Catching up with my reading here. I only just got down to this great post, “The Other Pope”, in which Juan Cole pulled together many facts about the late Pope’s political positions that were highly inconvenient to the US rightwingers who try to claim him as their own…
Including on Palestine, worker’s rights, the death penalty, the Iraq invasion, etc etc.
Great work.
Riverbend Rocks!
A combination of physiology and Real Life have taken over Helena’s brain and ability to blog today. I was going to post an open thread so y’all could post comments about Iraq (like Yankeedoodle used to before he brought in Matt and friendly Fire as his excellent ‘guest writers’.)
But then I moseyed (?sp) over to Riverbend’s blog and just loved this post on Iraqis’ new exposure to US Big Media:
- The first time I saw 60 Minutes on MBC 4, it didn
South African apartheid’s ‘Total Strategy’
South African JWN commenter Dominic and I have both started working on trying to find a good–preferably primary-source– articulation of the “Total Strategy” developed by the apartheid regime in 1976-77 with a view to being able to do a good comparative study between that and what is probably the Bush administration’s authoritative articulation of the ‘Global War on Terror’, namely the National Security Strategy document of September 2002.
We’re not quite there yet. Any other interested JWN readers are warmly invited to join our little project. Also, if you yourself are unable to contribute to this work but know of someone else who might be interested, please forward this post to them!
The quick background on the ‘Total Strategy’ is that in 1974-76 two disastrous sets of things happened to the “security situation” and the “security strategy” pursued up until then by the apartheid bosses:
- (1) Portugal’s massive African empire completely collapsed, “handing over” control of the two large southern African states Mozambique and Angola to national-liberation movements that were firmly African-nationalist and because of the nature and history of their struggle favorably inclined to the Soviet Union.
This was seen as the “collapse of vital buffer states”. Plus, of course, the example of victory provided by the nationalists in those two countries might–it was feared in Pretoria– serve as inspiration to SA’s own majority Black and other non-White populations… And
(2) In 1976, the sprawling, Black-only “townships” of Soweto incubated the Soweto Uprising, a revolt by disaffected Black youth that spread rapidly through most of the country’s urban areas. The youth were rebelling against the perceived passivity of their own elders as much as against the continuation of White control. They sought to make the country “ungovernable”, and were much more radical than most of the older-generation supporters of the existing nationalist organizations.
You could say that the combination of those two sets of developments, both outside and inside the country, acted as a kind of “9/11” for the leaders of the apartheid government. They described what they saw happening as a Soviet-orchestrated “Total Onslaught” on the good, White, Christian, pro-western values that the apartheid system sought to uphold. This Total Onslaught had to be met with a “Total Strategy”, that would be pursued simultaneously both inside and outside the country and involved many elements of social control, and social and political manipulation, at many different levels– not just the immediately “military” level, but also including that very prominently indeed.
It does sound a lot like the Bush administration’s GWOT already, doesn’t it? I guess my aim is to flesh out this hypothesis as much as possible.
Dominic doesn’t think this portion of Vol. 2 of the TRC report gives much useful info about the TS. However, I think it’s not a bad place to start, especially paras 108-139 and 152-165.
Dominic has found a couple of really helpful (though still not primary) sources. One is a book that I think he picked off his bookshelf called
Out of contact, 2 days
I’m in Maryland. My laptop doesn’t work. I’m just borrowing a friend’s computer to check email and write this.
It felt very frustrating, then I remembered most folks in the world don’t organize their lives according to “instant access”, cyber-time. And their mental health and general effectiveness in running their lives is probably far superior to those of folks who’re foreever rushing around to catch the “latest” of the latest news.
Ommmm.
Actually, today and tomorrow I’m doing Quaker things. So perhaps some cyber-silence is very appropriate.
Back Sunday evening, or Monday. If way opens.
“Far Away”
Last night, we went to an amazing production– directed by my very good friend Betsy Rudelich Tucker– of “Far Away“, a play written in 2000 by the brilliant British playwright Caryl Churchill.
I don’t have time here to write much about it. If any of you gets a chance to see it– rush to the theater in question! To think that Churchill wrote it before 9/11 is truly amazing. The woman can see into the future!
The future she sees into, and portrays in around 70 mins of very sparse performance time, is one in which two human tendencies– the desire to paper over or ignore disturbing signs of violence and violation, and the desire to be extremely judgmental about others– rapidly degerate into what can only be described as a form of dementia.
In the last scene, the entirely believable and fairly sympathetic three characters in the play are earnestly talking to each other about whether “the cats have come down on the side of the Frendch”, or “the Chinese, the porcupines, and the gazelles have lined with the Germans and the children under five”… And even whether “the river is for us or against us this week”.
