Foreign Relations

Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

dlindorff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:51:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle
by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to
acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them
and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and
grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to
man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune
illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the
general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its
battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common
use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an
approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops
and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to
eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military
affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the
obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry
saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent
Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US
government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

Thai Thi Nga, 16, 2nd-generation victim of US Agent Orange use in Vietnam

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as
many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related
illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of
Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge
who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least
three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans
and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese
in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems
due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and
others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant
care.

Veterans for Peace,
an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health
care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and
equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam—a call which
Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have
found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases
in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels.
The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases
to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach
the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the
way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two
nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later,
but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal
island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate
General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to
use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal
under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the
Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of
civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be
a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing
that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the
Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill
military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials
against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon
in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly
toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares—12% of the total land area of
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country—might be a
war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive
defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was
heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by
the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned
the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to
fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s
criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good
place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace
Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring
President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several
billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of
peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever
given.

Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times could salvage a bit
of its journalistic reputation by having Dao or some other reporter
write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the
people of Vietnam.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Credit Where Credit is Due, But What's This "Enemies" BS?

dlindorff — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:06:36 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama deserves credit for breaking the half-century-long
taboo in American politics of dealing with Cuba, and meeting with Raul
Castro, Cuba’s current leader. He also deserves credit for dealing in a
friendly manner with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela.

But what is this crap about “talking with” our enemies or with countries that have been “hostile” towards us?

It is certainly be true that America doesn’t like Communism, and
doesn’t like having properties owned by its citizens taken over, which
happened in the wake of the Cuban revolution, but nationalization is a
right that many sovereign nations have exercised in their national
interest, and besides that, what has Cuba ever done that would show it
to be an enemy of the US?

Oh, there were those missiles that Castro was allowing the former
Soviet Union to set up on Cuba’s shores back in 1962, but then that was
only a tit for tat, because the US had already put nuclear-tipped
Jupiter missiles in Turkey, aimed at the Soviet Union, and arguably the
purpose of the missiles going to Cuba was to force the US to remove the
Turkish-based missiles. In any event, Castro was acting less than two
years after the US had backed an invasion of his island by soldiers who
were seeking to overthrow his government.

Cuba has never attacked the US, never threatened the US, and never
in fact was an enemy of the US, nor is it an enemy today. You want
hostile? How about the role the US played in helping to fund the
backers of a coup against the elected government of President Chavez,
and the Bush administration’s hasty recognition of the coup leaders as
the new government after they captured and arrested President Chavez,
in an embarrassing incident that eventually collapsed, with the popular
restoration of Chavez to the Presidential Palace when rank and file
soldiers refused to follow their right-wing leaders.

These are “enemies” or “hostile powers”?

What planet do our leaders, including President Obama, live on?

Even Nicaragua, against which the US fought a proxy war, using
Nicaraguan Contra forces based in Honduras and Costa Rica, was only an
enemy of the US in the sense that the US was hell-bent in the 1980s on
overthrowing its elected government. Nicaragua, except in the fevered
minds of loopy right-wingers like Gen. John Singlaub and his
Anti-Communist League, was never a threat to the US.

I’m happy that President Obama is willing to talk and make nice
with the leaders of these three countries, but he hardly deserves much
credit for doing what his predecessors should have done all along.

There is a hostile power in the Americas, but it is the
US, which has a centuries-long history of meddling in and even
overthrowing the elected governments of South American countries
(Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Guatemala, Brazil, Haiti, etc.), of
propping up brutal fascist dictatorships like that of Augusto Pinochet
in Chile, and of training vicious soldiers and police in the fine arts
of torture and assassination at the School of the Americas.

Obama should drop the term “enemy” and “hostile power” from his lexicon. It just makes him look ridiculous.

_________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Who's Calling the Shots Now: The Death of American Empire

dlindorff — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:59:11 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It may not be obvious today, and certainly it’s not how the corporate media reported it, but future historians are likely to look back at March 13, 2009 as the day that American imperialism began it’s inexorable decline. That’s the day that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced that his country was “worried” about its holdings of over $1 trillion in US treasury securities, and warned that he wanted the US to assure China that it would maintain its good credit and “honor its promises” and “maintain the safety of China’s assets.”

There is no way that the US can accommodate Premier Wen and still finance and operate a global military system with over 1000 overseas bases, massive aircraft carrier battle groups, and with hundreds of thousands of men and women armed to the teeth with the latest high-tech military hardware, not to mention fight endless wars on the far side of the globe.

What China is doing is pulling the rug out from under America’s six decades of global military dominance. It is no coincidence that the weekend before Wen’s statement, Chinese naval vessels aggressively harassed a US intelligence ship, the Impeccable, that was operating in the South China Sea.

The implied threat in Wen’s seemingly mild comment was that if the US doesn’t trim its deficit spending dramatically, and get its economic house in order—which means dramatically reducing the American standard of living, and reducing wasteful spending of its military, China will simply cut back on its funding of the US deficit, in the form of buying US Treasury issues, an act which would cause the collapse of the US dollar and what’s left of the US economy.

Now this decline of the US as an economic and military power is not going to be an overnight thing, because China needs to keep selling manufactured goods to the US market—the largest in the world—and in order to do that, it needs to keep recycling dollars spent on Chinese goods back into the US, which to date has meant buying US debt issues.

