News from Neptune

(Text of the flyer for the regular monthly demonstration by the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign IL, 6 Feb 2010)

It’s not “because of 9/11″ or to “stop terrorism,” as President Obama now says. The war is neither just nor legal: the real reason for it seems to be the long-standing U.S. policy of control over the largest oil-producing region of the world. And not because we need the oil ourselves; the US imports very little oil from the Middle East for use here at home. Most of the energy resources that we consume in the US come from the Americas and West Africa. But control of Mideast oil and gas gives the US government a powerful bargaining chip in its relations with its real economic competitors in the world – the European Union and East Asia (China and Japan). That has been American policy for a long time. The National Security Advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977-81), Zbigniew Brzezinski (he was also a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign), observed that control of Mideast energy provides the US with “critical leverage” over its industrial rivals in Europe and Asia, an idea of American government planners that goes back to the end of World War II, in 1945.
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Whether or not the Republicans do well in the 2010 congressional elections by mobilizing the general dismay with the Obama administration, it seems clear that the Republican opposition to Obama in 2012 will include opposition to his war policy. The question is what form it will take. I’m coming to doubt that it will consist of a call for more war. (That will come from Democrats like Obama’s mentor Lieberman.)

In the presidential elections of 1952, 1968, and 2000, Republican candidates did well by running against the wars being conducted or recently concluded by incumbent Democratic administrations. Eisenhower’s “I will go to Korea,” Nixon’s “secret plan to end the Vietnam war,” and Bush’s opposition to “nation building” (referring to the Clinton-Gore war in the Balkans) all garnered them votes. It’s possible that a more honest debate on the Long War in the Mideast (it’s not about stopping terrorism) may occur because the Republican wing of our one-party government (it’s one business party) may see it as in its short term interest in 2012.

Of course there have been for some time principled opponents of the Mideast war among Republicans, notably the paleoconservatives around the journals “American Conservative,” “Chronicles,” and the website Antiwar.com. See Bill Kauffman’s excellent book “Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism” (2008). And add now the Ron Paulists – their critique of the war is as clear and cogent as Dennis Kucinich’s and has a larger following – and even a not insubstantial group among the Tea-partiers.

The Democrats’ sell-out on the war has been clear since the Kerry campaign – and their betrayal once they got control of the Congress. Obama sold himself to our rulers with the promise that he could bring the dissidents – primarily the anti-war movement – back in, and he largely succeeded. (The segments of “The Audacity of Hope” on the Vietnam war makes particularly instructive reading on this point.)

An effective anti-war movement in the coming year(s) will have to be marshaled against the Democrats’ policies, and of course against the principal commitments of the Republican party as well. But in the short term we might find some Republicans who claim to be fellow-travelers on the road to a principled peace. We shouldn’t immediately try to kick them to the curb, if only because they’ll provide us with opportunities to talk to more people.

A spontaneous and unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media, cablecast each Friday at 7pm on Urbana Public Television (cable channel 6 in Urbana, Illinois).
Joining C. G. Estabrook this week are E. Wayne Johnson and Ron Szoke. Each participant takes up to ten minutes to talk about events of the week; then each takes up to ten minutes to ask the others about what’s been said.
ON THIS DAY IN
1945 – Trials of 24 German government leaders by the victorious countries begin in Nuremberg.
1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis ends: Khruschev agrees to remove missiles from Cuba because U.S. President John F. Kennedy secretly pledges not to invade Cuba, & to remove missiles from Turkey.
1969 – Vietnam War: The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

The NYT today publishes a more candid than usual article in its campaign to set the terms of public discussion of US war policy — in a way that will favor that policy.
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The following are preliminary notes for a talk I was invited to give at the Midwest Liberty Fest in Du Quoin, IL , 9th-11th inst. The meeting included a wider variety of views than might have been predicted; I think it testifies to the failure of the Republicans and Democrats to constrain political debate within the tenets of neoliberalism (which was constructed a generation ago to suppress the challenging and creative political ideas of “the sixties”). For at least a decade, according to Harvard’s Vanishing Voter Project, about 75 percent of Americans have felt that even presidential elections don’t matter, that they’re just some kind of game being played by rich contributors, party bosses, and the media. That seems right to me, so it shouldn’t surprise us that the politics grown outside that carefully fenced garden should contain some luxuriant varieties, along with some quite sensible critiques. They’re perhaps the beginning of a more serious politics in America, which seems to need to be repristinated every generation or so.

From May ‘68: “le vote ne change rien; la lutte continue.”

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The German election has been seriously misreported in the US — an accident I’m sure. The real story is the breakdown of support of the major parties, and it may presage what’s to happen in US politics.

First, it’s been represented as a victory for the party of Angela Merkel (who’ll continue as chancellor), the CDU/CSU (roughly equivalent to the Republicans here).

