Every day in every city and town across America, progressives get up in the morning and go about the work of fighting racism and homophobia, defending the environment, organizing trade unions and tackling corporate hegemony. Sometimes they win--on the picket line, at the ballot box, in the streets and outside the WTO meetings in Seattle.
One of the central purposes of The Precinct Master is to report regularly and with immediacy on the political, social, economic and cultural activism that too often goes unremarked in so much of the mainstream media. The ultimate goal? To reveal the hidden reality that there is a left in America, and that it's active, growing and winning more consistently than the pundits or the politicians want you to know, and a segment of our population willing to face the difficult issues before this nation in the name of maintaining the integrity of country at home and abroad; willing not to excuse and willing to do what is simply right and necessary as citizens of the United States.
This is a calendar of local progressive events (DC, MD, VA only, please)Anyone can add an event (moderator approval needed before appearing on calendar)calendar about this calendar hosted by Protest.net return to DC Indymedia
The LIST button will toggle the week or month view between a table and a printable list
January 4th 2007
Presentation/Speech/Panel Discussion
Time
7:00 pm
Title
Voices for Impeachment
DC
Location
National Press Club
Topic / Issue
Elections & Democracy
January 4, Thursday, 7 p.m. - Voices Speak Out for Impeachment Ballroom, National Press Club 529 14th Street NW Washington, DC
One of the central purposes of The Precinct Master is to report regularly and with immediacy on the political, social, economic and cultural activism that too often goes unremarked in so much of the mainstream media. The ultimate goal? To reveal the hidden reality that there is a left in America, and that it's active, growing and winning more consistently than the pundits or the politicians want you to know, and a segment of our population willing to face the difficult issues before this nation in the name of maintaining the integrity of country at home and abroad; willing not to excuse and willing to do what is simply right and necessary as citizens of the United States.
This is a calendar of local progressive events (DC, MD, VA only, please)Anyone can add an event (moderator approval needed before appearing on calendar)calendar about this calendar hosted by Protest.net return to DC Indymedia
The LIST button will toggle the week or month view between a table and a printable list
January 4th 2007
Presentation/Speech/Panel Discussion
Time
7:00 pm
Title
Voices for Impeachment
DC
Location
National Press Club
Topic / Issue
Elections & Democracy
January 4, Thursday, 7 p.m. - Voices Speak Out for Impeachment Ballroom, National Press Club 529 14th Street NW Washington, DC
Speakers to include Cindy Sheehan, John Nichols, & Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights* Add your name to this Call for Jan. 4th - email World Can't Wait National Director Debra Sweet at: debra@worldcantwait.org.
For more information and to help plan and mobilize for January 4, contact DC World Can't Wait, dc@worldcantwait.org or call 202-536-4313. -- World Can't Wait DC Chapter (202) 536-4313 dc@worldcantwait.org
Donate to World Can't Wait DC at http://www.worldcantwaitdc.org The World Can't Wait, Drive Out the Bush Regime! http://www.worldcantwait.org
THE PRESIDENT'S NEW STRATEGY, TO BE REVEALED WITHIN DAYS, HAS A 'CENTRAL THEME' OF 'SACRIFICE.'
By Tom Regan csmonitor.com
President Bush's new Iraq strategy will call for sending more troops there in an effort to quell violence, rather than the current strategy of training more Iraqi troops, according to a BBC report. The BBC says the new plan will be revealed within days.
The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week. Its central theme will be sacrifice.
The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers. The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.
Tthe idea has already met with criticism, even from Republican officials. Reuters reports that Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) of Nebraska has called it "Alice in Wonderland."
The Financial Times reports that Mr. Bush is expected to look for an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 troops "as a short-term boost to the existing 140,000 level, with the aim of stabilising the violence in Baghdad and surrounding provinces." But again, opposition within his own party could create a problem.
In the past two days, a number of prominent Republican senators, including Arlen Specter and Richard Lugar, the outgoing chairmen of the Senate judiciary and foreign relations committees, have voiced strong scepticism about an increase in troops.
Although Mr Bush could expect the support of John McCain, the 2008 presidential hopeful, and Lindsey Graham, another Republican senator, the Republican tide appears to be moving against boosting troop levels. A number of Republicans have pointed out that Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, is also opposed to a beefed-up US military presence.
The conservative commentary site, PipelineNews.org, however, appears to advocate a renewed focus on victory in Iraq, which is expected to be a key point of the president's new plan. The site reports that the new strategy looks to be very similar to an earlier one drawn up by retired General Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army for the current Bush administration, and military historian Frederick W. Kagan, a former West Point instructor and current fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Keane/Kagan plan is really quite simple.
The majority of sectarian and Al Qaeda spawned violence is located in Iraq's largest city, Baghdad. Securing it is therefore of primary importance and that can be done with an infusion of approximately 50,000 additional American troops who will then be deployed in clear-and-hold operations which will, as the plan's executive summary states, stabilize and normalize the city:
1. We must change our focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.
2. We must send more American combat forces into Iraq and especially into Baghdad to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations starting in the Spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient.
3. These forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shi'a neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.
4. After the neighborhoods have been cleared, U.S. soldiers and marines, again partnered with Iraqis, will remain behind to maintain security.
5. As security is established, reconstruction aid will help to reestablish normal life and, working through Iraqi officials, will strengthen Iraqi local government. This approach requires a national commitment to victory in Iraq."
The Associated Press reports that pundits and political experts say that the president has gone out of his way this time to seek outside opinions about the situation in Iraq and how it could be improved. The only downside, they say, are the high expectations he has created in the American public.
There might as well be a drum roll.
"He has built up expectations," said David Gergen, a former White House adviser in the administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. "People are saying, 'OK, if you've spent all this time and effort on it, you better have a pretty darn good plan.'"
AP reports that the danger with high expectations can be seen in the report of the Iraq Study Group, which "was so highly anticipated that when it was not embraced by the White House in toto, it seemed to fall flat and fade from view."
Before deciding on whether to increase or decrease troop levels, US officials debate how hard to push soldiers already in Iraq.
By Peter Grier Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – The US military may have reached a critical point in generating Army and Marine ground forces to fight its global war on terror.
When it comes to force levels, finding 15,000 to 30,000 additional troops for Iraq is not the real problem, say officers and experts outside the government. The White House is considering such a surge as a way to counter rising sectarian violence.
More difficult is deciding how long to keep those extra units there. After years of war, US active duty ground forces are stretched to the limit. Many National Guard and reserve personnel can't be deployed to Iraq. Recruiting more soldiers would be an expensive and time-consuming process.
"The other issue is equipment," says Kevin Ryan, a retired Army brigadier general and fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Even if you could magically have 30,000 more troops, you don't have the equipment to give them."
To the layperson Washington's current debate about troop levels in Iraq might seem somewhat confusing.
On the one hand, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, among others, keeps insisting that we need more units in Iraq for a full push to provide security. A recent American Enterprise Institute study by a cadre of retired military officers and AEI scholar Frederick Kagan called for seven more Army brigades and Marine regiments for Iraq - and said that such a surge "is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient."
On the other hand, many Democrats keep pushing for a US commitment to withdraw troops, not add them. And respected figures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have cast doubt on whether the US even has enough extra troops to send.
"The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they're being asked to perform," said Mr. Powell.
The gap here, in essence, may lie in differing views about how hard current units should be used.
"It is possible for both of [these points of view] to be correct," says General Ryan, who in his last active duty assignment was responsible for Army strategic war plans, policy, and international affairs.
The AEI study does not hinge on plucking seven rested units from US bases and sending them to Iraq. Instead, it would advance the planned deployments of four brigades of troops by a matter of some weeks, while extending the rotations of other units already in Iraq.
For the next several years, active duty ground forces must accept longer tours in Iraq - perhaps 15 months, instead of the current 12 - and National Guard units will have to accept increased deployments, according to the AEI study.
President Bush should request an increase in active duty ground forces of at least 30,000 per year for the next two years, according to the Kagan study. "The president must call for young Americans to volunteer to defend the nation in a time of crisis," notes an outline of the AEI report.
Given the unpopularity of the Iraq conflict with US voters it might be politically difficult for the White House to call for such a redoubled effort. If nothing else, the expense of increasing US forces by 60,000 over the next two years would be considerable, on top of the extra money already appropriated for the war.
A report in the Washington Post Tuesday said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff privately are opposed to increasing troop levels in Iraq. In public, their comments on the issue have been hedged.
Last week, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker at a Capitol Hill hearing noted that over the past five years, sustained strategic demand has placed a strain on the Army's all-volunteer force, testing it for the first time in an extended period of conflict.
Dwell time, or regrouping time at home, for active duty brigade combat teams is now less than one year, noted General Schoomaker. "At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components through remobilization, we will break the active component," he says.
Access to the National Guard and reserve components of the military has become a sensitive issue for the top military leadership. These citizen-soldiers have performed well in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, Department of Defense personnel policies make them more difficult to send abroad than active duty troops.
Of the current 520,000 guard and reserve personnel, only about 90,000 currently are available for deployment, according to figures presented Friday to a congressional commission.
THE PRESIDENT'S NEW STRATEGY, TO BE REVEALED WITHIN DAYS, HAS A 'CENTRAL THEME' OF 'SACRIFICE.'
By Tom Regan csmonitor.com
President Bush's new Iraq strategy will call for sending more troops there in an effort to quell violence, rather than the current strategy of training more Iraqi troops, according to a BBC report. The BBC says the new plan will be revealed within days.
The BBC was told by a senior administration source that the speech setting out changes in Mr Bush's Iraq policy is likely to come in the middle of next week. Its central theme will be sacrifice.
The speech, the BBC has been told, involves increasing troop numbers. The exact mission of the extra troops in Iraq is still under discussion, according to officials, but it is likely to focus on providing security rather than training Iraqi forces.
Tthe idea has already met with criticism, even from Republican officials. Reuters reports that Sen. Chuck Hagel (R) of Nebraska has called it "Alice in Wonderland."
The Financial Times reports that Mr. Bush is expected to look for an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 troops "as a short-term boost to the existing 140,000 level, with the aim of stabilising the violence in Baghdad and surrounding provinces." But again, opposition within his own party could create a problem.
In the past two days, a number of prominent Republican senators, including Arlen Specter and Richard Lugar, the outgoing chairmen of the Senate judiciary and foreign relations committees, have voiced strong scepticism about an increase in troops.
Although Mr Bush could expect the support of John McCain, the 2008 presidential hopeful, and Lindsey Graham, another Republican senator, the Republican tide appears to be moving against boosting troop levels. A number of Republicans have pointed out that Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, is also opposed to a beefed-up US military presence.
The conservative commentary site, PipelineNews.org, however, appears to advocate a renewed focus on victory in Iraq, which is expected to be a key point of the president's new plan. The site reports that the new strategy looks to be very similar to an earlier one drawn up by retired General Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army for the current Bush administration, and military historian Frederick W. Kagan, a former West Point instructor and current fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Keane/Kagan plan is really quite simple.
The majority of sectarian and Al Qaeda spawned violence is located in Iraq's largest city, Baghdad. Securing it is therefore of primary importance and that can be done with an infusion of approximately 50,000 additional American troops who will then be deployed in clear-and-hold operations which will, as the plan's executive summary states, stabilize and normalize the city:
1. We must change our focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.
2. We must send more American combat forces into Iraq and especially into Baghdad to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations starting in the Spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient.
3. These forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shi'a neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.
4. After the neighborhoods have been cleared, U.S. soldiers and marines, again partnered with Iraqis, will remain behind to maintain security.
5. As security is established, reconstruction aid will help to reestablish normal life and, working through Iraqi officials, will strengthen Iraqi local government. This approach requires a national commitment to victory in Iraq."
