[Note for TomDispatch Readers: At this point every year, TD closes down. We’ll be back Tuesday, September 6th, with a powerful piece for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. In the meantime, I briefly morph into a book editor for the American Empire Project series that I co-run and also, perhaps, get a chance to answer some of those who emailed TD this last crazy month and haven’t yet heard back. (My apologies!) Special thanks, as ever, to the hardworking TomDispatch crew who keep this site ever above the waves: Nick Turse, Andy Kroll, Timothy MacBain, and Joe Duax. What in the world would I do without you?
And one last thing: if you’re in the mood for another dose of our absurd wars, check out my latest piece, “The New Date for Victory in Afghanistan: 2024,” written for AlterNet where Nick Turse is just in the process of setting up a new “empire” section. Tom]
What might have happened if John McCain had won the presidency in 2008? One thing is certain: there would have been a lot more protest from Democrats, progressives, and the left. Take it as an irony of his election, but Barack Obama has proved remarkably effective in disarming the antiwar movement, even as the use of war in American policy in the Greater Middle East has only grown. That Obama, the supposed anti-warrior of the 2008 campaign, has paid less than no attention to his antiwar critics is no news at all. It’s now practically a cliché as well that he seems to feel no need to feed his political “base” and that, generally speaking (and explain it as you will), his base has not yet pushed back.
This has been particularly true of Obama’s wars, especially the disastrous, never-ending one in Afghanistan. Had Afghanistan been “McCain’s war,” you would surely have seen growing waves of protest, despite the way 9/11 ensured that the Afghan War, unlike the Iraq one, would long be the unassailable “good war.” Still, as American treasure surged into the ill-starred enterprise in Afghanistan, while funds for so much that mattered disappeared at home, I think the streets of Washington would have been filling. What protest there has been, as John Hanrahan of the Nieman Watchdog website reported recently, tends to be remarkably ill-covered in the mainstream media.
Obama, only two points ahead of Ron Paul in the latest Gallup Poll in the race for 2012, is a beyond-vulnerable candidate. (Somewhere there must be some Democratic pol doing the obvious math and considering a challenge, mustn't there?) Fortunately, in another area at least as crucial as our wars, demonstrators against a Big Oil tar-sands pipeline from Canada that will help despoil the planet are now out in front of the White House -- you can follow them here -- and they haven’t been shy about aiming their nonviolent protests directly at Obama. Will he or won’t he act like the climate-change president that, on coming into office, he swore he would be? Time will tell. Meanwhile, let Bill McKibben, TomDispatch regular, an organizer of the protests, and just out of a jail cell, fill you in. Tom
Arrested at the White House
Acting as a Living Tribute to Martin Luther King
By Bill McKibbenI didn’t think it was possible, but my admiration for Martin Luther King, Jr., grew even stronger these past days.
As I headed to jail as part of the first wave of what is turning into the biggest civil disobedience action in the environmental movement for many years, I had the vague idea that I would write something. Not an epic like King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but at least, you know, a blog post. Or a tweet.
But frankly, I wasn’t up to it. The police, surprised by how many people turned out on the first day of two weeks of protests at the White House, decided to teach us a lesson. As they told our legal team, they wanted to deter anyone else from coming -- and so with our first crew they were… kind of harsh.
We spent three days in D.C.’s Central Cell Block, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds like it might be. You lie on a metal rack with no mattress or bedding and sweat in the high heat; the din is incessant; there’s one baloney sandwich with a cup of water every 12 hours.
It was an olive branch out of nowhere. In Ohio last week, Republican Governor John Kasich sent a letter to his state's labor unions pleading with them to join him in renegotiating Senate Bill 5. That’s the controversial bill he signed in March, amid a wave of anti-union legislation around the country, that cut collective bargaining rights for more than 350,000 Ohio teachers, cops, firefighters, and other public employees.
Kasich is now urging union leaders to "avoid the bitter political warfare" -- having initiated it himself. It's not surprising that he made his gesture now, since We Are Ohio, a union coalition, gathered a staggering 1.3 million signatures (only 231,000 were needed) and got a referendum to repeal the law onto the November ballot. Now, Kasich wants a compromise deal in which the unions would call off the referendum vote. We Are Ohio, however, has no urge to cater to Kasich's sudden yen for compromise. A spokesman for the coalition fired back that the governor "should either repeal the entire bill or support our efforts and encourage a no vote" in November.
