News and Views
The deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset tells Al Jazeera that he does not believe in a two-state solution.
There is of course a spectrum of belief and agendas in the Knesset, but this is unusually explicit. Still, this is largely consistent with actions. And Netanyahu said essentially the same in his recent speech to Congress.
Look. It’s no secret most of us at Antiwar.com are libertarians and/or anarchists (a Venn diagram of the two labels would only have a few of us outside the overlapping part…). But it’s never enough for some progressives that we are against every war, everywhere. They are affected by a Naomi Klein-like hysteria about libertarians — Milton Friedman’s followers run the world! The Koch brothers own and fund everything! — that still make them see us as an enemy. This is partly a misunderstanding of real libertarianism, a lack of knowledge of correct economics, or possibly just suspicion of our motivations.
For example, Raw Story ran a news piece about Antiwar.com’s FBI file. Most of the commenters are outraged, but one isn’t so bothered.
“This should surprise no one. But those crazy Libertarians will still vote Republican no matter what because they hate taxes and corporate regulations more than they hate war.”
Now, I don’t know if he means Libertarian Party member-types, or those of us here at Antiwar.com. If he means the former — and I highly doubt it, otherwise it wouldn’t have come up — he’s more or less right. If he means the latter, he’s a liar. Not merely wrong, a liar. Because aside from an obvious affinity for a certain Ron Paul, we not only don’t vote for Republicans, most of us don’t vote. Further, we specifically cite war as the VERY REASON for America’s onerous rate of taxation and regulation — you can’t finance a war without privileging certain entities and taxing the crap out of everyone else: the classic give-take of state-corporate mercantilism. So really, it is an utter lie that we “vote Republican no matter what” because we hate taxes and regulations more than war. And it’s one I have personally seen repeated over the years by our various leftist detractors who don’t realize we are on the same side.
To further illustrate, I should bring attention to a piece by the fabulous progressive David Bromwich from last week. Everyone in Antiwar.com’s universe ran this piece, and normally we also would have. But as the on-duty editor on Friday, I decided not to. Why?
The article is entitled “George W. Obama?” and details the officials with whom Obama chose to surround himself. I have no issue at all with most of the list, including such odious punks as the career climber Bob Gates, vicious goon Rahm Emanuel, paternalist Cass Sunstein, and spineless Eric Holder; Bromwich also notes those whom Obama jettisoned apparently to burnish his centrist image. But the main one, and the first one Bromwich cites, is Larry Summers.
Summers is no libertarian, and frankly, not much of an economist. I am not offended that he is included in the list. Rather, I am offended that Bromwich is repeating the boring and hackneyed “Glass-Steagall” myth. That is, that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented the commercial banks that hold the savings of ordinary Americans from engaging in speculative investment, was the reason for the 2008 crash. This is only true in the narrowest of senses — you have to ignore the entire body of US regulation and the actions of the various financial authorities to come to this conclusion with a straight face.
This is why I declined to run this piece. It does not go far enough by miles to explain the reason for the current economic disaster that continues to unfold. We live under a massive, overarching system built to favor gigantic connected corporations over ordinary people. This is NOT a free market, it is a heavily commanded one. It is one that purposely undermines the plans of ordinary citizens in favor of the plans of the few lucky enough to have the ear of the politburo. It’s called “fiscal policy,” and it is that for which “liberal” “economist” Paul Krugman gets paid to propagandize. Sadly, progressives unwittingly agitate for MORE of this evil system, thinking they will ever hold the reins. They will not.
To say, as many progressives did after the crash, that “everything was deregulated” is to fall into the trap of the power elite. The world’s biggest corporations love regulation — after all, they write it, someone else enforces it, and their alleged enemies on the left cheer this system on as they are taxed to pay for it. It’s insane. And it ignores all the other crashes of the last 200 years, all due to some intervention by the ruling rich into the voluntary economic affairs of everyone else.
So, no, anti-Antiwar.com progressives, we are not Republicans. We do not favor lower taxes over ending war — ending war lowers taxes! And what good is a healthy economy anyway when your government rampages over the world creating enemies who plot to destroy your wealth?