In fact the CDU/CSU vote percentage remained about same at 37% as in the election four years ago — but far fewer Germans voted this time, 71% of those eligible, compared with 78% in 2005. (That’s of course still much greater than the US total.) If you look far enough, you can find that the AP admits that “[Merkel's] party suffered its second-worst showing since World War II.”

The reason that the CDU looked good is that the SPD (roughly equivalent to the Democrats) collapsed, from 36% to only 23%, their worst percentage since 1953. Maybe voters have gotten tired of people who call themselves socialists and aren’t.

That allows the CDU/CSU to form a government with the Free Democrats (a “liberal” party in the European sense, roughly equivalent to Libertarians — the word isn’t used in that sense in Europe), who raised their total from 10% to 15%, after dramatically announcing their opposition to German participation in the Afghan war (cf. the Ron Paul “revolution”).

The other beneficiaries of the SPD collapse were the left parties, Die Linke — from 9% to 12% — and the Greens (not very left) — from 8% to 11%. Naturally, the NYT reported the election as a defeat for “the left” — meaning the not-at-all left SPD — while not noticing that real gains came on the real left.

And on at least one important issue, the “left/right paradigm” isn’t very helpful. While the two major parties support the war in Afghanistan (just as in the US), the Libertarian/FDP oppose it, as do Die Linke and (some of) the Greens.

“All in all, however, the two big parties which have headed every German government since the second world war are now down to less than 57% of the vote [from over 70% only four years ago]. All the minor parties polled strongly and increased their shares. For the first time in modern Germany, all the parties in the new Bundestag have polled more than 10% but less than 40%” [Guardian/UK].
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Frank Rich has a disgusting piece in the NYT today, an attempt to establish the limits of allowable debate for Obama’s Great Decision on Afghanistan.

What are the (only) alternatives? McChrystal or Biden. God help us. McChrystal — tens of thousands more US troops; Biden — air war against our real enemy in the region, Pakistan.

On the way, Rich makes the liberal’s favorite move about Vietnam. He contends, quite ahistorically, that it was Johnson who “Americanized” that war, and Kennedy was conflicted and innocent. That’s hogwash, as anyone who wants to look at the historical record will conclude. The invasion of South Vietnam occurred in 1962, while Kennedy was alive. (The war was always against the people of South Vietnam, who didn’t have the good grace to accept the government that we’d picked out for them.)

The point of the piece is to delegitimize the only non-criminal path for the US, the withdrawal of its troops (and mercenaries, corporations, etc.) from the region.

“Invading armies have no rights, only responsibilities. Among them are the responsibility to pay reparations for their crimes, and to hold the guilty accountable. A crucial responsibility is to pay careful attention to the will of the victims. The decision to withdraw does not lie in the hands of the invaders. That should be elementary.” [Noam Chomsky]

William Pfaff, who’s been writing from Paris roughly since the German army left, has a piece in the International Herald Tribune (alias European edition of the NYT) “Presidents Need a War to Call Their Own — Now Obama Has His” .

Pfaff is an ex-CIA employee and a long-time member of the Hudson Institute, which is described by US foreign policy scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as “closely associated with neoconservatives”.

In this article he avers,

“I think the American government now has become institutionally a war government, which finds its purpose in waging war against small and troublesome countries and peoples, in the generalized pursuit of running the world for the world’s own good. In this effort, one war is pretty much like another, and every president, to be re-elected, needs one…”

The article nods towards how domestic constituencies — governmental and corporate — want aggressive war by the US, and on how the US has substituted physical force for its relatively declining economic power over the past 50 years. But it’s wrong to suggest that it makes no difference where US presidents wage war. (Clinton invaded Serbia, not Rwanda.)
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Canadian PM Stephen Harper has 42 minutes of face time with Barack Obama in Washington today. While Canadian institutions (notably healthcare) are being compared favorably with those of the US, quite rightly, here are some other things to remember:
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The much-predicted demise of newspapers can’t happen too soon, so it seems to me, if we want a well-informed citizenry.

It was a 19th-century gibe that “newspapers are half advertisements — and the rest lies between them.”

But the lies can be subtle — and usually lie (sorry) in the unstated assumptions (unstated, they’re harder to refute). But occasionally they break cover.

Take this morning’s Afghanistan article on the front page of the NYT, the country’s agenda-setting paper (and its agenda is put in place by its executive editor Bill Keller, a right-wing Democrat). It was written by long-time foreign and military reporter, Thom Shanker.

Half-way thru, we find the following, a complete paragraph:

The military’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan
is focused on protecting the population and
preventing the Taliban from destabilizing the country.

The Obama administration’s transparently false propaganda assertion is presented as simple fact. If it weren’t about killing people, the only reasonable response would be disbelieving laughter. But instead members of the political class in the US take that as one of their assumptions in the coming “debate about Afghanistan.”
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