But there are other ways to recycle dollars back to the US, most notably by investing in actual US assets. To date, China has done this cautiously, in part to avoid arousing political concern in the US. Typically China, when it has purchased shares of US companies, has done so by buying small minority stakes, as it did in the case of the Blackstone Group, a private equity investment firm. But if China were to decide to stop funding America’s massive deficit, this could change. It could decide to just let the dollar slide, and take advantage of the slumping value of US assets to start buying the US up on the cheap.

There is already talk of Chinese auto companies buying up General Motors and Chrysler, and why not? They could have those companies, not to mention most of the national banks, for a song now. But China wouldn’t have to limit itself—nor would it—to buying up dying companies. It could also buy entities like General Electric, Boeing and IBM, or it could buy agricultural assets and mines—or oil companies and oil reserves.

In fact, China has been using its vast trade-surplus-fueled currency reserves of dollars and Euros to lock up at cheap prices on long forward contracts for oil and other critical commodities. This is just the beginning. (It would be ironic and incredibly foolish if the US, which has spent several hundred billion dollars in borrowed money, and as much as $3 trillion if interest costs are factored in, on conquering and controlling Iraq, really did so to gain control of oil, since China has accomplished the same thing peacefully for a small fraction of that cost, by just buying forward supply contracts.)

It is likely that India, whose economy is doing even better than China these days, will do much the same thing.

The end result will be a vast permanent weakening of America, as its economy becomes increasingly subservient to the interests of its new owners.

There is a delicious irony here, since the US, for decades, has done precisely this kind of thing around the world to developing nations, buying up their industries and their resources, and manipulating and controlling their political systems, to its own advantage, always with the backing, or threatened use, of America’s powerful military. Now the once-might US (remember Dick Cheney’s “world’s lone superpower” and George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order”?) is reduced to pleading with China to leave its warships alone, and to shamelessly begging, as Hillary Clinton did in one of her first public statements as secretary of state, for China to “keep buying” US Treasuries.

From the point of view of the majority of the world’s people, who have lived for too long under the American jackboot, this is all a good thing. But forcing the new “Rome” to retreat back within its own borders will also be good for us Americans, who have had to pay for all those military adventures in the name of empire and corporate profits over the years with our blood and taxes.

The problem, for us, however, is that all this military and economic comeuppance will also be accompanied by a dose of reality about our own real living standard. As long as China, India and the oil-producing states were willing to just keep buying American government securities to finance our multi-generational spending binge, it was possible for the US government to keep us citizens all fat and happy by creating a series of bubble economies, pushing up our salaries and the value of our homes to absurd levels, while interest rates remained comfortably low and the US dollar, as the world’s reserve currency, remained strong enough for us to continue to buy goods, the production of which was increasingly being moved overseas.

Suddenly, however, in one brief speech, Chinese Premier Wen has made it clear that the US is no longer calling the shots. Nobody’s saying it out loud here in America, but behind the scenes, it’s clear that increasingly US economic policy is going henceforth to be dictated by governments in places like Bejing, Tokyo, New Delhi and Brazilia. Those same places will also increasingly be telling us where and even if we can use our once mighty military forces.

Given our post-WWII history, that can’t be a bad thing.
_______________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent five years reporting on China and Hong Kong for Business Week magazine in the 1990s and is author, most recently, of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Does Anybody Else Think Getting America Shopping Again is Crazy Talk?

dlindorff — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:48:05 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum
in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago,
and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about
how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the
Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their
incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping
again.”

Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout
so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and
that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some
relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of
whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get
Americans back into the malls.

In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.

The problem facing America, and to a great extent the broader world economy, is that we’ve pretty much met basic human needs long ago, and now it’s about creating human wants and then convincing people that they need to buy more stuff and more services.

This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.

First of all, we don’t need all this stuff. Is my life any better
if I go from a 18-inch TV screen to a 60-inch TV screen? Is it, for
that matter, any better if I go from an old cathode-ray tube to a flat
screen digital display, or from no TV to a TV?

Is my life any better if I buy a high-performance $50,000 BMW than
if I drive a $20,000 Honda Civic, or even a $5000 used Toyota Corolla
with extended warranty?

Is my life any better if I live with my wife and my teenage son in
a 4000-square-foot house than if I live in a 1800-square-foot or a
1200-square-foot house?

The answer is no. The benefits, if there are any at all, are minuscule, and usually short-lived.

The costs of these trying to satisfy these wants, however, are
enormous. When I buy the large flat screen TV, I am contributing to the
production of gases, used in the flat screen, that are hundreds of
times more potent greenhouse factors than carbon dioxide, and of
course, from a balance-of-trade perspective, I’m sending dollars
overseas to wherever the product is made (none are made in America). If
I buy the $50,000 BMW, I contribute to massive waste of resources in
building the vehicle and having it shipped from Germany, as well as
driving it, not to mention to balance-of-trade issue again. If I buy
the Honda, it may at least be made in America, but again there is all
the energy waste and pollution that goes into its construction. The
used car, on the other hand, gets good mileage and already exists. As
for the house, no family, except perhaps one that eschews family
planning and has a baby every year and a half, needs a 4000-square-foot
house, and any family with 12 kids that might occupy such a palace
would never be able to afford one.

So all this buying doesn’t make us happier. In fact, by saddling us
with massive amounts of debt, it simply enslaves us to jobs that polls
tell us most people are simply desperate to get away from. Why,
otherwise, do polls show that so many people want to retire early in an
era when life expectancies are extending, and when people are staying
healthy much longer into old age? Why, otherwise, do polls consistently
show that over 60 percent of Americans say they would like to have a
labor union represent them at work if they could get one? The reality
is that most jobs, where we spend the majority of our waking hours five
or six days a week, simply suck, and in many ways they suck because
people are so desperate to hang on to them so they can pay their bills
that they don’t dare speak up or, god forbid, sign a union card.