Before that scene there is a lengthy, completely silent scene that consists only of a slow parade of individuals, one by one, across the stage. When each reaches a box in the middle of it, s/he stands and holds his hands out and then is “executed” with a flash of light.
After the performance, Betsy talked about it a little. She said that Churchill’s own directions for this scene had been very sparse: that there should be a slow parade of “raggedly dressed individuals wearing fantastic hats” across the stage, where each one in turn should be executed. (The hats, and the making of them, were part of an earlier scene.)
Betsy said that Churchill gave no precise number for the number of those doing this, except to write that ten was too few, and it could be 20 or 100 or more… Betsy had 34 of them, but it went so slowly that it took up maybe 25 minutes of the entire performance.
The way Betsy and her costume designer staged this, though, felt like a blow to my solar plexus. I felt literally sick to my stomach. She had each of the condemned persons dressed in ragged canvas pants and dragging a shackle from one foot. The very “fantastic” hats were perched atop a plain black hood that covered the whole face. Then beneath that each prisoner wore a ragged but clearly rectilinear poncho whose shape was clearly revealed as, just before the execution, he held his hands out to the side… Standing on a box…
Not “far away” at all.
Toothless Robb-Silberman report
Before last year’s election, things were getting so bad in Iraq that the Bush administration was forced to commission two additional studies of “what went wrong?” The higher-level of these studies was the one the Prez commissioned “personally”– the one headed by former Virginia Senator Chuck Robb and legal eagle Larry Silberman.
That one looked into “why the US intel agencies had gotten it so wrong on so many of the ‘claims’ the administration had made about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, etc, in the lead-up to the war. ” (Wrong question. It wasn’t mainly the work of the intel agencies that was faulty– though certainly, numerous mistakes were made. But it was overwhelmingly the fault of the political leaders who created a clear climate in which the intel chiefs were encouraged to bring in completely skewed intelligence… But the commission wasn’t “allowe” to look into that.)
The other, lower-level and more technical report was one produced by the quasi-nongovernmental Rand Corporation, which looked into the failures of planning for the post-war period in Iraq.
I’ve quickly skimmed the news reports about the Robb-Silberman report, and I think that today’s NYT editorial got it pretty right in its scathing critique of the report this morning:
- The president’s commission on intelligence gathering could have saved the country a lot of time, and considerable paper, by not publishing its report yesterday and just e-mailing everyone the Web addresses for the searching studies already done by the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. After more than a year’s dithering, the panel produced some 600 pages of conventional wisdom about the intelligence failures before the war with Iraq, along with a big dose of political spin that pleased the White House but provided little enlightenment for the public.
We were not optimistic when President Bush was pressured into creating this panel in February 2004. Though bipartisan, its membership lacked stature or independence, and Mr. Bush failed to give the commission a sweeping mandate that would go beyond rehashing the distressing but well-known shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. Still, it seemed worth waiting until after the election for the results because it was hard to imagine that the panel would not ask the vital questions.
Sadly, there is nothing about the central issue – how the Bush administration handled the intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and presented them to the public to win support for the invasion of Iraq. All we get is an excuse: the panel was “not authorized” to look at this question, so it didn’t bother. The report says the panel “interviewed a host of current and former policy makers” about the intelligence on Iraq, but did not “review how policy makers subsequently used that information.” (We can just see it – an investigator holding up his hand and declaiming: “Stop right there, Mr. Secretary! We’re not authorized to know what you did.”)
Just compare this job with the work of the 9/11 commission, whose chairman, Thomas Kean, battled the White House over access to documents, fearlessly expanded the inquiry and insisted that policy makers testify in public – and not just about the shortcomings of their subordinates.
The report is right in saying that American claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs were “dead wrong” because the intelligence was old or from highly dubious sources, and because the analysis was driven by a predetermined conclusion that Mr. Hussein was a threat. But we knew that.
The panel said timidly that “it is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom.” But it utterly ignored the way President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team, and Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, created that environment by deciding what the facts were and saying so, repeatedly.
It does not say that these powerful people knew or should have known that there was no new intelligence on Iraq, and that as the intelligence reports were sanitized for the public, the caveats were stripped out. Instead, it loyally maintains the fiction that Mr. Bush was just given bum information by incompetent intelligence agents.
The way the administration hyped the intelligence on Iraq is not just a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is vital that the public know the answers because Americans are now being asked to accept a new set of claims about nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. A full airing of this issue could help John Negroponte, after his expected confirmation as national intelligence director, ensure that the missteps and misrepresentations are not repeated as the nation grapples with real threats from those and other countries, not imagined threats from Iraq.
