Politics, Everyday, All day... morning, noon and night....
well, I'm sittin here working on a project and feelin pretty abused. I am getting paid well. From a certain marxist perspective you might call me a wage slave. I dunno. I tend to think that 13 year old girls making shoes for Nike in Indonesia at $2 a day is a far better example of exploitation than some woman in latvia getting, say, 500 marks to pose nude. Look at maxim for example. The celebrities who pose for that do it strictly for the publicity (they get paid but that is not the issue). So, for me, no matter what the task, the rate of pay is more important. I mean, if I had to smoke john ashcrofts pole my level of perceived exploitation all has to do with the fee. At $100 I start screamin 'patriot act my ass' at $30,000 I ask politely for a pair of kneepads.
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Simply Joel
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DVD Burner
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So anyway,
since this did'nt work the way I intended. it's probally best to be here in politics. ( I thought the "Michael Jackson" joke was pretty funny myself. hey, I'm not a comedian.)
since this did'nt work the way I intended. it's probally best to be here in politics. ( I thought the "Michael Jackson" joke was pretty funny myself. hey, I'm not a comedian.)
DVD Burner wrote:So what do ya think about British and American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners?
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2863375
Shocking photographs apparently showing British troops torturing an Iraqi detainee were published tonight.
The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the alleged incident which was condemned as “shameful” by the Army’s most senior officer and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The pictures, printed in the Daily Mirror, show soldiers apparently beating the man – a suspected thief – with rifle butts and urinating on him.
He was allegedly threatened with execution during an eight-hour ordeal, which left him bleeding and vomiting, with a broken jaw and smashed teeth.
Tonight’s revelation comes hot on the heels of the publication of photos of hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners being taunted and abused by US troops.
Those photographs led to a wave of revulsion across the world and were strongly condemned by President George Bush and Mr Blair.
Tonight, Chief of General Staff General Sir Michael Jackson said: “I am aware of the allegations which have been made today of the abuse of prisoners by British soldiers in Iraq.
“If proven, not only is such appalling conduct clearly unlawful, but it also contravenes the British Army’s high standards."
https://www.facebook.com/NeXTCODER
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Apollonaris Zeus
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DVD Burner
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Looks like Kelly gets what she wants. Optical scans was'nt it?
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/ ... 562283.htm
anyhoo,
I've never been to prison and I've never been to Iraq, but from what I've read and seen on both prison situations I dont see much of a diffrence.
Even though this thread and happy non-politics are 2 diffrent threads, I think Rob is on to something there.
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/ ... 562283.htm
anyhoo,
I've never been to prison and I've never been to Iraq, but from what I've read and seen on both prison situations I dont see much of a diffrence.
Even though this thread and happy non-politics are 2 diffrent threads, I think Rob is on to something there.
https://www.facebook.com/NeXTCODER
Umm, can I just point out that "exploited" does not mean naked.
Exploiting means taking advantage of someone. If these women are doing this of their own free will, then they're not exploited.
Nice try at fanning that ember into a fire...
In this day and age, you've gotta be smart enough to just not take at face value what the media says. They will characterize even well-paid playboy models as "exploited" if it's gonna help them sell papers. I'm currently on a news hiatus since my eye-rolling muscles are a bit sore...
Exploiting means taking advantage of someone. If these women are doing this of their own free will, then they're not exploited.
Nice try at fanning that ember into a fire...
In this day and age, you've gotta be smart enough to just not take at face value what the media says. They will characterize even well-paid playboy models as "exploited" if it's gonna help them sell papers. I'm currently on a news hiatus since my eye-rolling muscles are a bit sore...
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Lilly Flower
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Captain Goddammit
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What the hell for? We'll just get some emotionally-driven babble that is devoid of reason, and doesn't stand up to logical scrutiny. If they FEEL that 2 + 2 = 5, then it does and you're too closed-minded to see things the way they should be.Lilly Flower wrote:Can we have a females point of view here please?
O.K., NOW let's have a female point of view!
GreyCoyote: "At this rate it wont be long before he is Admiral Fukkit."
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DVD Burner
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angrykittie25
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One woman's point of view comming up
I do not feel that women who chose to pose nude are eploited. If they chose to take their clothes off and pose for a magazine, then they are making a choice to do so. No one is forcing them to do it, they want to make money and that is how they chose to do it. Even if they needed money badly, there is still a choice. Either make money while doing it, or finding alternate resources to make money. If there were so against it, they wouldn't do it. Now if a woman is unknowingly photographed nude or in a comprimising position, that is exploitation. Or if someone who is not of age to make an informed decision, that is exploitation. But women who see easy money by being naked or nearly naked, are definatly making a choice. I am considered low income and dont have much money, but I would not take my clothes off to pose in a magazine, no matter what it paid. They could do the same.
I do not feel that women who chose to pose nude are eploited. If they chose to take their clothes off and pose for a magazine, then they are making a choice to do so. No one is forcing them to do it, they want to make money and that is how they chose to do it. Even if they needed money badly, there is still a choice. Either make money while doing it, or finding alternate resources to make money. If there were so against it, they wouldn't do it. Now if a woman is unknowingly photographed nude or in a comprimising position, that is exploitation. Or if someone who is not of age to make an informed decision, that is exploitation. But women who see easy money by being naked or nearly naked, are definatly making a choice. I am considered low income and dont have much money, but I would not take my clothes off to pose in a magazine, no matter what it paid. They could do the same.
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angrykittie25
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DVD Burner
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Captain Goddammit
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DVD Burner
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Simply Joel
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May 4, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Battlefield of Dreams
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Last November the top economist at the Heritage Foundation was very optimistic about Iraq, saying Paul Bremer had just replaced "Saddam's soak-the-rich tax system" with a flat tax. "Few Americans would want to trade places with the people of Iraq," wrote the economist, Daniel Mitchell. "But come tax time next April, they may begin to wonder who's better off." Even when he wrote that, the insurgency in Iraq was visibly boiling over; by "tax time" last month, the situation was truly desperate.
Much has been written about the damage done by foreign policy ideologues who ignored the realities of Iraq, imagining that they could use the country to prove the truth of their military and political doctrines. Less has been said about how dreams of making Iraq a showpiece for free trade, supply-side tax policy and privatization — dreams that were equally oblivious to the country's realities — undermined the chances for a successful transition to democracy.
A number of people, including Jay Garner, the first U.S. administrator of Iraq, think that the Bush administration shunned early elections, which might have given legitimacy to a transitional government, so it could impose economic policies that no elected Iraqi government would have approved. Indeed, over the past year the Coalition Provisional Authority has slashed tariffs, flattened taxes and thrown Iraqi industry wide open to foreign investors — reinforcing the sense of many Iraqis that we came as occupiers, not liberators.
But it's the reliance on private contractors to carry out tasks usually performed by government workers that has really come back to haunt us.
Conservatives make a fetish out of privatization of government functions; after the 2002 elections, George Bush announced plans to privatize up to 850,000 federal jobs. At home, wary of a public backlash, he has moved slowly on that goal. But in Iraq, where there is little public or Congressional oversight, the administration has privatized everything in sight.
For example, the Pentagon has a well-established procurement office for gasoline. In Iraq, however, that job was subcontracted to Halliburton. The U.S. government has many experts in economic development and reform. But in Iraq, economic planning has been subcontracted — after a highly questionable bidding procedure — to BearingPoint, a consulting firm with close ties to Jeb Bush.
What's truly shocking in Iraq, however, is the privatization of purely military functions.
For more than a decade, many noncritical jobs formerly done by soldiers have been handed to private contractors. When four Blackwater employees were killed and mutilated in Falluja, however, marking the start of a wider insurgency, it became clear that in Iraq the U.S. has extended privatization to core military functions. It's one thing to have civilians drive trucks and serve food; it's quite different to employ them as personal bodyguards to U.S. officials, as guards for U.S. government installations and — the latest revelation — as interrogators in Iraqi prisons.
According to reports in a number of newspapers, employees from two private contractors, CACI International and Titan, act as interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to Sewell Chan of The Washington Post, these contractors are "at the center of the probe" into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. And that abuse, according to the senior defense analyst at Jane's, has "almost certainly destroyed much of what support the coalition had among the more moderate section of the Iraqi population."
We don't yet know for sure that private contractors were at fault. But why put civilians, who cannot be court-martialed and hence aren't fully accountable, in that role? And why privatize key military functions?
I don't think it's simply a practical matter. Although there are several thousand armed civilians working for the occupation, their numbers aren't large enough to make a significant dent in the troop shortage. I suspect that the purpose is to set a precedent.
You may ask whether our leaders' drive to privatize reflects a sincere conservative ideology, or a desire to enrich their friends. Probably both. But before Iraq, privatization that rewarded campaign contributors was a politically smart move, even if it was a net loss for the taxpayers.
In Iraq, however, reality does matter. And thanks to the ideologues who dictated our policy over the past year, reality looks pretty grim.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Battlefield of Dreams
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Last November the top economist at the Heritage Foundation was very optimistic about Iraq, saying Paul Bremer had just replaced "Saddam's soak-the-rich tax system" with a flat tax. "Few Americans would want to trade places with the people of Iraq," wrote the economist, Daniel Mitchell. "But come tax time next April, they may begin to wonder who's better off." Even when he wrote that, the insurgency in Iraq was visibly boiling over; by "tax time" last month, the situation was truly desperate.
