We are about to approve another attorney general who won't admit that torture is illegal. Watch Wednesday's Democracy Now! to see leaders with moral clarity like Ted Kennedy speak out and watch some Democratic leaders who seem to see the problem, but still refuse to play hardball with the goons running (and ruining) our country.

The following proclamation is circulating on the internet. I thought it looks like something most TPAs could sign on to, so I'll put it up here:

GREETINGS FROM EUROPE!

American Voices Abroad Berlin sends you greetings of solidarity!

As citizens of the United States living abroad, we look at our country through both a telescope and a microscope. From a distance we see what all the world sees: a country mired in a war begun under false pretenses and dominated by profiteering, a war that has unleashed multiple sources of violence. From our distant but very focused point of view, we see a delusional administration unwilling to end the occupation of Iraq, incapable of admitting its own failures, stalling until it is no longer in office.

But under the magnifying lens we see the people of the United States - our families, friends and former neighbors, now an overwhelming majority of the population - asking: How can we get out of Iraq responsibly?

From our point of view, responsibility means demonstrating our non-imperial aims: We must end all claims to permanent bases! We must end all claims to Iraqi oil! We must end the occupation of Iraq, withdrawing our soldiers and military contractors. This is the responsible way out.

We ask of our country that it work with the United Nations to form a peace-building mission - unprecedented in size and vigor - with partners especially from the Arab and Islamic worlds, led by the United Nations, without troops from the occupying countries. Those occupying countries - the United States and the Coalition of the Willing - must now work with the United Nations to re-build Iraq, to compensate it for all the death and destruction.

And, of course, responsible behavior also means preventing a war with Iran. Five years ago many Americans did not believe that the United States would really go to war with Iraq, especially because UN inspectors were not finding any weapons of mass destruction. But the disinformation campaign was successful, and a war powers authority resolution was passed in Congress, a resolution that is still in effect. This resolution must be repealed. And congressional hearings must begin to expose the current alarming disinformation campaign justifying war with yet another country. We must stop behaving as if we were sent by God to invade and remake the entire region.

At home, we must take care of our veterans. We must reform our dysfunctional electoral system. We must restore all of our
constitutionally guaranteed rights.

These are the right things to do. These are the responsible things to do. And, as far as we can tell from abroad, this is all in the national interest of the United States.

Let us begin to consider what real security means and what an effective government in the United States might look like. How do we want to relate to the rest of the world - as aggressors and war profiteers, or as a force for peace and justice and international law?

Thank you.

American Voices Abroad Berlin, Berlin/Germany (a member group of the UFPJ coalition)

signed: Ann Wertheimer, for the executive committee of American Voices Abroad Berlin, October 2007

Recently I read an article from Chomsky in which he spoke of people’s beliefs who have made it into the establishment. He looks at a typical top journalist for the New York Times, for example, and asks what moves this guy to write what he writes. Is he being censored, manipulated by his bosses to write pro-government, pro-corporate articles? Chomsky says no. This guy believes what he’s writing. He’s not lying and he’s not being censored. The journalist’s world view is clearly within that of the dominate culture. He is no radical and he doesn’t think in revolutionary terms and doesn’t seriously question the system. He’s beliefs conform to those of the power elite.
Chomsky says that top journalists are by default conformists. If they weren’t they simply wouldn’t have gotten where they are. They would have been booted out way earlier. The education they go through conditioned and formed them. Throughout his education and career the journalist has been molded into what h is. You could say he brainwashed, though that is misleading. So there’s no need to actively censure your newspapers cus they are by their own will printing what you want them to.
This attitude seems defeatist to me cus it says: you’re a conformer, you’re in the system cus you believe in it, so what can be changed? If the conformers firmly believe in what they’re doing, then there’s no way they’re gonna change. That seems rather hopeless.
Would Chomsky agree to that? There is no way to “convert” the conformists and there’s no use wasting our time trying. Maybe we should concentrate our efforts elsewhere. Maybe itÄs been a mistake and a waste of time thinking we could convince the established if we just tried hard enough, got enough people behind us an had good enough arguments.

Read some more of the hard goods on how the U.S. is now, by its own earlier criteria, a state with an official policy condoning torture. Even the corporate media is covering it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/weekinreview/03shane.html

Read or listen to Wednesday's Marketplace Money and hear about a new study that seems to show that Europe is offering more of the American dream than the United States.

Here are some quotes from the interview:

Diagnosis:
American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers were at the same age. ... [T]here is greater upward mobility in Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and get this, France, than in the U,S....In other words, the odds are better here: If you're born rich, you'll stay rich, and if you're born poor, you'll die poor.

Part of it is, back to the '50s and '60s when there was greater mobility, you know, we had limited competition, and our economy, we had a social compact, we had strong unions, the GI Bill, Social Security, Medicare...