Secondly, these artificial wants which so dominate our daily lives
and that are instilled in us via slick marketing campaigns, are a
disaster for the environment and for the chances of human survival. The
earth is a finite resource, while humanity, growing at a prodigious
rate, is gobbling up those resources—water, oil, trees, the oceans, and
the very atmosphere itself--much faster than even the renewable
resources can replace themselves. This situation cannot go on, and yet
we’re told that the goal is to get us back on that rapacious and
self-destructive path as quickly as possible. Economic growth, we are
always told, is an unambiguous good and is the primary goal of economic
policy, though clearly it cannot go on.

Finally, thinking of ourselves as consumers, instead of as citizens
and as people, is destructive of our social nature. Instead of learning
to build community, and to relate to one another as neighbors and
fellow citizens and human beings, as mere “consumers,” we compete to
have more or better stuff, compete to get the best deals on the things
we buy, and compete to get jobs that will help us buy those things. The
one thing we do not do in a consumer-based model of society is
cooperate.

This is not condition we need to go back to.

Nor can we.

The consumer society as we have known it since the 1950s is dead,
at least here in America. We have bought so much that now the country
is a gigantic economic basket case. Our debts as individuals and
especially as a nation (of which we all own a piece), are
incomprehensibly great. According to a new report by Bloomberg, just
the debts that the government has promised to back up in the banking
and insurance industry in the current bailout have reached $7.5
trillion, which is half the nation’s annual gross domestic product for
the past year! The national public debt now totals $59.1 trillion,
which represents over half a million dollars for every man, woman and
child in America. External debt—the amount of money owed by the US to
foreign nations—was, before the bailout, $13.7 billion, or about the
total of a year’s economic activity in the US. Let’s be honest here:
There’s no way all, or even a significant portion, of this can ever be
repaid.

So what should we do? Well, for starters we need to start to
rethink what constitutes a good society. It’s clearly not a bunch of
crazed consumers, all struggling to pay their monthly bills, because
we’ve seen where that has gotten us. Far better would be a society that
valued education, the arts, scientific and philosophical inquiry, and
natural beauty. Instead of encouraging kids to go to business school or
law school, we should be encouraging them to go into the sciences, into
medicine, into the arts. Bailout funds should not be going to Citicorp
or AIG. They should be going to the hellholes that are called schools
in our decayed inner cities. They should be going into environmental
clean up projects and tree planting projects across the land. They
should be going into solar and wind energy programs, and geothermal
heating installation subsidies for every home in America.

Meanwhile, Americans should be waking up and recognizing how
consumerism has reduced us all to little more than serfs of the
corporations that sell us the things they convince us we need. Then we
should all sign up for unions, and start demanding that the Bill of
Rights be extended to the workplace. Why on earth should a boss be able
to fire someone for expressing an opinion that is constitutionally
protected outside the building? Why should a boss be able to tell me to
either do a dangerous job or quit? Why, for that matter, should the
boss be insulated from personal liability if I am injured at work
because of decisions that were made by management about working
conditions? These may seem to be remote issues from the matter of a
consumer-based economy, but they are not. It is because we are all
consumer-serfs that we have surrendered so much to our corporate
masters.

The very idea that someone as supposedly liberal as Robert Reich
could speak in terms of getting the consumer debt treadmill back up and
running as a goal shows how impoverished our politics has become.

A scant few months ago, people were finally waking up to the fact
that human life on this planet, indeed all life on this planet, is in
grave danger because of the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere that is
being caused by human development and economic activity. Even then,
with clear evidence that the North Polar ice cap is vanishing, that the
oceans are acidifying and that species are dying off at an alarming
rate, there were those who grumbled at the cost when candidate Barack
Obama spoke of spending $15 billion over the next few years to combat
some of that warming by investing in clean energy program research and
development. Now, however, no one is talking about that sorely needed
investment, and meanwhile nobody bats an eye as the government, Obama
included, talks about blowing as much as a trillion dollars to get the
economy moving again!

There’s plenty of money to get people out to the mall, but no money
to save the earth, no money to save our children from ignorance, no
money for healthcare reform, no money for the arts.

And of course there’s war—two really. Since the US has ceased to be
a productive power in the world, and has become the world’s biggest
debtor nation, its sole claim to importance and power is now military,
and so there is not a word said, even as the country sinks into a
depression, of cutting the bloated and out-of-control $1-trillion
annual military and intelligence budget, perhaps 90 percent of which
serves no function but to frighten and oppress and kill mostly poor,
third world people around the globe. The propaganda machine tells us
that those poor saps in uniform dodging roadside bombs in Iraq and
Afghanistan, or dropping shells and bombs on villages made of mud
bricks and killing innocent women and children, are “defending our
freedom.”

Nonsense. They are destroying our freedom by helping to bankrupt this nation, while stirring up deep hatreds of America everywhere they set foot.

The good news is that this particular economic downturn in the US
may prove to be more than just another turn of the business cycle, but
rather, the beginning of the inexorable spiral of decline of the US as
a global economic power. The corporations (along with the schools,
churches and politicians) that have lured and tricked us all into this
mad consumer scramble for more and more useless crap and momentary
gratification have driven the country into a debt hole from which it
will clearly be impossible to climb out. That may not sound like good
news, but viewed from the perspective of the wider world it certainly
is—especially if it bankrupts the American military machine, and slows
the production of greenhouse gases. It could also be good news if it
leads us, the American people, to rethink what our lives are really all
about—if it leads us to start thinking of ourselves as part of a
society, again, instead of just that incredibly insulting and
derogatory term: “consumers.”

