the American escalation in Afghanistan and its spillover to Pakistan. But what an opportunity we’ve blown – as a nation – to have Iraq be, like the Winter Soldiers wanted Vietnam to be, the place where America turned.

Posted at 10:32 am.

March 10, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- What the Left Should Demand from Nader

Last week, I mentioned that I’m not exactly excited about the return of Ralph Nader and suggested that this time around he would have to recognize that, just like the Democratic candidate, he will have to earn the votes of the left.

I don’t know that there’s anything he could do at this point to win my support, but there are some minimum requirements.

I should start by saying that I think it’s fatuous to say that you should just vote for the candidate whose views most closely reflect your own. If so, you could just write in yourself or your dog. If you admit that the candidate should be on the ballot, you have already allowed the intrusion of crass concerns about political efficacy.

Many on the left went further and voted for Nader in 2000 rather than for David McReynolds even though they knew Nader wasn’t exactly a leftist.

They were right to do so; Nader’s campaign was building the Green Party at a tremendous rate, his super-rallies were bringing in thousands of disaffected people at every stop he made, and he was garnering serious attention by virtue of his 30 years’ worth of political capital. There was a prospect of building a much wider organizational base for the left and of getting federal funding for the Green Party.

Things are very different now. Nader is not running as a Green and he will be doing well to have hundreds come to his rallies.

More important for the left, between 2000 and now there was the 2004 campaign, which saw the most serious infighting on the left since the Vietnam era. Greens split, the Party completely lost its organizational momentum and became a shell of its former self, and the left as a whole was ripped apart.

Nader is as responsible as anyone for this. He decided that he couldn’t be beholden to the Green Party and couldn’t subject himself to democratic accountability – even though he would have won the nomination in a walk. Instead, he decided not to run for the nomination, but instead maneuver the Greens into not nominating anyone and then endorsing him as an independent. This strategy, combined with the generally autocratic nature of his organization even in 2000, which routinely refused to share decision-making and resources with the grassroots activists who organized his super-rallies, led some Greens to resist his coronation.

This is true no matter what you think of David Cobb and the Greens who supported him. I have no interest in descending into the ugliness of 2004 to figure out in detail how to apportion blame; I’m just saying there is plenty for Nader to share.

I even understand why Nader didn’t want to be subject to Green Party discipline; in many areas, the Greens were pretty dysfunctional. Nevertheless, his actions helped destroy the Greens without putting anything else in their place and he is responsible for his actions.

So if you’re a leftist the first thing you should demand from Nader in return for supporting him is an admission of responsibility and even an apology – or at the least, some overt sign that he feels accountable to you. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it, though.

The second thing you should demand is some recognition of the challenges that confront him and that he has a plan to accomplish something by running. His pathetic insistence on invoking his civil rights when asked about questions like this instills no confidence that he is politically savvy enough to be worth supporting.

What will he try to do to detoxify his image so that he doesn’t actually taint issues like Iraq withdrawal or the siege of Gaza by association? Is he going to put any issues, but especially Iraq, in a way that helps galvanize public opinion to break the current logjam? What’s he going to build; we know it’s not the Green Party, whose nomination he isn’t seeking? What does he plan to do about his pathetic fundraising last time? Why should we think that this isn’t just the campaign of a cantankerous old man who bears a grudge against the Democrats for their constant scurrilous attempts in 2004 to keep him off various state ballots – he even gave this as a primary reason for running when he talked to Tim Russert.

These aren’t illegitimate questions that show your subservience to the two-party system, although Nader will undoubtedly tell you they are if you get to ask them; they’re just a pretty mild version of the questions any presidential candidate should have to answer.

Posted at 10:26 am

March 3, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Return of the Nader

The military budget has become bloated beyond belief – over $700 billion annually – and the only thing mainstream presidential candidates will say is that they want to increase the size of the army, which would, presumably, increase it yet further. Southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan are going the way of Iraq, but the only solution on offer is to do more of the things that failed so spectacularly in Iraq – i.e., sending more troops to conduct search-and-destroy missions. Gaza is being crushed and, other than a few U.N. officials, no one is making a peep about it.

You’d think, with all of this (and more), I would be ecstatic to see Ralph Nader, who directly addressed points 1 and 3 on Meet the Press last week and is probably down with 2 (though you couldn’t tell it from his phenomenally exiguous website) throw his hat into the ring one more time.

That is not, to put it mildly, exactly the emotion I felt at the time.

I will give him credit for one thing: picking Matt Gonzalez, the most dynamic and successful Green politician in the country, as his running mate. Gonzalez is young, personable, and in touch, and, as far as I could tell from an evening of hanging out with him a number of years ago, not afflicted with a terminal sense of his own rectitude – in other words, as personally different from Nader as possible. It was exciting to see him almost win the mayorship of San Francisco in 2004, with 47% of the vote (of course, in the Bay Area, it is the Republicans who are the potential spoiler party).

But that’s almost the only thing that’s good that I can think of to say. The most obvious first reaction at this point, of course, is who cares? Nobody is listening to Nader any more and nobody is voting for him. In 2004, Nader got 465,000 votes -- .38% of the total. The Libertarian Michael Badnarik, who nobody had ever heard of or will ever hear of again, got .32 %. It is odd, indeed, to see Nader justify his candidacy, as he effectively did on Meet the Press, by suggesting that he will get so few votes that he couldn’t possibly spoil the Democrats’ chances.

Nader is right in that, but he is wrong to be so sanguine about the Democrats’ chance for a landslide. First, there are no more landslides in presidential elections. When Bush won in 2004, it was the first time the winner got over 50% of the popular vote since 1988. Second, if, as seems likely, Barack Obama is the candidate, the nasty innuendo and racial smears we’ve seen from the Clinton campaign will seem like a children’s game compared to what the Republicans do. Anything can happen and Obama and his supporters will have to fight tooth and nail for the victory.

One possible second reaction is, well, he’s unlikely to spoil, so it will be good to have someone bringing up these difficult issues and maybe even helping Obama to look more centrist. I wish I believed that. In truth, I think that, given the way Nader is perceived in the country now, his association with those issues will work negatively.

At long last, serious critiques of U.S. foreign policy and its role in the Middle East are on the table for members of the mainstream – liberals, moderates, old-style conservatives, realists, pretty much everyone but the neoconservatives. And even on the issues I started with there is more space within the mainstream for critique than ever before.

For various reasons, none of the possibilities inherent in these critiques has come to fruition. And, frankly, the antiwar left has neither done very much to extend and develop these critiques or to position itself to affect the underlying issues. Nader will just help these views to look more marginal than they really are, in addition to making them take on the burden of the liberals’ vituperative hatred for him.

None of this is said to suggest Nader shouldn’t run. He has obtusely staked his justification for running on his basic civil and political rights and on those grounds no one should deny him – especially Democrats worried about him getting ballot access and media gatekeepers worried about heretical views being expressed in debates.

But, just as Nader points out that nobody – Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore – should feel automatically entitled to someone’s vote, Nader needs to realize that this applies to him as well. More on that later.

Posted at 10:25 am.

February 27, 2008

The Good Die Young

William F. Buckley, dead at 82.

February 25, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Good News from Pakistan

There is genuinely good news from Pakistan, where the latest election results herald actual hope for the future, if ham-handed U.S. intervention doesn’t ruin things yet again.

The only negative thing about the elections, held last week, was the low turnout; fears of indiscriminate terror attacks like those that have plagued Pakistan in the past year kept voter participation down below 45%.

