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What’s Lost?
Not the election of Kerry so far.
But it does not look good. As projected, this most probably will be decided in courtrooms (to be precise – in backrooms of courtrooms) and that is where the Republicans have the advantage.
The beacon of democracy has lost some more of the light it once had. Irrational electoral college rules, defect and uncontrollable machines, thousands of lawyers and partisan selected judges make people around the world shake their head.
What’s coming now?
Iraq is a mess and will be worse in January/February 2005. There are no good chances. A win for the US is impossible – to loose is unacceptable for the US majority – escalation is probable. The only sure thing – more people will die violently there and elsewhere. The social agenda that will be legislated during the coming four years will deepen the divide we are already seeing. The world economy is at stall speed with all signs pointing down – even with a possible end-year DOW rally – no win possible here.
Bill Fleckenstein (pay-site), a bearish but successful, fund manager commented yesterday:
I believe that in the next four years, a lot of hopes and dreams are going to be shattered, and hearts will be broken. In my opinion, the winning party this time will perhaps lose for the next couple decades. So, the silver lining may go to the losing party, as it may only have to wait four years for a chance to reign supreme for a while.
We will not be sure who is the future President of the US for some more days. But we can be sure that some damage is done – more may be coming.
It is a cold wet foggy day here. Winter is at the doorstep.
(8:53am – after a walk at the harbourside let me add) And following winter it’s spring.
So, maybe I was right a few weeks or months back or whenever that was — that Kerry and his team were merely hired actors, paid to put up a pretense of a campaign, a surface sham of democracy, a “consumer choice” illusion — and then take a dive when instructed. His capitulation this morning has come as a mild surprise but not a shock.
I think this comment is worth a read. It comes from a dear friend and ex-Communist with long experience. For those who are short on time here’s the nub:
It may seem odd to call the US “besieged” when it’s obviously more powerful (militarily) than any other country in the world–maybe more powerful than all of them put together. (60,000 nuclear warheads…) And US troops are in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, etc. etc. But think about the Whiteboy Whine for a moment–the sullen, self-pitying complaint that people of color are taking all the jobs, that women are out of line, that immigrants are conversing incomprehensibly instead of learning English, that (as one rightwing rant put it last week) “We can’t say ‘Merry Christmas’ any more, we have to say ‘Season’s Greetings.'” These claims are all as false as the last one (though that one is funnier.) But they’re usually impervious to rebuttal by facts about employment or earnings or anything else, and politicians who know how to tap into these feelings of beleaguered-ness and resentment reap a rich harvest of votes.
I think the sense of being under siege resembles that mortal fear that gripped the slaveowning class in the old South. The actual chance of a successful, region-wide slave revolt was always tiny, though local uprisings, before being crushed, could and did inflict some damage. But what haunted the slaveowners was a sense that their power was illegitimate, that (as Jefferson put it) they should tremble when they reflected that God was just. (This is an interesting application of those Enlightenment ideals slanderous mentioned, inasmuch as those ideals included an appeal to Natural Right, and slavery was hard to reconcile with Natural Right–except, as it turned out, by invoking a pseudo-scientific version of “nature.”) In short they felt under attack because they had a bad conscience.
[…] I said to slanderous last night that there are times when I’m glad I’m 62. Maybe you younger folks will live to see the dawn of a better world, and I won’t, and that’s tough luck on me. Maybe, on the other hand, you won’t, and you’ll be 62 and discouraged, but I’ll have a good laugh, because I’ll be dead. (I won’t really laugh–I’m not that mean.)
Bush played strongly to the Whiteboy Whine and to the fantasy of being besieged. Between that and some clever voter fraud, he managed to grab the White House. What’s important to note is that even without the voter fraud (maddening though that is in its own right) he might have pulled it off. Even if Kerry had squeaked in, what this election says about the public mood is frightening. The reality-based community has lost control and the ideology-based or faith-based community has got the bit in its teeth. When that happens in any country, in any context, trouble follows.