Much has been written about the damage done by foreign policy ideologues who ignored the realities of Iraq, imagining that they could use the country to prove the truth of their military and political doctrines. Less has been said about how dreams of making Iraq a showpiece for free trade, supply-side tax policy and privatization — dreams that were equally oblivious to the country's realities — undermined the chances for a successful transition to democracy.
A number of people, including Jay Garner, the first U.S. administrator of Iraq, think that the Bush administration shunned early elections, which might have given legitimacy to a transitional government, so it could impose economic policies that no elected Iraqi government would have approved. Indeed, over the past year the Coalition Provisional Authority has slashed tariffs, flattened taxes and thrown Iraqi industry wide open to foreign investors — reinforcing the sense of many Iraqis that we came as occupiers, not liberators.
But it's the reliance on private contractors to carry out tasks usually performed by government workers that has really come back to haunt us.
Conservatives make a fetish out of privatization of government functions; after the 2002 elections, George Bush announced plans to privatize up to 850,000 federal jobs. At home, wary of a public backlash, he has moved slowly on that goal. But in Iraq, where there is little public or Congressional oversight, the administration has privatized everything in sight.
For example, the Pentagon has a well-established procurement office for gasoline. In Iraq, however, that job was subcontracted to Halliburton. The U.S. government has many experts in economic development and reform. But in Iraq, economic planning has been subcontracted — after a highly questionable bidding procedure — to BearingPoint, a consulting firm with close ties to Jeb Bush.
What's truly shocking in Iraq, however, is the privatization of purely military functions.
For more than a decade, many noncritical jobs formerly done by soldiers have been handed to private contractors. When four Blackwater employees were killed and mutilated in Falluja, however, marking the start of a wider insurgency, it became clear that in Iraq the U.S. has extended privatization to core military functions. It's one thing to have civilians drive trucks and serve food; it's quite different to employ them as personal bodyguards to U.S. officials, as guards for U.S. government installations and — the latest revelation — as interrogators in Iraqi prisons.
According to reports in a number of newspapers, employees from two private contractors, CACI International and Titan, act as interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to Sewell Chan of The Washington Post, these contractors are "at the center of the probe" into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. And that abuse, according to the senior defense analyst at Jane's, has "almost certainly destroyed much of what support the coalition had among the more moderate section of the Iraqi population."
We don't yet know for sure that private contractors were at fault. But why put civilians, who cannot be court-martialed and hence aren't fully accountable, in that role? And why privatize key military functions?
I don't think it's simply a practical matter. Although there are several thousand armed civilians working for the occupation, their numbers aren't large enough to make a significant dent in the troop shortage. I suspect that the purpose is to set a precedent.
You may ask whether our leaders' drive to privatize reflects a sincere conservative ideology, or a desire to enrich their friends. Probably both. But before Iraq, privatization that rewarded campaign contributors was a politically smart move, even if it was a net loss for the taxpayers.
In Iraq, however, reality does matter. And thanks to the ideologues who dictated our policy over the past year, reality looks pretty grim.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Simply Joel
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May 3, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Cruelest Month
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON — "April is the cruelest month," wrote T. S. Eliot in "The Waste Land." This April cruelly set back democracy and antiterrorism in Iraq.
Casualties reached a peak. A Marine commander had to appeal to a Republican Guard general to come to terms with Baathist insurgents in Falluja. President Bush had to express America's disgust at the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by a handful of sadistic guards. Taken together, that's about as bad as it gets.
However, a certain grim logic suggests a turn for the better may be coming this summer.
Our June 30 deadline for the end of occupation, once criticized, is now inexorable. Iraqi sovereignty, it has been agreed, will be palpable but limited; coalition troops will remain under command of the former occupiers, and the purpose of the U.N.-chosen transitional Iraqi government is strictly to set up free elections.
The U.N., at last given its long-sought "central role" in Iraq's politics, is becoming less afflicted with hubris.
U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, the Berber who sought cheap popularity among anti-Americans in Iraq by calling Israel "poison" and the U.S. support of Gaza withdrawal "thoughtless," was reported by Secretary General Kofi Annan to wish he had not said that.
Annan went on to assure NBC's Tim Russert that any U.N. employee who refused to cooperate with the independent investigation into the oil-for-food scandal would be fired.
Annan still called corruption charges a "smear." He passed the failed-supervision buck to the Security Council's 661 committee, then lamely professed little knowledge of a cover-up letter sent only two weeks ago in the name of his chief aide, hinting that it might not have been his aide's doing.
But the secretary general seemed aware of the damage done to the U.N. by the $5 billion kickback scheme. Hoping to recoup its reputation in Iraq, he must realize that this is no time to join French and Russian profiteers in multilateralist triumphalism.
The new certainty in Iraq of ultimate coalition troop withdrawal should also concentrate the minds of those Iraqis who until now have been all too content to allow the outside world to bear the human and financial costs of overthrowing Saddam.
But there is never any free ride to freedom. If Iraqis do not take up the opportunity now made available to them by the sacrifice of outsiders, they will slip back into a new dictatorship, with new torture chambers and mass graves.
The Kurdish minority is aware of this. That is why only a few hundred U.S. troops are needed in northern Iraq to help the Kurds keep the peace and build democracy in their region.
But in the Sunni triangle, many of Falluja's insurgents jubilantly declared victory, waving a Saddam-era flag, when a Marine commander apparently made a hasty deal with one of Saddam's generals to recruit a few hundred ex-officers and quieten the hotbed city. We can hope that any such gamble with unvetted Baathists does not mean we have stopped fighting to win and started fighting not to lose.
Perhaps the sight of a Sunni force in charge of a key city will snap the Shia leaders in the south out of their political torpor. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, unwilling so far to order his followers to confront Iran's violent stooge, faces the need to exert his influence lest it be lost to the anti-American firebrand.
Where are the religious Shia in the face of this challenge to their spiritual leader? Where are the secular Shia who would face another horrendous wipeout if the old Sunni military took over when coalition forces left? Where are the voices of a million Iraqis who returned from exile after their persecutor was overthrown? Where is the leader brave enough to tell fellow Iraqis that the danger to them is not from America, but from Iran, Al Qaeda and a new Saddam?
The great majority of Iraqis are glad that Saddam is overthrown. We and the U.N. are giving them democracy's moment, but courageous Iraqis must come forward to seize it. Next April's goal is not "stability," the new soft word for the old hard tyranny. The goal — theirs and ours — remains Iraqi freedom.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Cruelest Month
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON — "April is the cruelest month," wrote T. S. Eliot in "The Waste Land." This April cruelly set back democracy and antiterrorism in Iraq.
Casualties reached a peak. A Marine commander had to appeal to a Republican Guard general to come to terms with Baathist insurgents in Falluja. President Bush had to express America's disgust at the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by a handful of sadistic guards. Taken together, that's about as bad as it gets.
However, a certain grim logic suggests a turn for the better may be coming this summer.
Our June 30 deadline for the end of occupation, once criticized, is now inexorable. Iraqi sovereignty, it has been agreed, will be palpable but limited; coalition troops will remain under command of the former occupiers, and the purpose of the U.N.-chosen transitional Iraqi government is strictly to set up free elections.
The U.N., at last given its long-sought "central role" in Iraq's politics, is becoming less afflicted with hubris.
U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, the Berber who sought cheap popularity among anti-Americans in Iraq by calling Israel "poison" and the U.S. support of Gaza withdrawal "thoughtless," was reported by Secretary General Kofi Annan to wish he had not said that.
Annan went on to assure NBC's Tim Russert that any U.N. employee who refused to cooperate with the independent investigation into the oil-for-food scandal would be fired.
Annan still called corruption charges a "smear." He passed the failed-supervision buck to the Security Council's 661 committee, then lamely professed little knowledge of a cover-up letter sent only two weeks ago in the name of his chief aide, hinting that it might not have been his aide's doing.
But the secretary general seemed aware of the damage done to the U.N. by the $5 billion kickback scheme. Hoping to recoup its reputation in Iraq, he must realize that this is no time to join French and Russian profiteers in multilateralist triumphalism.
The new certainty in Iraq of ultimate coalition troop withdrawal should also concentrate the minds of those Iraqis who until now have been all too content to allow the outside world to bear the human and financial costs of overthrowing Saddam.
But there is never any free ride to freedom. If Iraqis do not take up the opportunity now made available to them by the sacrifice of outsiders, they will slip back into a new dictatorship, with new torture chambers and mass graves.
The Kurdish minority is aware of this. That is why only a few hundred U.S. troops are needed in northern Iraq to help the Kurds keep the peace and build democracy in their region.
But in the Sunni triangle, many of Falluja's insurgents jubilantly declared victory, waving a Saddam-era flag, when a Marine commander apparently made a hasty deal with one of Saddam's generals to recruit a few hundred ex-officers and quieten the hotbed city. We can hope that any such gamble with unvetted Baathists does not mean we have stopped fighting to win and started fighting not to lose.
Perhaps the sight of a Sunni force in charge of a key city will snap the Shia leaders in the south out of their political torpor. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, unwilling so far to order his followers to confront Iran's violent stooge, faces the need to exert his influence lest it be lost to the anti-American firebrand.