The fact that Musharraf, beleaguered at home and abroad, with his power base dwindling to nothing, was forced to allow at least moderately clean elections (unlike those of 2002), was a very positive sign.

So too were the results, in which the voters sent two messages very clearly: a complete rejection of Musharraf’s dictatorship and a complete rejection of the extremist Islamist parties.

The party that Musharraf essentially formed around himself to legitimize his rule, the PML-Q (Pakistan Muslim League – Qaid-i-Azam), won only 42 of 272 seats in the National Assembly up for grabs in the general election, down from 118 seats in 2002. Both the Pakistan People’s Party of Benazir Bhutto and the PML-N of Nawaz Sharif did better, and the two together will form a coalition government.

The Islamist coalition, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, was even harder hit. Never a major force in national electoral politics before the American was in Afghanistan and the 2002 elections, they have returned to their previous insignificance, with only 6 seats in the National Assembly, down from 59 previously. In 2002, they also took over the Provincial Assembly of the Northwest Frontier Province, the part of Pakistan that abuts Afghanistan and where much of the resurgent al-Qaeda/Taliban activity is based; this time, they were blown out and lost control to the secular nationalist Awami National League.

Musharraf’s tremendous and rapid loss of public support as he tried to gut Pakistan’s judiciary and generally increased his dictatorial power – and as Pakistan has suffered a short-term economic crisis, with the price of staple items like wheat flour doubling and major shortages of electricity and gas – is a well-known and much-reported story.

Much less noted has been the massive delegitimization of jihadi terrorist groups and the political parties that have been loosely affiliated with them either directly or in public perception. According to a poll by the unfortunately named Terror Free Tomorrow, while in August 70% of the population of the Northwest Frontier Province had a favorable opinion of Osama bin Laden, today only 4% do. It’s important, by the way, to interpret these numbers with caution – for example, they don’t mean that 70% supported the 9/11 attacks, since most people favorable to bin Laden think he is a good Muslim unjustly accused of such acts.

I think the reasons are clear; growing discomfort with the increasing control being exercised by jihadi groups in that area, coupled with revulsion against the incomprehensible indiscriminate mass violence of the recent high-fatality suicide bombings. In Saudi Arabia, support for bin Laden plummeted in 2003 when al-Qaeda was involved in similarly incomprehensible attacks against Saudis.

The biggest unknowns now for Pakistan are whether or in what manner Musharraf will step down; how much free rein the military, which largely controls the state, will allow to the civilian government; and whether the United States will manage to screw up the progress made in the NWFP by insisting on a belligerent military posture.

While right now the public of the NWFP is angry at people blowing them up for no reason, that can shift in a heartbeat if they once again see the jihadis as defending them from unreasonable attacks and intrusions by the Pakistani military.

Although it’s hard to figure out what exactly is the best strategy against these jihadi groups, one thing seems clear: literally doing nothing would be far more effective than the kind of ramping up of military violence that is seemingly wanted across the U.S. political spectrum, from Barack Obama to George Bush.

If Americans can just stop seeing Pakistan as merely a battleground in their latest moral crusade, as they have for at least 25 years (and arguably since 1947), if they can just keep their hands off for a while, the Pakistanis have the chance to reclaim their democracy and bring the country back from the brink of the violent chaos that has gripped Iraq and to some extent Afghanistan. That is an eventuality worth far more – not just to them but even to any sane vision of U.S. interests in the region – than a marginal increase in the probability of catching or killing Osama bin Laden.

Posted at 10:22 am.

February 18, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Afghanistan's "War of Necessity"

In the last two days, about 120 people were killed in twin suicide bombings in Afghanistan. Last year, the country saw 140 suicide bombings, a number that, were it not for Iraq, would be utterly unprecedented in world history.

Simultaneously, the New York Times, never at a loss to regurgitate – or to create – conventional wisdom, published an editorial about Afghanistan that would be remarkable for its obtuseness, were that obtuseness not so commonplace.

Hectoring the south and central Europeans for their relative unwillingness to fight, the Times’ main point was that the Iraq war was making success in Afghanistan unlikely or impossible. The money quote: “Nearly everything about President Bush’s botched war of choice in Iraq has made it much harder to win Afghanistan’s war of necessity.”

The sages at the Times made no effort to explain why it is more “necessary” to combat Pashtun irredentism in southern Afghanistan than it was for the past few years to combat Sunni irredentism in western Iraq; apparently the necessity is grandfathered in because “it is a war that began in response to a terrorist attack on the United States” and, somehow, because it is “fully backed by international law, the United Nations and is a solemn legal commitment of NATO.”

I don’t know that the average Afghan villager cares much for the “legal commitments” of NATO or thinks that NATO’s rules are somehow laws for Afghanistan, but then maybe the Times knows much more about these things than the rest of us.

Somehow, the self-righteous fervor that gripped the United States after the 9/11 attack still precludes rational assessment of the occupation of Afghanistan.

Whether or not you opposed the initial attack – along with others, I opposed it for reasons that, unfortunately, have been copiously borne out – there’s no reason you shouldn’t try to understand what’s going on now and what should be done. After all, if we get all of our arguments about withdrawal from Iraq from people who supported the war (who are naturally much more “credible” than the rest of us), why shouldn’t we hear some contradiction of the conventional wisdom on Afghanistan from people who were intoxicated by it in the past?

I’m not saying Afghanistan is the same as Iraq. There are numerous differences – public opinion polls show that the US/NATO presence is not as widely hated as that of the coalition in Iraq, the fact that the vast majority of Afghans get no basic services is not such a big political deal since they didn’t before the war either, the total level of violence has been much lower.

But look at the trends. Over 750 soldiers of the occupying force, almost 500 of them from the United States, have been killed; 2007 was the worst year for casualties. Suicide bombings are at levels that would have been impressive in Iraq at any time until mid-2005. Violent military operations by the occupying forces are probably at a higher level than in Iraq – last year, 3572 bombs were dropped there compared with 1447 in Iraq.

The rules of engagement seem overall to be somewhat different as well. In Iraq, improvements in the treatment of the population came only when they were seen as a key component of military strategy and part of the remedy for the massive failure of the occupiers to control the country; in Afghanistan, things have not gotten to that point, so the impetus to treat the population carefully is significantly less.

From every respectable quarter of liberal opinion, we hear that the occupying presence in Afghanistan must be increased, including more offensive operations in the south. This opinion is not limited just to the blinkered ignorance of the leading presidential candidates and the political class in the United States.

I hear, unfortunately, very little to convince me that this will be anything but a step on the road to Iraqization of Afghanistan. The fact that there hasn’t yet been massive ethnosectarian violence between Pashtun and non-Pashtun and Sunni and Shi’a in Afghanistan doesn’t mean there won’t be if the perception of foreign military victimization of Pashtuns is ramped up any further. You can point to the lessening of violence in Iraq recently, but one of the reasons for the lessening is that the violence reached such extravagant levels that people were willing to go to great lengths to stop it. Do we want to be looking back in five years on a “success” in Afghanistan that involves several hundred thousand (or a million) dead and a short-term drop in the violence to only twice what it is now?

Posted at 10:17 am.

February 11, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Iraq, the Campaign, and the Antiwar Movement

Back in early 2004, I predicted – correctly – that Iraq would be the defining issue of the presidential campaign. It was a message not really heeded by anyone – Howard Dean had risen to prominence over it, but then lost consistency as he became a front-runner, and even Nader and Kucinich never really made use of it as they could have. Kerry, of course, refused to see the light – or even to understand that running against George Bush as a better militarist was a bad idea.