As it stands, the report has mainly negative value. It reminds us that the Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to complete and publish its investigation of the handling of the Iraq intelligence. And it shows us what the 9/11 panel’s report might have looked like if Mr. Bush had succeeded in making Henry Kissinger chairman.
Well said. In general, I think the NYT has been doing a great job with its Iraq-related editorials recently.
Of course, with the Republicans having increased their hold on the Senate in the November elections, I don’t think we should hold our breaths waiting for the Senate Intel Committee’s report to come out with a fearless exposé of the intel-handling issue, either.
A note for commenters
One of the best things about this blog is the discussion on the Comments boards. Amazing to think of this globe-circling, multicultural discussion forum under continual development here. However, my own experience and that of many other people who try to post comments is that they now often take a long, long time to post.
I am very sorry about that.
The reason for the delay is the complex anti-spam software we had to put in to save the site from the barrage of extremely nasty, often very pornographic spam that had started to come in.
We haven’t completely solved the spam problem. But we’ve succeeded in blocking a vast proportion of it. The “cost” of doing this is that all incoming comments now go through the very complex series of anti-spam filters we’ve installed. That can take time.
Someone who’s posted a comment may rapidly jump to the conclusion that the attempt to post it failed, and then try again (and again, and again, and again). If you do that, you end up with multiple iterations of the comment on the board. No big problem in that except it’s a bit of a waste of time for the commenter, and for me when I go in to delete the duplicates– and a bit of a distraction for readers.
So I’m afraid I just need to ask you for some patience. Maybe you could go off and visit another JWN post or another website for a minute or two before you come back and check whether your comment has posted. In my experience the comments-posting system is actually working pretty well these days, even if slowly. So you don’t even really need to go back and check, at all.
Except hey, it’s always nice to see one’s own words in “print”, don’t you think?
US military $$, part 2
Addenda to yesterday’s post:
(1) Commenter Christiane pointed out (from Switzerland) that the shocking recent report from the UN’s Jean Ziegler on the near-doubling of child hunger in Iraq since the start of the US occupation should also be put into the general picture of US priorities. I completely agree.
(2) I had originally meant to make a reference in the post to the old saying that, “If the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem will look like a nail.” I forgot to do that. Okay: “If the only tool you have is a hypercharged military then every problem will look like….”
(3) I always love having Dominic’s inputs from South Africa that strengthen the parallel I have increasingly been identifying (and trying to allude to in my writings) between the US’s current position with regard to the rest of the world and that of the old apartheid regime in SA to the rest of the SA citizenry…
In his comment on yesterday’s post he said the Pentagon’s planned “Future Combat System” looks like the apartheid bosses’ old “Total Strategy”. I question that a bit, though. The “Total Strategy” was the intellectual framework (intended to be both justificatory and motivational) that the apartheid-era securocrats erected and used in their brutal and demented fight against all their perceived enemies. It wasn’t the hardware of the Casspirs, the fighter planes etc, that they actually used in the fight. I think the better analogy for the TS is the “Global War on Terror”– an “intellectual” construction that is also intended to be both justificatory and motivational.
If anyone can provide a hyperlink to some text that served as the seminal or otherwise authorittative expression of the “Total Strategy” it would be interesting to do a textual comparison between that and the September 2002 “National Security Strategy” document in which Prez Bush seminally articulated the intellectual framework of the “GWOT”.
Okay, I’m not necessarily volunteering to DO the textual comparion… But once we have URLs for the two texts, we can ask for volunteers.
By the way, I think the term “securocrats” was originally a South African coinage. It is one that we should certainly seek to “globalize” and use with regard to the authors and implementers of the GWOT these days!
The irony inherent in the term itself– from my perspective– is that though “security” is the announced justificatory be-all and end-all for the basket of policies in question, actually, these policies are extremely counter-productive and have the effect of majorly undermining the security not only of their immediate targets but also of the community that spawned and supported the so-called ‘securocrats’ in the first place.
US military spending out of control
What would you buy with $419.3 billion if you had the choice?
Well, one really good first idea might be to give about $69 to every woman, man, and child on God’s earth. If the taxpayers of the US were to do that, just imagine what a change that donation might make in the lives of the most impoverished of our fellow humans! In a mid-size village in Africa, people could pool their money together and get a good ways toward producing a safe drinking-water system for everyone. Or, every 20 families (= 100 people?) could club together and hire two pretty good additional teachers for their children.
Or… or… or… There must be thousands of fabulous ideas for how to spend such a sum of money!
Instead of which, the Bush administration is proposing sinking $419.3 billion into purely military goods and services in Fiscal Year 2006.
(That’s the figure for budgeted “Discretionary Budgetary Authority”… Of course, who knows how many “supplementals” they might also come up with along the way?)