Now, alabama believes that reality will batter down the door of the faith-based mindset, but I think he’s being unduly optimistic. The pattern of ideological solipsism, be it left-hand or right-hand threaded, is to screw itself in ever deeper — it has no other response. The more reality contradicts ideology, the more brutal and desperate become the attempts to smash reality into the mould of ideology. I can imagine without difficulty a future America (coming soon to a theatre near you) where reports of heavy weather, loss of crops, loss of life and property, etc. will be censored from the newscasts because the official US position is that global warming and climate destabilisation are not happening — that kind of thing. In general, an entrenched non-reality-based power structure doesn’t fall until it suffers catastrophic failure. It doesn’t get clues. And even after catastrophic failure, after absolutely conclusive proof that it didn’t work and never could have worked and brought misery to millions, there will still be dead-enders for whom all the evidence in the world isn’t enough, who will insist that their perfect system or heroic army was “sabotaged from within” and would have worked just fine if not for betrayal, conspiracy, etc etc.
So I agree with vbo: though the US has probably launched itself with vigour onto the declining ballistic curve of Empire, though its looted economy is not likely to recover with the chief looters remaining in charge, and though things are likely to get very bad for large numbers of Americans (and monstrously bad for all those other people out there who don’t matter because they live in countries we can’t find on a map) — the notion that all this bad karma coming home will actually teach anyone anything, is not a safe bet. The first response will be to blame foreigners, the second will be to imagine, invent, seek out and destroy “fifth columnists” and enemies within. In the end only exhaustion and bankruptcy terminate the arc of grandiose delusion, mania and denial: as the system fails, its grip tightens and tightens rather than loosening.
Alternatively, the insane PNAC plan may succeed for longer than we think. In our lifetimes, the US may be a very successful banana republic and colonial power, ruthlessly silencing dissent at home, ruthlessly occupying and looting abroad. The only countervailing power is China, which is not quite ready to stand up to the big bully yet. What I do know is that Banana Republican America, the total surveillance, total paranoia, All Patriotism All The Time Fox News(peak) America, is not a country I want to live in.
Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 3 2004 18:28 utc | 60
The War on Iraq Has Made Moral Cowards of Us All
By Scott Ritter
The Guardian U.K.
Monday 01 November 2004
More than 100,000 Iraqis have died – and where is our shame and rage?
The full scale of the human cost already paid for the war on Iraq is only now becoming clear. Last week’s estimate by investigators, using credible methodology, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians – most of them women and children – have died since the US-led invasion is a profound moral indictment of our countries. The US and British governments quickly moved to cast doubt on the Lancet medical journal findings, citing other studies. These mainly media-based reports put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at about 15,000 – although the basis for such an endorsement is unclear, since neither the US nor the UK admits to collecting data on Iraqi civilian casualties.
Civilian deaths have always been a tragic reality of modern war. But the conflict in Iraq was supposed to be different – US and British forces were dispatched to liberate the Iraqi people, not impose their own tyranny of violence.
Reading accounts of the US-led invasion, one is struck by the constant, almost casual, reference to civilian deaths. Soldiers and marines speak of destroying hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles that turned out to be crammed with civilians. US marines acknowledged in the aftermath of the early, bloody battle for Nassiriya that their artillery and air power had pounded civilian areas in a blind effort to suppress insurgents thought to be holed up in the city. The infamous “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad produced hundreds of deaths, as did the 3rd Infantry Division’s “Thunder Run”, an armored thrust in Baghdad that slaughtered everyone in its path.
It is true that, with only a few exceptions, civilians who died as a result of ground combat were not deliberately targeted, but were caught up in the machinery of modern warfare. But when the same claim is made about civilians killed in aerial attacks (the Lancet study estimates that most of civilian deaths were the result of air attacks), the comparison quickly falls apart. Helicopter engagements apart, most aerial bombardment is deliberate and pre-planned. US and British military officials like to brag about the accuracy of the “precision” munitions used in these strikes, claiming this makes the kind of modern warfare practiced by the coalition in Iraq the most humanitarian in history.