The Associated Press reports that pundits and political experts say that the president has gone out of his way this time to seek outside opinions about the situation in Iraq and how it could be improved. The only downside, they say, are the high expectations he has created in the American public.
There might as well be a drum roll.
"He has built up expectations," said David Gergen, a former White House adviser in the administrations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. "People are saying, 'OK, if you've spent all this time and effort on it, you better have a pretty darn good plan.'"
AP reports that the danger with high expectations can be seen in the report of the Iraq Study Group, which "was so highly anticipated that when it was not embraced by the White House in toto, it seemed to fall flat and fade from view."
Before deciding on whether to increase or decrease troop levels, US officials debate how hard to push soldiers already in Iraq.
By Peter Grier Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – The US military may have reached a critical point in generating Army and Marine ground forces to fight its global war on terror.
When it comes to force levels, finding 15,000 to 30,000 additional troops for Iraq is not the real problem, say officers and experts outside the government. The White House is considering such a surge as a way to counter rising sectarian violence.
More difficult is deciding how long to keep those extra units there. After years of war, US active duty ground forces are stretched to the limit. Many National Guard and reserve personnel can't be deployed to Iraq. Recruiting more soldiers would be an expensive and time-consuming process.
"The other issue is equipment," says Kevin Ryan, a retired Army brigadier general and fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Even if you could magically have 30,000 more troops, you don't have the equipment to give them."
To the layperson Washington's current debate about troop levels in Iraq might seem somewhat confusing.
On the one hand, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, among others, keeps insisting that we need more units in Iraq for a full push to provide security. A recent American Enterprise Institute study by a cadre of retired military officers and AEI scholar Frederick Kagan called for seven more Army brigades and Marine regiments for Iraq - and said that such a surge "is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient."
On the other hand, many Democrats keep pushing for a US commitment to withdraw troops, not add them. And respected figures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have cast doubt on whether the US even has enough extra troops to send.
"The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they're being asked to perform," said Mr. Powell.
The gap here, in essence, may lie in differing views about how hard current units should be used.
"It is possible for both of [these points of view] to be correct," says General Ryan, who in his last active duty assignment was responsible for Army strategic war plans, policy, and international affairs.
The AEI study does not hinge on plucking seven rested units from US bases and sending them to Iraq. Instead, it would advance the planned deployments of four brigades of troops by a matter of some weeks, while extending the rotations of other units already in Iraq.
For the next several years, active duty ground forces must accept longer tours in Iraq - perhaps 15 months, instead of the current 12 - and National Guard units will have to accept increased deployments, according to the AEI study.
President Bush should request an increase in active duty ground forces of at least 30,000 per year for the next two years, according to the Kagan study. "The president must call for young Americans to volunteer to defend the nation in a time of crisis," notes an outline of the AEI report.
Given the unpopularity of the Iraq conflict with US voters it might be politically difficult for the White House to call for such a redoubled effort. If nothing else, the expense of increasing US forces by 60,000 over the next two years would be considerable, on top of the extra money already appropriated for the war.
A report in the Washington Post Tuesday said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff privately are opposed to increasing troop levels in Iraq. In public, their comments on the issue have been hedged.
Last week, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker at a Capitol Hill hearing noted that over the past five years, sustained strategic demand has placed a strain on the Army's all-volunteer force, testing it for the first time in an extended period of conflict.
Dwell time, or regrouping time at home, for active duty brigade combat teams is now less than one year, noted General Schoomaker. "At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components through remobilization, we will break the active component," he says.
Access to the National Guard and reserve components of the military has become a sensitive issue for the top military leadership. These citizen-soldiers have performed well in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, Department of Defense personnel policies make them more difficult to send abroad than active duty troops.
Of the current 520,000 guard and reserve personnel, only about 90,000 currently are available for deployment, according to figures presented Friday to a congressional commission.
OH BROTHER! AN ED. PM SPECIAL
Despite a cynical campaign by those who would establish a religious test for holding office in these United States, newly elected Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison will swear his oath of office tomorrow on the Koran.
The objections to allowing Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to Congress, to take the oath as he chooses are so absurd in character and contention that they could easily be dismissed as a sideshow. It would be dangerous to do so. The fact is there has, for a number of years, been a concerted effort by misguided religious zealots and conservative political strategists who have delighted in exploiting fears of diversity to redefine the American experiment as a proprietary Christian religious endeavor.
History does not provide even a soft grounding for this twisted fantasy. The Founders were men and women of the Enlightenment who, while surely imperfect in their thoughts and deeds, wisely sought to break the chains of what Thomas Jefferson referred to as "monkish ignorance and superstition." They revolted against the divine right of kings, rejected the construct of state-sponsored religion and wrote a Constitution that not only guaranteed freedom of religion but required that: "The Senators and Representatives...and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
The controversy over Ellison's desire to swear his oath on a Koran, which had been stoked by conservative commentators initially, reached something of a fever pitch when Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode, an otherwise obscure Republican, declared in a letter to a constituent that "When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Qur'an in any way.
The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Qur'an."
Goode made several television appearances during which he pushed this line, even after it was pointed out to him that Ellison was born in the United States and traced his family's roots in this country back at least to 1742.
Goode left no doubt about his disdain for Islam and for its practioners, declaring that "I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.
The Ten Commandments and 'In God We Trust' are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Qur'an. My response was clear, 'As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Qur'an is not going to be on the wall of my office.'"
Predictably, Goode found a forum on Fox News, where he stood by his statements and said, without a hint of irony, that "I wish more people would take a stand and stand up for the principles on which this country was founded."
What made Goode's ignorance of those founding principles remarkable was the fact that he represents Virginia's Albemarle County, where Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743.
On Thursday, it will not be Virgil Goode who pays tribute to Jefferson.
It will be Keith Ellison.
The new Congressman from Minnesota will declare his loyalty to the Constitution while clutching a copy of the Koran that was once owned by Jefferson.
One of many Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist texts that the author of the Declaration of Independence donated to the Library of Congress at its founding, the Jefferson Koran has been loaned to Ellison by the rare book and special collections division of the library.
This is not mere symbolism.
Ellison understands the Jeffersonian impulse that underpins the American experiment.
"When I'm officially sworn in, I will do it the same exact way as every other Congressperson-elect who was sworn in," explains the Representative from Minneapolis.
"We will all stand up and in unison lift our hand and swear to uphold that Constitution, and then later, in a private ceremony, of course I'll put my hand on a book that is the basis of my faith, which is Islam, and I think that this is a beauty--this is a wonderful thing for our country because Jewish members will put their hands on the Torah.
Mormon members will put their hand on the Book of Mormon.
Catholic members will put their hand on the book of their choice--and members that don't want to put their hand on any book are also fully free to do that.
That's the American way.... I think the diversity of our country is a great strength. It's a good thing that we have people from all faiths and all cultures to come here."
Make no mistake, were Jefferson, Madison, George Mason or any of the other Virginians who put their hands to the task of forging an experiment in religious tolerance and liberty asked to choose between Virgil Goode and Keith Ellison, those advocates for a "wall of separation" between church and state would not hesitate to say that it is Ellison who should be sworn in.
And Jefferson, who spoke and wrote so extensively about his interest in and respect for Islam, would surely be honored to know that Ellison's hand will rest on the Koran that an enlightened Founder bequeathed not just to the Library of Congress but to America.
As a citizen of Virginia Virgil Goode will rank high on my political to do list!
A Reading Recommendation:
John Nichols' new book,
THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism has been hailed by authors and historians Gore Vidal, Studs Terkel and Howard Zinn for its meticulous research into the intentions of the founders and embraced by activists for its groundbreaking arguments on behalf of presidential accountability. "When I'm officially sworn in, I will do it the same exact way as every other Congressperson-elect who was sworn in," explains the Representative from Minneapolis.
"We will all stand up and in unison lift our hand and swear to uphold that Constitution, and then later, in a private ceremony, of course I'll put my hand on a book that is the basis of my faith, which is Islam, and I think that this is a beauty--this is a wonderful thing for our country because Jewish members will put their hands on the Torah.
Mormon members will put their hand on the Book of Mormon.
Catholic members will put their hand on the book of their choice--and members that don't want to put their hand on any book are also fully free to do that.
That's the American way.... I think the diversity of our country is a great strength. It's a good thing that we have people from all faiths and all cultures to come here."
Make no mistake, were Jefferson, Madison, George Mason or any of the other Virginians who put their hands to the task of forging an experiment in religious tolerance and liberty asked to choose between Virgil Goode and Keith Ellison, those advocates for a "wall of separation" between church and state would not hesitate to say that it is Ellison who should be sworn in.
And Jefferson, who spoke and wrote so extensively about his interest in and respect for Islam, would surely be honored to know that Ellison's hand will rest on the Koran that an enlightened Founder bequeathed not just to the Library of Congress but to America.
As a citizen of Virginia Virgil Goode will rank high on my political to do list!
A Reading Recommendation:
John Nichols' new book,
After reviewing recent books on impeachment, Rolling Stone political writer Tim Dickinson, writes in the latest issue of Mother Jones, "John Nichols' nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic, The Genius of Impeachment, stands apart. It concerns itself far less with the particulars of the legal case against Bush and Cheney, and instead combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the "heroic medicine" that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"
The Genius of Impeachment can be found at independent bookstores and at www.amazon.com
A BIT MORE OVER COFFEE READING MATERIAL:
Welcome again to 2007. Though the US death toll in Iraq just hit 3,000, President Bush remains adamant about sending a "surge" of up to 40,000 new troops to the region. But where will these soldiers come from? An overextended military has already increased signing bonuses, raised the age-limit, lowered education requirements and waived restrictions on criminal records, drug and alcohol abuse and obesity. Alas for the Pentagon, it seems that the pool of fat, drug-addled, middle-aged felons wasn't quite deep enough. So who's next? Homosexuals!
In today's NYT former Joint Chief of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili -- once a supporter of Don't Ask, Don't Tell -- proposed allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. "Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East," he wrote, "and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."
War makes for strange bedfellows indeed. Though truth be told, Gen. Shalikashvili isn't the first to link the case for military escalation with the advancement of gay rights. C. Dixon Osburn, the executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said last year, "The law deprives our nation of thousands of skilled men and women who could be instrumental in fighting the war on terror. Our national security suffers because of ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'"
And back when he was cheerleader-in-chief of the war on terror, Andrew Sullivan waxed on and on about the need for "gay heroes" in the fight against "Islamo-fascism." "For of all wars, this is surely one in which gay America can take a proud and central part. The men who have launched a war on this country see the freedom that gay people have here as one of the central reasons for their hatred," he once wrote.
The new Congress has been cool to Bush's call for more troops. The old Congress was positively frosty to the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2005, which would have struck down Don't Ask, Don't Tell. So it's difficult to see how either initiative gets much traction this time around.
That said, in his last term, Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) supported both the Military Readiness Enhancement Act and the Defense of Marriage Amendment. In his view, I suppose, gays aren't fit for marriage, but are fit to die for their country. President Bush once called gay marriage a threat to "the most fundamental institution of civilization." Perhaps in 2007, Bush will come around to Boehlert's position: those who most threaten civilization from within (gays) will be called upon to fight those who most threaten civilization from without (Islamo-fascists). Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Don’t you just love this kind of early morning reading?
The other day, the college-age daughter of a friend received an e-letter from a Marine Corps Officer Selection Officer, inviting her to "an awesome summer training program called the Platoon Leader's Course." Think of it as Marine Corps summer camp. No uniforms ("This is not ROTC!"), but reasonable amounts of moolah. Here's some of what was on offer to her, part of a desperate military's Iraq-era appeal to citizenly duty:
"You will earn approximately $2,400 (six weeks) or $4,000 (ten weeks) plus room and board during the training. How's that for a summer job?.... You will not incur any obligation to the Marine Corps even after completing the training. (You can choose whether or not to continue with the program).... Tuition assistance will be available to you after you complete training this summer. You could potentially earn $8,000 to $25,000 for school, depending on graduation date."