Where are the religious Shia in the face of this challenge to their spiritual leader? Where are the secular Shia who would face another horrendous wipeout if the old Sunni military took over when coalition forces left? Where are the voices of a million Iraqis who returned from exile after their persecutor was overthrown? Where is the leader brave enough to tell fellow Iraqis that the danger to them is not from America, but from Iran, Al Qaeda and a new Saddam?
The great majority of Iraqis are glad that Saddam is overthrown. We and the U.N. are giving them democracy's moment, but courageous Iraqis must come forward to seize it. Next April's goal is not "stability," the new soft word for the old hard tyranny. The goal — theirs and ours — remains Iraqi freedom.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Simply Joel
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May 2, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Let Us Pray
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
TOKYO
Here's what I learned in Tokyo: If you're the leader of Japan, America, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines or the European Union and you're not going to bed each night saying the following prayer for China, then you're not paying attention:
"Dear Heavenly Father, please keep the leader of China, President Hu Jintao, healthy and on an even keel. Please see to it that he moves steadily and carefully toward restructuring the Chinese banking system and ridding it of its huge overhang of bad loans and corruption, before there is a real meltdown that would be felt around the world. Give him the wisdom to cool the overheated Chinese economy without creating a recession that would prompt China to stop importing like crazy and start just exporting like crazy. And Father, forgive us for all the bad words we used in recent years to describe China's leaders — terms like `Butchers of Beijing.' We did not mean it. We meant to say `Bankers of Beijing,' because their economy is now fueling growth all over Asia, bolstering Japan and sucking up imports from everywhere. May China's leaders live to 120, and may they enjoy 9 percent G.D.P. growth every year of their lives. Thank you, Father. Amen."
The most striking thing about being in Asia today is hearing how much more important China's growth engine has become for companies all across the region — and well beyond it. When Chinese authorities told banks last week to cut back their wild lending, commodity prices and stock markets tumbled all over the world. News that China is having regular blackouts because it can't buy enough crude oil is helping push up gasoline prices the world over.
While three years ago the Bush team came to office growling about no longer coddling China — the way those "wimpy" Clintonites did — that talk has disappeared from the Bush vocabulary. It's not just business as usual now. It's business only.
To some degree the world is getting hooked on China — its cheap labor, its voracious appetite for commodities and capital (over $50 billion in foreign direct investment last year) and its emerging middle class. The more hooked we become, the less the world can tolerate any sort of prolonged instability there. If the China bubble bursts, it will be the mother of all burst bubbles. Which is why we need to pray that China's leaders will have the skill to cool things down, just enough but not too much, without some wheels falling off.
"A lot of the world's stability or instability is resting on the leadership in Beijing — there is no question about that," argues Richard Koo, chief economist for Nomura Research Institute. But, he insists, "Chinese leaders understand what world they are living in. They have a general equilibrium view of the world — that what they do affects us all and then comes back to affect them."
That seems true. But one of the ways that China has grown so rapidly in the last decade has been by decentralizing authority to regions and letting governors or mayors attract whatever investment they can. It is not clear anymore how much the center can slow things down.
And considering the huge amounts of foreign investment that have flowed into China in such a short time, "it's very hard to think that they could have invested that much money efficiently," remarked Robert Feldman, managing director in Tokyo for Morgan Stanley. "So the senior leadership is scared, because if they have a hard landing from bad loans you have a regime problem. [But] when they tried to slow the economy, they got real push back from the regions, who said, `You in Beijing have all that infrastructure. Why shouldn't we have a new bridge or road?' "
Given how opaque China's decision-making is, it's hard to predict how Chinese leaders will balance their obligation to behave in a way that promotes global equilibrium with their need to create millions of jobs each year in order to stay in power.
One can only say three things: 1. They've done a pretty good job so far. 2. The job gets harder every day. 3. No one will be immune to the fallout. The relationship of the world to China right now reminds me of that old banker's rule: If a client owes you $1,000, that's his problem. If a client owes you $1 million, that's your problem. China's stability is our problem.
Heavenly Father . . .
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Let Us Pray
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
TOKYO
Here's what I learned in Tokyo: If you're the leader of Japan, America, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines or the European Union and you're not going to bed each night saying the following prayer for China, then you're not paying attention:
"Dear Heavenly Father, please keep the leader of China, President Hu Jintao, healthy and on an even keel. Please see to it that he moves steadily and carefully toward restructuring the Chinese banking system and ridding it of its huge overhang of bad loans and corruption, before there is a real meltdown that would be felt around the world. Give him the wisdom to cool the overheated Chinese economy without creating a recession that would prompt China to stop importing like crazy and start just exporting like crazy. And Father, forgive us for all the bad words we used in recent years to describe China's leaders — terms like `Butchers of Beijing.' We did not mean it. We meant to say `Bankers of Beijing,' because their economy is now fueling growth all over Asia, bolstering Japan and sucking up imports from everywhere. May China's leaders live to 120, and may they enjoy 9 percent G.D.P. growth every year of their lives. Thank you, Father. Amen."
The most striking thing about being in Asia today is hearing how much more important China's growth engine has become for companies all across the region — and well beyond it. When Chinese authorities told banks last week to cut back their wild lending, commodity prices and stock markets tumbled all over the world. News that China is having regular blackouts because it can't buy enough crude oil is helping push up gasoline prices the world over.
While three years ago the Bush team came to office growling about no longer coddling China — the way those "wimpy" Clintonites did — that talk has disappeared from the Bush vocabulary. It's not just business as usual now. It's business only.
To some degree the world is getting hooked on China — its cheap labor, its voracious appetite for commodities and capital (over $50 billion in foreign direct investment last year) and its emerging middle class. The more hooked we become, the less the world can tolerate any sort of prolonged instability there. If the China bubble bursts, it will be the mother of all burst bubbles. Which is why we need to pray that China's leaders will have the skill to cool things down, just enough but not too much, without some wheels falling off.
"A lot of the world's stability or instability is resting on the leadership in Beijing — there is no question about that," argues Richard Koo, chief economist for Nomura Research Institute. But, he insists, "Chinese leaders understand what world they are living in. They have a general equilibrium view of the world — that what they do affects us all and then comes back to affect them."
That seems true. But one of the ways that China has grown so rapidly in the last decade has been by decentralizing authority to regions and letting governors or mayors attract whatever investment they can. It is not clear anymore how much the center can slow things down.
And considering the huge amounts of foreign investment that have flowed into China in such a short time, "it's very hard to think that they could have invested that much money efficiently," remarked Robert Feldman, managing director in Tokyo for Morgan Stanley. "So the senior leadership is scared, because if they have a hard landing from bad loans you have a regime problem. [But] when they tried to slow the economy, they got real push back from the regions, who said, `You in Beijing have all that infrastructure. Why shouldn't we have a new bridge or road?' "
Given how opaque China's decision-making is, it's hard to predict how Chinese leaders will balance their obligation to behave in a way that promotes global equilibrium with their need to create millions of jobs each year in order to stay in power.
One can only say three things: 1. They've done a pretty good job so far. 2. The job gets harder every day. 3. No one will be immune to the fallout. The relationship of the world to China right now reminds me of that old banker's rule: If a client owes you $1,000, that's his problem. If a client owes you $1 million, that's your problem. China's stability is our problem.
Heavenly Father . . .
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Neo-conservative
(Redirected from Neoconservative)
"With all the attention paid to neo-conservatives in the global media today, one would think that a standard definition of the term would exist. Yet, despite their now being credited with a virtual takeover of U.S. foreign policy under President George W. Bush, a common understanding of 'neo-cons' remains elusive." --Jim Lobe, 12 August 2003
Also, "A brief description of their basic tenets and origin can help distinguish them from other parts of the ideological coalition behind the administration's neo-imperialist trajectory; namely, the traditional Republican Machtpolitikers (Might Makes Right), such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and the Christian Rightists, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft, Gary Bauer, and Pat Robertson."
Joseph Sobran offers that But by winning power [with Ronald Reagan in 1980], the conservative movement began to lose its grip on conservative principles. It had hoped to reverse the gains of liberalism — not only Johnson’s Great Society, but Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, both of which had violated America’s constitutional tradition of strictly limited and federal government. Now it quietly dropped its original goals. As a powerful movement, conservatism also attracted new members who were more interested in power than in principle. Some of these were called “neoconservatives” — admirers of Roosevelt and recent supporters of Lyndon Johnson who cared nothing for limited government and the U.S. Constitution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A neo-conservative (abbreviated as neo-con) is an adherent of any of several formerly distinct political ideologies which have come together on some elements of global policy and use a common rhetoric, e.g. War on Terrorism, an international War on Drugs.
The term common sense conservative is said by some to be used for some people, but sometimes tends to refer to some domestic rather than to some foreign policy.
1 Neoconservative is conservative neoliberal
2 Origins on the left
3 Likudniks
4 Republikud
5 Important figures
5.1 Strauss
5.2 Ledeen
5.3 Bush
5.4 Netanyahu
5.5 Kristol
5.6 Zuckerman
5.7 Organizations
6 Insularity
7 Not "conservative"
7.1 Chickenhawk
7.2 Chinese view
7.3 Corruption
8 See also
9 Integral External Links
10 Incidental Neo-conservative External Links
Neoconservative is conservative neoliberal
Economically, there is little or no conflict between the neo-cons and other advocates of the neoliberal political economy which underlies corporate globalization. In general, neo-con supporters are drawn post-facto from those who support that system.
