[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I’m heading off for a week’s vacation Sunday. I’ll be largely, it not totally, off-line, so don’t expect answers to emails or requests until May begins. Nonetheless, this site will continue on its usual schedule. I’ve prepared ahead and Associate Editor Andy Kroll will be at the helm of the ship (kayak?) of TomDispatch. On Tuesday afternoon, expect a Noam Chomsky piece and on Thursday, a TD surprise. Tom]
Yes, We Could... Get Out!
Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.
Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter.
Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week.
Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-nation. It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well. That’s diversification for you.
It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on. We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household. Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place.
It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear.
This is one complicated planet. We’ve always known that. And call it what you will -- climate change, global warming -- it’s hard to put all the pieces together. Yes, Western forests are experiencing die-offs “on an extraordinary scale” as a single species of beetle thrives and kills, and warming weather seems to be a culprit. Yes, sea levels could, in this century, rise three to six feet or more -- again that warming trend -- but not the same three to six feet everywhere. According to Michael D. Lemonick, “among the most powerful influences on regional sea level is a surprising force: the massive polar ice sheets and their gravitational pull, which will lessen as the ice caps melt and shrink, with profoundly different effects on sea level in various parts of the globe.” (By the way, Miami tops the list of globally endangered major cities,“as measured by the value of property that would be threatened by a three-foot rise.”) And that’s just to scratch the surface of the climate-change puzzle at one interesting website, Environment 360, that spends time considering the matter.
Still, for any of us, seeing the whole picture from the puzzle pieces we come across and then imagining our daunting world and what to do with it is one tough task, made no easier by a wash of media and right-wing claptrap about how climate change is just another “gate,” another scandal, another fraud. Denial -- the urge to ignore or suppress a reality too painful to deal with -- is a tough phenomenon to confront, even when those attacking the reality of climate change proudly call themselves “deniers.” Unfortunately, while denial at the individual or societal level is never a pretty or healthy thing, denial on climate change -- even the less active kind where we pretend someone else will deal with the problem in some distant future -- is just plain dangerous.
Fortunately, TomDispatch can call on the irrepressible Rebecca Solnit, an expert on both disasters and hope -- and how the two can mix in New York City as in Port-au-Prince. She is, most recently, the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, a book about the extraordinary organizing acts of normal people in the face of natural or man-made disasters. And then there’s Bill McKibben, TomDispatch regular, who, in his new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (highly recommended to TD readers!), takes on the task of making sense of our chaotically changing world and indicating possible paths through which we normal people could begin to do something about it. It seemed perfect to put them together and see what happens. Maybe our mantra for the future should be: too small not to succeed. (Check out Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Solnit discusses what hope can do in the worst of circumstances by clicking here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
350 Degrees of Inseparability
The Good News About the Very Bad News (about Climate Change)
By Rebecca SolnitThese days, I see how optimistic and positive disaster and apocalypse movies were. Remember how, when those giant asteroids or alien space ships headed directly for Earth, everyone rallied and acted as one while our leaders led? We’re in a movie like that now, except that there’s not a lot of rallying or much leading above the grassroots level.
The movie is called “Climate Change,” and you can tell its plot in a number of ways. In one, the alien monsters taking over the planet are called corporations, while the leaders who should be protecting us from their depredations are already subjugated and doing their bidding. Think of Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and the coal companies as gigantic entities that don’t need clean water, or food, and don’t care much if you do (as you can see from the filthy wreckage in their extraction zones and their spin against the science of our survival).
It’s hard to miss these days. The headlines tell the story -- repetitively. Everyone, it seems, is on the take. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Goldman Sachs with securities fraud for creating and selling “a mortgage investment that was secretly intended to fail” -- and then betting against its own customers. JPMorgan Chase which, in a pinch in 2008, happily took taxpayer dough, just reported $3.3 billion in profits for the first quarter of 2010, a jump of 55% over the previous quarter. The bank set aside $9.3 billion in what’s called “compensation and benefits” for its employees in 2009.
Even when they lose, they win. According to James Kwak of the Baseline Scenario website, on a deal in which JPMorgan swallowed $880 million in losses, its bankers still managed to walk away with up to $10 million in compensation. As he wrote, “JPMorgan’s bankers did just fine, despite having placed a ticking time bomb on their own bank’s balance sheet.” Meanwhile, Robert Rubin, who helped create the world that led to the 2008 financial meltdown as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, then took a top position at Citibank and made more than $100 million before it tanked on his watch. As economist Dean Baker puts it, “In the fall of 2008, when Citigroup was saved from bankruptcy with a taxpayer bailout, Rubin quietly slipped out the back door (with his money), resigning from his position at Citigroup.” Only recently Rubin made the headlines for offering the least apologetic (non-)apology imaginable for taking the American people to the cleaners.
And when it comes to taking, according to Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times, “more than 125 former Congressional aides and lawmakers are now working for financial firms as part of a multibillion-dollar effort to shape, and often scale back, federal regulatory power.” In other words, the regulators and their aides legislate the rules and then simply step through that infamous revolving door and pick up a handsome check on the other side. There are, in fact, at least 11,000 well-employed registered lobbyists in Washington today. A $3.4 billion “industry” in 2009, lobbying is definitely a field to get into, even in bad times, and according to the Christian Science Monitor, “when the cost of grass-roots efforts and of strategic advisers are all counted, total spending on influencing policy in Washington approaches $9.6 billion a year.”