But there is nothing humanitarian about explosives once they detonate near civilians, or about a bomb guided to the wrong target. Dozens of civilians were killed during the vain effort to eliminate Saddam Hussein with “pinpoint” air strikes, and hundreds have perished in the campaign to eliminate alleged terrorist targets in Falluja. A “smart bomb” is only as good as the data used to direct it. And the abysmal quality of the intelligence used has made the smartest of bombs just as dumb and indiscriminate as those, for example, dropped during the second world war.
The fact that most bombing missions in Iraq today are pre-planned, with targets allegedly carefully vetted, further indicts those who wage this war in the name of freedom. If these targets are so precise, then those selecting them cannot escape the fact that they are deliberately targeting innocent civilians at the same time as they seek to destroy their intended foe. Some would dismiss these civilians as “collateral damage”. But we must keep in mind that the British and US governments made a deliberate decision to enter into a conflict of their choosing, not one that was thrust upon them. We invaded Iraq to free Iraqis from a dictator who, by some accounts, oversaw the killing of about 300,000 of his subjects – although no one has been able to verify more than a small fraction of the figure. If it is correct, it took Saddam decades to reach such a horrific statistic. The US and UK have, it seems, reached a third of that total in just 18 months.
Meanwhile, the latest scandal over missing nuclear-related high explosives in Iraq (traced and controlled under the UN inspections regime) only underscores the utter deceitfulness of the Bush-Blair argument for the war. Having claimed the uncertainty surrounding Iraq’s WMD capability constituted a threat that could not go unchallenged in a post-9/11 world, one would have expected the two leaders to insist on a military course of action that brought under immediate coalition control any aspect of potential WMD capability, especially relating to any possible nuclear threat. That the US military did not have a dedicated force to locate and neutralize these explosives underscores the fact that both Bush and Blair knew that there was no threat from Iraq, nuclear or otherwise.
Of course, the US and Britain have a history of turning a blind eye to Iraqi suffering when it suits their political purposes. During the 1990s, hundreds of thousands are estimated by the UN to have died as a result of sanctions. Throughout that time, the US and the UK maintained the fiction that this was the fault of Saddam Hussein, who refused to give up his WMD. We now know that Saddam had disarmed and those deaths were the responsibility of the US and Britain, which refused to lift sanctions.
There are many culpable individuals and organizations history will hold to account for the war – from deceitful politicians and journalists to acquiescent military professionals and silent citizens of the world’s democracies. As the evidence has piled up confirming what I and others had reported – that Iraq was already disarmed by the late 1990s – my personal vote for one of the most culpable individuals would go to Hans Blix, who headed the UN weapons inspection team in the run-up to war. He had the power if not to prevent, at least to forestall a war with Iraq. Blix knew that Iraq was disarmed, but in his mealy-mouthed testimony to the UN security council helped provide fodder for war. His failure to stand up to the lies used by Bush and Blair to sell the Iraq war must brand him a moral and intellectual coward.
But we all are moral cowards when it comes to Iraq. Our collective inability to summon the requisite shame and rage when confronted by an estimate of 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians in the prosecution of an illegal and unjust war not only condemns us, but adds credibility to those who oppose us. The fact that a criminal such as Osama bin Laden can broadcast a videotape on the eve of the US presidential election in which his message is viewed by many around the world as a sober argument in support of his cause is the harshest indictment of the failure of the US and Britain to implement sound policy in the aftermath of 9/11. The death of 3,000 civilians on that horrible day represented a tragedy of huge proportions. Our continued indifference to a war that has slaughtered so many Iraqi civilians, and will continue to kill more, is in many ways an even greater tragedy: not only in terms of scale, but also because these deaths were inflicted by our own hand in the course of an action that has no defense.
Scott Ritter was a senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 and is the author of “Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America”.
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 3 2004 20:04 utc | 68
Published on Wednesday, November 3, 2004 by the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
What We Call Peace is Little Better Than Capitulation To a Corporate Coup
by Arundhati Roy
This is an edited extract from the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy at the Seymour Center last night.
