See any good speeches this week? In point of fact, I did watch Obama’s all the way through, though I didn’t bother with Jindal’s response, and now I’m kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I’ve seen were pretty hilarious. I’m not sure where they were going with that entrance… it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part – an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there’s the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea… especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from “Disneyland” to Las Vegas. Interesting side note – the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it’s all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit… but then what do the Republicans have to talk about except taxes, the deficit (something they’ve apparently just determined is a bad thing), and wacky Democrat projects? With Jindal, Palin, Gingrich, and Joe “The Plumber” their headliners, they’re going to need more substance.

There are times when I think Americans, in spite of their news media, will be able to get their minds around the fact that this economic crisis is serious and needs addressing in ways that go beyond merely cutting taxes and interest rates. I’m not certain they grasp the seriousness of some of the other problems we face, not wholly unrelated to economics. The Iraq war is certainly front and center in this category. Through the tireless efforts of politicians, commentators, and news reporters (the kind who pass along lightly altered press releases to their copy editors), we have been given to understand that things are a whole lot better in Iraq now, and that aside from an explosion here and there, it’s really a very normal place. This is pretty sad. It’s like the smoldering remains of a house we burned down – the fire may be out, but the house is still destroyed. Hundreds of thousands have been killed there, millions displaced. This is a severely traumatized society that may never recover, and we can’t simply act as though our work is done there and our “mistakes” can merely be forgotten.

There was a particularly good article on Iraqi refugees in last week’s Nation Magazine. The author talked to families in Jordan and Syria about their experiences, and the stories are pretty universally bad. An example: an Iraqi man who was a member of the Baath party as part of the terms of his employment (it was a requirement for certain kinds of non-security related jobs); at some point he was kidnapped by unknown assailants, held and tortured for many weeks, such that he was partially paralyzed. During that time, gunmen invade his house and killed his 16-year-old son. His 8-year-old daughter’s school was attacked by assailants, who kidnapped her and other girls, assaulted them heinously and left them for dead (she survived, somehow). Then someone burned their house to the ground. Now they live in a one-room apartment in Syria where they have no means, no possessions, no hope, and no wish to ever return. Multiply that story by about a million and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of disaster this war represents.

We need to leave Iraq, probably faster and more completely than Obama wants to. But we also have to address the septic problem of all of these battered people exiled in penury. And we have to start yesterday.

luv u,

jp

President Obama is committing another 17,000 soldiers to the war in Afghanistan, we learned this week. Characterized even by liberals as “the good war” some time back, our occupation of that sorry place has begun its eighth year. That’s reaching Iran/Iraq war duration, and lord knows that conflict went on way too long. Only 18% of Afghans are in favor of this escalation, along with 34% of Americans (predictably higher, since we’re not the ones being surged upon). So why the hell are we still in Afghanistan, anyway? I’ve heard a lot of arguments, but none seem all that convincing, frankly – no more so than the ones I heard back when Bush decided post 9/11 to descend upon the basket case his predecessors left behind years earlier, after bankrolling fanatics like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and their terror-league allies for a decade or more. In 2001, Bush Jr. traded one set of war lords for another. What’s Obama’s plan?

I think before we as an imperial nation (don’t fight it – that’s what we are) can make that decision, we need to get used to the notion that we have no right to be there in the first place, and that occupying that country does not make us safer. Yes, yes… Osama Bin Laden lived there when 9/11 took place, but the essential planning and preparation for that hideous crime occurred not in the mountains of Afghanistan but in Germany and the United States. To this day, our government still doesn’t understand the nature of these decentralized terror groups. Our C.I.A. brags about killing senior leadership and decapitating the organization, as if Al Qaeda were organized like General Motors. It’s not. Preventing 9/11-type attacks is going to take something other than an endless supply of drone-fired missiles. For one thing, it will require more creative thinking at home with respect to prevention. Those fuckers used our own ramshackle air transportation system and our own lax building standards against us on that fateful day. My guess is that they’ll try to do the same again – identify a weakness and drive a metaphorical (or not) truck bomb through it. Just the other day, I heard the owner of nuclear power plants in my part of New York State complaining about NRC requirements for hardening new reactors against plane-crash attacks. Then there’s food safety. Yikes.

There is also the supply side of the equation to consider. We’ve got to stop making more terrorists. The Iraq war has created four million refugees – more than two million of them are stuck in squalid quarters in Jordan and Syria. Most will never see their homes again, since their neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed. That mass of dispossessed people provides fertile ground for future extremist attacks against us and anyone allied with us. They and the millions of Palestinians still rotting in refugee camps are understandably angry with the Middle East order we worked so hard to build. I’m not talking about the fantasy Middle East George Bush used to wax poetic about – I mean the actual one we’ve invested in over the past sixty years, through our deep involvement in regional affairs, our support for despotic regimes, our bankrolling of Israeli expansionism in the West Bank and adventures in Lebanon. For so many, we have been the enemy for many years – Bush merely sealed the deal. What we do from this point forward is crucial to any chance for peace in this already bloody century.

The best way to be safe is not to incentivize violence against yourself. Sending more troops, more drones, and more bombs is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

luv u,

jp