Imagine! The Marine Corps is willing to pay young people to go to a uniform-less summer camp to test their "leadership potential," with no commitment to the Corps necessary. Consider that; then consider what was certainly the President's only significant decision of the holiday season past--to permanently expand the US military by as many as 70,000 troops.
Now, as in some old math problem, the question is: How do you connect these two points. (Hint: Not with a straight line.)
Faced with a December shot across the bow in testimony before Congress by Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker, who warned that the Army "will break" under present war-zone rotation needs, President Bush responded by addressing the "stressed" nature of the US Armed Forces. He said, "I'm inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops--the Army, the Marines. And I talked about this to Secretary [Robert A.] Gates, and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building [the Pentagon], come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea." All this was, he added, "to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists."
Ah... that makes things clearer.
Of course, to get those new "volunteer" officers and men, who have generally been none too eager to volunteer for the Army and the Marines in the midst of a disastrous, far-away, increasingly incomprehensible set of double wars, you'll have to pay even more kids more money to go to no-commitment summer camp; and, while you're at it, you'll have to lower standards for the military radically. You'll have to let in even more volunteers without high school diplomas but with "moral" and medical "waivers" for criminal records and mental problems.
You'll have to fast-track even more new immigrants willing to join for the benefits of quick citizenship; you'll have to ramp up already high cash bonuses of all sorts; you'll have to push the top-notch ad agency recently hired on a five-year contract for a cool billion dollars to rev up its new "Army Strong" recruitment drive even higher; you'll certainly have to jack up the numbers of military recruiters radically, to the tune of perhaps a couple of hundred million more dollars; and maybe just for the heck of it, you better start planning for the possibility of recruiting significant numbers of potential immigrants before they even think to leave their own countries.
After all, it's darn romantic to imagine a future American all-volunteer force that will look more like the old French Foreign Legion--or an army of mercenaries anyway. All in all, you'll have to commit to the fact that your future soldier in your basic future war will cost staggering sums of money to hire and even more staggering sums to retain after he or she has had a taste of what "leadership potential" really entails.
Put another way, as long as Iraq remains a classic quagmire for the Army and Marines, any plan to expand the U.S. military in order to make it easier to fight such wars in the future, threatens to become a classic financial quagmire as well. In other words, Iraq and military expansion don't fit together well at all. And yet, looking at the state of our military in Iraq in a certain light, expansion seems so… well, logical.
After all, the American military, now at just over 500,000 troops, stood, at the time of the First Gulf War, at 703,000. (Of course, no one now counts the quite expensive hired mercenaries who envelop our military -- the privatized, Halliburton-style adjuncts, who cook the food, build the bases, do the cleaning, deliver the mail and supplies, perform interrogation duties, and so on, and whose increase has been striking as has the growth of rent-a-mercenary corporations whose armed employees are, for instance, all over Iraq.)
In addition, it has long been clear that the Armed Forces could not take the strain of failing wars in Central Asia and the Middle East forever, not to speak of increased "commitments" in the Persian Gulf and the normal massive global basing and policing that the Pentagon regularly refers to as our "footprint" on the planet. Added to this, the President seems to be leaning towards increasingly the pressure on military manpower needs by "surging"--the Vietnam era word would, of course, have been "escalating"--up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad and al-Anbar province, while naval and air forces (with an obvious eye to Iran) are simultaneously ramped up in the Persian Gulf.
In light of Iraq, military manpower needs cry out to be dealt with. In light of Iraq, dealing with them any time soon will be prohibitively expensive.
In Washington, this conundrum leads nowhere in particular. Instead, in the spirit of imperial-mission logic (and with the urge to bash the Bush administration for being late to such an obvious support-our-troops position), Democrats simply leaped onto the expand-the-military bandwagon even faster than Republicans. In fact, leading Democrats had long been calling for just this sort of expansion. ("I am glad [the President] has realized the need for increasing the size of the armed forces... but this is where the Democrats have been for two years," commented Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the new House Democratic Caucus chairman.) The Democratic leadership promptly pledged to make such an expansion one of its top reform priorities in the New Year.
To get those numbers significantly higher will, it's estimated, take a decade and unimaginable sums of money (as well as those lowered standards). And, if the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan worsen, as they almost certainly will, and American casualties rise with no end in sight, you can start going through your multiplication tables. This could be considered but a form of ongoing blowback from American imperial shock-and-awe tactics in Iraq and presents some curious choices to our leaders.
After all, to take but one example, those most eager to expand the military, with their eyes on the imperial future, should be eager to liquidate the Iraqi mission as soon as possible.
But a far more basic choice lurks--one rarely alluded to in the mainstream. If we voted on such things–-and, in truth, we vote on less and less that matters--the choice that actually lies behind the Marine e-letter to my friend's daughter might be put this way: Expand the military or shrink the mission?
This is the essential question that goes largely unmentioned--and largely unthought as well. In the meantime, money will continue to pour into military recruitment ad campaigns, bonuses, and summer camps. In the meantime, those Marine e-letters will continue to go out. In the meantime, money will continue to pour into the Pentagon and the national security world generally. In the meantime, we will continue to build our near billion-dollar embassy, the largest on the planet, in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone. In the meantime, the imperial and military paths will continue to fuse, and the Pentagon will continue to take on new roles, even outside "declared war zones," in intelligence, diplomacy, "information operations," and other "self-assigned missions"; so that, as Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times recently described it, even our embassies will increasingly be militarized outposts in the global war on terror.
Shrinking the mission--choosing some path other than the imperial one (in part by redefining what exactly our national interests are)--would, of course, address many problems. It would make paying young people thousands of dollars to test their leadership potential or thinking about scouring Central America for a future Foreign Legion far less necessary. But no one in Washington--not in the Bush administration, not in James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group, which recently captured the Inside-the-Beltway "middle ground" on Iraq policy, not in the Democratic leadership--is faintly interested in shrinking the American global mission. No one in Washington, where a kind of communal voting does go on, is about to vote "no" to that mission, or cast a ballot for democracy rather than empire.
Expanding the military may seem like a no-brainer in response to the Iraq crisis. As it happens, it's anything but. Unfortunately, few ever discuss (as, for instance, Chalmers Johnson did in his book, The Sorrows of Empire) the 700-plus military and intelligence bases we retain around the world or ask why exactly we're garrisoning the planet. No one, in these last years, has seriously challenged the ever expanding Pentagon budget; nor the mushrooming supplemental requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, including the record-setting latest for almost $100 billion; nor, generally, the fact that paying for actual war-fighting is no longer considered an appropriate part of the Pentagon's normal budget process.
No one challenged it when, in 2002, the United States gained a new North American Command (Northcom), making U.S. citizens but another coequal part of the Pentagon's division of its imperial world, along with those who live in regions covered by Centcom, Paccom, and the just authorized Africa Command (Africom). No one challenged the vast expansion of Pentagon intelligence activities. No one offered a challenge as the military took on ever more civilian domestic duties, including planning for the potential arrival of a pandemic disease on our shores or for future Katrinas. No one seriously challenges the plans the Pentagon has on the drawing boards for exotic, futuristic hardware meant to come on line decades from now that, along with futuristic military tactics already being worked out, will help predetermine the wars most Americans don't even know we are going to fight--from the vast mega-slum-cities of the Third World to the borderlands of space.
No one considers what the Pentagonization of our world and the Homeland Securitization of our country is doing to us, because militarism here has never taken on the expectable forms--few vast military parades or displays (despite the almost full-scale militarization of Presidential funerals); few troops in the streets; no uniforms in the high councils of government. In fact, it's one of the ironies of our particular form of militarization that when our military--no longer really a citizen army--goes to war and troops begin to die, less Americans are touched by this than perhaps at any time in our recent history.
Shrink the mission or expand the military? Your choice?
Fat chance.
HE’S BACK!!!
Pat Robertson, that wise prognosticator you all know and love has a brand new prediction for his flock: millions of them will most likely die at the end of this new year. On his incredibly classless program The 700 Club, where last year Robertson proved what a good Christian he was by calling for Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to be killed, he announced that God has told him of a "mass killing" coming at the end of '07.
"The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that," Robertson stated matter-of-factly. God apparently delivers these cataclysmic predictions on a regular basis to Robertson's doorstep. Last year God told Robertson that a tsunami would probably slam against our country. ( I guess God was just playing a practical joke.)
Who knows why this terrible "mass killing" is bound to occur? Something tells me Robertson will link it to the incoming Democratic Congress or perhaps the existence of abortion rights and homosexuals. Whatever reason he cites you can be sure it is meant to manipulate and malign, because that's what Robertson does best.
SOME DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE EXECUTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN
The Bush Administration hoped that a guilty verdict for Saddam Hussein two days before the midterm elections would boost the electoral fortunes of sagging Republicans. It didn't. Once sentenced, they hoped that his execution would bring some much-needed good news to an Iraq policy in shambles and a country torn apart by an escalating civil war. It hasn't.
It's amazing that the death of Saddam, a man considered by pretty much everyone to have been a horrible dictator, could backfire on the Bush Administration and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq. But the grizzly hanging--and the nasty cellphone recorded taunts that followed--can now be viewed as yet another chapter in the evolving story of "What Went Wrong."
Saddam's execution, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman noted today, "resembled a tribal revenge ritual rather than the culmination of a constitutional process in which America should be proud to have participated."
The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a man increasingly under fire, today detained one of Saddam's guards for possibly leaking the cellphone video. But the Times reported that another man present with a cellphone was Maliki's national security advisor, Mowaffak al-Rubaie. The plot thickens.
The Bush Administration is presently--and rather unconvincingly--trying to blame Maliki for rushing Saddam's execution. "American officials said that they had worked until the last hours of Mr. Hussein's life to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to delay the execution," the Times reported.
Maybe so. But the Bush Administration is to blame for botching Saddam's trial, by holding it inside Iraq and outside the jurisdiction of international law. If Saddam was given over to the International Criminal Court, there would have been no cellphone pictures, no taunting, no scandal and no execution.
While much of U.S. media coverage of Saddam Hussein's execution has strained to echo the Bush administration's suggestion that "justice" was done, the international reaction to the hurried hanging of the former dictator has recognized what one of the world's top experts on the Middle East refers to as the "gruesome, occasionally farcical" nature of the process that led to the execution.
"It's tawdry," Rosemary Hollis, the director of research at Chatham House, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London, said of the execution. "It's not going to achieve anything because of the way the trial was conducted and the way the occupation was conducted. Life in Iraq has become so precarious that many people are saying it was safer under Saddam Hussein - it makes the whole thing look like a poke in the eye as opposed to closure or some kind of contribution to the future of Iraq. The purpose should have been to see justice done in a transparent manner... the trial was gruesome, occasionally farcical, and failed to fulfill its promise of giving satisfaction."
Chris Doyle, the London-based director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, was equally dismissive, telling the Guardian newspaper that, "For Bush, Blair and their diminishing brotherhood of diehard supporters, Saddam's demise is their sole concrete victory in Iraq in almost four years. This should have been the crowning glory of their efforts, but instead it may pose yet another risk to their demoralised troops. For Iraqis, some will see it as a symbol of the death of the ancien regime. For some Sunnis, Saddam's death represents the final nail in the coffin of their fall from power. But Iraqis may also see this as the humiliation of Iraq as a whole, that their president, however odious, was toppled by outside powers, and is executed effectively at others' instigation."