Sometimes there’s truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice. Today, it is not merely justice itself, but the idea of justice that is under attack.
The assault on vulnerable, fragile sections of society is so complete, so cruel and so clever that its sheer audacity has eroded our definition of justice. It has forced us to lower our sights, and curtail our expectations. Even among the well-intentioned, the magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of “human rights”.
This is an alarming shift. The difference is that notions of equality, of parity, have been pried loose and eased out of the equation. It’s a process of attrition. Almost unconsciously, we begin to think of justice for the rich and human rights for the poor. Justice for the corporate world, human rights for its victims. Justice for Americans, human rights for Afghans and Iraqis. Justice for the Indian upper castes, human rights for Dalits and Adivasis (if that.) Justice for white Australians, human rights for Aborigines and immigrants (most times, not even that.)
It is becoming more than clear that violating human rights is an inherent and necessary part of the process of implementing a coercive and unjust political and economic structure on the world. Increasingly, human rights violations are being portrayed as the unfortunate, almost accidental, fallout of an otherwise acceptable political and economic system. As though they are a small problem that can be mopped up with a little extra attention from some non-government organisation.
This is why in areas of heightened conflict – in Kashmir and in Iraq for example – human rights professionals are regarded with a degree of suspicion. Many resistance movements in poor countries which are fighting huge injustice and questioning the underlying principles of what constitutes “liberation” and “development” view human rights non-government organisations as modern-day missionaries who have come to take the ugly edge off imperialism – to defuse political anger and to maintain the status quo.
It has been only a few weeks since Australia re-elected John Howard, who, among other things, led the nation to participate in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
That invasion will surely go down in history as one of the most cowardly wars ever. It was a war in which a band of rich nations, armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over, rounded on a poor nation, falsely accused it of having nuclear weapons, used the United Nations to force it to disarm, then invaded it, occupied it and are now in the process of selling it.
I speak of Iraq, not because everybody is talking about it, but because it is a sign of things to come. Iraq marks the beginning of a new cycle. It offers us an opportunity to watch the corporate-military cabal that has come to be known as “empire” at work. In the new Iraq, the gloves are off.
As the battle to control the world’s resources intensifies, economic colonialism through formal military aggression is staging a comeback. Iraq is the logical culmination of the process of corporate globalisation in which neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism have fused. If we can find it in ourselves to peep behind the curtain of blood, we would glimpse the pitiless transactions taking place backstage.
Invaded and occupied Iraq has been made to pay out $US200 million ($270 million) in “reparations” for lost profits to corporations such as Halliburton, Shell, Mobil, Nestle, Pepsi, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Toys R Us. That’s apart from its $US125 billion sovereign debt forcing it to turn to the IMF, waiting in the wings like the angel of death, with its structural adjustment program. (Though in Iraq there don’t seem to be many structures left to adjust.)
So what does peace mean in this savage, corporatised, militarised world? What does peace mean to people in occupied Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet and Chechnya? Or to the Aboriginal people of Australia? Or the Kurds in Turkey? Or the Dalits and Adivasis of India? What does peace mean to non-Muslims in Islamic countries, or to women in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? What does it mean to the millions who are being uprooted from their lands by dams and development projects? What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of their resources? For them, peace is war.
We know very well who benefits from war in the age of empire. But we must also ask ourselves honestly who benefits from peace in the age of empire? War mongering is criminal. But talking of peace without talking of justice could easily become advocacy for a kind of capitulation. And talking of justice without unmasking the institutions and the systems that perpetrate injustice is beyond hypocritical.
It’s easy to blame the poor for being poor. It’s easy to believe that the world is being caught up in an escalating spiral of terrorism and war. That’s what allows George Bush to say, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” But that’s a spurious choice. Terrorism is only the privatisation of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They believe that the legitimate use of violence is not the sole prerogative of the state.
It is mendacious to make moral distinction between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. Both kinds of violence are unacceptable. We cannot support one and condemn the other.
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 3 2004 23:10 utc | 79
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