This time around, unfortunately, I think it’s already clear, in this extended campaign season that has given us all a taste of what Purgatory will be like, that this is not the case.

It is true, of course, that revulsion against some varying combination of Bush’s militarism, incompetence, arrogance, and stupidity frames the election and is the reason the Democrats are favored over all. And it’s true that a lot of people are fed up with the bullying stupidity of the right wing and much of the Republican Party. It’s even true that nobody except for a few crazies (who are marginalized to powerless enclaves like the New York Times opinion page, foreign policy advisor to presidential candidates, etc.) actually wants to get into another war.

But there is virtually no traction to be had from an increasingly confused and tuned-out public over Iraq policy.

One case in point was the miserable failure of Dennis Kucinich’s candidacy to attract attention from anyone at all. Kucinich raised less than $4 million, as compared with $11 million last time around, and presumably quit running not just because of the threat to his seat but because he wasn’t accomplishing anything.

Similarly, Bill Richardson, a conservative Democrat and previously an Iraq war hawk, like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, attempted to juice up his lackluster campaign by promoting himself as the only “mainstream” candidate who would pull American troops out on day one of his presidency – or start pulling them out or pull them out within a year or whatever parsing allowed him to stay ahead of his rival candidates without actually saying anything. Looking at the New Hampshire exit polls, I think about 1% of the voters in the Democratic primary shifted their allegiance to Richardson because of this.

The Obama-Clinton matchup is all about “change” vs. “experience” and, to the extent that any support hinges on “policy positions,” it depends on whether you support garnishing workers’ wages to force them to pay corporations for health insurance.

Although some on the left habitually excoriate the media for covering only the “horserace” aspect of a campaign rather than paying attention to actual issues and positions, it’s somewhat understandable. There is utterly no point in trying to parse Obama’s and Clinton’s stated positions on Iraq; not only are they about as clear as a Rorschach test, all they reveal at the end of the day is what position each candidate thinks will help them win.

Interestingly, even though Obama and Clinton are wildly different on foreign policy – she is a big fan of her husband’s interventionism and went around making speeches about the “grave Iraqi threat” before voting for war without even bothering to read the National Intelligence Estimate while he clearly wants to avoid wars in favor of domestic transformation and actually spoke at an antiwar rally – they sound virtually identical on Iraq, a sign that their advisers, at least, agree with my analysis. And they agreed even a few months ago, when polls were still showing Iraq as the number one issue on voters’ minds.

There is at least a smidgen of hope that there will be some change in the general election, where John McCain has staked himself on a messianic vision of staying in the Middle East at least until the Rapture. There are two potential strategies for a moribund antiwar movement right now, understanding that, as in 2004, there is little chance to do very much non-electorally during a campaign season.

The first is to get involved in the Obama campaign (I judge him as much better placed to attack McCain effectively on the war than Clinton), in part to engage with Obama’s enthusiastic converts and turn some of their attention to other things, and the second is to support a Nader campaign, if it emerges, that focuses relentlessly on the war and avoids the personalistic narcissism that helped split the left in 2004.

I’m not excited about either strategy, frankly, but the alternative seems to be another year waiting for Godot.

Posted at 8:20 pm.

February 4, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Lessons from Edwards' Failure

Despite John Edwards’ talk of going all the way to the convention to take the country back from our corporate overlords, in the end it turned out Eli Manning had more fight in him than Edwards.

Though I personally find this unsurprising, given my perception that Edwards was a poseur and an empty suit, he certainly excited many progressives; it’s worth the effort to try to see what lessons we can learn from his failure.

For a long time, it’s been a majority view on the left that if only someone who had the right opportunities – i.e., had lots of money and mainstream respectability and didn’t believe in UFOs -- would stand up in an election season and promote a strong, anti-corporate economic populist message, the entire game would be changed. Part of the underlying belief was that the masses who don’t vote – usually 45+% of the voting-age population – allow servants of the plutocracy like George Bush to get elected because they are closet socialists and don’t want to sully themselves by voting for a mildly redistributionist pro-capitalist politician. And even for those who end up voting, the reasoning would go, very often it’s like playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe because they don’t get anyone who really represents their interests.

Well, John Edwards raised $44 million in 2007, he’s a former vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, and he has excellent hair. Nobody mocked him as a leprechaun or a vegan. And his words – all twelve of them, repeated over and over – were anti-corporate enough that Ralph Nader himself, famous for his claims that there’s no difference between the two main parties, called Edwards a Democratic “glimmer of hope” and said that this was, “the only time I've heard a Democrat talk that way in a long time.”

Well, it’s true that, as his wife pointed out, he had the handicap of being from that ultimate historically disadvantaged group, white males. As politically asinine and overall whiny as her comment was, it wasn’t exactly wrong – Edwards couldn’t really make himself interesting to most, especially when compared with Obama. And it’s true that the mainstream media gave him less attention than the other two – and later panned him for his “divisive” rhetoric.

Even so, he had absolutely the best chance in a long time of catching on with a populist message and it just didn’t fly. In fact, the message did considerably worse than it appears from his vote totals. If you look at exit polls from the primaries, you’ll find that in Iowa and South Carolina those who identified themselves as conservative voted for Edwards at twice the rate as those who identified as liberal, while in general Obama and Clinton spread pretty evenly across the categories. In South Carolina, it was clearest, when white men (the most conservative demographic group overall) voted largely for Edwards.

It’s possible that most of them really weren’t paying any attention to what he said. It’s possible that some of them picked up on his obvious homophobia (which differentiates him from Clinton and Obama). Or, perhaps, just the comforting fact that he was a white man with a Southern accent blinded the conservative voters to all else.

This is not a nicely controlled experiment. Edwards raised money from his hedge-fund cronies to run a populist campaign, he repudiated every single legislative stance he had ever taken, and he generally had difficulty projecting credibility with his new tack. On the other hand, Nader, who had all the credibility in the world in 2000, tried to run outside the two-party system, forgoing the massive institutional support that the system gives by design to the two parties.

Still, put it all together and the results suggest very clearly to me that we should give up on the fetishization of “If we could just get the information/message out” and realize that, even on what ought to be the slam-dunk issue of representing 80% of the people’s economic interests against those of the other 20%, the ground must be prepared.

The right wing has done this so well that even an insane message like “Cutting tax rates always increases tax revenues” seems automatically true to a significant chunk of the population, of media opinion-makers, and of politicians – and even with the rest, it doesn’t qualify you as a wingnut. We have yet to do this with even a much more intuitive message like “When corporations control your health care and are paid with fixed premiums, their profits will be higher the less care they actually allow.”

Until we can do that, we can forget about changing the game of electoral politics in this country.

Posted at 9:33 am.

January 28, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Advice to the Gazans

I have a suggestion for Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza: Stop your ridiculous rocket attacks into Israel.

I'm not saying this because they are effectively terroristic indiscriminate attacks on the civilian populace. Although they are, the arguments that the Qassam attacks or Hezbollah's Katyusha attacks in northern Israel during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war are inherently terroristic because the targeting technology is so poor seems to suggest that only advanced militaries with GPS-guided bombs are allowed to conduct a war.

I'm also at a loss to understand why idiotic rocket attacks that may possibly, by sheer weight of metal, occasionally scratch a civilian, are inexcusable but the deliberate, sustained siege of an entire civilian populace is not.