If you oppose war and its concomitant monopolistic control over the economy by connected elites, we are with you. But if you just want a D in front of the murderer-in-chief, it’s best if you left the real opposition to violence and institutional control to those of us who actually care about human freedom.
UPDATE: I wish this had been written and sent to me before I posted this — “Quantum Tuba” writes Don’t Tax the Rich, Smash Their Privilege: A Response to Warren Buffett, on all the ways a minuscule tax hike on the elites will do NOTHING if we don’t throw off the very system that would make theatrical motions of taxing them to keep us contently within this system. So to preempt a lot of commenters who still don’t understand what I mean: read this. Your precious state is the very entity shoring up the evil actors you hate.
This New York Times piece notes several parallels between Muammar Gadhafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq vis-à-vis US foreign policy. Somewhat trivial comparisons like vying to be the “West’s principle nemesis in the Arab world,” “vow[ing] to defeat the enemy at the gates of his capital, only to find his outer defenses…crumbled,” retreating “into a vast underground complex — a last-ditch refuge similar to those that Saddam constructed underneath several of his Baghdad palaces,” among others.
One rather more substantive point of comparison with the fall of Gadhafi and the fall of Saddam was speculative, and a concern I happen to share.
That possibility merged into the larger nightmare, one that appeared to be obsessing Western leaders like Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and President Obama: that having committed themselves to the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi and providing the crucial margin of military power to do so, they might only have opened a Pandora’s box of menacing possibilities.
Could Libya, like Iraq with its dictator removed, descend into bloody fratricide and civil war? And would the West, careful thus far to limit its military involvement mostly to aerial strikes, get drawn into the chaos?
Indeed, that is a serious concern. But there is another more fundamental parallel regarding US policy and action towards the two countries. First of all, both leaders became the great nemesis and primary target for America’s wrath only after having been supported by the US. Saddam of course was funded and weaponized by the US during the Iran-Iraq war, only subsequently to be condemned for the crimes he committed with our support. Then Gulf War I, harsh sanctions, and regime change in Gulf War II. Gadhafi actually started out the subject of US ire, then under Bush became a friend and ally with economic and military support. Then again, quickly resumed his role as Mad Dog of the Middle East.
The even more fundamental parallel, only implicitly included in the Times piece, is of course that they both were on the receiving end of a US-led campaign for regime change. Both were Middle Eastern regimes that the US and its allies intervened to depose in the name of democracy. That hasn’t quite happened in Iraq. And signs are that it won’t happen in Libya for quite a while, given the current leadership, and especially if US intervention there persists.
What is unnerving is that these parallels exist because US policy has remained fundamentally the same for so long. There are plenty of other parallels too. Orchestrating coups, implementing regime change, and carrying out either direct or indirect occupations is a process America has refined to a high art. What should concern us really is, who’s next?
There is renewed support in Washington for crippling new sanctions against Iran, which some say parallel those that led up to the regime change in Iraq and which are really meant to undermine the regime as opposed to deviate them from the path to nuclear weapons (a path they are evidently not on). Covertly, the US and Israel are already at war with Iran, as a concerted covert campaign of cyber-terrorism, commercial sabotage, targeted assassinations, and proxy wars have been underway for years. If at some point in the future this evolves far enough that we might be reading New York Times articles about the parallels between the regime changes in Libya, Iraq, and Iran, we can expect a similar lie to engulf that particular set of US actions. Namely, that it was done in the name of democracy.
Of course, the real parallel throughout the history of US foreign policy is that it is carried out overwhelmingly against democracy.
As you can see, the John Boehner-Minnesota Golfing Fundraiser in Minnesota enjoyed beautiful weather on Wednesday August 17, 2011. So did our Come Home America group as we traveled to Wayzata, Minnesota to banner outside the event. We had read that House Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Rep. Erik Paulsen, Rep. John Kline and Rep. Chip Cravaack would be hosting the $10,000 a person golf tournament and dinner fundraiser at the Spring Hill Golf Club. Shortly after we arrived, however, outside the gated (and apparently exclusive) Spring Hill club, we were met by golf course employees who told us there was no such event on their greens. Eventually (and probably to get us away from their club), the Spring Hill Golf crew advised us that the Republican fundraiser had been relocated a couples miles away to the Wayzata Country Club.