All neo-conservative groups adhere to at least part of that neoliberal agenda. However, they add to this a profound obsession with one or more traits specific to their own culture or nation, and may be more likely to see protectionism as an option, especially to preserve a role for their supporters in a military-industrial complex.
In Canada and Australia, for instance, there is vocal support for purchases and production of new military hardware in neoconservative circles. There is usually also industrial policy that supports high-technology industries, and more than a little pro-technology propaganda to justify extensive (mostly indirect) support for the software and aerospace industries.
Perhaps due solely to divergent national interests, neoconservatives are not wholly consistent worldwide, although there are some strong convergences on rhetoric. Some see all neoconservative movements as different excuses to impose and defend a global neoclassical economics, which excuses differ from those of the neoliberal. In particular, the neoconservative ideology seems obsessed with defense as opposed to development, and thus is similar to the conservative/liberal divisions seen within each country in the polity of pre-globalization states. However, there are important differences between the conventional "conservative" and the modern neo-conservative or common sense conservative. The former term is more associated with domestic policy, whereas neo-cons are foreign policy "hawks".
Origins on the left
Originally, in the context of the United States, it referred to a right-wing movement of former political leftists. As Michael Lind has observed, "Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history.
A Special Report issued by Foreign Policy in Focus in 2002, says that
"Neoconservatives constitute an intellectual current that emerged from the cold war liberalism of the Democratic Party. Unlike other elements of the conservative mainstream, neoconservatives have historical social roots in liberal and leftist politics. Disillusioned first with socialism and communism and later with new Democrats (like George McGovern) who came to dominate the Democratic Party in the 1970s, neoconservatives played a key role in boosting the New Right into political dominance in the 1980s. For the most part, neoconservativesÐwho are disproportionately Jewish and CatholicÐare not politicians but rather political analysts, activist ideologues, and scholars who have played a central role in forging the agendas of numerous right-wing think tanks, front groups, and foundations. Neoconservatives have a profound belief in America1s moral superiority, which facilitates alliances with the Christian Right and other social conservatives. But unlike either core traditionalists of American conservatism or those with isolationist tendencies, neoconservatives are committed internationalists. As they did in the 1970s, the neoconservatives were instrumental in the late 1990s in helping to fuse diverse elements of the right into a unified force based on a new agenda of U.S. supremacy."
Likudniks
Republikud
Self-proclaimed neoconservatives sometimes express strong admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy.'
Neo-conservatives often refer to their ideology as 'Wilsonian' (after President Woodrow Wilson). However, a number of left-wing critics have argued that it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. These critics have argued that American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians."[1]
In actuality, this is a false misconception, possibly due to the en vogue antisemitic sentiments on both the far-left and far-right that neo-conservatives place Israeli interests above American interests. In fact, Paul Wolfowitz, considered by many one of the most prominent neo-conservatives, has expressed support for Palestinian self-determination on a number of occasions[2][3][4], as has Eliot Cohen[5], a well-regarded political scientist and military professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, considered an intellectual center of neo-conservative thought.
The ideology of neoconservatism developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Six-Day War between Israel and Arab states was a watershed, as that conflict turned much of the left against Israel, while the founders of the neoconservative movement remained passionate advocates for Israel. The movement has been increasingly influential in the United States and within the Republican Party. Its weight has especially been felt within foreign policy. One of its main tenents is the vital importance of Israel as a strategic partner to the U.S. This is the Republikud alliance characterized by Nima Shirali, who wrote in February 2003 that "the relations between the U.S and Israeli states serve to effectuate each other's policies. On the one hand, U.S assistance to Israel is essential to that country's survival. On the other hand, this assistance perpetuates an alliance, which is gainful for the U.S. It has become starkly evident that the Republican agenda prioritizes military and economic aid to Israel, yet without significant persuasions to make land concessions; a condition precedent to reconciliation." [6].
In effect, by simply refusing to make land concessions or even implement the long-standing UN order to withdraw from territories captured during the 1967 war in the West Bank, some believe that Likud can leverage Republican Party support for an endlessly escalating military and technological conflict from which its own members, and elites of the Republican Party, directly benefit. If dangerous technology leaks out to enemies, such as the nuclear technology to Iraq or biological technology to Iran, this can provide excuses for "crackdowns" and preemptive war. Refusal to actually limit the development, deployment and use of such technology is another cornerstone of Republikud: G. W. Bush has withdrawn from a vast array of international agreements to control technologies, and Israel has consistently refused to allow UN weapons inspectors to review its rumoured nuclear facilities.
These sentiments are likewise disputable, particularly since Israel has long enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and overwhelming support amongst US citizens.
Important figures
The early leaders of the neoconservative movement were Irving Kristol (author of 1983 book Reflections of a Neoconservative) and Norman Podhoretz, both of whom have served as editors of Commentary Magazine. Important neoconservatives in American politics include Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, William Kristol (son of Irving Kristol), Elliott Abrams (son-in-law to Norman Podhoretz) and Douglas Jay Feith.
Strauss
Some neoconservatives embrace the teachings of philosopher Leo Strauss, a German who fled his country from the Nazis in the 1930s and eventually found refuge in the U.S., teaching at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz is among those self-identified as a Straussian.
The philosophy of Strauss is controversial with ideals that go contrary to democracy. In an analysis by Jim Lobe for the Inter Press Service News Agency, Lobe writes:
Hersh wrote that Strauss believed the world to be a place where "isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad", and where policy advisers may have to deceive their own publics and even their rulers in order to protect their countries.
Shadia Drury, author of 1999's controversial book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, says Hersh is right on the second count but dead wrong on the first.
"Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat," she said in a telephone interview from her office at the University of Calgary in Canada. "Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical (in Strauss's view) because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them."
"The Weimar Republic (in Germany) was his model of liberal democracy for which he had huge contempt," added Drury. Liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.
Like Plato, Strauss taught that within societies, "some are fit to lead, and others to be led", according to Drury. But, unlike Plato, who believed that leaders had to be people with such high moral standards that they could resist the temptations of power, Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior".
For Strauss, "religion is the glue that holds society together", said Drury, who added that Irving Kristol, among other neo-conservatives, has argued that separating church and state was the biggest mistake made by the founders of the U.S. republic.
"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing", because it leads to individualism, liberalism and relativism, precisely those traits that might encourage dissent, which in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. "You want a crowd that you can manipulate like putty," according to Drury. [7]
However, this view is contradicted by the socially liberal views held by a number of neo-conservatives.
Ledeen
Neo-conservative policies are also strongly influenced by Michael Ledeen. Ledeen has worked for the Pentagon, U.S. State Department, and the National Security Council, and he was involved with the arms transfers to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair, which he documents in his book Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair. William O. Beeman writes the following about Michael Ledeen for the Pacific News Service:
Ledeen's ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq.
Quotes from Ledeen's works reveal a peculiar set of beliefs about American attitudes toward violence. "Change -- above all violent change -- is the essence of human history," he proclaims in his book, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago. In an influential essay in the National Review Online he asserts, "Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically ... it is time once again to export the democratic revolution."
Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned. His 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed; How the United States Led a Global Domocratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away, reveals the basic neoconservative obsession: the United States never "won" the Cold War; the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight without a shot being fired. Had the United States truly won, democratic institutions would be sprouting everywhere the threat of Communism had been rife.
Iraq, Iran and Syria are the first and foremost nations where this should happen, according to Ledeen. The process by which this should be achieved is a violent one, termed "total war."
"Total war not only destroys the enemy's military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends," Ledeen writes. "The sparing of civilian lives cannot be the total war's first priority ... The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people."
(Redirected from Neoconservative)
"With all the attention paid to neo-conservatives in the global media today, one would think that a standard definition of the term would exist. Yet, despite their now being credited with a virtual takeover of U.S. foreign policy under President George W. Bush, a common understanding of 'neo-cons' remains elusive." --Jim Lobe, 12 August 2003
Also, "A brief description of their basic tenets and origin can help distinguish them from other parts of the ideological coalition behind the administration's neo-imperialist trajectory; namely, the traditional Republican Machtpolitikers (Might Makes Right), such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and the Christian Rightists, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft, Gary Bauer, and Pat Robertson."
Joseph Sobran offers that But by winning power [with Ronald Reagan in 1980], the conservative movement began to lose its grip on conservative principles. It had hoped to reverse the gains of liberalism — not only Johnson’s Great Society, but Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, both of which had violated America’s constitutional tradition of strictly limited and federal government. Now it quietly dropped its original goals. As a powerful movement, conservatism also attracted new members who were more interested in power than in principle. Some of these were called “neoconservatives” — admirers of Roosevelt and recent supporters of Lyndon Johnson who cared nothing for limited government and the U.S. Constitution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A neo-conservative (abbreviated as neo-con) is an adherent of any of several formerly distinct political ideologies which have come together on some elements of global policy and use a common rhetoric, e.g. War on Terrorism, an international War on Drugs.
The term common sense conservative is said by some to be used for some people, but sometimes tends to refer to some domestic rather than to some foreign policy.