Doyle's assessment was shared by Iraqi expatriate Kamil Mahdi, an academic who is now associated with the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at Britain's Exeter University. "It will be taken as an American decision," Mahdi said of the decision to execute Hussein and the way in which deposed leader was killed. "The worst thing is that it's an issue which, in an ideal situation, should have unified Iraq but the Americans have succeeded in dividing the Iraqis."
Critics of the trial and execution of the former dictator did not defend his actions. Rather, they recognized the fundamental flaws in his trial by an inexperienced and clearly biased Iraqi judiciary. And they condemned the rush to hang Hussein by a country employing the widely-rejected sanction of capital punishment.
"A capital punishment is always tragic news, a reason for sadness, even if it deals with a person who was guilty of grave crimes," explained Father Federico Lombardi, spokesman for the Vatican, who added that, "The killing of the guilty party is not the way to reconstruct justice and reconcile society. On the contrary, there is a risk that it will feed a spirit of vendetta and sow new violence."
British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, while officially welcoming moves to hold Hussein to account for killings and other crimes that tool place during his tenure as president of Iraq, issued a statement that said, "The British government does not support the use of the death penalty, in Iraq or anywhere else. We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime."
Another longtime U.S. ally, Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who in 2003 dispatched his country's troops to support the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, condemned the hanging of Hussein as "a step backward in Iraq's difficult road toward full democracy. Describing the killing as a "political and historical" mistake, Berlusconi said, "The civilization in the name of which my country decided to send Italian soldiers into Iraq envisioned overcoming the death penalty, even for a bloody dictator like Saddam."
Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Gerrit Zalm criticized the hanging as "barbaric," and similar criticism came from officials of Chile, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland and the Ukraine.
Speaking for Amnesty International, Malcolm Smart, director of the organization's Middle East and North Africa Programme, echoed concerns expressed by Human Rights Watch and other watchdog groups.
"We oppose the death penalty in all cases as a violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, but it is especially abhorrent when this most extreme penalty is imposed after an unfair trial," said Smart. "It is even more worrying that in this case, the execution appeared a foregone conclusion, once the original verdict was pronounced, with the Appeals Court providing little more than a veneer of legitimacy for what was, in fact, a fundamentally flawed process."
While Iran, which fought a long war with Iraq in the 1980s, found itself in ironic agreement with the Bush administration's enthusiasm for the execution, most Muslim countries were critical of the timing of the hanging.
The killing of Hussein during the Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, an annual period of religious reflection seem by Muslims globally as a time for showing forgiveness, drew rebukes even from U.S. allies. During Eid, Muslim countries rarely execute prisoners and frequently pardon them.
"There is a feeling of surprise and disapproval that the verdict has been applied during the holy months and the first days of Eid al-Adha," Saudia Arabia's official news agency declared after the execution. "Leaders of Islamic countries should show respect for this blessed occasion... not demean it."
"It had been expected that the trial of a former president, who ruled for a considerable length of time, would last longer... demonstrate more precision, and not be politicized," continued the blunt statement from the Saudis.
Libya cancelled Eid al Adha celebrations and ordered that flags on government buildings be flown at half-mast.
A statement from the Egyptian foreign ministry announced that, "Egypt regrets the fact that the Iraqi authorities carried out the execution of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and that it took place on the first day of Eid Al Adha."
From Cairo, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alaa Al Hadidi complained that the execution's timing "did not take into consideration the feelings of Muslims and the sanctity of this day which represents amnesty and forgiveness."
Saddam Hussein's execution on Dec. 30 prevents him from being put on trial for his most serious crimes – genocide against the Kurds and the use of poison gas in the Iran-Iraq war. As many as 100,000 Kurds were killed in 1988. Why then was Saddam executed for killing 148 men and boys in the Shiite town of Dujail in 1982?
Human rights activists say the answer is clear: the Bush White House wanted to prevent Saddam from offering evidence of US complicity in his crimes as a defense. It's the same reason the Saddam trial was held under Iraqi auspices rather than in the International Criminal Court: ''It's to protect their own dirty laundry,'' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times in 2004. ''The U.S. wants to keep the trial focused on Saddam's crimes and not their acquiescence.''
Human Rights Watch has done more to document Saddam's genocide of the Kurds than any other organization. Their 1993 report remains the most detailed and meticulous account, based on extensive interviews with eyewitnesses and analysis of Iraqi government internal communications. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam had lost control of Kurdish regions because all his troops had been sent to the battlefields. But as that war came to an end in 1988, he launched his "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds, leveling thousands of their villages and killing 50,000-100,000, mostly by bombing and mass executions.
Saddam's most notorious atrocity was his use of poison gas against Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988, killing at least 5,000. George Bush cited that attack – "gassing his own people" -- as part of his argument for a US war against Iraq. However back in 1988 the US worked to prevent the international community from condemning Iraq's chemical attack against Halabja, instead attempting to place part of the blame on Iran. [See Dilip Hiro, "Iraq and Poison Gas," TheNation.com, Aug. 28, 2002.]
The US had supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, on the grounds that Iran was a greater threat to the US after the rise to power of the Ayatolla Khomeini.
When the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, Saddam's genocide against the Kurds was no secret. The US Senate passed a bill to penalize Baghdad for violating the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons – they did it virtually without opposition, in a single day.
But the Reagan Administration killed the bill. Political scientist Bruce Jentleson of Duke University told the BBC that they did it "for two reasons. One, economic interests. In addition to oil, Iraq at that point had become the second-largest recipient of government agricultural credits to buy American agriculture . . . . And secondly was this continual blinders of the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam used chemical weapons, most obviously in his 1988 campaign to retake the Fao Peninsula. The had been banned since the 1925 Geneva Convention. His trial for that crime has also been prevented by the execution.
Again his defense was likely to have been that the US did not object at the time. Walter Lang, senior defense intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, told the New York Times in 2002 that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides, because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose."
Trials in Baghdad for other Iraqi leaders accused of genocide against the Kurds and violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons may be held. But as Antoine Garapon, director of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies in Paris, told the New York Times, even if others stand trial, "the person deemed most responsible would never face judgment."
Thus Saturday's execution of Saddam Hussein seems less an act of justice for his victims and more an effort to cover up US complicity in his regime.
Convicted in a show trial that certainly appeared to have been timed to finish on the eve of last month's US elections, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hanged in a show execution that just as certainly seems to have been timed to be carried out before the end of the worst year of the Iraq War.
Hussein was a bad player -- a totalitarian dictator who, with tacit approval from the U.S. and other western nation during the 1980s, killed his own people and waged a mad war with Iran. He needed to be held to account. But even bad players deserve fair trials, honest judgments and justly-applied punishments. The former dictator got none of these.
According to Human Rights Watch, which has a long and honorable history of documenting and challenging the abuses of Hussein's former government, the execution early Saturday morning followed "a deeply flawed trial" and "marks a significant step away from respect for human rights and the rule of law in Iraq."
"The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders," says Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program. "History will judge these actions harshly."
For fifteen years, Human Rights Watch had demanded that Hussein be brought to justice for what the group has rightly described as "massive human rights violations." But the group argues that Hussein was not brought to justice.
In addition to objecting at the most fundamental level to the use of the barbaric practice of state-sponsored execution--which is outlawed by the vast majority of the world's nations--Human Rights Watch notes that Hussein was killed before being tried for some of his most well-documented acts of brutality.
The group notes the trial that did take place was fundamentally flawed.
A niney-seven-page report by Human Rights Watch, issued late last month, details the severe problems with the trial. The report, based on close monitoring of the prosecution of the former president, found that:
•"(The) Iraqi High Tribunal was undermined from the outset by Iraqi government actions that threatened the independence and perceived impartiality of the court."
• The Iraqi administrators, judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers lacked sufficient training and expertise "to fairly and effectively try crimes of this magnitude."
• The government did not protect defense lawyers--three of whom were killed during the trial--or key witnesses.
• "(There were) serious flaws in the trial, including failures to disclose key evidence to the defense, violations of the defendants' right to question prosecution witnesses, and the presiding judge's demonstrations of bias."
• "Hussein's defense lawyers had 30 days to file an appeal from the November 5 verdict. However, the trial judgment was only made available to them on November 22, leaving just two weeks to respond."
The report did not study the appeals process, But the speed with which the tribunal's verdict and sentence were confirmed suggests that the Iraqi Appeals Chamber failed to seriously consider the legal arguments advanced by Hussein's able--if violently harassed--legal team.
"It defies imagination that the Appeals Chamber could have thoroughly reviewed the 300-page judgment and the defense's written arguments in less than three weeks' time," said Dicker. "The appeals process appears even more flawed than the trial."
There will, of course, be those who counter criticism of the process by pointing out that Saddam Hussein did not give the victims of his cruel dictates fair trials or just sentences. That is certainly true.
But such statements represent a stinging indictment of the new Iraqi government and its judiciary. With all the support of the United States government, with massive resources and access to the best legal advice in the world, with all the lessons of the past, Iraq has a legal system that delivers no better justice than that of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.
This is the ugly legacy of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq: An awful mess of a country that cannot even get the trial and punishment of deposed dictator right, a justice system that schedules the taking of life for political and propaganda purposes, a thuggishly brutal state that executes according to whim rather than legal standard.
According to Britain's Telegraph newspaper, "There was no comment from the White House, which was determined that the execution should appear to be an Iraqi event." The central role played by the US government in the process was not lost on the Telegraph, however, as the newspaper noted that: "the transfer of Saddam from American to Iraqi custody meant his death was imminent."
The term "transfer" is of course being used in a loose sense, as Hussein was hung not in an Iraqi prison but within the American-controlled Green Zone in central Baghdad.
Now that the killing is done, the governments of Iraq and the United States have confirmed what may have been the worst fear of those who condemned both Saddam Hussein and the US invasion and occupation that removed him from power. The crude lawlessness of Hussein has been replaced by the calculated lawlessness of a new regime.
By Peter Grier Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – The US military may have reached a critical point in generating Army and Marine ground forces to fight its global war on terror.
When it comes to force levels, finding 15,000 to 30,000 additional troops for Iraq is not the real problem, say officers and experts outside the government. The White House is considering such a surge as a way to counter rising sectarian violence.
More difficult is deciding how long to keep those extra units there. After years of war, US active duty ground forces are stretched to the limit. Many National Guard and reserve personnel can't be deployed to Iraq. Recruiting more soldiers would be an expensive and time-consuming process.
"The other issue is equipment," says Kevin Ryan, a retired Army brigadier general and fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Even if you could magically have 30,000 more troops, you don't have the equipment to give them."
To the layperson Washington's current debate about troop levels in Iraq might seem somewhat confusing.
On the one hand, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, among others, keeps insisting that we need more units in Iraq for a full push to provide security. A recent American Enterprise Institute study by a cadre of retired military officers and AEI scholar Frederick Kagan called for seven more Army brigades and Marine regiments for Iraq - and said that such a surge "is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient."
On the other hand, many Democrats keep pushing for a US commitment to withdraw troops, not add them. And respected figures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have cast doubt on whether the US even has enough extra troops to send.
"The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they're being asked to perform," said Mr. Powell.
The gap here, in essence, may lie in differing views about how hard current units should be used.
"It is possible for both of [these points of view] to be correct," says General Ryan, who in his last active duty assignment was responsible for Army strategic war plans, policy, and international affairs.
The AEI study does not hinge on plucking seven rested units from US bases and sending them to Iraq. Instead, it would advance the planned deployments of four brigades of troops by a matter of some weeks, while extending the rotations of other units already in Iraq.
For the next several years, active duty ground forces must accept longer tours in Iraq - perhaps 15 months, instead of the current 12 - and National Guard units will have to accept increased deployments, according to the AEI study.