It's no coincidence that Kasich's concession offer came one day after the end of the long, politically fraught summer of recall elections in Wisconsin that dented Republican strength in that other Midwestern state where lawmakers laid siege to workers’ rights. Consider Kasich’s sudden gesture a straw in the wind, but as TomDispatch Associate Editor Andy Kroll writes, just where and how strongly that wind is blowing remains anybody’s guess. (Kroll’s work for TomDispatch on the Wisconsin events of last winter has been included in a new book, We Are Wisconsin, which describes itself as "the Wisconsin uprising in the words of the activists, writers, and everyday Wisconsinites who made it happen.") Tom
The Badger State's Bloody Stalemate
What Comes Next for Wisconsin's Fledgling Uprising
By Andy KrollStephanie Haw needed a good cry.
On the night of August 9th, the rowdy crowd inside Hawk's bar in downtown Madison grew ever quieter as the election results trickled in. Earlier that day, with the nation watching, voters statewide cast their ballots in Wisconsin's eagerly awaited recall elections that threatened the seats of six Republican state senators. Democrats needed to win three of them to regain control of the state senate and block Republican Governor Scott Walker's hard-line agenda. But it wasn't to be. Deep into the night, an MSNBC anchor announced that a fourth GOP senator, Alberta Darling of north Milwaukee and the nearby suburbs, had clinched a narrow victory.
Haw slipped outside. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this, she thought. Progressives had mobilized damn near every possible supporter they could, phone banking and door knocking and Facebooking and Tweeting, and in the end, it still wasn't enough. She thought of all the energy poured into the recall effort, and of her two-year-old daughter running around the house shouting "Recall Walker! Recall Walker!" Standing on the sidewalk, she burst into tears.
I met Haw and her mother later that night at Hawk's. We sat around chewing over the election results till the bar emptied. Haw, who was wearing a red t-shirt with SOLIDARITY emblazoned on the front, said simply, "I feel terrible that we lost." I reminded her what the Democrats had been up against: with one exception, the six districts in play leaned to the right, and all six of those Republicans had won in 2008 despite the Obama frenzy that gripped the state. (He won it by nearly 14 percentage points.) She nodded along with me and then summed her feelings up this way: "I guess it's the best of times and the worst of times."
That ambivalence seemed to carry through Wisconsin's historic summer of recalls, which ended on August 16th when a pair of Democratic state senators easily defended their seats from a Republican recall effort. Which is to say, when the dust settled in the Badger State, there was no clear winner.
Can you even remember the world before 9/11? You know, the one where you weren’t stripped in the airport or body-wanded at the ballpark? It’s as much a lost world as anything Conan Doyle ever imagined. And it seems there’s no turning back. An administration voted into office by a populace tired of George W. Bush-ism has, remarkably enough, added on to Bush’s wars, redoubled his “secret” drone campaigns, further expanded the special operations forces that have grown into a secret military inside the military, upped the level of secrecy that envelops the National Security Complex (whose further expansion it also has overseen), renewed the Patriot Act, supported further surveillance of Americans, dumped yet more money into the Pentagon, and in sum seems intent on recreating Bushism without Bush.
Now, barely noticed, basic American institutions are starting to wobble under the strain of our post-9/11 world. With the Supreme Court ensuring that corporations would be prime actors in electoral campaigns and the coming of billion-dollar elections, national politics has become a bread-and-circuses media affair that could at best be considered a “semi-democracy.” Similarly -- as Karen J. Greenberg, TomDispatch regular and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days, tells us -- the courts, already under increasing financial pressure and suffering layoffs and slowdowns, have been losing the confidence of Washington.
Osama bin Laden must be spinning with pleasure in his watery grave. Tom
Crisis of Confidence
How Washington Lost Faith in America’s Courts
By Karen J. GreenbergAs the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus. The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize. On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.
If, in fact, we are a “nation of laws,” you wouldn’t know it from Washington’s actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country’s increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.
Clearly, a key factor in that decision was a growing belief, widely shared within the national-security establishment, that none of our traditional or even newly created tribunals, civilian or military, could have handled a bin Laden trial. Washington’s faith went solely to Navy SEALs zooming into another country’s sovereign airspace on a moonless night on a mission to assassinate bin Laden, whether he offered the slightest resistance or not. It evidently seemed so much easier to the top officials overseeing the operation -- and so much less messy -- than bringing a confessed mass murderer into a courtroom in, or even anywhere near, the United States.
The decision to kill bin Laden on sight rather than capture him and bring him to trial followed hard on the heels of an ignominious Obama administration climb-down on its plan to try the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, in a federal court in New York City. Captured in Pakistan in May 2003 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, his proposed trial was, under political pressure, returned to a military venue earlier this year.