According to an op-ed by Sara Roy and Eyad al-Sarraj in the Boston Globe, since June, out of roughly 9000 different commodities that used to enter Gaza before the siege was imposed in 2006, only nine have been allowed in. Daily imports of flour allowed are about 5% of what is needed. 87% of Gazans live below the poverty line.

This is not exactly the Nazi walling-in of the Jewish ghettoes – the starvation there was far worse and the end-game was different – but it's the closest modern approach. And, to say the least, there's more of an international culture of human rights around these days than there was 70 years ago. For all the good that's doing the Gazans.

No, the main reason the Qassam attacks should stop is that they're playing the Israelis' game. Even before Hamas won the elections in 2006, the Israeli plan was to isolate itself from Gaza, absolve itself of even the minimal obligations it respected as an occupying power, and attain near-complete freedom of military action in dealing with future potential problems. They didn't need more of a plan than that because they had decided Gaza, unlike the West Bank or the Golan Heights, was almost worthless to them.

Since the elections and especially since the clashes between Fatah and Hamas and the splitting of the Palestinian territories, the plan has been in addition to squeeze the populace so hard that it gives up on having its own political representation and happily accepts a government – that of Mahmoud Abbas – that collaborates with Israel and eventually signs for a "two-state solution" of the kind that Israel wants.

This plan, conceived in even harsher terms by the Bush administration, which decided in 2006 that Palestine was part of the "global war on terrorism," has been carried out with minimal international outcry and, indeed, with substantial international support.

Hamas did make some bold and creative initial attempts to present its international case. After the elections, Ismail Haniyeh told the Washington Post, a propos of the endless questions about recognizing Israel, "Which Israel should we recognize? The Israel of 1917; the Israel of 1936; the Israel of 1948; the Israel of 1956; or the Israel of 1967? Which borders and which Israel? Israel has to recognize first the Palestinian state and its borders and then we will know what we are talking about."

There were signs that Hamas might drop the bloodthirsty rhetoric and start communicating in the language, duplicitous as it is, of international respectability.

Unfortunately, that has all been sabotaged, in part because of the U.S./Israel response to the elections (with Europe and the Arab nations as accomplices) and in part because of internal power struggles in Hamas.

The current strategy of continuing to fire rockets that never hit anything is not "resistance." It is, rather, all that Israel needs in order to continue its policies, to legitimize its claim to treat Gaza as an "enemy entity" rather than an occupied nation to which it has certain humanitarian obligations.

I wouldn't presume to tell the Gazans whether the political goal they should fight for right now is simply an end to the Israeli siege or a preservation of the shards of the Hamas government and of their democratic right to pick their own representatives. I'm just saying either goal would be served better by an end to the rocket fire.

Gandhi's advice to the Jews faced with Nazi exterminism was to oppose openly and nonviolently so as to arouse the conscience of the world. Naturally, this disgusts most people who hear it. And it's certainly not clear it would have saved the Jews. It might, however, not have turned out worse than the eventual strategies followed by most Jewish communities.

In order to have any chance at a better future, the Palestinians need the conscience of the world just as much – and the conscience of Israelis too.

Posted at 12:23 pm .

January 21, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Obama, Reagan, and the Promise of Change

Amidst all the furor over Barack Obama's recent comments about Ronald Reagan, it would be nice if somebody -- anybody – would pay attention to what he actually said and, more important, what he meant.

It was, in fact, an intriguing reflection on both the opportunities currently available to liberals and the left and their lack of ability or positioning to take advantage of those opportunities.

In the process of talking about himself as the candidate of change, Obama pointed to the potential of this historical conjuncture. To him, this election, like that of 1980 and 1960, has the possibility to lead to major changes in the political paradigm.

Echoing fairly standard political science analyses – and speaking in a manner much better suited to a graduate seminar than to a political campaign – Obama pointed out (more by implication than by actual detail) that the Vietnam War and the stagflation and "moral crisis" of the 70's led to the collapse of establishment liberalism and a growing feeling that people wanted to take power away from the government and give it to the grassroots. Unlike how some on the left read it, the real winners of this seismic shift were the right. We got a huge antinuclear movement that had modest accomplishments – they got Proposition 13 in California, the rise of the right-wing machine, talk radio, a renewal of militaristic confrontation with the Soviet Union as opposed to the "establishment" consensus of détente and coexistence, and a tectonic shift in fiscal policy. Only ten years lapsed between Nixon's statement that "we are all Keynesians now" and Reagan's introduction of the tortured arithmetic of supply-side economics.

Says Obama, this couldn't have happened if it didn't capitalize on underlying popular feelings. The feeling that Europe and Japan were taking over economically and that taxes were too high, and dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic, non-innovative postwar accord between business and labor did lead to a political opening to promote "entrepreneurship" and this in turn was the wedge for everything from supply-side economics to the ideological transformation that saw the conventional wisdom go from blaming poverty on structural features of the economy to blaming poverty on poor people and especially on black welfare queens.

Notwithstanding asinine comments from Edwards Clinton, Obama was not praising these changes. It's just that, in his ongoing attempt to be all things to all men, he avoided explicitly condemning them, merely pointing out that they did in fact resonate with a large number of Americans (including people who got harmed by them).

Kennedy, said Obama, similarly involved major change. Nixon and Clinton did not. Furthermore, according to him, the Republicans have been for 10 or 15 years now the party of ideas.

Despite Bill Clinton's red-faced tantrum over this claim, it is laughable to say, as he did, that he was the one with the ideas during his presidency. His slight tax raise involved merely a rejection of Reagan, not anything fundamentally new. He intervened militarily more often than Reagan, with exactly the same kind of small-bore, heavily scripted operations. He won reelection in 1996 by talking about school uniforms and a V-chip for televisions – if these count as ideas, then this country is doomed.

Finally, Obama pointed out the promise that is there for the other side now. The right wing's ideas, never more than garbage logically, are also played out politically. You can still see John McCain claiming that tax cuts always increase revenues and Mike Huckabee talking about remaking the Constitution in God's image, but, as much political force as this nonsense has behind it, it is clearly on the downswing.

Now it ought to be our turn. Unfortunately, here's the rub: We got nothing. Says Obama, political change has to resonate with the American people to be achievable. I have seen no hint that Obama himself has any such new ideas. The real left's ideas are still, to the American public, way out in left field. The closest approach I could imagine is a national single-payer health insurance system, but mainstream Democrats won't embrace it. In 2000, Nader's anti-corporate agenda had a near-miss; unfortunately, it could make little headway against the institutionalized two-party system.

And these ideas build on no elaborate quasi-logical ideological underpinning that can itself resonate, unlike supply-side economics, the conservative attack on affirmative action, or anything else you could name. When you look at the difference in product between left-wing think tanks and right-wing ones, you can see why.

The window of opportunity, unfortunately, won't be open forever.

Posted at 10:47 am.

January 14, 2008

Weekly Commentary -- Hillary Clinton meets Karl Rove

Last week, I sketched a few reasons why progressives ought to be intrigued by the possibility of an Obama presidency. This week, I’d like to suggest that they get outraged by what is being done to thwart that.

The Clintons, longtime fans of dirty smashmouth politics and racially coded political messages (remember Bill Clinton’s making a point of executing Rickey Ray Rector, a black man so mentally impaired that he saved the dessert of his last meal “for later” and his gratuitous attack on a black female rapper), seem to have taken a page from Karl Rove.