1 Neoconservative is conservative neoliberal
2 Origins on the left
3 Likudniks
4 Republikud
5 Important figures
5.1 Strauss
5.2 Ledeen
5.3 Bush
5.4 Netanyahu
5.5 Kristol
5.6 Zuckerman
5.7 Organizations
6 Insularity
7 Not "conservative"
7.1 Chickenhawk
7.2 Chinese view
7.3 Corruption
8 See also
9 Integral External Links
10 Incidental Neo-conservative External Links
Neoconservative is conservative neoliberal
Economically, there is little or no conflict between the neo-cons and other advocates of the neoliberal political economy which underlies corporate globalization. In general, neo-con supporters are drawn post-facto from those who support that system.
All neo-conservative groups adhere to at least part of that neoliberal agenda. However, they add to this a profound obsession with one or more traits specific to their own culture or nation, and may be more likely to see protectionism as an option, especially to preserve a role for their supporters in a military-industrial complex.
In Canada and Australia, for instance, there is vocal support for purchases and production of new military hardware in neoconservative circles. There is usually also industrial policy that supports high-technology industries, and more than a little pro-technology propaganda to justify extensive (mostly indirect) support for the software and aerospace industries.
Perhaps due solely to divergent national interests, neoconservatives are not wholly consistent worldwide, although there are some strong convergences on rhetoric. Some see all neoconservative movements as different excuses to impose and defend a global neoclassical economics, which excuses differ from those of the neoliberal. In particular, the neoconservative ideology seems obsessed with defense as opposed to development, and thus is similar to the conservative/liberal divisions seen within each country in the polity of pre-globalization states. However, there are important differences between the conventional "conservative" and the modern neo-conservative or common sense conservative. The former term is more associated with domestic policy, whereas neo-cons are foreign policy "hawks".
Origins on the left
Originally, in the context of the United States, it referred to a right-wing movement of former political leftists. As Michael Lind has observed, "Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history.
A Special Report issued by Foreign Policy in Focus in 2002, says that
"Neoconservatives constitute an intellectual current that emerged from the cold war liberalism of the Democratic Party. Unlike other elements of the conservative mainstream, neoconservatives have historical social roots in liberal and leftist politics. Disillusioned first with socialism and communism and later with new Democrats (like George McGovern) who came to dominate the Democratic Party in the 1970s, neoconservatives played a key role in boosting the New Right into political dominance in the 1980s. For the most part, neoconservativesÐwho are disproportionately Jewish and CatholicÐare not politicians but rather political analysts, activist ideologues, and scholars who have played a central role in forging the agendas of numerous right-wing think tanks, front groups, and foundations. Neoconservatives have a profound belief in America1s moral superiority, which facilitates alliances with the Christian Right and other social conservatives. But unlike either core traditionalists of American conservatism or those with isolationist tendencies, neoconservatives are committed internationalists. As they did in the 1970s, the neoconservatives were instrumental in the late 1990s in helping to fuse diverse elements of the right into a unified force based on a new agenda of U.S. supremacy."
Likudniks
Republikud
Self-proclaimed neoconservatives sometimes express strong admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy.'
Neo-conservatives often refer to their ideology as 'Wilsonian' (after President Woodrow Wilson). However, a number of left-wing critics have argued that it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. These critics have argued that American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians."[1]
In actuality, this is a false misconception, possibly due to the en vogue antisemitic sentiments on both the far-left and far-right that neo-conservatives place Israeli interests above American interests. In fact, Paul Wolfowitz, considered by many one of the most prominent neo-conservatives, has expressed support for Palestinian self-determination on a number of occasions[2][3][4], as has Eliot Cohen[5], a well-regarded political scientist and military professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, considered an intellectual center of neo-conservative thought.
The ideology of neoconservatism developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Six-Day War between Israel and Arab states was a watershed, as that conflict turned much of the left against Israel, while the founders of the neoconservative movement remained passionate advocates for Israel. The movement has been increasingly influential in the United States and within the Republican Party. Its weight has especially been felt within foreign policy. One of its main tenents is the vital importance of Israel as a strategic partner to the U.S. This is the Republikud alliance characterized by Nima Shirali, who wrote in February 2003 that "the relations between the U.S and Israeli states serve to effectuate each other's policies. On the one hand, U.S assistance to Israel is essential to that country's survival. On the other hand, this assistance perpetuates an alliance, which is gainful for the U.S. It has become starkly evident that the Republican agenda prioritizes military and economic aid to Israel, yet without significant persuasions to make land concessions; a condition precedent to reconciliation." [6].
In effect, by simply refusing to make land concessions or even implement the long-standing UN order to withdraw from territories captured during the 1967 war in the West Bank, some believe that Likud can leverage Republican Party support for an endlessly escalating military and technological conflict from which its own members, and elites of the Republican Party, directly benefit. If dangerous technology leaks out to enemies, such as the nuclear technology to Iraq or biological technology to Iran, this can provide excuses for "crackdowns" and preemptive war. Refusal to actually limit the development, deployment and use of such technology is another cornerstone of Republikud: G. W. Bush has withdrawn from a vast array of international agreements to control technologies, and Israel has consistently refused to allow UN weapons inspectors to review its rumoured nuclear facilities.
These sentiments are likewise disputable, particularly since Israel has long enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and overwhelming support amongst US citizens.
Important figures
The early leaders of the neoconservative movement were Irving Kristol (author of 1983 book Reflections of a Neoconservative) and Norman Podhoretz, both of whom have served as editors of Commentary Magazine. Important neoconservatives in American politics include Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, William Kristol (son of Irving Kristol), Elliott Abrams (son-in-law to Norman Podhoretz) and Douglas Jay Feith.
Strauss
Some neoconservatives embrace the teachings of philosopher Leo Strauss, a German who fled his country from the Nazis in the 1930s and eventually found refuge in the U.S., teaching at the University of Chicago. Wolfowitz is among those self-identified as a Straussian.
The philosophy of Strauss is controversial with ideals that go contrary to democracy. In an analysis by Jim Lobe for the Inter Press Service News Agency, Lobe writes:
Hersh wrote that Strauss believed the world to be a place where "isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad", and where policy advisers may have to deceive their own publics and even their rulers in order to protect their countries.
Shadia Drury, author of 1999's controversial book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, says Hersh is right on the second count but dead wrong on the first.
"Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat," she said in a telephone interview from her office at the University of Calgary in Canada. "Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical (in Strauss's view) because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what's good for them."
"The Weimar Republic (in Germany) was his model of liberal democracy for which he had huge contempt," added Drury. Liberalism in Weimar, in Strauss's view, led ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews.
Like Plato, Strauss taught that within societies, "some are fit to lead, and others to be led", according to Drury. But, unlike Plato, who believed that leaders had to be people with such high moral standards that they could resist the temptations of power, Strauss thought that "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior".
For Strauss, "religion is the glue that holds society together", said Drury, who added that Irving Kristol, among other neo-conservatives, has argued that separating church and state was the biggest mistake made by the founders of the U.S. republic.
"Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing", because it leads to individualism, liberalism and relativism, precisely those traits that might encourage dissent, which in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. "You want a crowd that you can manipulate like putty," according to Drury. [7]
However, this view is contradicted by the socially liberal views held by a number of neo-conservatives.
Ledeen
Neo-conservative policies are also strongly influenced by Michael Ledeen. Ledeen has worked for the Pentagon, U.S. State Department, and the National Security Council, and he was involved with the arms transfers to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair, which he documents in his book Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair. William O. Beeman writes the following about Michael Ledeen for the Pacific News Service:
Ledeen's ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq.
Quotes from Ledeen's works reveal a peculiar set of beliefs about American attitudes toward violence. "Change -- above all violent change -- is the essence of human history," he proclaims in his book, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago. In an influential essay in the National Review Online he asserts, "Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically ... it is time once again to export the democratic revolution."
Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned. His 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed; How the United States Led a Global Domocratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away, reveals the basic neoconservative obsession: the United States never "won" the Cold War; the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight without a shot being fired. Had the United States truly won, democratic institutions would be sprouting everywhere the threat of Communism had been rife.
Iraq, Iran and Syria are the first and foremost nations where this should happen, according to Ledeen. The process by which this should be achieved is a violent one, termed "total war."
"Total war not only destroys the enemy's military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends," Ledeen writes. "The sparing of civilian lives cannot be the total war's first priority ... The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people."
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DVD Burner
- Posts: 11031
- Joined: Fri Dec 12, 2003 3:09 am
- Burning Since: 1986
- Camp Name: White Trash Camp
- Contact:
This was discussed awhile ago on this thread. Anyone still not think that people around the world have more of a problem with Bush than they do with Americans in general?DVD Burner wrote:No, the world doesn't have a beef with America. they have a beef with this Bush establishment. everyone else is getting caught in the crossfire.Don Muerto wrote: So you are saying that a anti-American world revolution is imminent? Think it's safe to 'show your cards' on this one?
the sooner Americans recognize this the sooner they will see the truth.
( and I'm not including macho dumb fucks like Blackwater as your typical Americans.)
Trey and I mentioned this a long time ago on this thread.
No! They do count as idiots though dont they?III wrote:do mercenaries, err "civilian contractors" count as civilians?
Oh and will Bush apear on Aljezeera as one of the 2 Arab stations?
https://www.facebook.com/NeXTCODER
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Simply Joel
- Posts: 3483
- Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2004 9:08 am
- Location: Land of Lincoln
- Contact:
I wish I had a travel account like this guy's.
May 5, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Those Friendly Iranians
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
TEHRAN, Iran
Finally, I've found a pro-American country.