Those first acts of that first shining full day in the Oval Office are now so forgotten, but on January 21, 2009, among other things, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground,” and then signed a straightforward executive order “requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.” It was an open-and-shut case, so to speak, part of what CNN called “a clean break from the Bush administration.” On that same day, as part of that same break, the president signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda hailing a “new era of openness,” of sunshine and transparency in government. As the president put it, "Every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known."
Of course, nothing could have been more Bushian, if you were thinking about “clean breaks,” than America’s wars in the Greater Middle East. When it came to the Iraq War, at least, President Obama arrived in office with another goal and another promise that couldn’t have been more open and shut (or so his supporters thought), not just drawing down Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, but “ending” it “responsibly.” (Admittedly, he was also muttering quietly about “residual forces” there, but who noticed?)
Two and a half years later, Guantanamo remains thrivingly open, while all discussion of ever closing it has long since ended; the administration has, in those same years, gained a fierce reputation as an enforcer of government secrecy and, while it has prosecuted neither torturers, nor financial titans, it has gone after government whistleblowers with a passion. In the meantime, the Iraq War was indeed wound down “responsibly” (which turned out to mean incredibly slowly), but in recent months, as U.S. casualties again rose, the Obama administration and the U.S. military have visibly been in a desperate search for ways to keep sizeable numbers of American forces there as “trainers,” while also militarizing a vast State Department mission in Baghdad and outfitting it for the long haul with more than 5,000 armed mercenaries as well as a mini-air force.
Promises? As Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman used to say: What? Me worry? As it happens, though, David Bromwich, TomDispatch regular (and essayist for the Huffington Post and the New York Review of Books) does worry. In today’s ambitious post, he offers a new yardstick for measuring the promises, the acts, and the nature of the Obama administration -- as well as the nature of its “break” with the Bush era. Tom
Symptoms of the Bush-Obama Presidency
The Saved and the Sacked
By David BromwichIs it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?
The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of “state secrets” to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact -- the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.
The significance of this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in 2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had been presented as “sectarian feuding” began to look like a war of national liberation against an occupying power, the American press exhibited an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington’s embrace of “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it -- along with the Afghan War -- has returned only occasionally in the four years since.
This disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep the wars going but normalize them; make them normal by not talking about them much; by not talking about them imply that, while “victory” is not in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately been given a name. They call it “success.”
Meanwhile, back at home...
The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
China just launched a refitted Ukrainian aircraft carrier from the 1990s on its first test run -- and that’s what the only projected "great power" enemy of the U.S. has to offer for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier task forces to cruise the seven seas and plans to keep that many through 2045. Like so much else, when it comes to the American military, all comparisons are ludicrous. In any normal sense, the United States stands alone in military terms. Its expenditures make up almost 50% of global military spending; it dominates the global arms market; and it has countless more bases, pilotless drones, military bands, and almost anything else military you’d care to mention than does any other power.
In other words, comparisons can’t be made. The minute you try, you’re off the charts. And yet, in purely practical terms, when you take a shot at measuring what the overwhelming investment of American treasure in the military, the U.S. intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security, and the rest of our national security establishment has actually bought us, you come up with a series of wars and conflicts headed nowhere and a series of post-9/11 terror attacks generally so inept it hardly mattered whether they were foiled or not.
Still, when it comes to cutting the U.S. national security budget, none of this seems to matter. The Pentagon “cuts” presently being discussed in Washington are largely in projected future growth, not in real funds (which continue to rise) -- and even then, the Pentagon and its many boosters in Washington are already crying bloody murder. Give some credit for all this to the giant weapons makers and to the military itself: both have so carefully tied military-related jobs into so many state economies that few congressional representatives could afford to vote for the sorts of real cutbacks that would bring perhaps the most profligate institution on the planet to heel and yet still leave the country as the globe’s military giant. You want, for instance, to cut back on that absolutely crucial Navy acrobatic flying team, the Blue Angels. (What would we all do without dramatic military flyovers at our major and minor sporting events?) Count on it, hotel keepers in Florida will be on the phone immediately! Add in the veneration of American soldiers and you have a fatal brew when it comes to serious budget cutting.
Absurdity, logic. Neither seems to matter. Still, the financial basics remain eye-opening, as TomDispatch regular Chris Hellman of the National Priorities Project makes clear. Tom
How Safe Are You?
What Almost $8 Trillion in National Security Spending Bought You
By Chris HellmanThe killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a "doomsday mechanism” for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year’s even larger military budget.
None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.
Consider this my contribution to a future 12-step program for national security sobriety.