Indeed, they’ve converged with Rove. In a recent WSJ op-ed, touting Clinton to the skies because he thinks the Republicans can beat her, Rove managed to call Obama “lazy,” suggest that he was “trash talking,” and allude to “playing pickup basketball.” How he managed to leave out watermelon and swinging from trees, I can’t imagine.

But he’s got nothing on the Clinton people. Billy Shaheen drew a lot of press in December for suggesting, faux solicitously, that the Republicans would go after Obama’s cocaine use as a young man and even suggest that he was a dealer. Hint: “drug dealer” is another racial code word. Although Shaheen was then ousted, Clinton’s unionbusting campaign manager Mark Penn managed to get in another mention of cocaine on TV. More recently, Andrew Cuomo, referring obliquely to Obama, actually said that this was not a campaign where you could “shuck and jive” – a watermelon reference would be a step up for him.

Bill Clinton managed to avoid any code words, just suggesting that Obama’s campaign and public persona were a “fairy tale.” Hillary Clinton got her chance to shine when she suggested that all of Obama’s rhetoric about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was overblown and that the credit really lay with a racist Texas good ol’ boy who destroyed a small Southeast Asian nation.

To the credit of Democratic primary voters, none of this garbage was playing very well until Hillary Clinton’s apparent “emotional moment” provoked an unbelievable storm of sexist inanity from TV hosts and pundits – the utterly misogynist Chris Matthews being perhaps the worst culprit. Faux progressive John Edwards got in his licks too, slimily taking the opportunity to suggest that Clinton didn’t have the “strength and resolve” (read male genitalia) to be president.

It’s very understandable why college-educated white women in New Hampshire got angry and turned out in droves to vote for Ms. Clinton. It is unfortunate that there is something of a push to blame Obama, who has stayed above the fray (and also hasn’t started any wars or levied crippling economic sanctions on any countries, unlike the Clintons), for the disgusting behavior of a bunch of asinine white guys.

Gloria Steinem, a pro-Clinton hack who ten years ago actually defended his execrable alleged behavior toward Paula Jones as a “clumsy sexual pass,” deliberately tried to inject a destructive race/gender dynamic into the race. In arguing that gender is the ultimate axis of oppression, that black men had benefited from the end of legal discriminations but white women hadn’t (roughly the opposite is actually true), she even resurrected the old claim that black men got the vote long before white women, without bothering to mention that this right was subsequently taken away. It was hard not to think of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s opposition to the 15th amendment because “Sambo” would be “making laws for the daughters of Adams and Jefferson.”

But by far the worst – and most Rovian – thing the Clintons are doing is going on in Nevada. After the mostly Hispanic Culinary Workers Union endorsed Obama, AFSCME, a pro-Clinton union, has brought a suit to disallow a number of caucusing locations on the Strip, because they claim that those locations make it too easy for pro-Obama culinary workers to vote. Just as the Bush machine disenfranchised blacks in Florida to “win” the 2000 election, the Clinton machine is trying to disenfranchise Hispanics in Nevada. But it’s not racist – any more than what the Bushes did was. They just want to keep supporters of the other side from voting.

The left, which seems to have written off Obama as no better than Clinton, should be a lot more outraged than it is. No matter what you think about Obama – and he is way better than the Clintons – it doesn’t take any deep analysis to figure out that the Clintons shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this. One Karl Rove is enough.

Posted at 10:43 am.

January 7, 200

Weekly Commentary -- Obama's Victory

I don’t do presidential endorsements, and I wouldn’t even if we had decent candidates.

That said, almost the only candidate in the race who I find interesting is Barack Obama and, I must confess, I’m happy that he won the Iowa caucuses so resoundingly, even though John Edwards is the newly anointed progressive populist hero.

One reason is obvious: even if Edwards had won, given his funding and polling situation, he couldn’t have beaten Clinton. Obama, by contrast, is already the heir presumptive; some polls are showing him ahead in New Hampshire by 10 or more points, and on the Iowa Electronic presidential futures market, Obama is given a 65% chance to become the Democratic nominee, compared to 30% for Clinton.

I also really don’t care for Edwards. In 2004, he was probably the most conservative Democratic candidate other than the execrable Joe Lieberman. According to Bob Shrum, Edwards was actually very skeptical of the Iraq war but voted for it because Shrum told him he was too inexperienced and didn’t have the “credibility” to vote no.

In his 2008 reincarnation, he goes around telling people that we’ve got to take back government from the kind of politicians who work for hedge funds, live in 28,000-square-foot houses, and get $400 haircuts. My problem here is not his hypocrisy – better Edwards than a rich corporate shill who doesn’t talk the populist talk.

No, what bothers me is that Edwards is an airhead. You don’t found a center that supposedly is studying how to alleviate poverty (when it isn’t just working for your political aggrandizement) and work for a hedge fund. And if you’re going to run as a man of the people, why not go to Supercuts like the rest of us? Apparently, no matter how many mills his father worked in, he has already lost any gut-level understanding of how most Americans live.

Edwards deserves credit only for his political opportunism: he realized early that the only way he could be in this race was by apologizing very explicitly for his Iraq war vote and relentlessly attacking everything he stood for in his previous political career.

Obama is much more interesting. He comes from a community organizer background. He hung out with pro-Palestinian activists. Be assured that he knows how the world looks from the viewpoint of a progressive activist.

Every now and then, in the midst of his blather, he slips in a little hint that he knows what’s what. Most recently, he pointed out that if he were to design the health-care system from scratch, he would choose a single-payer system. Similarly, in the summer, after a really silly speech to the Council on Foreign Relations about how he would love to bomb Pakistan without Musharraf’s approval, he inadvertently started to say that there was no reason ever to use nuclear weapons.

Put all of these moments together and it’s a sorry mess of gruel compared to the red meat Edwards is throwing to progressives. And, honestly, Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa caucus was one of the most content-free speeches I’ve heard.

But what white progressives seem remarkably obtuse about is that it is that the best thing about Obama is that very ambiguity and vacuity. If he said the kinds of things that even a “bright, clean, articulate” Harvard-educated community organizer who wants mainstream respectability would say, he wouldn’t be doing much better than Al Shapton.

Instead, he got 38% of delegates in a state that’s 95% white and only 2.5% black. More important, he dramatically increased participation in the caucuses, through correctly identifying the causes and cures of apathy and disaffection. The left’s standard answer on this is , for the most part, wrong; most people are not apathetic because nobody speaks for their views and against the corporations that run the country. Edwards has shown how far you can go with that in a presidential campaign; his hope for victory in Iowa was predicated on low turnout. Obama’s vague, mushy “politics of hope rather than politics of fear” rap is working.

What will be the use of his vague, mushy mobilization of Democrats, independents, and Republicans to “get beyond partisan division” is another matter – but it can’t be a bad thing that he is doing it.

Obama is not some stealth candidate who will suddenly unveil a socialist agenda once elected; that kind of thing doesn’t happen. But it might be very interesting to have a president with a gut-level understanding of the U.S. left and of the rest of the world.

Posted at 10:40 am

December 31, 2007

Weekly Commentary -- Democracy is Dead, Long Live Democracy

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto caps off Pakistan’s recent descent into hell. The last few years have seen the emergence of a tribal insurgency in Balochistan, an upsurge in conflict between state forces and jihadis in Waziristan, escalation of violent Shi’a-Sunni conflict, and, most recently, an epidemic of mass-casualty suicide bombings that have briefly caused Pakistan to eclipse Iraq in the news.