President Bush should request an increase in active duty ground forces of at least 30,000 per year for the next two years, according to the Kagan study. "The president must call for young Americans to volunteer to defend the nation in a time of crisis," notes an outline of the AEI report.
Given the unpopularity of the Iraq conflict with US voters it might be politically difficult for the White House to call for such a redoubled effort. If nothing else, the expense of increasing US forces by 60,000 over the next two years would be considerable, on top of the extra money already appropriated for the war.
A report in the Washington Post Tuesday said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff privately are opposed to increasing troop levels in Iraq. In public, their comments on the issue have been hedged.
Last week, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker at a Capitol Hill hearing noted that over the past five years, sustained strategic demand has placed a strain on the Army's all-volunteer force, testing it for the first time in an extended period of conflict.
Dwell time, or regrouping time at home, for active duty brigade combat teams is now less than one year, noted General Schoomaker. "At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components through remobilization, we will break the active component," he says.
Access to the National Guard and reserve components of the military has become a sensitive issue for the top military leadership. These citizen-soldiers have performed well in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, Department of Defense personnel policies make them more difficult to send abroad than active duty troops.
Of the current 520,000 guard and reserve personnel, only about 90,000 currently are available for deployment, according to figures presented Friday to a congressional commission.
BEIRUT, LEBANON – The execution of Saddam Hussein was a subdued finale for a man whose merciless rule shaped the course of Middle East history for a quarter century.
Mr. Hussein may be gone, but his legacy lives on in the ethnic and religious conflict undermining a nation that he held together through fear. His attacks on nearby countries - Iran, Kuwait, and Israel - won widespread condemnation and, ultimately, little reward.
While the architects of the Iraq war hoped his ouster would help spread Western-style democracy in the region, violence in Iraq has grown so bad that recent polls say most Iraqis believe life was better under Hussein.
It remains to be seen whether the lesson of his life will be the end of brutal dictatorships in the region or whether current unrest in Iraq will bolster Middle Eastern autocrats and increase resistance to democratic reforms.
"The downfall of Saddam and its aftershocks only empowered the regimes of the Middle East," says Sami Moubayed, a Syrian political analyst. "Leaders can now say 'Look to Iraq. This is what the Americans will bring.' By failing in Iraq, the Americans actually did democracy a great disservice."
While democracy may have yet to flower in the Arab world, the seeds have been sown, other analysts say, with the Hussein experience in Iraq serving as a stark warning of the consequences should the long-term reform effort falter or fail.
"I do believe that the Middle East is coming to a conclusion and learning from the Saddam lesson," says Shafeeq Ghabra, a Kuwaiti professor of politics and president of Jusoor Arabiya Leadership and Consultancy Company.
"Yet the learning is not as quick and fast as one would like. It will take time for the region to understand that era and go beyond it to an era of pluralism and development where people can express themselves without fear," he says.
Hussein's ambition and sense of self-destiny combined with impulsive and vengeful acts propelled Iraq into a series of disasters that has left an indelible mark on the region.
"He was a catalyst, he made things happen and usually they were not positive and constructive, but he constantly kept the Middle East in a state of turmoil," says Gary Sick, executive director of the GULF 2000 project and professor of international affairs at Columbia University in New York.
Hussein's rise to absolute power began in 1968 when he participated in a bloodless coup that saw his cousin Ahmad al-Hassan al-Bakr become president. In the 1970s, Hussein, who gradually came to overshadow the president, led an economic modernization program, funded by the proceeds of the 1973 oil boom.
He also helped forge a sense of national unity rooted in Baath Party ideology, overcoming Iraq's diverse ethnic and sectarian composition. "He was able to bring to Iraq a sense of development for a period.... Then it was all destroyed year after year with adventurous decisions," says Professor Ghabra.
Hussein pushed aside the ailing Bakr and became president in 1979, the same year that Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was toppled in neighboring Iran by the Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.
The rise of a militant Shiite theocracy in Iran alarmed the Sunni Arab states. Hussein, fearing Khomeini's influence over Iraq's restless Shiites and tacitly backed by his Sunni Gulf neighbors, invaded Iran in 1980, setting in motion a devastating eight-year war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Hussein intended to smash the disorganized fledgling Islamic regime in Iran, an act that would confirm his leadership of the Arab world and earn the gratitude of his neighbors. But the war was to have the unintended consequence of strengthening Mr. Khomeini's rule.
"It forced the Islamic revolution to get out of its zealous craziness and begin to organize itself and pull itself together," says Professor Sick, an Iran specialist. "In a way, Saddam stabilized the Iranian revolution and kept the mullahs in power."
The conflict also triggered an alliance between Iran and Iraq's archenemy, Syria, which was ruled by a rival branch of the Baath Party. The Iranian-Syrian relationship has proved enduring, and in the past year has further strengthened to become one of the region's most significant geo-strategic alignments.
When the Gulf War ended in 1988, the Iraqi economy was in ruins with some $75 billion owed to Iraq's Arab nation backers. Relations between Iraq and Kuwait steadily deteriorated over the next two years with the latter's refusal to forgive the war debt and cut oil production to raise revenues for Iraq.
A bitter Hussein sent his war-weary army into Kuwait in 1990, triggering a fresh convulsion in the Middle East. The US assembled a coalition of Arab and European allies to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. This Gulf war also marked the beginning of a prolonged US military deployment in Saudi Arabia, which would later be used by Osama bin Laden to partly justify his anti-American actions, culminating in 9/11.
The UN sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s, the most severe ever against any country, devastated an already weakened economy, but failed to bring down Hussein's regime.
Although the 2003 invasion of Iraq finally ended Hussein's tyrannical rule, its aftermath has turned Iraq into a byword of sectarian violence.
Although Hussein is dismissed by most Arabs as a tyrant who ran a regime of unmitigated brutality and greed, some regard him as a champion of Arab steadfastness against American "imperialism" and Israeli aggression.
The mock funerals in the West Bank Sunday testified to Hussein's lingering support among Palestinians. Hussein adopted the Palestinian cause as a cornerstone of his foreign policy, dispensing millions of dollars to armed Palestinian groups. Analysts say Hussein manipulated the plight of the Palestinians to curry popularity and burnish his Arabist credentials. "You can't judge the Palestinians by their reaction [to Hussein's death]," says Sateh Noureddine, columnist with Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper. "They are a desperate people looking for any sign of support from anyone. Saddam was a tyrant, and there was nothing positive from his era."
The Genius of Impeachment can be found at independent bookstores and at www.amazon.com
A BIT MORE OVER COFFEE READING MATERIAL:
Welcome again to 2007. Though the US death toll in Iraq just hit 3,000, President Bush remains adamant about sending a "surge" of up to 40,000 new troops to the region. But where will these soldiers come from? An overextended military has already increased signing bonuses, raised the age-limit, lowered education requirements and waived restrictions on criminal records, drug and alcohol abuse and obesity. Alas for the Pentagon, it seems that the pool of fat, drug-addled, middle-aged felons wasn't quite deep enough. So who's next? Homosexuals!
In today's NYT former Joint Chief of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili -- once a supporter of Don't Ask, Don't Tell -- proposed allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. "Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East," he wrote, "and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job."
War makes for strange bedfellows indeed. Though truth be told, Gen. Shalikashvili isn't the first to link the case for military escalation with the advancement of gay rights. C. Dixon Osburn, the executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said last year, "The law deprives our nation of thousands of skilled men and women who could be instrumental in fighting the war on terror. Our national security suffers because of ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell.'"
And back when he was cheerleader-in-chief of the war on terror, Andrew Sullivan waxed on and on about the need for "gay heroes" in the fight against "Islamo-fascism." "For of all wars, this is surely one in which gay America can take a proud and central part. The men who have launched a war on this country see the freedom that gay people have here as one of the central reasons for their hatred," he once wrote.
The new Congress has been cool to Bush's call for more troops. The old Congress was positively frosty to the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2005, which would have struck down Don't Ask, Don't Tell. So it's difficult to see how either initiative gets much traction this time around.
That said, in his last term, Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) supported both the Military Readiness Enhancement Act and the Defense of Marriage Amendment. In his view, I suppose, gays aren't fit for marriage, but are fit to die for their country. President Bush once called gay marriage a threat to "the most fundamental institution of civilization." Perhaps in 2007, Bush will come around to Boehlert's position: those who most threaten civilization from within (gays) will be called upon to fight those who most threaten civilization from without (Islamo-fascists). Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Don’t you just love this kind of early morning reading?
The other day, the college-age daughter of a friend received an e-letter from a Marine Corps Officer Selection Officer, inviting her to "an awesome summer training program called the Platoon Leader's Course." Think of it as Marine Corps summer camp. No uniforms ("This is not ROTC!"), but reasonable amounts of moolah. Here's some of what was on offer to her, part of a desperate military's Iraq-era appeal to citizenly duty:
"You will earn approximately $2,400 (six weeks) or $4,000 (ten weeks) plus room and board during the training. How's that for a summer job?.... You will not incur any obligation to the Marine Corps even after completing the training. (You can choose whether or not to continue with the program).... Tuition assistance will be available to you after you complete training this summer. You could potentially earn $8,000 to $25,000 for school, depending on graduation date."
Imagine! The Marine Corps is willing to pay young people to go to a uniform-less summer camp to test their "leadership potential," with no commitment to the Corps necessary. Consider that; then consider what was certainly the President's only significant decision of the holiday season past--to permanently expand the US military by as many as 70,000 troops.
Now, as in some old math problem, the question is: How do you connect these two points. (Hint: Not with a straight line.)
Faced with a December shot across the bow in testimony before Congress by Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker, who warned that the Army "will break" under present war-zone rotation needs, President Bush responded by addressing the "stressed" nature of the US Armed Forces. He said, "I'm inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops--the Army, the Marines. And I talked about this to Secretary [Robert A.] Gates, and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building [the Pentagon], come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea." All this was, he added, "to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists."
Ah... that makes things clearer.
Of course, to get those new "volunteer" officers and men, who have generally been none too eager to volunteer for the Army and the Marines in the midst of a disastrous, far-away, increasingly incomprehensible set of double wars, you'll have to pay even more kids more money to go to no-commitment summer camp; and, while you're at it, you'll have to lower standards for the military radically. You'll have to let in even more volunteers without high school diplomas but with "moral" and medical "waivers" for criminal records and mental problems.
You'll have to fast-track even more new immigrants willing to join for the benefits of quick citizenship; you'll have to ramp up already high cash bonuses of all sorts; you'll have to push the top-notch ad agency recently hired on a five-year contract for a cool billion dollars to rev up its new "Army Strong" recruitment drive even higher; you'll certainly have to jack up the numbers of military recruiters radically, to the tune of perhaps a couple of hundred million more dollars; and maybe just for the heck of it, you better start planning for the possibility of recruiting significant numbers of potential immigrants before they even think to leave their own countries.
After all, it's darn romantic to imagine a future American all-volunteer force that will look more like the old French Foreign Legion--or an army of mercenaries anyway. All in all, you'll have to commit to the fact that your future soldier in your basic future war will cost staggering sums of money to hire and even more staggering sums to retain after he or she has had a taste of what "leadership potential" really entails.
Put another way, as long as Iraq remains a classic quagmire for the Army and Marines, any plan to expand the U.S. military in order to make it easier to fight such wars in the future, threatens to become a classic financial quagmire as well. In other words, Iraq and military expansion don't fit together well at all. And yet, looking at the state of our military in Iraq in a certain light, expansion seems so… well, logical.
After all, the American military, now at just over 500,000 troops, stood, at the time of the First Gulf War, at 703,000. (Of course, no one now counts the quite expensive hired mercenaries who envelop our military -- the privatized, Halliburton-style adjuncts, who cook the food, build the bases, do the cleaning, deliver the mail and supplies, perform interrogation duties, and so on, and whose increase has been striking as has the growth of rent-a-mercenary corporations whose armed employees are, for instance, all over Iraq.)