As for the money flowing into politics from corporate deep pockets, 2008 not only saw the first billion-dollar presidential campaign, but at $1.7 billion, more than doubled the 2004 campaign’s costs, and no one expects 2012 to be anything but more expensive. All this is, of course, known to anyone who glances at the front page of a daily newspaper, but what exactly do we make of it all? What does it add up to? William Astore, historian and TomDispatch regular, has a suggestion, but before you start his piece, you might want to close your purse or button that back pocket with your wallet in it. Otherwise, they could be picked bare by the time you’re done. Tom
American Kleptocracy
How Fears of Socialism and Fascism Hide Naked Theft
By William J. AstoreKleptocracy -- now, there’s a word I was taught to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. It’s a word, in fact, that’s usually applied to flawed or failed governments in Africa, Latin America, or the nether regions of Asia. Such governments are typically led by autocratic strong men who shower themselves and their cronies with all the fruits of extracted wealth, whether stolen from the people or squeezed from their country’s natural resources. It’s not a word you’re likely to see associated with a mature republic like the United States led by disinterested public servants and regulated by more-or-less transparent principles and processes.
It all began in Afghanistan (the War on Terror, of course). It was there as well that, in late 2001, the Bush administration first "took the gloves off," a phrase its top officials then loved to use. So the first torture and abuse of prisoners, including the use of dogs to intimidate, took place there and only then migrated to Guantanamo in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. By 2004, the U.S. was already operating approximately two dozen off-the-grid prisons in Afghanistan and a report in the British Guardian could speak of the U.S. prison system there as “the hub of a global network of detention centers.” It included a notorious CIA-run secret Afghan prison nicknamed “the Salt Pit.” The first killing of prisoners by Americans occurred at our prison at Bagram Air Base, the huge former Soviet base that became a focus of American military activities. One of the nastier spots on the planet for many years, Bagram was, as Karen Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First 100 Days, has termed it, “the missing prison” (at a time when all attention was focused on Guantanamo). It remains George W. Bush’s unmentioned living legacy to Barack Obama.
Bagram itself theoretically cleaned up its act -- with $60 million invested in a full-scale facelift in 2009 and so, as Anand Gopal reported at TomDispatch, “the mistreatment of prisoners [in Afghanistan] began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites,” a series of prison “holding areas” on U.S. military bases around the country. To this day, the U.S. still operates a remarkably extensive, essentially off-the-grid prison system there. It’s not completely clear who is in all of these prisons, and reports are not encouraging. The BBC, for instance, recently found nine witnesses it considered credible who were ready to testify to abuse -- in the period since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office -- at a secret prison nicknamed “the Black Hole,” also at Bagram. (“The U.S. military has denied the existence of a secret detention site and promised to look into allegations.”)
Even more ominously, the first reports have appeared in the U.S. press indicating that the Obama administration may once again actually expand the use of Bagram to include the interrogation and incarceration for indefinite periods of new prisoners, wherever taken, in the Global War on Terror, whatever it may now be called, and is actually drawing up classified guidelines to that effect. As Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law and a TomDispatch regular, indicates, Bagram could turn out to be only one of two future American Guantanamos. Yes, we can! (By the way, check out the latest TomCast audio interview in which Greenberg discusses the quagmire of U.S. detention practices by clicking here or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, here.) Tom
Obama’s “Remainees”
Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future?
By Karen J. GreenbergOn his first day in office, President Barack Obama promised that he would close the Bush-era prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “as soon as practicable” and “no later than one year from the date of this order.” The announcement was met with relief, even joy, by those, like me, who had opposed the very existence of Guantanamo on the grounds that it represented a legal black hole where the distinction between guilt and innocence had been obliterated, respect for the rule of law was mocked, and the rights of prisoners were dismissed out of hand. We should have known better.
Over the past several years, when he complained again and again about American attacks in his country that were killing civilians in surprising numbers and remarkably often, he was generally humored and dealt with as an irrelevance or an annoyance. Now, given the rampant drug trade, the corruption, the "tantrums," the emotional outbursts, the threats to join the Taliban, and his embracing of the Iranians and the Chinese, he is dealt with in Washington as a cross between a big baby, an unstable adult, an overemotional drug-taker, and a prime danger to the American project in Afghanistan. He was given a lot of TLC by the previous resident of the White House, while being studiously ignored or reproved by this one. American officials have lavished praise -- and scorn -- on him. They have brandished hard power -- and laid on the soft power -- to tame him. They have regularly tried “new tacks” in dealing with him, and then tacked -- and tacked again. I’m talking, of course, about Hamid Karzai, the American-installed president of Afghanistan, our man in Kabul, as Alfred McCoy so aptly dubs him. He’s our boy, our nemesis, the definition of our problem in Afghanistan, our worst mistake, and our missing conscience all wrapped in one.
McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on the Vietnam War, the CIA, and the drug trade, offers a powerful reminder that we’ve been here before. And he’s not the only one who knows it. After all, Richard Holbrooke, the president’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, spent his first six years in government service in, or focused on, Vietnam during the war years. And as the Obama administration was setting its Afghan course in the fall of 2009, a number of key figures in the White House, including the president, took time out to study Gordon Goldstein’s book, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, which recounts, among other things, the grim tale of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Hamid Karzai of that moment, and the CIA plot that led to his overthrow and assassination, as well as a wider, more disastrous war for the U.S.
As McCoy makes clear, however, the history lesson in all this goes deeper than Karzai and Diem, despite the unbelievably eerie parallels between them. As that old Seinfeld break-up line goes: It’s not you, it’s me. And whatever Karzai’s problems are, it’s not, in the end, him, it’s us. It’s a problem that goes to the riven imperial heart of the matter. Tom
America and the Dictators
From Ngo Dinh Diem to Hamid Karzai
By Alfred W. McCoyThe crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe.
