Missed Weekend Roundup on Sunday -- was working on another post that didn't quite work out -- but I hit a few scattered links today that I might as well post now.
Chris Hedges: The Treason of the Intellectuals: Excoriates a long list of liberal-or-left-identified "academics, writers and journalists" who supported Bush's invasion of Iraq (missing some key figures like Kenneth Pollack), pointing out not just their complacency but how they labored to discredit all those who didn't join the war effort. Hedges takes this personally:
Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing "patriots" and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own "patriotism" and "realism" about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics.
Actually, the "treason" -- really, a lapse both in principles and in judgment that betrayed a secret identification with the powers in Washington as opposed to people all around the world -- that bothered me worse was the even-more-widespread post-9/11 support for attacking Afghanistan. Had Al-Qaeda indeed attacked civilization, wouldn't a civilized response had been more appropriate? Instead, Bush took it as an attack on American power, and responded with more power, the way thoughtless brutes do -- the way Osama Bin Laden expected. In that moment, an awful number of people you would generally regard as good natured, thoughtful, civilized, rushed to side with Bush, as if the only alternative to Bin Laden was a bigger army. Moreover, the liberal hawks of 2001 were far nastier to dissenters than their 2003 Iraq subset was. Without the supposed success in Afghanistan, invading Iraq wouldn't have been an option. While the liberal hawks weren't strictly responsible for the disasters, they gave aid and comfort those who were, and blunted our understanding of why.
Tom Engelhardt: The 12th Anniversary of American Cowardice: I slipped this out of alphabetical order to follow up on what I had already written under Hedges. With the 10th anniversary of Bush's Iraq misadventure behind us, that 12th anniversary is still a few months in the future: the Congress's Authorization of Use of Military Force on September 14, 2001 that plunged us into war in Afghanistan, but Engelhardt mentions many other anniversary dates, then asks:
When it comes to the Marines, here's a question: Who, this November 19th, will mark the eighth anniversary of the slaughter of 24 unarmed civilians, including children and the elderly, in the Iraqi village of Haditha for which, after a six-year investigation and military trials, not a single Marine spent a single day in prison? Or to focus for a moment on U.S. Special Forces: will anyone on August 21st memorialize the 90 or so civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children, killed in the Afghan village of Azizabad while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had reportedly been anti-Taliban?
And not to leave out the rent-a-gun mercenaries who have been such a fixture of the post-9/11 era of American warfare, this September 16th will be the sixth anniversary of the moment when Blackwater guards for a convoy of U.S. State Department vehicles sprayed Baghdad's Nisour Square with bullets, evidently without provocation, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding many more. [ . . . ]
So perhaps the last overlooked anniversary of these years might be the 12th anniversary of American cowardice. You can choose the exact date yourself; anytime this fall will do. At that moment, Americans should feel free to celebrate a time when, for our "safety," and in a state of anger and paralyzing fear, we gave up the democratic ghost.
Thomas Homer-Dixon: The Tar Sands Disaster: A Canadian chimes in on the Keystone XL pipeline:
The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world's most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.
Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.
There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don't like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.
Homer-Dixon goes on to explain how Canada's ruling Conservative Party is entwined with the oil industry, but he doesn't go quite far enough: he doesn't point out that the very worst thing about the oil industry is the production of oil men. We should know all about them in the US, where they form the most reactionary, extremist crust on the ultra-right: sworn enemies of government despite the fact that their fortunes are totally based on the laws that grant them rights to suck as much oil as they can from the ground -- laws that few countries other than the US and Canada have.
Also see Sally Kohn: New Spill Reveals How Horrible Keystone Could Be.
Dilip Hiro: How the Pentagon Corrupted Afghanistan: This is a big part of the story, but after Homer-Dixon's reference to Canada becoming a "petro state," it's worth pondering whether the windfall in war spending isn't having the same adverse effects in Afghanistan. Certainly it's resulted in tremendous inflation in Kabul, pushing up the cost of living and making exports (other than opium) unviable, thereby stunting an economy that didn't amount to much anyway. Of course, that point may be too subtle, given the gross numbers.
Corruption in Afghanistan today is acute and permeates all sectors of society. In recent years, anecdotal evidence on the subject has been superseded by the studies of researchers, surveys by NGOs, and periodic reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). There is also the Corruption Perceptions Index of the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI). Last year, it bracketed Afghanistan with two other countries as the most corrupt on Earth.
None of these documents, however, refers to the single most important fact when it comes to corruption: that it's Washington-based. It is, in fact, rooted in the massive build-up of U.S. forces there from 2005 onward, the accompanying expansion of American forward operating bases, camps, and combat outposts from 29 in 2005 to nearly 400 five years later, and above all, the tsunami of cash that went with all of this. [ . . . ]
Later, the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) took over this role. As with the Pentagon, most of the money it distributed ended up in the pockets of those local power brokers. By some accounts, USAID lost up to 90 cents of each dollar spent on certain projects. According to a Congressional report published in June 2011, much of the $19 billion in foreign aid that the U.S. pumped into Afghanistan after 2001 was probably destabilizing the country in the long term.