People recognized how inane and wrong it was when, immediately after the 9-11 attacks, President Bush told us it was important for Americans to pick themselves up and then go out and shop. But Robert Reich has it just as wrong. The challenge we face as a nation is not
to get people’s income growing and consumers back to buying stuff. It
is to get people to rethink what is important, to downsize our
appetites, to think as citizens of a community, and to focus our
politics and government on the important issues, like protecting the
environment and enhancing the quality of life not just for all
Americans, but for all the people who inhabit this globe.
_____________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

One-Sided Propaganda `Journalism' About a Destabilizing Boondoggle

dlindorff — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:51:44 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A CBS/Associated Press story
yesterday reported that the man who runs the Pentagon’s anti-missile
program, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, had warned incoming
President-elect Barack Obama that any reversal of Bush/Cheney
administration plans to install anti-ballistic missile missiles in
Poland would “severely hurt” American interests.

It was a classic “stupid” story of the type that we now expect to
get from our corporate media—basically a regurgitation of the statement
of one self-interested official, backed up by a few supporting quotes
from other government officials, and the usual “anonymous” official
sources, and lacking any context or opposing viewpoints.

Let’s analyze this a little more. The Bush/Administration, since
coming into office eight years ago, has been putting intense pressure
on Russia by pressing to have NATO expanded right up to Russia’s
borders—also to have NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, to Russia’s
south in central Asia. As one ratchet up in that pressure, the
administration pushed to get anti-missile sites placed in some
countries on Russia’s western border. One such proposed location was
the Czech Republic, but that was rejected because of local opposition.
Poland, however, agreed, after being pressed hard by the administration.

For US consumption, the move was presented as being aimed at Iran,
which Bush and Cheney keep insisting is constructing nuclear bombs. No
one could explain why anti-missile missiles placed in Poland, which
sits in northern Europe, would have any utility in knocking down would
be Iranian missiles aimed at Europe, or, for that matter, why Iran
would want to fire nuclear missiles at Europe, which, in Britain and
France, has a large and sophisticated nuclear stockpile capable of
incinerating Iran. The real target of those missiles became clear when
Georgia provoked Russia into sending its army into the breakaway state
of Ossetia. Before that little military conflict, Poland had been
resisting US pressure to agree to the missile sites, because of strong
local opposition. After Russia moved its troops and tanks into Ossetia,
and trounced Georgia’s military, Poland went ahead and approved the
anti-missile site.

If the anti-missile missiles were intended to protect against Iran,
such a decision by Poland would have made no sense whatever. Clearly
the US was pointing those things at a different enemy: Russia. And that
of course is how the Russians view things. Earlier this month, within
days of the US election, Russia’s president warned that if the
anti-missile battery were placed in Poland, Russia would move
short-range nuclear-capable missiles up to its border with Poland, thus
not only rendering the US missile “shield”, such as it is, useless
because there would be no notice of any attack from that close, but
also escalating the wholly unnecessary conflict between the US and NATO
on the one hand, and Russia on the other.

Of course, this is exactly what the Bush/Cheney plan has been all
along: to increase tensions with Russia, and thus justify continuation
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which should have been
dismantled along with the demise of the Soviet Union. The Bush/Cheney
strategy has been to use NATO as a kind of global cover for its
military adventures, such as Afghanistan, which is, it should be noted,
about as far from the “North Atlantic” as one can get.

None of this history made it into the CBS/AP story yesterday. Nor
was there any mention of the fact that the anti-missile missile program
itself is little more than a $160-billion boondoggle.

The only thing that would be “severely hurt” if the Polish basing
plan were killed by the incoming Obama administration would be Lt. Gen.
Obering’s career, the more so if Obama did the right and proper thing
and killed the whole “Star Wars” project altogether.

There are plenty of critics of this Reagan-era boondoggle. After
the spending of $160 billion on the program, not one missile has ever
actually been shot down if flight in a real test, where the trajectory
of the target wasn’t strictly plotted out in advance to guide the
interceptor. Moreover, as many scientific critics have repeatedly
pointed out, even low-tech Third World nations like North Korea could
include countermeasures such as decoy warheads, which would render any
effort at interception of a real warhead impossible. The entire idea of
an anti-missile shield against nuclear weapons is an incredibly
expensive fraud, yet one which promises to revive the threat of nuclear
war, because the simplest way to overcome an anti-missile system is to
increase the number of incoming missiles, and to put them as close to
the target countries as possible to reduce warning time.

Yet none of this kind of criticism of the Polish missile-basing plan was mentioned in the CBS/AP story.

It’s funny. If CBS or AP ran a story about a warning by the
chairman of General Motors saying that failure to give the company a
$25 billion bailout would “severely hurt” the US economy, without any
comment by critics of such a taxpayer gift, everyone would recognizing
the article as junk. But with national security stories, no one raises
an eyebrow when this kind of thing is done.

President Elect Barack Obama has a chance to do what President
Clinton should have done, which is to kill the whole “Star Wars”
program. He can start by killing the absurd and dangerous plan to put
anti-missile platforms in Poland.

If the media will report fairly and honestly about this issue,
instead of simply passing off the arguments of self-interested
proponents like anti-missile program director Lt. Gen. Obering, maybe
the American people will demand that it be ended, and that the billions
of dollars that have annually been wasted in pursuing this Pentagon
fantasy be put to better use, perhaps building schools or developing
electric cars to replace the gas guzzlers nobody wants to buy anymore.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Perfora Cariño, Perfora!

dlindorff — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:44:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It’s going to be interesting to see how much longer the vicious
decades-long US embargo of Cuba lasts, whichever person wins the White
House this November.

