[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just to let those of you in New York City know, I’ll be appearing with the remarkable journalist Jeremy Scahill, just back from the frontlines in the Global War on Terror and author of the bestselling book Blackwater, on Friday, February 10th, 6 to 8pm, at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University -- 7th Floor Commons, 20 Cooper Square (Bowery at 5th Street). For directions, click here.
The event is a launch for my new book, The United States of Fear. I’ll read a piece or two and then Jeremy and I will have a conversation about our work and our world. It’s free and open to the public. Hope to see you there! Tom]
Are you on tenterhooks? Will Mitt make it out of the Cayman Islands and into the White House? Will Newt take the full “wild and woolly” ride on the primary roller coaster to the Republican convention? Will the two of them and their PACs eat each other alive by next week? Will Rick and his single Wyoming funder hang in there until his “man on dog” sex comment finally fades from Google? And Ron Paul -- yes, we’re on first-name terms with the other three, but not Paul, the guy who insisted he’d be home reading an “economics textbook” while other Republican candidates piously opted for watching a football game -- will he continue to make statements about U.S. global policy that would normally send a Republican to hell? And honestly, did you really imagine that Elizabeth Warren wasn’t going to have something strong and supportive to say about the Pats in the Super Bowl, after the previous Democratic senatorial candidate blew her chances with a dismissive comment about Fenway Park?
You thought I was talking about American electoral politics? Not at all. I’m discussing the latest version of The Amazing Race. And if you're like me, don’t you miss the contestants who have already been eliminated: Herman (“Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan”) Cain, Michele (who mistook a serial killer for a movie star) Bachman, and the other Rick, whatever-his-name-was, the Texan who just couldn’t count to three?
I mean, aren’t you having a blast watching this bread-and-circuses spectacle, which in January captured a staggering 41% of the combined media newshole, 64% of cable TV’s? There’s a headline a second, a new poll a minute, an angry set-to an hour. With only three primaries and one caucus out of the way, the Republicans have already had 19 (count 'em 19!) televised “debates,” and my hometown paper is running daily front-page stories about the race with double- or triple-page inside coverage. In a season when spectacle and Super Bowl normally go together, the entertainment extravaganza of the moment remains the race for the White House -- and in football terms, we’re still in the wild-card round of the playoffs.
I mean truly, did you ever dream that a moribund Democratic presidential race and a Republican one led by Mr. Mitt, the plastic quarter-billionaire, would be competition for that single holiest night on the sports calendar when everyone but the Giants, Patriots, and Madonna is expected to couch out? Fortunately, we have TomDispatch Jock Culture correspondent Robert Lipsyte, author most recently of An Accidental Sportswriter, to remind us that, whether you’re watching a Republican debate or the Super Bowl, it’s wild and woolly America all the way to the end zone. Tom
Four Reasons to Watch the Super Bowl
Joe Hill, Joe Pa, Tebow, Wee Brains
By Robert LipsyteMost Americans won’t need a justification to watch Sunday’s game, but if you’re a TomDispatch.com reader you might think, even in passing, that celebrating the holiest day of violence, consumerism, and class warfare on your couch is a betrayal of your values or a waste of your time. You might even imagine that it would be better to take a hike, read a book, or meditate.
Not this Sunday, buster. It’s an election season. You need to watch this game to fully understand how jobs, religion, leadership, and healthcare dominate every American contest.
When it comes to U.S. policy toward Iran, irony is the name of the game. Where to begin? The increasingly fierce sanctions that the Obama administration is seeking to impose on that country’s oil business will undoubtedly cause further problems for its economy and further pain to ordinary Iranians. But they are likely to be splendid news for a few other countries that Washington might not be quite so eager to favor.
Take China, which already buys 22% of Iran’s oil. With its energy-ravenous economy, it is likely, in the long run, to buy more, not less Iranian oil, and -- thanks to the new sanctions -- at what might turn out to be bargain basement prices. Or consider Russia once the Eurozone is without Iranian oil. That giant energy producer is likely to find itself with a larger market share of European energy needs at higher prices. The Saudis, who want high oil prices to fund an expensive payoff to their people to avoid an Arab Spring, are likely to be delighted. And Iraq, with its porous border, its thriving black market in Iranian oil, and its Shiite government in Baghdad, will be pleased to help Iran avoid sanctions. (And thank you, America, for that invasion!)
Who may suffer, other than Iranians? In the long run, the shaky economies of Italy, Greece, and Spain, long dependent on Iranian oil, potentially raising further problems for an already roiling Eurozone. And don’t forget the U.S. economy, or your own pocketbook, if gas prices go up, or even President Obama, if his bet on oil sanctions turns out to be an economic disaster in an election year.