Everywhere I've gone in Iran, with one exception, people have been exceptionally friendly and fulsome in their praise for the United States, and often for President Bush as well. Even when I was detained a couple of days ago in the city of Isfahan for asking a group of young people whether they thought the Islamic revolution had been a mistake (they did), the police were courteous and let me go after an apology.
They apologized; I didn't.
On my first day in Tehran, I dropped by the "Den of Spies," as the old U.S. Embassy is now called. It's covered with ferocious murals denouncing America as the "Great Satan" and the "archvillain of nations" and showing the Statue of Liberty as a skull (tour the "Den of Spies" here).
Then I stopped to chat with one of the Revolutionary Guards now based in the complex. He was a young man who quickly confessed that his favorite movie is "Titanic." "If I could manage it, I'd go to America tomorrow," he said wistfully.
He paused and added, "To hell with the mullahs."
In the 1960's and 1970's, the U.S. spent millions backing a pro-Western modernizing shah — and the result was an outpouring of venom that led to our diplomats' being held hostage. Since then, Iran has been ruled by mullahs who despise everything we stand for — and now people stop me in the bazaar to offer paeans to America as well as George Bush.
Partly because being pro-American is a way to take a swipe at the Iranian regime, anything American, from blue jeans to "Baywatch," is revered. At the bookshops, Hillary Clinton gazes out from three different pirated editions of her autobiography.
`It's a best seller, though it's not selling as well as Harry Potter," said Heidar Danesh, a bookseller in Tehran. "The other best-selling authors are John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel."
Young Iranians keep popping the question, "So how can I get to the U.S.?" I ask why they want to go to a nation denounced for its "disgustingly sick promiscuous behavior," but that turns out to be a main attraction. And many people don't believe a word of the Iranian propaganda.
"We've learned to interpret just the opposite of things on TV because it's all lies," said Odan Seyyid Ashrafi, a 20-year-old university student. "So if it says America is awful, maybe that means it's a great place to live."
Indeed, many Iranians seem convinced that the U.S. military ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are going great, and they say this with more conviction than your average White House spokesman.
One opinion poll showed that 74 percent of Iranians want a dialogue with the U.S. — and the finding so irritated the authorities that they arrested the pollster. Iran is also the only Muslim country I know where citizens responded to the 9/11 attacks with a spontaneous candlelight vigil as a show of sympathy.
Iran-U.S. relations are now headed for a crisis over Tehran's nuclear program, which appears to be so advanced that Iran could produce its first bomb by the end of next year. The Bush administration is right to address this issue, but it needs to step very carefully to keep from inflaming Iranian nationalism and uniting the population behind the regime. We need to lay out the evidence on satellite television programs that are broadcast into Iran, emphasizing that the regime is squandering money on a nuclear weapons program that will further isolate Iranians and damage their economy.
Left to its own devices, the Islamic revolution is headed for collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad. The ayatollahs' best hope is that hard-liners in Washington will continue their inept diplomacy, creating a wave of Iranian nationalism that bolsters the regime — as happened to a lesser degree after President Bush put Iran in the axis of evil.
Oh, that one instance when I was treated inhospitably? That was in a teahouse near the Isfahan bazaar, where I was interviewing religious conservatives. They were warm and friendly, but a group of people two tables away went out of their way to be rude, yelling at me for being an American propagandist. So I finally encountered hostility in Iran — from a table full of young Europeans.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
May 5, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Those Friendly Iranians
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
TEHRAN, Iran
Finally, I've found a pro-American country.
Everywhere I've gone in Iran, with one exception, people have been exceptionally friendly and fulsome in their praise for the United States, and often for President Bush as well. Even when I was detained a couple of days ago in the city of Isfahan for asking a group of young people whether they thought the Islamic revolution had been a mistake (they did), the police were courteous and let me go after an apology.
They apologized; I didn't.
On my first day in Tehran, I dropped by the "Den of Spies," as the old U.S. Embassy is now called. It's covered with ferocious murals denouncing America as the "Great Satan" and the "archvillain of nations" and showing the Statue of Liberty as a skull (tour the "Den of Spies" here).
Then I stopped to chat with one of the Revolutionary Guards now based in the complex. He was a young man who quickly confessed that his favorite movie is "Titanic." "If I could manage it, I'd go to America tomorrow," he said wistfully.
He paused and added, "To hell with the mullahs."
In the 1960's and 1970's, the U.S. spent millions backing a pro-Western modernizing shah — and the result was an outpouring of venom that led to our diplomats' being held hostage. Since then, Iran has been ruled by mullahs who despise everything we stand for — and now people stop me in the bazaar to offer paeans to America as well as George Bush.
Partly because being pro-American is a way to take a swipe at the Iranian regime, anything American, from blue jeans to "Baywatch," is revered. At the bookshops, Hillary Clinton gazes out from three different pirated editions of her autobiography.
`It's a best seller, though it's not selling as well as Harry Potter," said Heidar Danesh, a bookseller in Tehran. "The other best-selling authors are John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel."
Young Iranians keep popping the question, "So how can I get to the U.S.?" I ask why they want to go to a nation denounced for its "disgustingly sick promiscuous behavior," but that turns out to be a main attraction. And many people don't believe a word of the Iranian propaganda.
"We've learned to interpret just the opposite of things on TV because it's all lies," said Odan Seyyid Ashrafi, a 20-year-old university student. "So if it says America is awful, maybe that means it's a great place to live."
Indeed, many Iranians seem convinced that the U.S. military ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are going great, and they say this with more conviction than your average White House spokesman.
One opinion poll showed that 74 percent of Iranians want a dialogue with the U.S. — and the finding so irritated the authorities that they arrested the pollster. Iran is also the only Muslim country I know where citizens responded to the 9/11 attacks with a spontaneous candlelight vigil as a show of sympathy.
Iran-U.S. relations are now headed for a crisis over Tehran's nuclear program, which appears to be so advanced that Iran could produce its first bomb by the end of next year. The Bush administration is right to address this issue, but it needs to step very carefully to keep from inflaming Iranian nationalism and uniting the population behind the regime. We need to lay out the evidence on satellite television programs that are broadcast into Iran, emphasizing that the regime is squandering money on a nuclear weapons program that will further isolate Iranians and damage their economy.
Left to its own devices, the Islamic revolution is headed for collapse, and there is a better chance of a strongly pro-American democratic government in Tehran in a decade than in Baghdad. The ayatollahs' best hope is that hard-liners in Washington will continue their inept diplomacy, creating a wave of Iranian nationalism that bolsters the regime — as happened to a lesser degree after President Bush put Iran in the axis of evil.
Oh, that one instance when I was treated inhospitably? That was in a teahouse near the Isfahan bazaar, where I was interviewing religious conservatives. They were warm and friendly, but a group of people two tables away went out of their way to be rude, yelling at me for being an American propagandist. So I finally encountered hostility in Iran — from a table full of young Europeans.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Simply Joel
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- Location: Land of Lincoln
- Contact:
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Simply Joel
- Posts: 3483
- Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2004 9:08 am
- Location: Land of Lincoln
- Contact:
Ideas or comments I endorse and/or believe in are in bold/underlined/italics... don't read a lot into any of it... just providing some food for thought.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Restoring Our Honor
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.
This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.
That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.
Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable. Words matter, but deeds matter more. If the Pentagon leadership ran any U.S. company with the kind of abysmal planning in this war, it would have been fired by shareholders months ago.
I know that tough interrogations are vital in a war against a merciless enemy, but outright torture, or this sexual-humiliation-for-entertainment, is abhorrent. I also know the sort of abuse that went on in Abu Ghraib prison goes on in prisons all over the Arab world every day, as it did under Saddam — without the Arab League or Al Jazeera ever saying a word about it. I know they are shameful hypocrites, but I want my country to behave better — not only because it is America, but also because the war on terrorism is a war of ideas, and to have any chance of winning we must maintain the credibility of our ideas.
We were hit on 9/11 by people who believed hateful ideas — ideas too often endorsed by some of their own spiritual leaders and educators back home. We cannot win a war of ideas against such people by ourselves. Only Arabs and Muslims can. What we could do — and this was the only legitimate rationale for this war — was try to help Iraqis create a progressive context in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world where that war of ideas could be fought out.
But it is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you. We have to restore some sense of partnership with the world if we are going to successfully partner with Iraqis.
Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the U.N., and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes and make clear that he is turning a new page. Second, he needs to explain that we are losing in Iraq, and if we continue to lose the U.S. public will eventually demand that we quit Iraq, and it will then become Afghanistan-on-steroids, which will threaten everyone. Third, he needs to say he will be guided by the U.N. in forming the new caretaker government in Baghdad. And fourth, he needs to explain that he is ready to listen to everyone's ideas about how to expand our force in Iraq, and have it work under a new U.N. mandate, so it will have the legitimacy it needs to crush any uprisings against the interim Iraqi government and oversee elections — and then leave when appropriate. And he needs to urge them all to join in.
Let's not lose sight of something — as bad as things look in Iraq, it is not yet lost, for one big reason: America's aspirations for Iraq and those of the Iraqi silent majority, particularly Shiites and Kurds, are still aligned. We both want Iraqi self-rule and then free elections. That overlap of interests, however clouded, can still salvage something decent from this war — if the Bush team can finally screw up the courage to admit its failures and dramatically change course.