The main reason the US has stubbornly refused to trade with Cuba,
and has used sanctions to bully other nations into refusing to trade
with Cuba, while enthusiastically trading with and investing in China,
Vietnam and other communist regimes, is that Cuba has had little to
offer the US, either in terms of products or markets.

That’s all about to change dramatically, with word that the
Communist island just 90 miles to the south of Florida may possess oil
reserves equal to or greater than all the oil reserves left in the
United States.

According to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian,
Cuba may be sitting on some 20 billion barrels of oil, located in Cuban
territory under the Gulf of Mexico. If the reports from Cuban, Spanish
and other geologists are correct, Cuba, which currently only produces
60,000 barrels of oil per day (about half the country’s domestic
demand), is on the verge of joining the ranks of the world’s exporting
nations.
20 billion barrels of reserves would place the little country in the top 20 nations in the world in terms of reserves.

The Republican crowds who are greeting presidential candidate John
McCain and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin with rowdy chants of
“Drill Baby, Drill!” my have to start shouting “Perfora Cariño, Perfora!”
while watching Raul Castro joining meetings of OPEC.

After all, most experts say that a lot of the offshore drilling
being planned in US coastal waters is likely to lead to dry holes,
while drilling in Cuban waters by the country’s national oil company
Cubapetroleo, or Cupet, and by a consortium led by Spain’s Repsol,
which is set to begin with punching some test wells early next year,
are likely to produce gushers.

If the oil starts flowing, how long will it be before the US starts
clamoring to buy it? How long will it be, for that matter, before US
oil companies start using their lobbying clout to get the US embargo
lifted, so they can get a chance to join the drilling party? After all,
if the US companies are kept out by vestigial anti-Communist ideology,
the investment opportunities will be left wide open for European,
Middle Eastern and Venezuelan interests.

For the long-suffering Cuban people, who have been forced to eke
out a national economy virtually barred from the global marketplace,
this oil find is an astonishingly lucky break, particularly coming at a
time that existing oil reserves are beginning to run out, and that
prices for crude are soaring.

It’s going to be fun to watch the rationalizations coming out of
Washington, particularly from the hard Right, for whom Fidel Castro’s
Cuba has for several generations served as a prime bogeyman in the Cold
War pantheon of villains. Just as Corporate America has since the 1970s
been hypocritically singing the praises of Communist China, and has
been justifying economic trade and investment with that nation on the
grounds that “economic engagement” will bring democracy (all the while
calling for a boycott of all things Cuban), we will soon be hearing
such songs about virtues of economic engagement with Cuba.

This new oil bonanza may not be great news for the
environment—either the waters of the Gulf or for the carbon-sogged
atmosphere of the earth—but for the Cuban people, at least for the
short term, it’s an amazing turn of events.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bush Exits with a Bang: Toxic Bailout and Two More Wars?

Heather Wokusch — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:53:09 -0400

The Bush administration is heading us towards more disaster with its 'toxic debt' bailout and destabilization of Pakistan and Iran. We can't afford to go down this road again. In this short video, Heather Wokusch provides background, context and ideas for taking action.

Links for sources cited in this video:

Bailout:

Crisis talks over $700B 'toxic debt' rescue plan

Bush: "The American people have got to know that I made this decision along with a lot of experts because it was necessary to protect them."

Pakistan:

Washington is Risking War with Pakistan

The American War Moves to Pakistan

Iran:

Preparing The Battlefield July 07, 2008

Dutch intel: US to strike Iran in coming weeks September 1, 08

Israel asks U.S. for arms, air corridor to attack Iran September 11, 08

U.S. to sell IAF smart bombs for heavily fortified targets September 14, 08

Bush could still attack Iran Sept 17 08

Russia Invades Latin America While Condi Talks Trash

Bob Fertik — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:55:03 -0400

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, John McCain, and the crazy Neocons have been playing "poke the giant" around Russia in places like Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, and the Czech Republic.

So Russia decided to retaliate by strengthening military and business relations in places like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Here's a good roundup from Bloomberg News:

Russia Builds Ties in Latin America to Challenge U.S.

By Henry Meyer

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Russia is in talks to build a space center in Cuba as it forges closer ties with Latin American countries opposed to the U.S. in the wake of Cold War-era tensions sparked by the Georgia conflict.

The head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, or Roscosmos, Anatoly Perminov, who visited Havana with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin earlier this week, made the announcement in a statement posted today on the agency's Web Site.

After Cuba, Sechin traveled to Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chavez heads to Moscow next week, and Nicaragua. Russia is playing its most active role in the region since the Soviet era, in a challenge to the U.S. in its traditional backyard.

``We're increasing our presence in Latin America -- the countries in the region themselves want this,'' said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov. ``There's a big power in the north. They need a counterweight,'' he said by telephone from Moscow today, referring to the U.S.

Russia has sold billions of dollars of weapons to oil-rich Venezuela in recent years. Since the August war with U.S.-backed Georgia provoked a rift with the West, Russia has stepped up efforts to bolster its influence in Latin America.

``The worse Russia's ties with the West become, the more it will look for allies elsewhere,'' said Viktor Kremenyuk, deputy director of the USA and Canada Institute in Moscow. ``Russia can play the role of a great power; it can sell oil, weapons and nuclear technology.''