In other words, once again Washington's (and Tel Aviv's) carefully calculated plans for Iran may go seriously, painfully awry. Now, in all honesty, wouldn’t you call that Kafkaesque? Or perhaps that’s a question for the Pentagon where, it turns out, Kafka is in residence. I’m talking, of course, about Lieutenant Commander Mike Kafka. He’s a spokesman for the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command -- believe me, you can’t make this stuff up -- and just the other day he was over at the old five-sided castle being relatively close-mouthed about the retrofitting of a Navy amphibious transport docking ship as a special operations “mothership” (a term until now reserved for sci-fi novels and Somali pirates). It’s soon to be dispatched to somewhere in or near the Persian Gulf to be a floating base for Navy SEAL covert actions of unspecified sorts, guaranteed not to bring down the price of oil.
Certainly, the dispatch of that ship in July will only ratchet up tensions in the Gulf, a place that already, according to Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of the upcoming book The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, is the most potentially explosive spot on the planet. Tom
Hormuz-Mania
Why Closure of the Strait of Hormuz Could Ignite a War and a Global Depression
By Michael T. KlareEver since December 27th, war clouds have been gathering over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water connecting the Persian Gulf with the Indian Ocean and the seas beyond. On that day, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi warned that Tehran would block the strait and create havoc in international oil markets if the West placed new economic sanctions on his country.
“If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports,” Rahimi declared, “then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz.” Claiming that such a move would constitute an assault on America’s vital interests, President Obama reportedly informed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that Washington would use force to keep the strait open. To back up their threats, both sides have been bolstering their forces in the area and each has conducted a series of provocative military exercises.
All of a sudden, the Strait of Hormuz has become the most combustible spot on the planet, the most likely place to witness a major conflict between well-armed adversaries. Why, of all locales, has it become so explosive?
Iranian Aircraft Carriers in the Gulf of Mexico
It Can’t Happen Here
By Tom Engelhardt
Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S.
(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels. The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats...”
The unit began its existence in mid-2009 -- around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States -- or might do in the future -- is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard. “It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation,” Arastoo says about the U.S.
Okay, so I made that up. Sue me. But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction. After all, despite the talk about American decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet. Yes, there is a new U.S. special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, we really don’t quite know what it’s tasked with doing (other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).
And yes, the quotes are perfectly real, just out of the mouth of a U.S. “spokesman for special-operations forces in the Mideast,” not a representative of Iran’s Republican Guard. And yes, most Americans, if they were to read about the existence of the new special ops team, wouldn’t think it strange that U.S. forces were edging up to (if not across) the Iranian border, not when our “safety” was at stake.
Reverse the story, though, and it immediately becomes a malign, if unimaginable, fairy tale. Of course, no Iranian elite forces will ever operate along the U.S. border. Not in this world. Washington wouldn’t live with it and it remains the military giant of giants on this planet. By comparison, Iran is, in military terms, a minor power.
Any Iranian forces on the Mexican border would represent a crossing of one of those “red lines” that U.S. officials are always talking about and so an international abomination to be dealt with severely. More than that, their presence would undoubtedly be treated as an act of war. It would make screaming headlines here. The Republican candidates for the presidency would go wild. You know the rest. Think about the reaction when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that an Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas had contacted a Mexican drug cartel as part of a bizarre plot supposedly hatched by senior members of the elite Iranian Quds Force to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant and possibly bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies as well.
At some basic level, climate change shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Fossil-fuel burning -- the essence of our civilization since the industrial revolution -- dumps prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. As it happens, 2010 was another banner year for carbon dioxide production; the 5.9% rise in CO2 emissions was the “biggest jump ever recorded.” That greenhouse gas, in turn, traps heat and so warms the planet. The results are clear enough for anyone to see. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. Last year was the ninth warmest on record, despite an expected cooling effect from a strong La Niña temperature pattern in the Pacific Ocean.
More heat means more turbulence, which means more extreme weather events, which have clearly been on the rise -- more wetness, more droughts, fiercer storms. In that category, 2011 was definitely a year for the record books, with an unprecedented 14 weather events that each caused $1 billion or more in damage. More extreme weather means more human misery, relatively predictable globally, but reasonably unexpected when it actually hits locally.
The urge not to believe that we are despoiling our own planet has meant that we’ve been slow to develop alternate energy sources, but not slow to grow economically. What that means, of course, is that the search only intensifies for more fossil fuels, ever tougher to get as time goes on and ever “dirtier” (in greenhouse gas terms) to produce.