In addition, it has long been clear that the Armed Forces could not take the strain of failing wars in Central Asia and the Middle East forever, not to speak of increased "commitments" in the Persian Gulf and the normal massive global basing and policing that the Pentagon regularly refers to as our "footprint" on the planet. Added to this, the President seems to be leaning towards increasingly the pressure on military manpower needs by "surging"--the Vietnam era word would, of course, have been "escalating"--up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad and al-Anbar province, while naval and air forces (with an obvious eye to Iran) are simultaneously ramped up in the Persian Gulf.
In light of Iraq, military manpower needs cry out to be dealt with. In light of Iraq, dealing with them any time soon will be prohibitively expensive.
In Washington, this conundrum leads nowhere in particular. Instead, in the spirit of imperial-mission logic (and with the urge to bash the Bush administration for being late to such an obvious support-our-troops position), Democrats simply leaped onto the expand-the-military bandwagon even faster than Republicans. In fact, leading Democrats had long been calling for just this sort of expansion. ("I am glad [the President] has realized the need for increasing the size of the armed forces... but this is where the Democrats have been for two years," commented Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the new House Democratic Caucus chairman.) The Democratic leadership promptly pledged to make such an expansion one of its top reform priorities in the New Year.
To get those numbers significantly higher will, it's estimated, take a decade and unimaginable sums of money (as well as those lowered standards). And, if the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan worsen, as they almost certainly will, and American casualties rise with no end in sight, you can start going through your multiplication tables. This could be considered but a form of ongoing blowback from American imperial shock-and-awe tactics in Iraq and presents some curious choices to our leaders.
After all, to take but one example, those most eager to expand the military, with their eyes on the imperial future, should be eager to liquidate the Iraqi mission as soon as possible.
But a far more basic choice lurks--one rarely alluded to in the mainstream. If we voted on such things–-and, in truth, we vote on less and less that matters--the choice that actually lies behind the Marine e-letter to my friend's daughter might be put this way: Expand the military or shrink the mission?
This is the essential question that goes largely unmentioned--and largely unthought as well. In the meantime, money will continue to pour into military recruitment ad campaigns, bonuses, and summer camps. In the meantime, those Marine e-letters will continue to go out. In the meantime, money will continue to pour into the Pentagon and the national security world generally. In the meantime, we will continue to build our near billion-dollar embassy, the largest on the planet, in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone. In the meantime, the imperial and military paths will continue to fuse, and the Pentagon will continue to take on new roles, even outside "declared war zones," in intelligence, diplomacy, "information operations," and other "self-assigned missions"; so that, as Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times recently described it, even our embassies will increasingly be militarized outposts in the global war on terror.
Shrinking the mission--choosing some path other than the imperial one (in part by redefining what exactly our national interests are)--would, of course, address many problems. It would make paying young people thousands of dollars to test their leadership potential or thinking about scouring Central America for a future Foreign Legion far less necessary. But no one in Washington--not in the Bush administration, not in James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group, which recently captured the Inside-the-Beltway "middle ground" on Iraq policy, not in the Democratic leadership--is faintly interested in shrinking the American global mission. No one in Washington, where a kind of communal voting does go on, is about to vote "no" to that mission, or cast a ballot for democracy rather than empire.
Expanding the military may seem like a no-brainer in response to the Iraq crisis. As it happens, it's anything but. Unfortunately, few ever discuss (as, for instance, Chalmers Johnson did in his book, The Sorrows of Empire) the 700-plus military and intelligence bases we retain around the world or ask why exactly we're garrisoning the planet. No one, in these last years, has seriously challenged the ever expanding Pentagon budget; nor the mushrooming supplemental requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, including the record-setting latest for almost $100 billion; nor, generally, the fact that paying for actual war-fighting is no longer considered an appropriate part of the Pentagon's normal budget process.
No one challenged it when, in 2002, the United States gained a new North American Command (Northcom), making U.S. citizens but another coequal part of the Pentagon's division of its imperial world, along with those who live in regions covered by Centcom, Paccom, and the just authorized Africa Command (Africom). No one challenged the vast expansion of Pentagon intelligence activities. No one offered a challenge as the military took on ever more civilian domestic duties, including planning for the potential arrival of a pandemic disease on our shores or for future Katrinas. No one seriously challenges the plans the Pentagon has on the drawing boards for exotic, futuristic hardware meant to come on line decades from now that, along with futuristic military tactics already being worked out, will help predetermine the wars most Americans don't even know we are going to fight--from the vast mega-slum-cities of the Third World to the borderlands of space.
No one considers what the Pentagonization of our world and the Homeland Securitization of our country is doing to us, because militarism here has never taken on the expectable forms--few vast military parades or displays (despite the almost full-scale militarization of Presidential funerals); few troops in the streets; no uniforms in the high councils of government. In fact, it's one of the ironies of our particular form of militarization that when our military--no longer really a citizen army--goes to war and troops begin to die, less Americans are touched by this than perhaps at any time in our recent history.
Shrink the mission or expand the military? Your choice?
Fat chance.
HE’S BACK!!!
Pat Robertson, that wise prognosticator you all know and love has a brand new prediction for his flock: millions of them will most likely die at the end of this new year. On his incredibly classless program The 700 Club, where last year Robertson proved what a good Christian he was by calling for Venezuela's Hugo Chavez to be killed, he announced that God has told him of a "mass killing" coming at the end of '07.
"The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that," Robertson stated matter-of-factly. God apparently delivers these cataclysmic predictions on a regular basis to Robertson's doorstep. Last year God told Robertson that a tsunami would probably slam against our country. ( I guess God was just playing a practical joke.)
Who knows why this terrible "mass killing" is bound to occur? Something tells me Robertson will link it to the incoming Democratic Congress or perhaps the existence of abortion rights and homosexuals. Whatever reason he cites you can be sure it is meant to manipulate and malign, because that's what Robertson does best.
SOME DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON THE EXECUTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN
The Bush Administration hoped that a guilty verdict for Saddam Hussein two days before the midterm elections would boost the electoral fortunes of sagging Republicans. It didn't. Once sentenced, they hoped that his execution would bring some much-needed good news to an Iraq policy in shambles and a country torn apart by an escalating civil war. It hasn't.
It's amazing that the death of Saddam, a man considered by pretty much everyone to have been a horrible dictator, could backfire on the Bush Administration and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq. But the grizzly hanging--and the nasty cellphone recorded taunts that followed--can now be viewed as yet another chapter in the evolving story of "What Went Wrong."
Saddam's execution, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman noted today, "resembled a tribal revenge ritual rather than the culmination of a constitutional process in which America should be proud to have participated."
The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a man increasingly under fire, today detained one of Saddam's guards for possibly leaking the cellphone video. But the Times reported that another man present with a cellphone was Maliki's national security advisor, Mowaffak al-Rubaie. The plot thickens.
The Bush Administration is presently--and rather unconvincingly--trying to blame Maliki for rushing Saddam's execution. "American officials said that they had worked until the last hours of Mr. Hussein's life to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to delay the execution," the Times reported.
Maybe so. But the Bush Administration is to blame for botching Saddam's trial, by holding it inside Iraq and outside the jurisdiction of international law. If Saddam was given over to the International Criminal Court, there would have been no cellphone pictures, no taunting, no scandal and no execution.
While much of U.S. media coverage of Saddam Hussein's execution has strained to echo the Bush administration's suggestion that "justice" was done, the international reaction to the hurried hanging of the former dictator has recognized what one of the world's top experts on the Middle East refers to as the "gruesome, occasionally farcical" nature of the process that led to the execution.
"It's tawdry," Rosemary Hollis, the director of research at Chatham House, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London, said of the execution. "It's not going to achieve anything because of the way the trial was conducted and the way the occupation was conducted. Life in Iraq has become so precarious that many people are saying it was safer under Saddam Hussein - it makes the whole thing look like a poke in the eye as opposed to closure or some kind of contribution to the future of Iraq. The purpose should have been to see justice done in a transparent manner... the trial was gruesome, occasionally farcical, and failed to fulfill its promise of giving satisfaction."
Chris Doyle, the London-based director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, was equally dismissive, telling the Guardian newspaper that, "For Bush, Blair and their diminishing brotherhood of diehard supporters, Saddam's demise is their sole concrete victory in Iraq in almost four years. This should have been the crowning glory of their efforts, but instead it may pose yet another risk to their demoralised troops. For Iraqis, some will see it as a symbol of the death of the ancien regime. For some Sunnis, Saddam's death represents the final nail in the coffin of their fall from power. But Iraqis may also see this as the humiliation of Iraq as a whole, that their president, however odious, was toppled by outside powers, and is executed effectively at others' instigation."
Doyle's assessment was shared by Iraqi expatriate Kamil Mahdi, an academic who is now associated with the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at Britain's Exeter University. "It will be taken as an American decision," Mahdi said of the decision to execute Hussein and the way in which deposed leader was killed. "The worst thing is that it's an issue which, in an ideal situation, should have unified Iraq but the Americans have succeeded in dividing the Iraqis."
Critics of the trial and execution of the former dictator did not defend his actions. Rather, they recognized the fundamental flaws in his trial by an inexperienced and clearly biased Iraqi judiciary. And they condemned the rush to hang Hussein by a country employing the widely-rejected sanction of capital punishment.
"A capital punishment is always tragic news, a reason for sadness, even if it deals with a person who was guilty of grave crimes," explained Father Federico Lombardi, spokesman for the Vatican, who added that, "The killing of the guilty party is not the way to reconstruct justice and reconcile society. On the contrary, there is a risk that it will feed a spirit of vendetta and sow new violence."
British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, while officially welcoming moves to hold Hussein to account for killings and other crimes that tool place during his tenure as president of Iraq, issued a statement that said, "The British government does not support the use of the death penalty, in Iraq or anywhere else. We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime."
Another longtime U.S. ally, Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who in 2003 dispatched his country's troops to support the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, condemned the hanging of Hussein as "a step backward in Iraq's difficult road toward full democracy. Describing the killing as a "political and historical" mistake, Berlusconi said, "The civilization in the name of which my country decided to send Italian soldiers into Iraq envisioned overcoming the death penalty, even for a bloody dictator like Saddam."
Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Gerrit Zalm criticized the hanging as "barbaric," and similar criticism came from officials of Chile, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland and the Ukraine.
Speaking for Amnesty International, Malcolm Smart, director of the organization's Middle East and North Africa Programme, echoed concerns expressed by Human Rights Watch and other watchdog groups.
"We oppose the death penalty in all cases as a violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, but it is especially abhorrent when this most extreme penalty is imposed after an unfair trial," said Smart. "It is even more worrying that in this case, the execution appeared a foregone conclusion, once the original verdict was pronounced, with the Appeals Court providing little more than a veneer of legitimacy for what was, in fact, a fundamentally flawed process."
While Iran, which fought a long war with Iraq in the 1980s, found itself in ironic agreement with the Bush administration's enthusiasm for the execution, most Muslim countries were critical of the timing of the hanging.
The killing of Hussein during the Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, an annual period of religious reflection seem by Muslims globally as a time for showing forgiveness, drew rebukes even from U.S. allies. During Eid, Muslim countries rarely execute prisoners and frequently pardon them.
"There is a feeling of surprise and disapproval that the verdict has been applied during the holy months and the first days of Eid al-Adha," Saudia Arabia's official news agency declared after the execution. "Leaders of Islamic countries should show respect for this blessed occasion... not demean it."
"It had been expected that the trial of a former president, who ruled for a considerable length of time, would last longer... demonstrate more precision, and not be politicized," continued the blunt statement from the Saudis.