Ties With Nicaragua

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, whose revolutionary Sandinista government was supported by military aid from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, said yesterday after talks with Sechin that he planned to strengthen ties with Russia. Sechin said Russia will study plans to fund energy projects and boost trade. Nicaragua was the only country to follow Russia in recognizing the independence of Georgia's two breakaway regions.

Bolivia, South America's poorest country, will turn to Russia to replace U.S. funding for its anti-drugs program, the Bolivian government said yesterday.

Bolivia will send representatives to Russia to wrap up an agreement to provide it with helicopters, logistical support and military training to help the fight against drug trafficking, La Razon reported today, citing Felipe Caceres, Bolivia's vice minister of social defense.

Strained Ties

Relations between the U.S. and Bolivia have soured in the past week after President Evo Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador for allegedly helping foment violence in the opposition stronghold of eastern Bolivia.

Russia's Foreign Ministry yesterday criticized what it termed efforts to undercut Bolivia's territorial integrity and ``all forms of outside interference in the affairs of this sovereign Latin American nation.''

Morales, Ortega and Chavez are close allies who oppose the historic U.S. influence in Latin America. By courting Russia, ``Latin American states can demonstrate to the U.S. that if it doesn't treat them with respect, they have other countries they can turn to,'' Kremenyuk said.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will be in Peru in late November for the summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group and plans a weeklong regional trip, his office said today.

Sechin's visit to Cuba followed one he made in July to the Cold War-era ally. Russian newspaper reports of plans to station nuclear bombers on the Caribbean island prompted warnings from the U.S. not to cross ``a red line'' and were later denied by Russia.

U.S. Missile System

Russia opposes proposed U.S. missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, former Communist-era satellites. It's also resisting further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine, accusing the U.S. of threatening its security by moving militarily up to Russia's borders.

Chavez last week welcomed two Russian TU 160 bombers, which flew from Venezuela to conduct training flights over neutral waters. Venezuela is planning a joint naval exercise in the Caribbean later this year with Russian warships, including the atomic-powered Peter the Great cruiser.

The Venezuelan leader will be in Moscow for the second time in two months next week. Three Russian oil companies signed exploration deals for Venezuela during Chavez's last visit to Russia in July.

Russia is currently in talks to sell air defense systems, armored personnel carriers and new-generation Su-35 fighter jets to Venezuela, the Kommersant newspaper reported, citing state industrial holding company Russian Technologies chief Sergei Chemezov.

So how is our Russia expert-in-chief responding? With typical Bushevik denial and trash talk.

Rice says West must resist Russian "bullying"

Reuters/Susan Cornwell
Thu Sep 18, 6:17 PM ET

The West must stand up to "bullying" by Moscow, which is becoming increasingly authoritarian and aggressive, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a speech highly critical of Russia on Thursday.

In her first major address on Russia since its incursion into Georgia last month, Rice said Moscow had taken a "dark turn" that left its global standing worse than at any time since 1991, when it emerged from the fall of the Soviet Union.

Rice, a former Soviet expert who has presided over a steady deterioration of relations with Russia, said Moscow's invasion of Georgia was part of a pattern that included its use of oil and natural gas as a political weapon, the suspension of a treaty on conventional forces in Europe and a threat to target peaceful nations with nuclear weapons.

"The picture emerging from this pattern of behavior is that of a Russia increasingly authoritarian at home and aggressive abroad," Rice said in the speech to the German Marshall Fund.

The United States and Europe must not allow Russian actions in Georgia to achieve any benefit, she said. "Not in Georgia. Not anywhere," she said.

"Our strategic goal now is to make it clear to Russia's leaders that their choices are putting Russia on a one-way path to self-imposed isolation and international irrelevance."

Umm Condi, Russia isn't facing isolation, it's expanding throughout Latin America!

Moscow was internationally condemned for sending troops to Georgia to stop Tbilisi's attempt to reassert control over the pro-Russian, separatist region of South Ossetia.

Moscow later recognized South Ossetia and another rebel region, Abkhazia, as independent states, and on Wednesday signed treaties to protect them from Georgian attack.

The Kremlin said it had a moral duty to defend the regions against what it called "genocide" by Georgia's military.

But some political analysts have said Russia's actions heighten the risk of Moscow attempting to exert more influence over other former Soviet territories, particularly Ukraine.

'SPHERE OF INFLUENCE'

Rice rejected a Russian "sphere of influence" over its neighbors and hoped Russia leaders would "overcome their nostalgia for another time."

Umm Condi, you've squandered the American "sphere of influence" over Latin America, which dates back to another time - the presidency of James Monroe.

"We cannot afford to validate the prejudices that some Russian leaders seem to have: that if you pressure free nations enough -- if you bully, and threaten, and lash out -- we will cave in, and forget, and eventually concede," Rice said.

"The United States and Europe must stand up to this kind of behavior, and all who champion it."

She also scoffed at Moscow's recent dispatch of "Blackjack" bombers to U.S. foe Venezuela.

Rice said Russia's behavior threatened its participation in a number of global diplomatic, economic and security bodies, including the Group of Eight industrialized nations, and jeopardized Moscow's bid to join the World Trade Organization and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

But she said Washington would continue to pursue areas of common concern with Russia, from denuclearizing the Korean peninsula to stopping Iran's rulers from acquiring nuclear weapons and combating terrorism, underscoring Washington's need for Moscow to play a role in international negotiations.

Rice, who called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to tell him she was giving the speech, said the door remained open for Georgia and Ukraine to eventually join the NATO alliance.

But some European governments have misgivings about allowing those states to take the first step toward joining NATO, and successfully blocked the move earlier this year.

In London, Pentagon chief Robert Gates used a less critical tone when asked whether NATO should change its operational posture toward Russia as a result of events in Georgia.