It’s the definition of a nasty feedback loop, made worse because the changing planet is itself setting off other phenomena that only increase the warming trend. Arctic sea ice, now melting at prodigious rates, reflects the sun’s heat back into the atmosphere. Less ice, in other words, isn’t just a sign of the planet getting hotter, but a factor in heating up the planet. In addition, the more iceless the oceans, the more their waters absorb carbon emissions, which only puts further pressure on many of the life forms living in them. Similarly, the melting of the permafrost in the northern reaches of the planet, which contains vast frozen reservoirs of another greenhouse gas, methane, might -- no one is yet sure -- sooner or later release enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere, only increasing the overheating effect. It’s creepy. It’s happening. And Ma Nature really doesn’t give a damn whether we’re in denial or not.
Sooner or later, undoubtedly, denial will give way to... well, who knows what? Christian Parenti, author of a new book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, that, under the circumstances, couldn’t be more relevant or recommended, has some thoughts on why it’s time to stop cursing big government and think more seriously about what its role might be in the future that awaits us. Tom
Why Climate Change Will Make You Love Big Government
A Secret History of Free Enterprise and the Government That Made It Possible
By Christian ParentiLook back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees, touched off wildfires that burned four million acres, and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture, particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion -- and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.
In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.
Across the planet the story was similar. Wildfires consumed large swaths of Chile. Colombia suffered its second year of endless rain, causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. In Brazil, the life-giving Amazon River was running low due to drought. Northern Mexico is still suffering from its worst drought in 70 years. Flooding in the Thai capital, Bangkok, killed over 500 and displaced or damaged the property of 12 million others, while ruining some of the world’s largest industrial parks. The World Bank estimates the damage in Thailand at a mind-boggling $45 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters ever. And that’s just to start a 2011 extreme-weather list, not to end it.
The twenty-first century hasn’t exactly been America’s greatest moment. Still, there remain winners, along with all the losers you might care to mention. If, in fact, you were to sum up the first decade-plus of the next “American Century” in manufacturing terms, you might say that -- Steve Jobs aside -- this country has mainly been successful at making things that go boom in the night. Start with Hollywood. Its action and superhero films -- the very definition of what goes boom in the night -- continue to capture eyeballs and dominate global markets in ways that should impress and that have left national movie industries elsewhere in the proverbial dust. And then, of course, there’s that other group of winners, the arms-makers of the military-industrial-homeland-security complex. They’ve had the time of their lives these last boom years (so to speak), with national security budgets soaring annually beyond all imagination.
Even now, in the toughest of tough times and despite the headlines about gigantic Defense Department spending cuts, President Obama recently reassured arms-makers (and the rest of us) that the Pentagon budget would, in his words, “still grow, because we have global responsibilities that demand our leadership. In fact, the defense budget will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration.” In response, his Republican opponents lambasted him as weak on defense for promising so little. Which tells you just who the winners of the last decade were and who the winners of the next one are likely to be.
Of course, in any situation there are always winners and losers, but it is striking that our losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven a gold mine for a small set of crony corporations and weapon-makers, producing a group of real winners at home with names like Lockheed Martin, KBR, and General Dynamics.
TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore points, for instance, to the end results of our debacle in Iraq: the new Iraqi government is planning to purchase $11 billion in American weapons (and training), including F-16 fighter jets. A little history of American dreams for the Iraqi Air Force might be in order. When the Bush administration launched its invasion in 2003, it imagined an American-garrisoned Iraq for decades to come and a reconstituted Iraqi military “lite,” a force of perhaps 40,000 lightly armed troops “without an air force,” who would patrol the borders of their part of an American-dominated Middle East. In those halcyon days, there were no plans to recreate an Iraqi Air Force (though Saddam Hussein’s had once been one of the biggest in the world). Or rather, U.S. planners saw no need to do so because the “Iraqi Air Force” already existed and was settling into Balad Air Base north of Baghdad. It was, of course, the U.S. Air Force.
Consider it now a sign of defeat that almost the last military link between Iraq and the U.S. military will be the delivery of those new weapons and the years of training and support that will go with them. We didn’t win in Iraq, but someone here did! Let Astore tell you all about it. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses the thrill of weaponry in pop culture and how it faded for him, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
Weapons ‘R’ Us
Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds
By William J. AstorePerhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who were “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts.
If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Predators and Reapers (as in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) and Eagles and Fighting Falcons (as in F-15 and F-16 combat jets), and outfitting them with the deadliest of weapons. In this market niche, we’re still the envy of the world.