Contrary to certain Bush administration fantasies about quick, easy, and clean regime change through surgical “decapitation” strikes against heads of state and powerful political figures, assassination, even of worse leaders than Benazir, is rarely a good thing for any country. Even Saddam’s richly deserved execution ended up only adding fuel to the fires raging in Iraq.

The fact that Benazir’s assassination was a terrible thing for Pakistan does not somehow mean that she herself was some prize. The response from virtually every political quarter in the United States, from Dennis Kucinich to George Bush, has been that somehow the shining light of Pakistani democracy has gone out.

The queen of democracy is dead, but fortunately the Dauphin of democracy has emerged from Oxford to take her place. A 19-year-old boy is now the titular head of the Pakistan Peoples Party simply because of who his mother was (and she, in turn, rose to her position of prominence because her father had been Prime Minister).

To top it all off, at the press conference after his elevation, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had the audacity to say, “My mother always told me democracy is the best revenge.”

Apparently, democracy equals corrupt feudal autocracy combined with dynastic succession.

We in the United States should hardly be wagging our fingers, of course, seeing as how we’re still in the middle of what’s likely to be at least a 24-year period of Clinton-Bush rule. And that our president, whose first election at least was not exactly a model of democracy itself, has no problem in talking about how Pervez Musharraf – a military dictator who just earlier this year locked up hundreds of lawyers and human rights activists and imposed censorship on broadcast media – is advancing democracy in Pakistan.

Have you notice that even when our talk about democracy is not an out-and-out lie, it is essentially meaningless, amounting to little more than a fetish for elections?

A recent newspaper headline announce that despite elections last year, Congo’s problems remain. Really? A country of a million square miles with almost no state outside the capital city, virtually no infrastructure, no social services, where armed militias carve out their own fiefdoms, frequently extracting the country’s rich natural resources and dealing directly with the foreign corporations that use them, using the local population as slave labor or worse, didn’t have its problems solved by a meaningless paper exercise? Remarkable.

That same attitude has been there in spades with regard to the Bhutto assassination. Her blood was barely drying when President Bush made his first statement that elections should go ahead as planned. Farcical as the January 8 elections would already have been, coming off a long period of overt martial law (and with continuance of repressive measures even after martial law had formally been lifted), with two parties headed by autocratic exiles and a process rigged by the military dictator in power, they will be even more of a joke now with Benazir dead and the whole process thrown into chaos.

And yet it seems likely they will go ahead on schedule. The PPP wants them early to capitalize on sympathy for Bhutto (and on their dynastic succession), Nawaz Sharif wants them because he wants to get rid of Musharraf, and Musharraf wants them because he needs some legitimation to prop up his rule. However they turn out, rule in Pakistan by a corrupt, unresponsive, repressive feudal and military elite will continue – but it will be a great victory for democracy.

Meanwhile, across the oceans, nobody is explaining that the Bhutto assassination underscores more deeply than ever that the “war on terror” paradigm is simply a recipe for creating more failed and semi-failed states where violence dominates the political process. Instead, we get to learn that we need a fence on the border with Mexico to keep swarms of Pakistani jihadis out of the country. Oddly, this is no more ridiculous than the previous contention, which we have heard from numerous Democrats, that what we really need in Pakistan is more of the policies that have caused this phenomenal upsurge in jihadi violence.

Posted at 10:57 am

December 10, 2007

Weekly Commentary -- How Not to Build 21st Century Socialism

Last week, I wrote about the political threats to maintaining and extending democracy in Venezuela during its revolutionary transformation to “21st century socialism.” They are substantial, but there is still plenty of hope. Aspiring dictators rarely lose referenda by 1.4% and accept the defeat. Chavez’s egomania is one of the main obstacles to progress in Venezuela, but, por ahora, he remains committed to constitutional means.

The economic threats are potentially as big as or perhaps bigger than the political ones. It’s an odd sort of socialism they’re building in Venezuela.

There are a number of achievements on this front to be proud of. According to government figures, the poverty rate has gone from 43% in 1999 to 27% today, partly because of a doubling of the share of social spending in the total government budget. The Barrio Adentro program has, through a partnership with Cuba, brought vastly improved health-care to the urban poor, helping to realize the 1999 constitution’s enshrining of health as a basic human right. Mision Robinson has also had a major impact on illiteracy, although not quite as great, apparently, as the government initially claimed.

Given Venezuela’s spectacular increase in oil revenues – last year they totaled $58 billion -- a modestly redistributive vaguely welfare-statish government could have accomplished as much. Of course, with reference to the ideological climate in the world when Chavez initially came to power, that would have been considered tantamount to revolutionary socialism.

The negatives, however, are many and surprising. According to Venezuela’s own Central Bank, income inequality has increased in the Chavez years; the Gini coefficient, a common measure of inequality, went from .44 in 2000 to .48 in 2005. At the same time, and in accordance with this, according again to the Central Bank, the share of remuneration to capital in the GDP has increased dramatically and that to labor has decreased. According to the Economist, even the incidence of stunting and malnutrition in children has increased during Chavez’s term, from 8.4 per thousand to 9.1 per thousand. During roughly the same period, the financial sector increased in size by 160%.

Socialism, 21st century or otherwise, should be made of sterner stuff.

At the same time, the macroeconomic stability of Venezuela is open to question. Although it claims to be producing 3.3 million barrels per day, most estimates are that the number is closer to 2.5. Gasoline is sold on the domestic market for 7 cents a gallon, vastly below even the subsidized prices Saudis and Kuwaitis pay. The government maintains an official exchange rate for the Bolivar that differs wildly from the market rate; not only that, it sells dollar-denominated bonds to Venezuelan banks at the official exchange rate, which they can then sell for dollars and turn around to get bolivares at the market rate. This sort of arbitrage sucks up billions of dollars of Venezuela’s oil revenues.

In addition, although Chavez’s partial privatization of various oil concessions (which forced ExxonMobil but not ChevronTexaco out of the country) would seem to be a good thing, the upshot is that investment in further exploration and infrastructure has declined; revenues from the Venezuelan oil company, PdVSA, go to fund social programs and to pay for a staff that has doubled in size under Chavez, rather than to investment.

Add to all of this a spree of arms purchases that would warm the cockles of a Pentagon procurer’s heart – including 24 Su-30 fighters and 50 helicopter gunships (neither of any use if the United States were to attack) from Russia just recently – and you have a looming disaster.

These figures do not mean that the Venezuelan government is malevolent or that the talk of socialism is a sham. In part, they reflect the uncomfortable fact that it is impossible to get very far in the world today without appeasing domestic and international capital. In large part, they reflect a sudden boom in oil revenues without the economic and social mechanisms in place to channel it properly. The problem is that there is little sign that much is being done about this.

So far, the oil boom has kept Venezuela’s accumulating economic contradictions from directly harming the people of Venezuela. And it is true that oil prices will never go back to what they were before the Iraq war. But Venezuela cannot remain certain even that its oil revenues will continue at the current level. If there is a sudden drop, expect the economic strains to come to the surface as political unrest.

Posted at 12:26 pm>

I am indebted to my colleague Matias Scaglione for some of this analysis.

December 3, 2007

Weekly Commentary -- No 18th Brumaire for Hugo Chavez

I confess to being slightly relieved that Sunday’s constitutional reform referendum in Venezuela was defeated. I am, of course, in favor of social security for street vendors and protection of gay rights.