"I think we need to proceed with some caution because there clearly is a range of views in the alliance about how to respond, from some of our friends in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, to some of the countries in western Europe," Gates said.

One U.S. analyst said he did not see the point of Rice's speech. "It didn't lay out a framework that showed American leadership for where do we go from here," said Robert Hunter, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO now with the RAND corporation.

Nope, it was just trash talk - the only thing the Busheviks are good at.

Heckuva job, Condi!

Experience is Over-Rated

dlindorff — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:25:42 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Sarah Palin stated again, most recently in her interview yesterday
by ABC’s Charlie Gibson, that she has foreign policy experience because
as governor of Alaska she has been in charge of that state’s National
Guard, and because Alaska is, doggone it, “right next” to Russia.

This made me feel pretty good, because it made me realize that I
have a whole lot of skills and experience which I hadn’t really
appreciated before and that I could perhaps use to get myself out of
this freelance journalism profession, which is not all that great from
a financial perspective.

I, for instance, live very close to the garage where my mechanic
works (I mean, I drive past the place every day and even buy my gas
there), so I’m ready to be a car mechanic (I can’t tell you how many
cars I’ve seen being gone over there, and have even sometimes watched a
bit as my own vehicles were up on the lift). I also live literally
across the street from a large forest, which qualifies me to be a
number of things—forest ranger, lumberjack, and perhaps naturalist.

I’ve also been to the doctor many times, so maybe I should hang a
shingle and open up a medical practice. I swear I’ve got all those exam
questions by memory at this point, and they’ve got nurses to do the
stuff with the arm cuff and the stethoscope.

Of course, the real money these days is in law, and there I’ve really got it nailed. Not only do several lawyers live right in my neighborhood,
but I’ve actually been in court and seen lawyers at work. For that
matter, I even had a lawyer argue a case for me once, when I was being
charged with trespassing at the Pentagon. He wasn’t successful at
getting my fine and jail time dropped, but hey, you learn from other
people’s failures, too. Furthermore, I actually wrote a book with a co-author who is a lawyer. With all that experience, I could certainly be an attorney.

Over the years, I’ve spent time at the seashore, and even went on a
one-week ocean sailing trip, so you’d have to admit oceanography is
almost in my blood. Or perhaps I could be a sea captain. I’m sure I
could do at least as well as the captain of the Exxon Valdez tanker.

Come to think of it, back when I was 16, I hitchhiked up to Alaska
with a friend and spent the summer thumbing around the state, so I know
that place like the back of my hand, which means if Sarah Palin gets
elected and goes to Washington, maybe I could be governor of Alaska.
And then, as governor I’d be commander of a National Guard unit, so I’d
be qualified to be a vice president, or, should the opportunity present
itself, even president of the United States. Actually, I’d be maybe
more experienced than Palin for the job, because I grew up in
Connecticut, and thanks to the small size of the states in my native
New England, have actually been living closer to a foreign
country—Canada—than she, living in Wasilla, has been living to Russia.
In other words, when you think of it, my foreign policy experience is
much greater than hers. Besides, I’ve actually visited Canada a few times, which really boosts my experience in international affairs.

I know some people think that jumping into jobs like president or
vice president of the United States based upon what they might perceive
as limited experience is presumptuous, but that’s because they aren’t
being fair and open-minded. And I’ll admit that it’s hard, with
relatively limited experience, to expect someone like Palin or me to
measure up to the standard of someone like our current vice president,
Dick Cheney, who came to his position after having served previously as
presidential chief of staff, as secretary of defense, and as a member
of Congress. I mean, that’s real experience, and it shows in the fine
job he’s done as VP.

But we shouldn’t let examples like Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld,
another guy who took an important government post—in his case Secretary
of Defense—after having considerable prior experience—make us obsess
about experience. I mean, look at our current president. George W. Bush
got elected in 2000, when his experience consisted of just two terms as
governor of Texas, a state where the governor has a largely ceremonial
role and most of the real work of government is handled by the
legislature, and look what a great job he did in the White House!
Furthermore, his only military experience was as a pilot in a Texas
National Guard unit, most of which tour of duty he missed because he
decided to work on his father’s failed election campaign instead, and
because he didn’t want to take any drug tests, and look what a fine job
he’s done as commander in chief.

This should all make Americans lighten up and be less snooty and
judgemental about what they demand in terms of experience in
presidential and vice presidential candidates. Palin in my view has proved her qualifications for the job. Yesterday she sent her young son off to battle in Iraq to fight against "the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the deaths of thousands of Americans" on 9-11 seven years ago. What better evidence do we need of this woman's solid grasp of foreign affairs, history and combat?

________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia journalist and columnist. His
latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Foreign Policy and National Security Are Not the Same Thing

dlindorff — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:27:10 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

One of the sorrier legacies of eight years of Bush and Cheney in the White House has been the conflation of the terms “National Security” and “Foreign Policy” by both Republicans and Democrats.

Granted that the history of US foreign policy in the world has been heavily larded with wars, many of them at America’s instigation. It is nonetheless true that foreign policy is much bigger and more far reaching than just what has come to be known as “national security” issues.

In Bush-speak, national security come to mean having big guns, lots of heavily armed troops, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, naval armadas and a bully’s willingness to use these weapons on a whim, with no thought of consequences.

The term is kind of oxymoronic, since it is clear that by resorting to war and to threats of war, and by squandering unprecedented sums of money on the military, eight years of bellicosity has not made the nation more secure. Quite the opposite: The military has been run into the ground, the economy has been bankrupted, education, healthcare and other critical national services have been shortchanged, and the country has become a pariah state, viewed around the world as a loose cannon and a terror nation—hardly a comforting position to be in.