Numerous police officials lined the driveway to the Wayzata Golf Club and directed us to a narrow strip of “free speech area” marked with orange cones on the side of the road. As soon as we put up our banners, we started to get honks of approval from passing traffic.
About a half hour later, a much larger group of activists was bused to the location by “Minnesotans for a Fair Economy” (identified in news reports as affiliated with “Move-On”) and the SEIU union. These activists walked back and forth as in a picket line, carrying signs and yelling chants demanding jobs. A plane flew overhead dragging a sky message saying, “Where’s our piece of the pie? Jobs Now!” Puppet heads drove by in a limousine mocking the politicians believed to be golfing. We graciously moved to the side of the free speech area to give the Move-On people more room for their political theatre.
We got the chance, it turned out, to convey our points about the destructiveness of US wars as much to the “liberal protesters” as to the Republican golfers. We didn’t get much of a response, however, when we asked Move-On chanters to recall that there ARE plenty of jobs still available—although they may not be exactly what they’re looking for—with war contractors and in the U.S. military. Nor did the organizers of the politically partisan Move-On group seem to want to pick up on our questions: “Guns or butter? War or Social Security?” or “Endless War = Endless Debt”.
Of course the bigger question is why is it that some of the “liberal protesters” who led the charge against Bush’s wars in the 2006 and 2008 elections find it difficult to criticize Obama’s wars? Unfortunately the Move-On group relegated itself to a script that falsely separates the many domestic economic problems of the United States from its foreign policy, its decade of costly pre-emptive wars and mounting national debt.
Although the two party kabuki theatre often ignores it, there is a growing consensus that our nation’s economic problems are linked to its costly wars.
(co-written with Robert Palmer, member of Minnesota Branch of non-partisan Come Home America)
Again the media has drawn attention to massive atrocities which the US was directly responsible for and completely leaves out the operative fact of US involvement. A BBC article late last week reported that the “Chilean commission investigating human rights abuses under the former military leader Gen Augusto Pinochet” has ” identified another 9,800 people who had been held as political prisoners and tortured” bringing “the total of recognised victims to 40,018.” The official number of those killed or “disappeared” now stands at 3,065.
A “victim” according to this commission is one who experienced the following under Pinochet:
The article leaves out the fact that the Nixon administration in 1973 planned, promoted, and financed the coup, going on to help install the dictator Pinochet, where he remained until 1990. The US-orchestrated regime change, and subsequent decades of terrorism on the Chilean people, is extensively documented and widely known about. No matter how busy the media is presently reporting on America’scurrent regime–changes-in-progress, US culpability of past crimes should never be omitted.
The Washington Post catches up with reality:
The Obama administration often cites Colombia’s thriving democracy as proof that U.S. assistance, know-how and commitment can turn around a potentially failed state under terrorist siege.
The country’s U.S.-funded counterinsurgency campaign against a Marxist rebel group — and the civilian and military coordination behind it — are viewed as so successful that it has become a model for strategy in Afghanistan.
But new revelations in long-running political scandals under former president Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally throughout his eight-year tenure, have implicated American aid, and possibly U.S. officials, in egregious abuses of power and illegal actions by the Colombian government under the guise of fighting terrorism and drug smuggling.
The article unfortunately (and expectedly) keeps only to one small area of the abuse and illegality that has been occurring in Colombia supported by the US: the illegal spying and surveillance regime that I referenced here almost a month ago.
American cash, equipment and training, supplied to elite units of the Colombian intelligence service over the past decade to help smash cocaine-trafficking rings, were used to carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices, Uribe’s political opponents and civil society groups, according to law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with prosecutors and former Colombian intelligence officials.
No mention of the ongoing atrocities I reported on here. Nothing about how the para-political scandal, where the government was found to have significant and intricate ties to brutal right-wing paramilitaries. Nothing about how the Colombian military that we train and equip and support financially, engaged in perhaps over 1,200 extra-judicial assassinations of innocent civilians in order to make it seem like they were killing lots more leftist guerillas. Nothing about the aerial eradication of drug crops which helps impoverish already poor peasant farmers. But, at least its something, I suppose.