And I realize that not supporting the reform puts me in bad company – the New York Times to start, but including all other defenders of the status quo who refuse to believe that another world is possible and that ordinary people can actually be the subjects and not simply and always the objects of their own lives.

I am even aware that as I speak the privileged upper classes of Venezuela are rejoicing that they have taught those obnoxious Negros e Indios a lesson.

Even so, I’ll stick to my position. For years now, I’ve been worried about anti-democratic trends in Venezuela.

Not all of them are Chavez’s doing. He may well not have been involved in the publishing of a “blacklist” containing the names of the millions who signed the petition for a recall referendum. Many of them suffered penalties like loss of government jobs or benefits for exercising their democratic rights.

The decision in December 2005 by the opposition to boycott the National Assembly elections, leading to 100% domination of the assembly by Chavistas, was deeply irresponsible and has been disastrous for the country, providing Chavez the rope by which he has tried desperately to hang himself.

Especially since his reelection by a landslide in 2006, Chavez’s ego has been out of control, and, in the runup to the referendum his behavior was increasingly erratic. He told Venezuelans that a vote for the referendum was a vote for him and a vote against was a vote for George W. Bush.

He threatened to nationalize Venezuela branches of Spanish banks if Spain’s King Juan Carlos didn’t apologize for telling him to shut up. Maybe it’s wise to nationalize them – I don’t know (the right of nationalization has been understood and accepted internationally ever since Mossadegh argued the British into the ground before the UN in 1951) – and Juan Carlos is an unelected former Franco sympathizer, but connecting a major political act with a personal insult is ridiculous. He seems to suffer from the same malady as Louis XIV.

And the referendum itself coupled progressive social measures with scary political ones. Eliminating the term limits on the presidency was the one that got the most attention, but it also gave the president the right to appoint officials who would normally be elected, to declare a state of emergency and suspend some civil liberties indefinitely, and to designate areas for military control. It’s hard to make a case that, even with the best intentions, Chavez needs that kind of power.

Early on, Chavez was often criticized for being an authoritarian caudillo type, even on the American left. At that point, I was much more sympathetic to him, because it was clear to me that his hopes for transformation in Venezuela would require the accumulation of power. After he won the recall, though, was the time to slow down and gradually push for his ideas while pressing the opposition to work through normal legal and political means.

Now, Chavez does not lack for defenders on the left, who point out that, for all the talk about lack of democracy, Chavez has routinely put major matters to popular vote, something that never happens in the United States. Or they compare him with George Bush – Chavez acts within the law, unlike King George, who thinks the Constitution gives the president unlimited powers.

But comparing any head of state with George Bush is succumbing to the soft bigotry of low expectations. Besides, Venezuela needs democracy much more than the United States does. Even the almost unprecedented assault of Mr. Bush on the Constitution and democracy has hardly affected the lives of the vast majority of Americans. On the other hand, huge changes in people’s lives are at stake in Venezuela and for the building of “21st century socialism” not to go the route of 20th century socialism will require a great deal of effort.

The shock of the defeat seems to have given Chavez some much-needed grounding and his concession speech was conciliatory in tone, radically different from his rhetoric previously. It is even possible that the defeat will in the end help to bring some democratic form of socialism to Venezuela. In any case, 15 years in power ought to be enough for Chavez; a revolution that requires him for longer than that isn’t much of a revolution.

Posted at 10:38 am

November 27, 2007

Weekly Commentary -- The "Good News" from Iraq

Well, there’s another elephant in the room. You can tell by how quiet opponents of the war in Iraq have become.

The last two months have, it seems, shown a precipitous drop in violence in Iraq. The best-known and most easily tracked statistic is, of course, U.S. military fatalities. There were 38 in October and 32 thus far in November, as compared with an average of about 70 per month overall or 85 per month in previous Octobers and Novembers. This is particularly striking given the elevated troop levels in the country.

Iraqi fatalities, combatant or noncombatant, are far more difficult to track and it’s likely that all official tabulations are gross underestimates. Still, reported violence against civilians in Iraq is way down, by a factor of three or so compared with the summer and maybe a factor of 6 or more compared with the height of the violence in late 2006. It’s easy to notice a huge drop in reported high-casualty car-bombings.

The Bush administration and its right-wing supporters are crowing and everybody else is dead silent. The Democratic presidential candidates, forced by the conventions of American politics to open their mouths even when they have nothing to say, have – at least, the leading candidates have – decided that it is important to acknowledge the “good news” and slightly soft-pedal their already soft-pedaled criticisms of the conduct of the war. The websites of Clinton, Obama, and Edwards all have plans to “end the war in Iraq,” but none of those plans have been updated to take into account recent events; nor do any of them rise above the most banal of platitudes.

The left is saying even less than that.

ِAt this point, we don’t even know if the drop in violence is sustainable, let alone why it’s happened. But there are some things we can say.

It is certain that the extreme and indiscriminate violence perpetrated by some insurgent groups, combined with the lack of any concrete benefits they bring, has alienated many to the point that they see anybody else as better. Tribal Sunnis fed up with al-Qaeda in Iraq, Shi’a fed up with the Mahdi Army’s reign of terror, other vengeance-seekers have decided that their primary concern is not the depredations of the U.S. military and that the best way to oppose their worst enemies is an alliance of convenience with the United States.

How much any of this has to do with the increased number of troops and the supposed shift to a counterinsurgency strategy is unclear. What is clear, I think, is that it has little to do with Americans winning “hearts and minds” in Iraq; not only is that not how counterinsurgency actually works, all the Americans need to do on that front is not be as bad as the jihadis and death squads. If it does have to do with the new strategy, it is simply two things. First, that the Americans are seen now as having enough of a presence on the ground for people to risk allying with them against those they hate even more than the Americans. As troops are drawn down, this calculation could shift. And second, that the Americans are establishing closer control over the population. This is impossible to verify, in the absence of information. It is interesting to note, though, that Jon Lee Anderson’s account of operations in the latest issue of the New Yorker describes troops as engaging in the same kinds of gratuitous physical and verbal abuse so amply documented from the earlier period of the occupation.

Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen describes these alliance shifts as signs that “more Iraqis are lining up with the government and against extremism.” This is nonsense. Against extremism definitely and with the U.S. troops tactically yes, but the Anbar Awakening is not lining up with the Shi’a-dominated government and there are no signs that it ever will.

But then, contrary to popular opinion, the goal of the United States is not unity and stability in Iraq; it is retention of the most U.S. influence with the least trouble. That is the goal that is being better served now than it was last year; criticizing the tales of the surge’s “success” by saying that it hasn’t led to a political solution misses the point and confuses rhetoric with reality.

For the most part, opponents of the war are falling back on the hoary “whatever happens in Iraq isn’t worth the life of one more American soldier,” a proposition that is not only false but politically useless. We need to respond to the new events in Iraq and we need to do it better than that.

Posted at 10:04 am

November 25, 2007

Allan Nairn

Allan Nairn, the brilliant investigative journalist who did groundbreaking work in Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, East Timor, and elsewhere (for example, he broke the story of CIA connections with FRAPH, the paramilitary goon squad that worked as enforcers for the military regime that ousted Aristide in 1990), has resurfaced. He's got a blog called News and Comment. Check it out.

November 22, 2007

The Good Die Young

Ian Smith, ruler of the white racist settler regime of southern Rhodesia during the late 60's and the 70's, dead at 88. Unrepentant to the end. I hope he took a message with him for Jeane Kirkpatrick, Milton Friedman, and Augusto Pinochet.