Foreign policy, meanwhile, has ceased to have any meaning at all, beyond the making of war or threats of war, making it virtually synonymous with the term national security.

When I was a Fulbright professor in China, back in 1991, at a mid-year conference in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, we grantees were addressed by the head of the Fulbright Program in China, a cultural affairs director from the US embassy in Beijing. He informed us that as teachers (I was teaching journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai), we Fulbrighters were the frontline of American foreign policy in China. Most of us were kind of repulsed by his semi-military allusion to a battle line and by implication to us as soldiers, and we chose instead to see our role as something different: emissaries from the American people to the Chinese people. In fact, given that most of the 21 of us were hardly superpatriots or cold warriors (the academics, journalists, lawyers and other professionals who serve in the Fulbright Program tend demographically to be among the most liberal and left-leaning group in the American workforce), we would have made a pretty bad defense line. Rather, what we were doing in China, by teaching and building relationships with young Chinese college students, was the essence of real foreign policy—building bridges at the grass roots level between the people of China and the people of the US.

Foreign policy can be reduced to a strategic chess game—the kind of “real politik” practiced by Klemens von Metternich in the 19th Century, or espoused by Henry Kissinger in the Nixon years—but it is actually, or at least ought to be, much broader than that kind of cold and calculating manipulation and pursuit of narrow self-interest.

Real foreign policy should be about winning friends, building trust, establishing relationships between countries and peoples, negotiating treaties designed to achieve mutual advantage and to deter aggression. It is about aiding countries that are in need of assistance, and at its best, should also be about making the world a safer, better place for all, which in the end is the best way to guard against war and the threats of war.

Now it would be naïve to imagine a foreign policy that ignored national self-interest. Much as I or others might wish for a world without borders and a common humanity, in a world of nation states, it is inevitable that foreign policy as practiced by any nation, including the United States, will be focused on achieving the maximum benefit for that nation, and US foreign policy has always been about just that, and unfortunately probably always will be. But even granted this selfish parochialism, it is incredibly shortsighted and ignorant to treat foreign policy as simply an America-first process of bullying others into submission to our dictates. Thousands of American teachers and Peace Corps volunteers and aid workers do much more to advance America’s position in the world and to enhance the nation’s security than do hundreds of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs and missiles.

For Republicans, there is no difference between national security, which is defined as a powerful and assertive military, and foreign policy. But Democrats, who at times have had a more nuanced view, have more recently bought into this too. At the current Democratic Convention, anxious to look as tough as Republicans, Democratic speakers have used the terms national security and foreign policy interchangeably.

Afghanistan and Iraq provide excellent cases in point. Clearly, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, ostensibly aimed initially at hunting down Al Qaeda fighters and leaders, quickly devolved into an all-out assault on that nation, which has been reduced to the same rubble and state of chaos and civil war as has Iraq. Now, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is talking about expanding the war there, and increasing the killing and destruction in that country. In Iraq, where the US has been involved in an orgy of killing and destruction now for over five years, Obama and fellow Democrats are calling for a “responsible exit” from that conflict over the course of another 16 months. A truly responsible exit would be an immediate withdrawal, a national apology to Iraqis and to the world community, and a massive program of reparations to help rebuild that nation.

What Obama and the Democrats are touting is not foreign policy. It is a continuation of national security run amok.

No amount of American force, no level of mayhem and slaughter, will bring about a secure and tranquil Afghanistan. In fact, every time Americans kill Afghanis, as American bombers recently did, slaughtering 60 children and 30 other adults, women and men, in an aerial bombardment reminiscent of the German Luftwaffe’s attack on the Basque village of Guernica, they produce not peace and submission, but rather hatred and a desire for vengeance.

It will take perhaps a generation of good works for the US to undo the evil done to American foreign relations by eight years of Bush/Cheney obsession with national security, but it doesn’t even look like the Democrats “get it.” In Congress, they have vied with Republicans to look tough, supporting both the invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, they have supported the continued funding of those wars and increased funding for the already bloated US war machine, and they are now backing Obama’s call for more combat troops in Afghanistan.

Real foreign policy would be looking at ways to work with other nations to bring down the level of combat, and to bring peace to Afghanistan and to other war-torn regions of the world.

Meanwhile, the concept of national security needs to be broadened. As Genghis Khan, conqueror of China, is reputed to have said as a frightened Chinese empire, at extraordinary financial and human cost, constructed the Great Wall to fend him off, “A wall is only as strong as the people behind it.”

One need only drive through any American city today and view the bombed-out neighborhoods, the crack dens, the pot-holed streets, the decrepit transit systems, the shamefully overcrowded and prison-like schools where any teaching and learning that goes on is an accident, one need only visit ignored and forgotten rural areas of America where unemployment is the norm and healthcare is half a day’s drive and half a year’s income away, one need only drive through a suburban neighborhood and look at all the “For Sale” and even more pathetic “For Sale: Reduced Price!” signs in front of houses, to see that what lies behind America’s walls, like the ridiculous one being built now along parts of the border with Mexico, is incredible weakness. (At the rate things are going here, it won’t be long before Americans will be scaling that wall to find jobs in Mexico!)

The folly of conflating national security and foreign policy, and of imagining that a mindless willingness to resort to force and bullying is the sine qua non for being “presidential,” has been made painfully clear not only in the screams of wounded children in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the cries of hungry children in America. The United States does not need a man of war in the White House. It needs a wise advocate of peace.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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