Libya cancelled Eid al Adha celebrations and ordered that flags on government buildings be flown at half-mast.
A statement from the Egyptian foreign ministry announced that, "Egypt regrets the fact that the Iraqi authorities carried out the execution of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and that it took place on the first day of Eid Al Adha."
From Cairo, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alaa Al Hadidi complained that the execution's timing "did not take into consideration the feelings of Muslims and the sanctity of this day which represents amnesty and forgiveness."
Saddam Hussein's execution on Dec. 30 prevents him from being put on trial for his most serious crimes – genocide against the Kurds and the use of poison gas in the Iran-Iraq war. As many as 100,000 Kurds were killed in 1988. Why then was Saddam executed for killing 148 men and boys in the Shiite town of Dujail in 1982?
Human rights activists say the answer is clear: the Bush White House wanted to prevent Saddam from offering evidence of US complicity in his crimes as a defense. It's the same reason the Saddam trial was held under Iraqi auspices rather than in the International Criminal Court: ''It's to protect their own dirty laundry,'' Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times in 2004. ''The U.S. wants to keep the trial focused on Saddam's crimes and not their acquiescence.''
Human Rights Watch has done more to document Saddam's genocide of the Kurds than any other organization. Their 1993 report remains the most detailed and meticulous account, based on extensive interviews with eyewitnesses and analysis of Iraqi government internal communications. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam had lost control of Kurdish regions because all his troops had been sent to the battlefields. But as that war came to an end in 1988, he launched his "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds, leveling thousands of their villages and killing 50,000-100,000, mostly by bombing and mass executions.
Saddam's most notorious atrocity was his use of poison gas against Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988, killing at least 5,000. George Bush cited that attack – "gassing his own people" -- as part of his argument for a US war against Iraq. However back in 1988 the US worked to prevent the international community from condemning Iraq's chemical attack against Halabja, instead attempting to place part of the blame on Iran. [See Dilip Hiro, "Iraq and Poison Gas," TheNation.com, Aug. 28, 2002.]
The US had supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, on the grounds that Iran was a greater threat to the US after the rise to power of the Ayatolla Khomeini.
When the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988, Saddam's genocide against the Kurds was no secret. The US Senate passed a bill to penalize Baghdad for violating the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons – they did it virtually without opposition, in a single day.
But the Reagan Administration killed the bill. Political scientist Bruce Jentleson of Duke University told the BBC that they did it "for two reasons. One, economic interests. In addition to oil, Iraq at that point had become the second-largest recipient of government agricultural credits to buy American agriculture . . . . And secondly was this continual blinders of the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam used chemical weapons, most obviously in his 1988 campaign to retake the Fao Peninsula. The had been banned since the 1925 Geneva Convention. His trial for that crime has also been prevented by the execution.
Again his defense was likely to have been that the US did not object at the time. Walter Lang, senior defense intelligence officer for the United States Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, told the New York Times in 2002 that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern" to Reagan and his aides, because they "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose."
Trials in Baghdad for other Iraqi leaders accused of genocide against the Kurds and violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons may be held. But as Antoine Garapon, director of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies in Paris, told the New York Times, even if others stand trial, "the person deemed most responsible would never face judgment."
Thus Saturday's execution of Saddam Hussein seems less an act of justice for his victims and more an effort to cover up US complicity in his regime.
Convicted in a show trial that certainly appeared to have been timed to finish on the eve of last month's US elections, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was hanged in a show execution that just as certainly seems to have been timed to be carried out before the end of the worst year of the Iraq War.
Hussein was a bad player -- a totalitarian dictator who, with tacit approval from the U.S. and other western nation during the 1980s, killed his own people and waged a mad war with Iran. He needed to be held to account. But even bad players deserve fair trials, honest judgments and justly-applied punishments. The former dictator got none of these.
According to Human Rights Watch, which has a long and honorable history of documenting and challenging the abuses of Hussein's former government, the execution early Saturday morning followed "a deeply flawed trial" and "marks a significant step away from respect for human rights and the rule of law in Iraq."
"The test of a government's commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders," says Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program. "History will judge these actions harshly."
For fifteen years, Human Rights Watch had demanded that Hussein be brought to justice for what the group has rightly described as "massive human rights violations." But the group argues that Hussein was not brought to justice.
In addition to objecting at the most fundamental level to the use of the barbaric practice of state-sponsored execution--which is outlawed by the vast majority of the world's nations--Human Rights Watch notes that Hussein was killed before being tried for some of his most well-documented acts of brutality.
The group notes the trial that did take place was fundamentally flawed.
A niney-seven-page report by Human Rights Watch, issued late last month, details the severe problems with the trial. The report, based on close monitoring of the prosecution of the former president, found that:
•"(The) Iraqi High Tribunal was undermined from the outset by Iraqi government actions that threatened the independence and perceived impartiality of the court."
• The Iraqi administrators, judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers lacked sufficient training and expertise "to fairly and effectively try crimes of this magnitude."
• The government did not protect defense lawyers--three of whom were killed during the trial--or key witnesses.
• "(There were) serious flaws in the trial, including failures to disclose key evidence to the defense, violations of the defendants' right to question prosecution witnesses, and the presiding judge's demonstrations of bias."
• "Hussein's defense lawyers had 30 days to file an appeal from the November 5 verdict. However, the trial judgment was only made available to them on November 22, leaving just two weeks to respond."
The report did not study the appeals process, But the speed with which the tribunal's verdict and sentence were confirmed suggests that the Iraqi Appeals Chamber failed to seriously consider the legal arguments advanced by Hussein's able--if violently harassed--legal team.
"It defies imagination that the Appeals Chamber could have thoroughly reviewed the 300-page judgment and the defense's written arguments in less than three weeks' time," said Dicker. "The appeals process appears even more flawed than the trial."
There will, of course, be those who counter criticism of the process by pointing out that Saddam Hussein did not give the victims of his cruel dictates fair trials or just sentences. That is certainly true.
But such statements represent a stinging indictment of the new Iraqi government and its judiciary. With all the support of the United States government, with massive resources and access to the best legal advice in the world, with all the lessons of the past, Iraq has a legal system that delivers no better justice than that of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.
This is the ugly legacy of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq: An awful mess of a country that cannot even get the trial and punishment of deposed dictator right, a justice system that schedules the taking of life for political and propaganda purposes, a thuggishly brutal state that executes according to whim rather than legal standard.
According to Britain's Telegraph newspaper, "There was no comment from the White House, which was determined that the execution should appear to be an Iraqi event." The central role played by the US government in the process was not lost on the Telegraph, however, as the newspaper noted that: "the transfer of Saddam from American to Iraqi custody meant his death was imminent."
The term "transfer" is of course being used in a loose sense, as Hussein was hung not in an Iraqi prison but within the American-controlled Green Zone in central Baghdad.
Now that the killing is done, the governments of Iraq and the United States have confirmed what may have been the worst fear of those who condemned both Saddam Hussein and the US invasion and occupation that removed him from power. The crude lawlessness of Hussein has been replaced by the calculated lawlessness of a new regime.
By Peter Grier Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON – The US military may have reached a critical point in generating Army and Marine ground forces to fight its global war on terror.
When it comes to force levels, finding 15,000 to 30,000 additional troops for Iraq is not the real problem, say officers and experts outside the government. The White House is considering such a surge as a way to counter rising sectarian violence.
More difficult is deciding how long to keep those extra units there. After years of war, US active duty ground forces are stretched to the limit. Many National Guard and reserve personnel can't be deployed to Iraq. Recruiting more soldiers would be an expensive and time-consuming process.
"The other issue is equipment," says Kevin Ryan, a retired Army brigadier general and fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Even if you could magically have 30,000 more troops, you don't have the equipment to give them."
To the layperson Washington's current debate about troop levels in Iraq might seem somewhat confusing.
On the one hand, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, among others, keeps insisting that we need more units in Iraq for a full push to provide security. A recent American Enterprise Institute study by a cadre of retired military officers and AEI scholar Frederick Kagan called for seven more Army brigades and Marine regiments for Iraq - and said that such a surge "is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient."
On the other hand, many Democrats keep pushing for a US commitment to withdraw troops, not add them. And respected figures such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell have cast doubt on whether the US even has enough extra troops to send.
"The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they're being asked to perform," said Mr. Powell.
The gap here, in essence, may lie in differing views about how hard current units should be used.
"It is possible for both of [these points of view] to be correct," says General Ryan, who in his last active duty assignment was responsible for Army strategic war plans, policy, and international affairs.
The AEI study does not hinge on plucking seven rested units from US bases and sending them to Iraq. Instead, it would advance the planned deployments of four brigades of troops by a matter of some weeks, while extending the rotations of other units already in Iraq.
For the next several years, active duty ground forces must accept longer tours in Iraq - perhaps 15 months, instead of the current 12 - and National Guard units will have to accept increased deployments, according to the AEI study.
President Bush should request an increase in active duty ground forces of at least 30,000 per year for the next two years, according to the Kagan study. "The president must call for young Americans to volunteer to defend the nation in a time of crisis," notes an outline of the AEI report.
Given the unpopularity of the Iraq conflict with US voters it might be politically difficult for the White House to call for such a redoubled effort. If nothing else, the expense of increasing US forces by 60,000 over the next two years would be considerable, on top of the extra money already appropriated for the war.
A report in the Washington Post Tuesday said that the Joint Chiefs of Staff privately are opposed to increasing troop levels in Iraq. In public, their comments on the issue have been hedged.
Last week, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker at a Capitol Hill hearing noted that over the past five years, sustained strategic demand has placed a strain on the Army's all-volunteer force, testing it for the first time in an extended period of conflict.
Dwell time, or regrouping time at home, for active duty brigade combat teams is now less than one year, noted General Schoomaker. "At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components through remobilization, we will break the active component," he says.
Access to the National Guard and reserve components of the military has become a sensitive issue for the top military leadership. These citizen-soldiers have performed well in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, Department of Defense personnel policies make them more difficult to send abroad than active duty troops.
Of the current 520,000 guard and reserve personnel, only about 90,000 currently are available for deployment, according to figures presented Friday to a congressional commission.
BEIRUT, LEBANON – The execution of Saddam Hussein was a subdued finale for a man whose merciless rule shaped the course of Middle East history for a quarter century.
Mr. Hussein may be gone, but his legacy lives on in the ethnic and religious conflict undermining a nation that he held together through fear. His attacks on nearby countries - Iran, Kuwait, and Israel - won widespread condemnation and, ultimately, little reward.
While the architects of the Iraq war hoped his ouster would help spread Western-style democracy in the region, violence in Iraq has grown so bad that recent polls say most Iraqis believe life was better under Hussein.
It remains to be seen whether the lesson of his life will be the end of brutal dictatorships in the region or whether current unrest in Iraq will bolster Middle Eastern autocrats and increase resistance to democratic reforms.
"The downfall of Saddam and its aftershocks only empowered the regimes of the Middle East," says Sami Moubayed, a Syrian political analyst. "Leaders can now say 'Look to Iraq. This is what the Americans will bring.' By failing in Iraq, the Americans actually did democracy a great disservice."
While democracy may have yet to flower in the Arab world, the seeds have been sown, other analysts say, with the Hussein experience in Iraq serving as a stark warning of the consequences should the long-term reform effort falter or fail.
"I do believe that the Middle East is coming to a conclusion and learning from the Saddam lesson," says Shafeeq Ghabra, a Kuwaiti professor of politics and president of Jusoor Arabiya Leadership and Consultancy Company.
"Yet the learning is not as quick and fast as one would like. It will take time for the region to understand that era and go beyond it to an era of pluralism and development where people can express themselves without fear," he says.