[We still have those to some extent] but we have now moved toward a society of hyper competition, both domestically and internationally, this thing that we talk about a lot, we've also had deregulation, which is, you know, again, I'm not saying these things are all negative. What I'm saying is how the environment has changed. Yes, Social Security is a great program, but things like the Earned Income Tax Credit, best anti-poverty program that we've had, you know, the past couple of years, the movement has been, you know, well, how do we sort of cut into it?


Treatment:
Chris Farrel goes on to recommend education and - get this - universal health care as the remedies with the greatest potential.

There you have it. Greater regulation. Less competition. Social compact. Universal health care. Essentially, things that the U.S. corporate media pundits defame as "socialism," are motors of prosperity.

Things have improved for minorities and women relative to white males over the past 30 years and that is a good thing. They have in other countries as well, however.

See also background on the original report at http://www.economicmobility.org/

The controversy is Washington over majority leader Harry Reid's statement that the war is lost is an interesting case study in the logic of war. Reid's statement has been countered by

• General David A. Petreaus' claims of barely perceptable improvement in the situation on the ground
• President Bush's statement to the effect that the new surge of violence in Iraq is the U.S. surge going according to plan - the expected reaction of the insurgency to the surge
• and former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld's comment on Larry King to the effect that this is a "contest of wills."

Meanwhile, some strongly critisize the Democratic plan of setting a deadline for U.S. disengagement from the conflict.

My question is this: How can a war like this ever end if it is lost, but arguments like those of Petreaus (which might be right, but sound a lot like what we were hearing in Vietnam with all the stuff about pacified areas and body counts) and Rumsfeld are taken seriously? Of course it is a test of wills. To follow that logic and not give because it is a test of wills means never-ending war. If we assume for a moment that

• we are not fanatics and do not want eternal war
• and acknowledge that defeat is possible
• and note the fact that in a war like this the war cannot end in enemy occupation of U.S. territory

it becomes a war of pure choice where we need some kind of way out in the event of defeat. The central questions then becomes What are the indicators that the war is lost? If we go the "test of wills" route, there is always reason to keep fighting. If increased enemy violence is an indicator of the plan succeeding, defeat becomes almost absurdly an indicator of victory. How many more weeks of record-breaking slaughter will be "the plan"? When does it turn into an indicator of the opposite - failure?

I can't answer these questions, but it seems to me that we must find a way to avoid the deadly, murderous logic of these kinds of arguments while, at the same time, not slipping into automatic defeatism every time something goes wrong. (Which might set a poor precident for situations where the war is indeed necessary, unlike it was in this case.)

At the very, very least, the answer must include a situation where someone can at least make a public statement to the effect that the war is lost without being accused of Wehrkraftzersetzung. And an exit plan with a calendar date must be an option. Otherwise, if even presenting such ideas is treason, it will be a never-ending game of "emperor's new clothes" and never-ending slaughter. In a life-or-death struggle on our own territory, this kind of totalitarian political discourse would serve a purpose that just about anyone other than a total pacifist might accept, depending on the situation. In a situation of a war of choice on the other side of the globe, however, it stifles the very discussion needed to eventually end the war in the event that it really is a lost cause. Where defeat is not total, the mechanism for accepting it involves discourse that runs counter to the military logic of mobilizing the entire population's total will and sentiment. If that makes winning harder in the "test of wills," then that is part of fighting wars of choice that those who choose them must accept.

I would highly recommend that my fellow TPAs listen to the April 8th episode of Media Matters with Bob McChesney. The guest is Michael Albert, founder of South End Press and Z Magazine. The interview is about his new book Remembering Tomorrow. He says a lot about the differences between the 1960s and today, things that are highly relevant to what we are trying to do with our little piece of the movement.

A main thesis of the interview, and presumably the book, is that in the 1960s, people realized there was a problem and felt morally obligated to act. Today, on the other hand, people know that there is a problem. Nobody is shocked by news of poverty, racism, corruption, war, etc. They do not act, however, because there is a perception that these things are beyond our control. There is a feeling of helplessness, as if all these things are just there and cannot be changed. That is why this is so important for us: We need to work first and formost against the feeling of helplessness.

Paul Krugman's recent article Don't Cry For Reagan made it into the Süddeutsche Zeitung digest of the New York Times. Krugman argues that W. Bush is not an aberation, a derailment of the conservative movement, but an extension of it. He points out that all the nostalgia for the Reagan days is out of place.