So which of those two ways of spending this humungous gob of money would seem better to serve the national security of the US and its 285 million citizens and (a deeply intertwined concept, this) the human security of all the world’s 6.1 billion people?
By way of comparison, the amount the Bush administration is requesting for all non-military international work is $33.6 billion.
And then, there is this. Namely, an article in Monday’s NYT, in which Tim Weiner wrote about the massive additional spending that some people in the Pentagon want to engage in, to upgrade the technology in the hands of the military including thru a truly mega-buck program called Future Combat Systems.
Weiner wrote:
- Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion…
That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat weapons and technologies to forces beyond [the] first 15 brigades [out of about 45].
Now some of the military’s advocates in Congress are asking how to pay the bill.
“We’re dealing today with a train wreck,” Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a March 16 Congressional hearing on the cost and complexity of Future Combat Systems…
The Army sees Future Combat, the most expensive weapons program it has ever undertaken, as a seamless web of 18 different sets of networked weapons and military robots…
But the bridge to the future remains a blueprint. Army officials issued a stop-work order in January for the network that would link Future Combat weapons, citing its failure to progress. They said this month that they did not know if they could build a tank light enough to fly. [? — HC]
The Army is asking Congress to approve Future Combat while it is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose costs, according to the Congressional Research Service, now exceed $275 billion. Future Combat is one of the biggest items in the Pentagon’s plans to build more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of more than $1.3 trillion.
The Army has canceled two major weapons programs, the Crusader artillery system and the Comanche helicopter, “to protect funding for the Future Combat System,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Armed Services Committee. “That is why we have to get the F.C.S. program right.”
I’d like to, er, humbly submit that maybe it’s not the “FCS” system that the US citizenry and our representatives in Congress “need to get right”… Maybe instead it’s our whole approach to the rest of the world?
I mean, why on earth should we think that a globalized “Manifest Destiny” mentality backed up simply by hard steel power that is also, um, “highly networked” or whatever the appropriate FCS jargon is– that this would do anything to strengthen the wellbeing of our communities or the security of our nation?
It didn’t work for the South African authors of apartheid… No reason at all it should work for us. So, please! Let’s focus all our efforts, and our spending, and our technological wizardry into getting back into right relationship with the rest of the world, instead… That way lies security. And that is the “seamless web” to which we should truly be paying attention.
Is “Yank” or “Yankee” a slur?
There’s been an interesting but fairly off-topic discussion going on on the previous JWN Comments board. Here’s the gist of it so we can continue this discussion over here:
At 11:40, Inkan wrote:
Dominic sounds strange when he brands the comments as “beyond the tolerable limit of racism” and then goes on to use “yank” as a slur.
At 12:05, Dominic wrote:
Is “yank” a slur? I refuse to write “American” to mean US people. I consider the implied claim that the US is bigger than two continents to be arrogant and insulting. If you have an alternative noun, I’m interested.
At 12:43, Inkan wrote:
I get a dehumanizing tone from the way “yank” is used in “Yankee go home” type rhetoric. ( It’s peculiar to use yank in that context. US southern right-wingers use “yankee” as a pejorative against Northerners and liberals. So “yankee go home” protesters are ironically using the same language that people in the US who have rightwing or even racist leans use. )
Well, I’ve been using “US” as an adjective in place of American, and I guess “US people” or “US residents” works as best as anything. All countries from Angola, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique on south compose the region of south Africa. So I guess then you never call yourself “South African” in reference to just the Republic of South Africa?
At 13:32, Dominic wrote:
South Africa is the country. The term used for the region is “Southern Africa”.
A noun is what I’m after. US is fine as an adjective but “US people” is clumsy. I’ve tried using it. I go back to “yank” or “Yank” with a capital Y if I’m feeling polite.
“Yankee, Go Home!” is a venerable and well-loved slogan. In itself it is a plain request for US troops to go home from the 138 countries where they now sit. That’s two out of every three countries, roughly. Perhaps you are a supporter of US bases in other countries, Inkan? In that case I have no sympathy for you.
“Yankee, Go Home!” is not the same as “Death to the Great Satan!” or anything of that kind. All the yankee has to do is go home. What’s wrong with that?
At “now”, Helena decided to put in her two-penn’orth:
I corroborate Inkan where he comments about the particular usage of “Yank/Yankee” inside the US… “Texans” go home would be more accurate in many ways but seems a little highly specific. As a collective noun for the general mass of US citizens I like “US citizenry”. But actually, what I think most people who hang out on JWN really want is for the US troops to get the heck home.
And that’s what we call for in our peace actions here inside the US: “Bring the troops HOME”, etc. Maybe keeping the focus on that is better than getting tied up with “Yankees”?
So the rest of you, feel free to join in…