November 19, 2007

Weekly Commentary -- Iran and Coercive Diplomacy

In general, I hate writing about Iran; the whole endless mess of coverage about Iran’s nuclear programs and speculation about whether we’re crazy enough to bomb them is about as enlightening as reading about the latest suicide car bombing in Iraq.

Unfortunately, just such an atmosphere of boredom and supersaturation is the least conducive to actually understanding what’s going on and what’s at stake.

So, the Iranian nuclear issue, in a nutshell. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires it not to develop nuclear weapons and to conduct declared peaceful nuclear programs under a series of safeguards enforced by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Enforcement under the NPT is noncoercive and is predicated on voluntary cooperation between signatories.

Because of the nature of these enforcement protocols, it’s not difficult to develop a nuclear program on the side; Iraq did in the 1980’s, and the IAEA was unaware of its extent until the enhanced weapons inspection regime put into place after the 1991 Gulf War.

For these reasons, at the insistence of the United States, something called the Additional Protocol, which would enable IAEA inspectors to check for undeclared nuclear facilities by requesting access to various physical locations, scientists and technicians, and documentation, was added to the NPT. In 2003, Iran agreed voluntarily to submit to its provisions.

As a result, IAEA inspectors were able to find out a great deal that had not been known before. But this was of course not good enough for the United States, and in 2006 it succeeded in pushing the Security Council to approve sanctions against Iran (Resolutions 1737 and 1747), in addition to implementing some of its own.

The Iraq experience has taught members of the Security Council to trust the United States as far as they can throw it, and so 1737 and 1747 are very carefully worded. Although they invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the part governing the use of force, they stick to Article 41 of Chapter VII, which involves only nonviolent actions. They want the resolutions to have teeth, but they don’t want to take the slightest chance that the United States could claim the resolutions authorize it to bomb Iran.

Those resolutions went beyond the provisions of the NPT, requiring Iran to stop uranium enrichment, something that’s necessary for nuclear reactors as well as bombs.

Iran’s reaction was predictable; it stepped up efforts at enrichment and also terminated cooperation under the Additional Protocol. Ahmadinejad, Bush-like, told the world that the resolutions were just “pieces of paper.”

The latest IAEA report on Iranian compliance, dated November 15, is mixed. On the one hand, it verifies that there has been no diversion of declared nuclear material and that uranium is being enriched only to 4% U-235, enough for a reactor but far short of bomb-grade. The report is reasonably pleased with Iranian cooperation, although it notes that it expects more access to individuals and documents within the next few weeks.

On the other, it notes that suspension of Additional Protocol measures mean it has declining ability to assess whether Iran has undeclared programs. It also notes that Iran, goaded by the Security Council resolutions, has increased by a factor of 10 its number of centrifuges, for use in enrichment.

The contents have been badly misreported in the U.S. press, most of which is as eye-glazed as the rest of us over Iranian nuclear activities, and perhaps slightly more inclined than most of us to accept State Department characterizations unexamined.

The Bush administration reportedly will seek stricter sanctions from the U.N., to go along with its new raft of belligerent measures against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and anyone who deals with them.

Of course, the lesson from the IAEA report is blindingly obvious. Even if Iran isn’t interested in building a bomb, it’s even less interested in backing down under U.S. coercion – and it feels no need to with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq, oil at $95 a barrel, and almost nobody in the world taking the Bush administration seriously.

Except for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidates seem to understand that the ham-handed approach of the current administration won’t work. What most of them don’t seem to understand is that even a kinder, gentler, smooth-tongued (Bill) Clintonesque coercion won’t work either – and is increasingly unlikely to work with any of the problems we will face. What will be needed is – dare I say it – actual diplomacy.

Posted at 1:02 pm

November 12, 2007

Weekly Commentary -- Honoring Henri Alleg's Heroism

Over the weekend, you no doubt got the chance to hear many empty words about heroism. It’s a topic the right wing and the various official and semi-official organs of mainstream culture are very fond of. On the left, however, here in the United States, it hardly ever comes up.

It is not a good idea to cede any basic human virtue to the other side. And it’s not as if there aren’t stories enough to talk about.

Thanks to Democracy Now!, I just learned to my surprise and delight that Henri Alleg is still alive. His 50-year-old story of heroism under the most trying circumstances, long buried under the weight of history, has, by the peculiar alchemy of the Bush administration, been transmuted into the most current of current events.

Alleg, born to a French mother and Algerian father, was a journalist living in Algiers during the Algerian Revolution. For five years in the early 1950’s, he was editor-in-chief of the Alger Republicain, a Communist and anti-colonialist newspaper that called for freedom of speech and the right of redress for Algerian grievances.

In 1955, the French shut the paper down; shortly thereafter, Alleg went into hiding. In 1957, he was finally caught, by the 10th Paratrooper Division.

For one month, he was subjected to an array of the most brutal tortures imaginable. He was beaten on the genitals, his genitals and nipples were burnt with an open flame, he was repeatedly shocked, he was deprived of water for days. And, most relevant to today, he was subject to what the French called “la baignoire,” the bathtub – and what the U.S. government, perhaps wishing to evoke a summer day at an amusement park with the family, calls waterboarding.

He was strapped to a board and placed under a sink, with a rag covering his face, and the tap was turned on. After minutes of desperately trying to keep the water from filling up his lungs and drowning him, right when he was on the verge of suffocation, the water flow would be stopped. After he caught his breath, it would start again.

This was perhaps the most effective method the French had at their disposal and may well have won the Battle of Algiers for them.

Yet somehow, heroically, Alleg didn’t break, not even when the “Paras” took his wife into custody. He knew that if he did, the lives of all those who had helped him while he was in hiding would be forfeit.

After he was moved from his place of torture and held in ordinary prison, Alleg wrote up his ordeal and smuggled the account out. In 1958, it was published as La Question – The Question. Initially, the French government allowed printing of the book, but simply censored newspaper accounts of it – here, we could expect the newspapers to do that themselves – but, as its popularity took off, the book was banned outright. Even so, publishers continued to bring it out and people continued to read it. After that, nobody in France could any longer claim ignorance of what was being done in Algeria in their name. The book was re-released in the United States last year.

Jumping forward a half-century again, the Democrat-dominated Senate just confirmed the appointment of a new attorney general who apparently does not know if waterboarding is torture. While you might argue that such stunning ignorance fully qualifies the man to be a Bush appointee, I can’t help but think his blindness is shared by many, abetted by a press that routinely describes the procedure in sanitized and highly inaccurate terms. The reason that waterboarding produces a “feeling of drowning” is that the victim is drowning. Pouring water on someone’s face won’t produce any effect if he can still breathe – check this out in the shower sometime.

Sadly, our mainstream journalists, no matter how assiduously some of them may work to discredit the Bush administration, are only capable of imagining life from on top; if they could even think for a minute or two about the effects of water, they would be more critical. They don’t need to be like Henri Alleg, they just need a little empathy.

Hugh Thompson, the man who stopped the My Lai massacre, died last year without fanfare. Alleg is 86 and living in obscurity. If we’re going to have a day dedicated to honoring heroism, let’s honor some true heroes.

Posted at 10:48 am

November 5, 2007

Weekly Commentary -- Musharraf Acting Out Bush's Fantasies

Pity poor George Bush; he must be consumed with envy as Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf gets to act out his wet dreams. If only the institutional basis of civilian government and rule of law in the United States was as weak as that in Pakistan!

B