Yes, the hour is late, but as long as there's a glimmer of hope that this Bush team will do the right thing, we must insist on it, because America's role in the world is too precious — to America and to the rest of the world — to be squandered like this.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Restoring Our Honor
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
We are in danger of losing something much more important than just the war in Iraq. We are in danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world. I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving.
This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.
That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld's authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.
Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable. Words matter, but deeds matter more. If the Pentagon leadership ran any U.S. company with the kind of abysmal planning in this war, it would have been fired by shareholders months ago.
I know that tough interrogations are vital in a war against a merciless enemy, but outright torture, or this sexual-humiliation-for-entertainment, is abhorrent. I also know the sort of abuse that went on in Abu Ghraib prison goes on in prisons all over the Arab world every day, as it did under Saddam — without the Arab League or Al Jazeera ever saying a word about it. I know they are shameful hypocrites, but I want my country to behave better — not only because it is America, but also because the war on terrorism is a war of ideas, and to have any chance of winning we must maintain the credibility of our ideas.
We were hit on 9/11 by people who believed hateful ideas — ideas too often endorsed by some of their own spiritual leaders and educators back home. We cannot win a war of ideas against such people by ourselves. Only Arabs and Muslims can. What we could do — and this was the only legitimate rationale for this war — was try to help Iraqis create a progressive context in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world where that war of ideas could be fought out.
But it is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you. We have to restore some sense of partnership with the world if we are going to successfully partner with Iraqis.
Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the U.N., and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes and make clear that he is turning a new page. Second, he needs to explain that we are losing in Iraq, and if we continue to lose the U.S. public will eventually demand that we quit Iraq, and it will then become Afghanistan-on-steroids, which will threaten everyone. Third, he needs to say he will be guided by the U.N. in forming the new caretaker government in Baghdad. And fourth, he needs to explain that he is ready to listen to everyone's ideas about how to expand our force in Iraq, and have it work under a new U.N. mandate, so it will have the legitimacy it needs to crush any uprisings against the interim Iraqi government and oversee elections — and then leave when appropriate. And he needs to urge them all to join in.
Let's not lose sight of something — as bad as things look in Iraq, it is not yet lost, for one big reason: America's aspirations for Iraq and those of the Iraqi silent majority, particularly Shiites and Kurds, are still aligned. We both want Iraqi self-rule and then free elections. That overlap of interests, however clouded, can still salvage something decent from this war — if the Bush team can finally screw up the courage to admit its failures and dramatically change course.
Yes, the hour is late, but as long as there's a glimmer of hope that this Bush team will do the right thing, we must insist on it, because America's role in the world is too precious — to America and to the rest of the world — to be squandered like this.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
A Wretched New Picture Of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page C01
Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory --
the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the
oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the
accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is
always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the
occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals,
unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience.
This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and political
leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting American abuse of
Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These photographs do not capture the
soul of America, they argued. They are aberrant.
This belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their
authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor;
democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of
information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so ingrained
that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing -- becomes
self-propagating.
But now we have photos that have gone to the ends of the Earth, and
painted brilliantly and indelibly, an image of America that could remain
with us for years, perhaps decades. An Army investigative report reveals
that we have stripped young men (whom we purported to liberate) of their
clothing and their dignity; we have forced them to make pyramids of flesh,
as if they were children; we have made them masturbate in front of their
captors and cameras; forced them to simulate sexual acts; threatened
prisoners with rape and sodomized at least one; beaten them; and turned
dogs upon them.
There are now images of men in the Muslim world looking at these images.
On the streets of Cairo, men pore over a newspaper. An icon appears on the
front page: a hooded man, in a rug-like poncho, standing with his arms out
like Christ, wires attached to the hands. He is faceless. This is now the
image of the war. In this country, perhaps it will have some competition
from the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled. Everywhere else,
everywhere America is hated (and that's a very large part of this globe),
the hooded, wired, faceless man of Abu Ghraib is this war's new mascot.
The American leaders' response is a mixture of public disgust, and a good
deal of resentment that they have, through these images, lost control of
the ultimate image of the war. All the right people have pronounced
themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more closely. "And
it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations
of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines.
. . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
on Sunday.
Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the
abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of
course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our
soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist,
are not us.
But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the
scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own
internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of
individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes
begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many
people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are,
collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in
a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized
prisoner, is ours.
And more. Perhaps this is just a little cancer that crept into the culture
of the people running Abu Ghraib prison. But stand back. Look at the
history. Open up to the hard facts of human nature, the lessons of the
past, the warning signs of future abuses.
These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger
and resentment grows and costs spiral. There's nothing surprising in this.
These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of
occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the
vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be
pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing
the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.
Look at these images closely and you realize that they can't just be the
random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few
bad seeds. First of all, they exist. Soldiers who allow themselves to be
photographed humiliating prisoners clearly don't believe this behavior is
unpalatable. Second, the soldiers didn't just reach into a grab bag of
things they thought would humiliate young Iraqi men. They chose sexual
humiliation, which may recall to outsiders the rape scandal at the Air
Force Academy, Tailhook and past killings of gay sailors and soldiers.
Is it an accident that these images feel so very much like the kind of
home made porn that is traded every day on the Internet? That they capture
exactly the quality and feel of the casual sexual decadence that so much
of the world deplores in us?
Is it an accident that the man in the hood, arms held out as if on a
cross, looks so uncannily like something out of the Spanish Inquisition?
That they have the feel of history in them, a long, buried, ugly history
of religious aggression and discrimination?
Perhaps both are accidents, meaningless accidents of photographs that
should never have seen the light of day. But they will not be perceived as
such elsewhere in the world.
World editorial reaction is vehement. We are under the suspicion of the
International Red Cross and Amnesty International. "US military power will
be seen for what it is, a behemoth with the response speed of a
muscle-bound ox and the limited understanding of a mouse," said Saudi
Arabia's English language Arab News.
We reduce Iraqis to hapless victims of a cheap porn flick; they reduce our
cherished, respected military to a hybrid beast, big, stupid, senseless.
Last year, Joel Turnipseed published "Baghdad Express," a memoir of the
first Gulf War. In it, he remembers an encounter with Iraqi prisoners. A
staff sergeant is explaining to the men the rules of the Geneva
Convention.
" . . . What that means, in plain English, is 'Don't feed the animals' and
'Don't put your hand in the cage.' "
And then, the author explains, the soldiers proceed to break the rules.
The ox thinks like a mouse.
"My vanquished were now vanquishing me," wrote Turnipseed, heartsick.
Not quite 50 years ago, Aime Cesaire, a poet and writer from Martinique,
wrote in his "Discourse on Colonialism": "First we must study how
colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the
true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts,
to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism."
Are we decivilized yet? Are we brutes yet? Of course not, say our leaders.
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page C01
Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory --
the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the
oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the
accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is
always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the
occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals,
unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience.
This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and political
leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting American abuse of
Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These photographs do not capture the
soul of America, they argued. They are aberrant.
This belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their
authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor;
democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of
information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so ingrained
that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing -- becomes
self-propagating.
But now we have photos that have gone to the ends of the Earth, and
painted brilliantly and indelibly, an image of America that could remain
with us for years, perhaps decades. An Army investigative report reveals
that we have stripped young men (whom we purported to liberate) of their
clothing and their dignity; we have forced them to make pyramids of flesh,
as if they were children; we have made them masturbate in front of their
captors and cameras; forced them to simulate sexual acts; threatened
prisoners with rape and sodomized at least one; beaten them; and turned
dogs upon them.
There are now images of men in the Muslim world looking at these images.
On the streets of Cairo, men pore over a newspaper. An icon appears on the
front page: a hooded man, in a rug-like poncho, standing with his arms out
like Christ, wires attached to the hands. He is faceless. This is now the
image of the war. In this country, perhaps it will have some competition
from the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled. Everywhere else,
everywhere America is hated (and that's a very large part of this globe),
the hooded, wired, faceless man of Abu Ghraib is this war's new mascot.
The American leaders' response is a mixture of public disgust, and a good
deal of resentment that they have, through these images, lost control of
the ultimate image of the war. All the right people have pronounced
themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more closely. "And
it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations
of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines.
. . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
on Sunday.
Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the
abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of
course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our
soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist,
are not us.
But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the
scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own
internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of
individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes
begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many
people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are,
collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in
a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized
prisoner, is ours.
And more. Perhaps this is just a little cancer that crept into the culture
of the people running Abu Ghraib prison. But stand back. Look at the
history. Open up to the hard facts of human nature, the lessons of the
past, the warning signs of future abuses.
These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger
and resentment grows and costs spiral. There's nothing surprising in this.
These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of
occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the
vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be
pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing
the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.
Look at these images closely and you realize that they can't just be the
random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few
bad seeds. First of all, they exist. Soldiers who allow themselves to be
photographed humiliating prisoners clearly don't believe this behavior is
unpalatable. Second, the soldiers didn't just reach into a grab bag of
things they thought would humiliate young Iraqi men. They chose sexual
humiliation, which may recall to outsiders the rape scandal at the Air
Force Academy, Tailhook and past killings of gay sailors and soldiers.
Is it an accident that these images feel so very much like the kind of
home made porn that is traded every day on the Internet? That they capture
exactly the quality and feel of the casual sexual decadence that so much
of the world deplores in us?