Staggering amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars allocated to aid Afghanistan were spent so quickly and profligately that they circumvented any anti-corruption, transparency, or accountability controls and safeguards that existed on paper. However, those who amassed bagsful of dollars faced a problem. Afghanistan's underdeveloped $12 billion economy -- a sum Washington spent in that country in a single month in 2011 -- did not offer many avenues for legitimate profitable investment. Therefore, most of this cash garnered on a colossal scale exited the country, large parts of it ending up in banks and real estate in the Gulf emirates, especially freewheeling Dubai.
Dahr Jamail: "My Children Have No Future": In his intro, Nick Turse reminds us of the costs of invading Iraq:
According to a recent report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University, at least 123,000-134,000 Iraqi civilians have died "as a direct consequence of the war's violence since the March 2003 invasion." In fact, while the U.S. military left Iraq in 2011 and war supporters have advanced a counterfeit history of success there -- owing to then-General (now disgraced former CIA director) David Petraeus's military "surge" of 2007 -- the war's brutal legacy lives on. Last year, the casualty watchdog group Iraq Body Count tallied 4,570 Iraqi civilian deaths from violence, a small increase over the death toll from 2011.
And on the day of Obama's 10th anniversary announcement, car bombs and other attacks killed and wounded hundreds in the Iraqi capital Baghdad alone. Add to these numbers the countless wounded of the last decade and the approximately 2.8 million Iraqis who, to this day, remain refugees outside the country or internally displaced within it and the words of both presidents ring hollow indeed.
Jamail goes into the country and finds out things like this:
As he said this, we passed under yet another poster of an angry looking Maliki, speaking with a raised, clenched fist. "Last year's budget was $100 billion and we have no working sewage system and garbage is everywhere," he added. "Maliki is trying to be a dictator, and is controlling all the money now."
In the days that followed, my fixer Ali pointed out new sidewalks, and newly planted trees and flowers, as well as the new street lights the government has installed in Baghdad. "We called it first the sidewalks government, because that was the only thing we could see that they accomplished." He laughed sardonically. "Then it was the flowers government, and now it is the government of the street lamps, and the lamps sometimes don't even work!"
Despite his brave face, kind heart, and upbeat disposition, even Ali eventually shared his concerns with me. One morning, when we met for work, I asked him about the latest news. "Same old, same old," he replied, "Kidnappings, killings, rapes. Same old, same old. This is our life now, everyday."
"The lack of hope for the future is our biggest problem today," he explained. He went on to say something that also qualified eerily as another version of the "same old, same old." I had heard similar words from countless Iraqis back in the fall of 2003, as violence and chaos first began to engulf the country. "All we want is to live in peace, and have security, and have a normal life," he said, "to be able to enjoy the sweetness of life." This time, however, there wasn't even a trace of his usual cheer, and not even a hint of gallows humor.
"All Iraq has had these last 10 years is violence, chaos, and suffering. For 13 years before that we were starved and deprived by [U.N. and U.S.] sanctions. Before that, the Kuwait War, and before that, the Iran War. At least I experienced some of my childhood without knowing war. I've achieved a job and have my family, but for my daughters, what will they have here in this country? Will they ever get to live without war? I don't think so."
Ed Kilgore: Bleeding Kansas: Good to see that The Washington Monthly is at least paying some attention to "the state that is trying very hard to outdo all its many extremist rivals, even those steeped in the toxic cultural wastes of my own Deep South." Subject here, as is so often the case, is abortion:
The dirty little secret of "personhood" initiatives is that they would proscribe not only abortions, or "abortion pills," but IUD's and "Plan B" contraceptives on grounds that such devices and drugs are actually"abortifacients," identical morally to murdering an infant. And indeed, some "personhood" folk would ban the routine anti-ovulant "pill" used by many millions of Americans on grounds that it sometimes operates by interfering with the implantation of a fertilized ovum -- i.e., a"person" -- in the uterine wall.
If regular Republican-voting Americans had any idea of the radical vision underlying such legislation -- something straight out of theHandmaid's Tale, folks -- the solons supporting it wouldn't even last until the next election. So you'd think they'd be extra careful about supporting efforts to ensure that most of the female population of the state of child-bearing age wouldn't have to worry about being hauled off to the hoosegow and told they needed to get their procreative groove on or put an aspirin between their legs.
But no: Kansas Republicans consider that sort of concession to the twentieth century a "little gotcha amendment" they find irritating.