Hussein's ambition and sense of self-destiny combined with impulsive and vengeful acts propelled Iraq into a series of disasters that has left an indelible mark on the region.
"He was a catalyst, he made things happen and usually they were not positive and constructive, but he constantly kept the Middle East in a state of turmoil," says Gary Sick, executive director of the GULF 2000 project and professor of international affairs at Columbia University in New York.
Hussein's rise to absolute power began in 1968 when he participated in a bloodless coup that saw his cousin Ahmad al-Hassan al-Bakr become president. In the 1970s, Hussein, who gradually came to overshadow the president, led an economic modernization program, funded by the proceeds of the 1973 oil boom.
He also helped forge a sense of national unity rooted in Baath Party ideology, overcoming Iraq's diverse ethnic and sectarian composition. "He was able to bring to Iraq a sense of development for a period.... Then it was all destroyed year after year with adventurous decisions," says Professor Ghabra.
Hussein pushed aside the ailing Bakr and became president in 1979, the same year that Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was toppled in neighboring Iran by the Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.
The rise of a militant Shiite theocracy in Iran alarmed the Sunni Arab states. Hussein, fearing Khomeini's influence over Iraq's restless Shiites and tacitly backed by his Sunni Gulf neighbors, invaded Iran in 1980, setting in motion a devastating eight-year war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Hussein intended to smash the disorganized fledgling Islamic regime in Iran, an act that would confirm his leadership of the Arab world and earn the gratitude of his neighbors. But the war was to have the unintended consequence of strengthening Mr. Khomeini's rule.
"It forced the Islamic revolution to get out of its zealous craziness and begin to organize itself and pull itself together," says Professor Sick, an Iran specialist. "In a way, Saddam stabilized the Iranian revolution and kept the mullahs in power."
The conflict also triggered an alliance between Iran and Iraq's archenemy, Syria, which was ruled by a rival branch of the Baath Party. The Iranian-Syrian relationship has proved enduring, and in the past year has further strengthened to become one of the region's most significant geo-strategic alignments.
When the Gulf War ended in 1988, the Iraqi economy was in ruins with some $75 billion owed to Iraq's Arab nation backers. Relations between Iraq and Kuwait steadily deteriorated over the next two years with the latter's refusal to forgive the war debt and cut oil production to raise revenues for Iraq.
A bitter Hussein sent his war-weary army into Kuwait in 1990, triggering a fresh convulsion in the Middle East. The US assembled a coalition of Arab and European allies to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. This Gulf war also marked the beginning of a prolonged US military deployment in Saudi Arabia, which would later be used by Osama bin Laden to partly justify his anti-American actions, culminating in 9/11.
The UN sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s, the most severe ever against any country, devastated an already weakened economy, but failed to bring down Hussein's regime.
Although the 2003 invasion of Iraq finally ended Hussein's tyrannical rule, its aftermath has turned Iraq into a byword of sectarian violence.
Although Hussein is dismissed by most Arabs as a tyrant who ran a regime of unmitigated brutality and greed, some regard him as a champion of Arab steadfastness against American "imperialism" and Israeli aggression.
The mock funerals in the West Bank Sunday testified to Hussein's lingering support among Palestinians. Hussein adopted the Palestinian cause as a cornerstone of his foreign policy, dispensing millions of dollars to armed Palestinian groups. Analysts say Hussein manipulated the plight of the Palestinians to curry popularity and burnish his Arabist credentials. "You can't judge the Palestinians by their reaction [to Hussein's death]," says Sateh Noureddine, columnist with Lebanon's As-Safir newspaper. "They are a desperate people looking for any sign of support from anyone. Saddam was a tyrant, and there was nothing positive from his era."
JAPAN WATCH; THINGS THEY ARE A CHANGING!
The country's post-World War II pacificism is being challenged by a more assertive, patriotic attitude.
By Robert Marquand Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
TOKYO – On a pleasant November morning, some 300 Japanese executives paid $150 each to hear a lanky math professor named Masahiko Fujiwara give a secular sermon on restoring Japan's greatness. Mr. Fujiwara spoke quietly, without notes, for 80 minutes. His message, a sort of spiritual nationalism, rang loudly, though: Japan has lost its "glorious purity," its samurai spirit, its traditional sense of beauty, because of habits instilled by the United States after the war. "We are slaves to the Americans," he said.
Fujiwara's remedy is for Japan to recover its emotional strength. He says that Japan "can help save the world" - but its youths are lost in a fog of laxity and don't love Japan enough.
Fujiwara represents the milder side of an assertive discourse rising gradually but powerfully here. What direction it will take in this vibrant and complex society remains unclear. But as a new generation seeks to shed the remnants of what is commonly called the "American occupation" legacy, a range of speech and ideas previously frowned on or ignored, is showing up sharply in mainstream culture.
"We came because Fujiwara is one of few who speaks the truth to our politicians," says Hirofumi Kato, vice president of a family business who attended the talk. Those not there can buy Fujiwara's "Dignity of a Nation," a bestseller at more than 2 million copies this year, that describes how Western concepts like freedom and equality are inappropriate for Japan and don't really work in the US.
Cartoons, magazines fuel message
The new nationalist sentiment is seen in popular magazines that use provocative language to advocate a more militaristic Japan, question the legitimacy of the Tokyo war-crimes trials, and often cast racist aspersions on China and Korea. Magazines include "Voice," "Bungei-shunju," "Shokun," "Seiron," and "Sapio," among others that are widely available. Sapio issues this fall have detailed how China will soon invade Japan and advocate nuclear weapons for Taiwan and Japan. The Dec. 27 issue details which members of the US Congress "love and hate Japan," including those described by political scientist Takahiko Soejima as helping "US companies take over Japanese banks at cheap prices."
Popular manga cartoons, another example, are a vivid entry point for school children and young adult males who read them on the trains. In recent years, manga have begun to include stronger and more-open ethnic hate messages. "The 100 Crimes of China," for example, is one in a recent series put out by publisher Yushinsha, with a kicker noting that China is the "world's most evil country." One recent manga is titled, "Why We Should Hate South Korea." Drawings are graphic and depict non-Japanese in unflattering ethnic stereotypes.
New programs are emerging, like the weekly Asahi talk show hosted by Beat Takeshi, that have thrown staid political expression into satire for Japanese viewers. There's a higher profile set of "conspiracy theories" that get repeated on TV, including those by writer Hideyuki Sekioka, author of "The Japan That Cannot Say 'No.' " Mr. Sekioka says the US manipulates Japan into adopting weak policies and has a "master plan" to control Japanese business. TV Asahi broadcasts programs detailing various US manipulations, including the idea that the CIA sent the Beatles to Japan in 1966 to dissipate an anti-US mood and "emasculate" Japanese youths.
The rise of this rhetoric is often denied here. Yet by last summer, Yoshinori Katori, then-Foreign Ministry spokesman, acknowledged that nationalism, most often on the right, had become a "new phenomenon."
The Japan of 2006 has quietly adopted a tone very different from the milder pacifism of it postwar identity. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe engineered two historic changes - transforming the postwar Defense Agency into a full-scale Defense Ministry, and ushering in a law requiring patriotic education in schools. The new law requires teachers to evaluate student levels of patriotism and eagerness to learn traditions. The Asahi Shimbun warns that this may "force students to vie to be patriotic in the classroom."
"A nationalistic reawakening from Japan's old pacifist identity, is leading to a domestic restructuring of Japan," says Alexander Mansourov, Asia specialist at the Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. "Along with a new defense ministry, a new national security council, and new intelligence agency, there's debate over whether to go nuclear, a debate on pre-emptive strikes on North Korea."
Pacifist sensibility still strong
The new nationalism is not coming as an especially fire-breathing exercise. Japan remains quite cosmopolitan; mildness and politeness are valued. Many Japanese don't notice the stronger messages, or are not interested in politics.
The majority retain a pacifist sensibility. There's little hint of a mass emotional patriotism seen in Japan under Emperor Hirohito. The trend may get redirected as part of a healthy rediscovery of pride.
"I see a Japan that, after the 1990s, is becoming more confident," says one American corporate headhunter who has lived here for two decades.
Still, the extent of change in Japan's discourse can be measured by the number of moderates who say that they have little ground to stand on today. Former Koizumi presidential adviser Yukio Okamoto, a moderate conservative, argues that the "middle or moderate ground" is disappearing. Mr. Okamoto says that on many subjects - membership in the UN Security Council, culpability in World War II - he finds himself without a voice. "Every time I open my mouth to say something, I am bashed by either the left or the right," he says. Recent TV appearances by the granddaughter of Hideki Tojo, a World War II leader who was later executed for war crimes, describing him as a fine fellow, also concern Okamoto, who says that, though not an exact parallel, it would be inconceivable to imagine a granddaughter of Hitler going on German TV.
Most of the current domination of media is by the harder right. Former finance minister Eisuke Sakakibara says, "The sense of nationalism is rising here. I feel threatened ... any liberal does. We worry about a loss of freedom of speech. [In the US,] the right has not taken complete control in the media, but we are not the US."
The new tone is coupled with the rise of China, fears associated with North Korea, perennial questions of identity - and comes as America, Japan's main ally and security guarantor, is bogged down in Iraq. It was given some license by the repeated visits to the Yasukuni war-memorial shrine by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Those angered much of Asia, where they were seen as implicit support of a view that Japan's 20th-century war was justified.
Prime Minister Abe has eased that anger by not visiting the shrine, instead visiting Beijing to promote common points, like trade. But many experts see that decision as tactical.
Radical media, too, are thriving. The magazine "Will," for example, ran a discussion between the ultranationalist governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, and Fujiwara, the author. Mr. Ishihara, who won 80 percent of the Tokyo vote in 2005, calls World War II "a splendid war." Fujiwara says Japan must replace its logic-based culture with an emotion-based culture; he pushes to eliminate the teaching of English in schools. Photos in "Will" this year depicted fascist author Yukio Mishima standing atop the high command in 1970 in a military uniform, minutes before he jumped to his death. Mr. Mishima's private army had just failed to take control of the building.
It's the "mainstreaming" of such material that raises some eyebrows. Yoshinori Kobayashi, a popular far-right cartoonist, now appears regularly on mainstream talk shows. Ishihara recently interviewed Sekioka in "Bungeishunju," a literary magazine akin to the Atlantic Monthly. Ishihara wonders why Japan lacks the spiritual strength to stand up to the Americans.
Behind such views is a shared vision: a return to pure virtues found in medieval Japan. The Tom Cruise film "The Last Samurai" captures some of this. "What we need is a return to the inherent religion and culture of Japan ... of our ancestors in the middle ages," argues Sekioka.
Japan's education bill is designed to teach such virtues. Prime Minister Abe's new book, "Toward a Beautiful Country," hearkens to the ideas of love of homeland.
The idealized samurai code was given best expression by a Japanese Christian named Inazo Nitobe. His book, "Bushido: The Soul of Japan," was written in English and translated back into Japanese after World War II. It prizes sympathy for the weak and hatred of cowardice - and has been a gold mine for present-day nationalists.
Critics say Japan must confront its wartime past. Much of its pacifist identity emerges from the view that it was a war victim, as epitomized by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That story, reinforced by textbooks that downplay or deny Japan's role in invading Korea and Manchuria, rang loudly in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and ignored as the economy boomed in the late 1980s. But it has received a boost from tales of Japanese abducted by North Korea. Prime Minister Abe, who has been instrumental in promoting the abductee issue, has of late been trying to mediate between extreme nationalism while still advocating more patriotism.
Japan reads into 'Letters From Iwo Jima' 12/22/06
Nuclear question still nags at Japan 11/06/06
Editorial: Japan's rising son 09/22/06
No comments:
Post a Comment