Is it an accident that the man in the hood, arms held out as if on a
cross, looks so uncannily like something out of the Spanish Inquisition?
That they have the feel of history in them, a long, buried, ugly history
of religious aggression and discrimination?
Perhaps both are accidents, meaningless accidents of photographs that
should never have seen the light of day. But they will not be perceived as
such elsewhere in the world.
World editorial reaction is vehement. We are under the suspicion of the
International Red Cross and Amnesty International. "US military power will
be seen for what it is, a behemoth with the response speed of a
muscle-bound ox and the limited understanding of a mouse," said Saudi
Arabia's English language Arab News.
We reduce Iraqis to hapless victims of a cheap porn flick; they reduce our
cherished, respected military to a hybrid beast, big, stupid, senseless.
Last year, Joel Turnipseed published "Baghdad Express," a memoir of the
first Gulf War. In it, he remembers an encounter with Iraqi prisoners. A
staff sergeant is explaining to the men the rules of the Geneva
Convention.
" . . . What that means, in plain English, is 'Don't feed the animals' and
'Don't put your hand in the cage.' "
And then, the author explains, the soldiers proceed to break the rules.
The ox thinks like a mouse.
"My vanquished were now vanquishing me," wrote Turnipseed, heartsick.
Not quite 50 years ago, Aime Cesaire, a poet and writer from Martinique,
wrote in his "Discourse on Colonialism": "First we must study how
colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the
true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts,
to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism."
Are we decivilized yet? Are we brutes yet? Of course not, say our leaders.
-
Simply Joel
- Posts: 3483
- Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2004 9:08 am
- Location: Land of Lincoln
- Contact:
Bold, italics and underlined are points I find important to share with you...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/colu ... 438.column
Prisoner abuse costs U.S. moral high ground
Clarence Page
May 5, 2004
NEW YORK CITY -- The saddest, most outrageous thing about those troops-gone-wild photographs of American soldiers abusing naked Iraqi prisoners is how easily the whole ugly mess could have been avoided.
Human rights watchdog groups have been warning British and American leaders for the past year that bad things were happening to detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Bush administration's reaction was swift and predictable. The administration ignored the warnings.
Now America and our selfless, courageous troops are shamed needlessly before the world by the disgraceful acts of a few poorly trained, poorly supervised prison guards.
The sadistic and humiliating abuse of detainees is painful to see, but such misbehavior is virtually inevitable when detentions and interrogation are hidden away from independent monitoring and accountability, as those in Iraq have been over the past year since what President Bush called "the end of major combat."
Ending the conditions that lead to such abuses will require a lot more than the usual public-relations spin and damage control. It is not enough to sweep this shameful episode under the rug with the prosecution of a few offenders at Abu Ghraib prison, formerly one of Saddam Hussein's hellholes of torture and death just outside Baghdad. Our government needs to impose the same level of humanity, transparency and accountability that we expect from our enemies when they are holding U.S. troops.
We now know that an internal Army review last fall blasted the military intelligence-gathering operation in Abu Ghraib for, among other problems, inadequate staffing and training of some reserve intelligence troops. At the same time, those operatives have come under increasing pressure to root out Iraqi insurgents and figure out the strength of their support.
The jail's now-relieved commanding officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which is based in Uniondale, N.Y., and lawyers for the soldiers argue they are being made scapegoats for a flawed military prison system in which civilian "contract interrogators" gave orders without legal accountability to uniformed troops who did not have training as prison guards or interrogation assistants.
Such problems lie at the root of the problems at Abu Ghraib, according to the Army's internal review. Detentions for purposes of interrogation always have potential for abuse, especially in untrained hands.
If it comes to you as news that the U.S. now hires out interrogation duties in much the same way that you might hire a plumber or electrician, chalk it up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's continuing efforts to restructure, downsize and privatize our military.
The problem with using civilian contractors for intelligence and other sensitive work involving human rights issues is that no one is quite sure what laws apply to them. As U.S. civilians, they are not accountable to American military law or Iraqi civilian laws. They may be accountable under some American laws that have yet to be tested. In the meantime, they're pretty much free agents.
Even after CBS News' "60 Minutes II" broadcast the outrageous photos, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "categorically" on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday that the case was isolated and "there is no evidence of systematic abuse" in the U.S. detention operations in the region. Somehow he managed to know this without reading the 3-month-old U.S. military report on the Abu Ghraib case, a report that details specific systematic problems.
It was still working its way up the chain of command, he said. "I'll see this report," he said. "I'm sure it just hasn't come to me yet."
Fortunately, an American soldier turned over evidence that included photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib, saying "There are some things going on here that I can't live with," according to Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. military in Iraq.
America should thank that soldier, whomever he or she may be. Some cynics try to play down the abuses at Abu Ghraib as small potatoes compared to the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein or other Arab leaders who still are in power. That's a pathetically low standard for Americans to meet. If we want other world leaders to behave better, we have to behave better too.
As Kimmitt said in the CBS report, "If we can't hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect, we can't ask that other nations do that to our soldiers."
Indeed, as the world's superpower, we are obliged to follow the standards that we want to set for the rest of the world. The price of a place on the moral high ground is eternal vigilance, particularly against those on our own side whose idiocy drags us down.
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune editorial board. E-mail: [email protected]
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/colu ... 438.column
Prisoner abuse costs U.S. moral high ground
Clarence Page
May 5, 2004
NEW YORK CITY -- The saddest, most outrageous thing about those troops-gone-wild photographs of American soldiers abusing naked Iraqi prisoners is how easily the whole ugly mess could have been avoided.
Human rights watchdog groups have been warning British and American leaders for the past year that bad things were happening to detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Bush administration's reaction was swift and predictable. The administration ignored the warnings.
Now America and our selfless, courageous troops are shamed needlessly before the world by the disgraceful acts of a few poorly trained, poorly supervised prison guards.
The sadistic and humiliating abuse of detainees is painful to see, but such misbehavior is virtually inevitable when detentions and interrogation are hidden away from independent monitoring and accountability, as those in Iraq have been over the past year since what President Bush called "the end of major combat."
Ending the conditions that lead to such abuses will require a lot more than the usual public-relations spin and damage control. It is not enough to sweep this shameful episode under the rug with the prosecution of a few offenders at Abu Ghraib prison, formerly one of Saddam Hussein's hellholes of torture and death just outside Baghdad. Our government needs to impose the same level of humanity, transparency and accountability that we expect from our enemies when they are holding U.S. troops.
We now know that an internal Army review last fall blasted the military intelligence-gathering operation in Abu Ghraib for, among other problems, inadequate staffing and training of some reserve intelligence troops. At the same time, those operatives have come under increasing pressure to root out Iraqi insurgents and figure out the strength of their support.
The jail's now-relieved commanding officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which is based in Uniondale, N.Y., and lawyers for the soldiers argue they are being made scapegoats for a flawed military prison system in which civilian "contract interrogators" gave orders without legal accountability to uniformed troops who did not have training as prison guards or interrogation assistants.
Such problems lie at the root of the problems at Abu Ghraib, according to the Army's internal review. Detentions for purposes of interrogation always have potential for abuse, especially in untrained hands.
If it comes to you as news that the U.S. now hires out interrogation duties in much the same way that you might hire a plumber or electrician, chalk it up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's continuing efforts to restructure, downsize and privatize our military.
The problem with using civilian contractors for intelligence and other sensitive work involving human rights issues is that no one is quite sure what laws apply to them. As U.S. civilians, they are not accountable to American military law or Iraqi civilian laws. They may be accountable under some American laws that have yet to be tested. In the meantime, they're pretty much free agents.
Even after CBS News' "60 Minutes II" broadcast the outrageous photos, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "categorically" on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday that the case was isolated and "there is no evidence of systematic abuse" in the U.S. detention operations in the region. Somehow he managed to know this without reading the 3-month-old U.S. military report on the Abu Ghraib case, a report that details specific systematic problems.
It was still working its way up the chain of command, he said. "I'll see this report," he said. "I'm sure it just hasn't come to me yet."
Fortunately, an American soldier turned over evidence that included photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib, saying "There are some things going on here that I can't live with," according to Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S. military in Iraq.
America should thank that soldier, whomever he or she may be. Some cynics try to play down the abuses at Abu Ghraib as small potatoes compared to the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein or other Arab leaders who still are in power. That's a pathetically low standard for Americans to meet. If we want other world leaders to behave better, we have to behave better too.
As Kimmitt said in the CBS report, "If we can't hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect, we can't ask that other nations do that to our soldiers."
Indeed, as the world's superpower, we are obliged to follow the standards that we want to set for the rest of the world. The price of a place on the moral high ground is eternal vigilance, particularly against those on our own side whose idiocy drags us down.
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune editorial board. E-mail: [email protected]
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
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Simply Joel
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Simply Joel
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and... yes, we are animals.stuart wrote:or all we all just animals?
Yet, we are animals that can learn to control our most debase behaviors.
IMHO, the military leadership failed both their soldiers and their captives... the civilian leadership in the pentagon has failed their soldiers and their employers, the American people.
It is imperative that the American people to ensure the rule of law be followed regarding those in the leadership chain as well as the prisoners being held.
I consider the actions of a few to be shameful, yet I won't jump on for a ride... any lynch mob art car...