Going on a 1993 article which looked back on the 12 years of Reagan and Bush I, he notes how the Reagan administration is similar to the Bush administration:

• packing the Department of Environmental Protection with opponents of environmental protection
• privatization and contractors run amok without regulation
• a horrid attourney general (Ed Meese); the politization of the Justice Department
• an administration filled with movement conservative ideologues from the 1960s-1970s for whom government is always the problem and thus see no point in governing well
• thus jobs go to loyal followers, not experts in the field, an apparatchik culture
• the contempt for the rule of law

Why didn't Reagan's administration turn into the total disaster that Bush's has? He offers several reasons:

• Reagan's party still had moderates who kept some of his program in check. (To which I would add that not even the Democrats have been willing to check Bush II).
• Reagan's party never controlled both houses of congress.
• "There was no Reagan-era equivalent of the rush, after 9/11, to give the Bush adminstration whatever it wanted in the name of fighting terrorism."
• The Cold War prevented Reagan from developing the hubris "that led the Bush administration to believe that a splendid little war in Iraq was just the thing to secure his position."

Thus, Krugman concludes, since he is the one who got the blank check and really did what he wanted to do, it is Bush II who is the "true representative of what modern conservatism is all about. And it's the movement, not just one man, that has failed."

A friend of mine recently remarked that the German state-sponsored news programs are a source of anti-American propaganda. I disagreed, pointing out that they are critical of many things, not just the United States, including the German government itself. Well, the coverage of Saddam Hussein's execution last night made me rethink that assessment. In the ZDF 19:00 news, the summary of Saddam's political biography included the following "facts":

- During his war against Iraq, he was an "armed by the United States."

- When he attacked Kuwait, he was a "friend" and "ally" of the U.S. (Verbundeter) now turned enemy.

Excuse me? Certainly, a quick google search for terms such as "armed Iraq" or "weapons for Saddam" and the like will give one the impression that the United States was Iraq's biggest friend in the 1980s. But that is not the case. The United States helped supply the Iraqi military and even played a role in supporting Iraq's chemical weapons program. But the United States also armed Iraq's enemy, Iran.

U.S. policy was arguably cynical, deadly, counter-productive and many other things. But the U.S. was not alone.

Who armed Saddam Hussein before 1990?

- 53% of his arms came from the Soviet Union.
- 20% came from France. Yes, France.
- China 7%
- Brazil 4%
- Egypt 4%
- Czechoslovakia 4%

(figures for the period 1980-1989)

All other suppliers combined made up for 10% of his arms imports -including the support given by the United States and GERMANY. Germany played an important role in developing Iraqi missile and chemical weapons capabilities. (See Hippler, Jochen: Iraq's Military Power: The German Connection. Middle East Report, Jan-Feb 1991, 27-31.)

Instead of mentioning these facts, the German news report ZDF heute and the ZDF-Spezial mentioned only that Saddam was "heavily armed" by the United States (hochgeruestet) and that the U.S. did "not leave his side, even when he used poison gas."

The video "potrait" of Saddam now available at heute.de is fairer. It emphasizes the French role in Iraq's nuclear program and notes that many people profited off of Saddam in the 1970s . The German role in building
up his chemical weapons program is mentioned. But the weapons for the attack on Iran "come from the USA and Europe."

The impression is still that the USA is, as usual, the primary culprit. In this particular case, I don't think that is the case. The lack of any mention of the large role played by the Soviet Union in arming Saddam's dictatorial regime is telling.

Listen to the 12 November issue of Media Matters (mp3 download). Experts from FAIR debunk the mainstream media's mantra that the Democrats won this election by moving to the right. People cared not only about the war, but about health care, globalization, and other issues. They were, "a clear repudiation of GOP policy."

The show is also interesting because of comments made on the elitist nature of the news on supposedly "liberal" NPR news shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

As an example of how the "liberal" media works, the FAIR people noted a story in Newsweek in which impeachment was shown to be favored by 51% of the population, but this was only mentioned at the end of the article, after impeachment was takled about as not being popular. In case anyone doubts that this is how the media can work, listen to this interview on Radio Times. Bennett Roth, the Washington correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, talking about impeachment, says Pelosi will get her way over Conyers and no impeachment will happen because Democrats saw how popular Clinton got when the Republicans began impeachment. They don't want the public to go sour on them, "...if it looks like Democrats are picking on him [Bush] for no real reason." (I am serious. That is a direct quote: "no real reason.") It is remarks like that which shape reality. They are not commenting on how the voting population feels, they are creating the feeling among the voting population such that each voter has the impression he or she is alone in their desire for impeachment (or whatever other progressive issue is being talked about), that their position is somehow radical. Despite the progressive profile of many of the candidates, any indication that they might act on those convicions are played down because of the assumption that the Dems will want to come off as "clear-headed" and "moderate" going into the 2008 elections. Here, I was surprised that even the hostess, Marty Moss-Coane, went along with it.