Obama’s surge strategy is beginning to take shape, and it isn’t encouraging for those of us who question this ongoing occupation (and who have questioned the war since the beginning). The Times of London quotes a U.S. commander as describing this action in terms of a “D-Day Moment”, but in the context of a conflict that has lasted nearly twice as long as America’s part in World War II, this would seem in relative terms more like a second. Also, rather than attacking the flank of the most powerful military force in the world, we are invading a battered, impoverished region of one of the planet’s most miserable nations – a place where people struggle to subsist, and where large-scale conflict will likely result in a major displacement of the population, perhaps approaching the scale of what is now occurring across the border in Pakistan’s tribal departments.

I guess it’s up to all of us to ask, how much more of this? We’ve been in Afghanistan for almost eight years, and we are further from the place we’d said we were going than when we started. Setting aside the basic illegitimacy of our invasion, the simple fact that we’ve been there so long with neither a clear mission nor an end point in sight would be enough to sour the public’s taste for this imperial project. Unfortunately, with the change of administration, it’s as though someone has pushed the reset button. The Bush team fucked it up, the argument goes, so Obama needs to set things straight. As the president said, we took our eye off the “ball” by invading Iraq – thus the crime of invading Iraq becomes a rationale for compounding the crime of invading Afghanistan. We’re acting like a serial killer, one driven on by his/her own twisted logic. Someone grab a bit stick.  (Make mine wintergreen.)

All right, I know… I’ve gotten on my soap box about this before, but the reason why these lousy, pointless wars have so much staying power is that there is NO CONSCRIPTION and NO WAR TAX LEVIES. Our system has corrected for this oversight, which proved the undoing of our last major imperial enterprise – the Indochina wars. By eliminating these two age-old institutional pillars of warfare, we have effectively disconnected the bulk of our population from the costs of warfare. Fueled by borrowed treasure and the victims of economic misfortune, our wars have become self-perpetuating. Afghanistan and Iraq are going to be a great deal harder to stop than was Vietnam (and it was hard to stop the Vietnam war, with the end coming far too late for the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). This flurry of recent fighting is just another flare up in what has proven a far longer, more difficult campaign than anyone thought going in.  The real D-Day question is, when will our V-E day arrive?

Here’s another question: Will anyone notice that it’s over, other than the poor fuckers who have to fight it?

luv u,

jp

Right now, as I write these lines, MSNBC is probably in its fourth hour of coverage on the death of Michael Jackson, with many more to come. So much for “The Place for Politics”. I will admit to be a frequent viewer of Olbermann and Maddow – often enjoy watching them, in fact – but that network operates on a definition of politics that is nearly indistinguishable from that of personality and celebrity. So much of the discussion is about individuals, about style, about posture more than policy. Incidents like Jackson’s death put it in harsh relief. They’ll be on this for days, turning it like a roast on a rotisserie… and they won’t be alone in that. It’s just the type of narrative our pop culture loves best: the mega-star, staggeringly popular yet strangely isolated, follows a long downward trajectory into a very public disintegration, then dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Elvis all over again. That and the myth of the young crash-and-burn star (e.g. Curt Cobain) are particular favorites. I’m sorry Jackson’s dead, but honestly… is he the only one today?

We have two pointless wars going on, mind you. People are still dying by the score in Iraq, though each incident is treated like an aberration. I think the mainstream media is too focused on the bogus success story of the surge to dwell on the fact that the temporary truce appears to be falling apart. And while the spotlight is directed elsewhere, our antiwar congress has approved a massive supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan (with funds tucked in to support the IMF) and sent it to our antiwar president to sign.  This is the power of branding, my friends. As long as you sell these political actors as something different, they can do the same thing as the last group and barely raise a note of protest. Let the wise ones and the compassionate ones drive the killing/wrecking machine for a while. Surely they will wreak havoc more wisely than their predecessors.

While cable news cameras followed the ambulance block-by-block from Jacko’s mansion to the hospital, one wonders how many Iraqis met their end as a result of the violence we ignited; how many Afghans were shaken down by a kleptocratic state run by warlords and fueled by international aid dollars; how many nameless detainees were beaten, starved, electrocuted, waterboarded, or worse in some third-world dungeon on the orders of a faceless bureaucrat. And those are only the fires we started; there are also those we merely profit from, like the continuing blood-letting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and elsewhere. (And yes, before you email, we did have something to do with putting the Congo in the state it’s in today, funding and directing a terrorist army in the sixties that secured the deranged Mobutu’s grip on power.) In short, there’s no such thing as a slow news day… and no day when it becomes any less important to talk about injustice the world over.

They’re playing “Thriller” again. Ah, well. That’s all I’ve got.

luv u,

jp 

Looks like even in Iran, sometimes elections don’t turn out the way you expect. Been there, done that, right? At least our pundits can’t say it never happens here. Fraud tends to happen around the fringes in our system, when the margins are relatively tight. Iran has much more serious, systemic problems. Even so, the people there obviously know what to do when things go badly wrong – get out in the street. These are the people we want to bomb so badly. I hope Americans are taking a close look at those folks out in the street, putting their necks on the line. This is the enemy, folks – the “axis of evil”. Whatever Bush used to say about having no quarrel with the Iranian people, it is they who would suffer in the event of any confrontation between our countries, just as they have suffered in the past, when we overthrew Mossadeq in 1953, through the decades of rule by our ally the Shah, and under massive assault from our other ally Saddam Hussein during the 1980s.  Just take a real close look.

I imagine Daniel Pipes is kind of disappointed right now, since Ahmadinejad’s seems to be on the brink of evaporation. Probably still rooting for him. He and his fellow neocons just love Ahmadinejad with his over-the-top rhetoric (frequently misquoted to make him sound more threatening), and Pipes himself has professed a preference for “an enemy who is forthright, blatant, obvious” over a more conciliatory figure. Once again, the facts are being fixed around the policy. There’s a strong preference for military action against Iran amongst a faction of foreign policy hardliners, some of whom reside in the Obama administration. (My guess is Dennis Ross is the man to watch this time around.) Though he does not set foreign policy or control the military, Ahmadinejad helps them make their case. I don’t have to tell you, wars are easier to stop before they start, rather than after (See: Iraq), so this is when you should make your opinion known about opposing military action by us and/or Israel.

Does this Iran election controversy have a familiar ring to it? If so, perhaps it’s because something very similar happened in Mexico in 2006, when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ran against Filipe Calderon and most likely won the election, but was chiseled out of the presidency by Calderon (with the full support of the Bush administration, of course). To look at news coverage of Mexico today and its relationship with the United States, you would never know that there was any question surrounding Calderon’s election. Massive street protests yielded no change, no re-run of the election, no nothing. Could be that Iran’s current uprising will end the same way, despite the hopes of many. That would be sad for the many in Iran who wanted things to change, but with respect to U.S. policy, it is we who must change, whoever the president may be. We’ve invaded and occupied countries on both sides of Iran, we regularly threaten them with massive destruction, and yet we speak of them as the outlaw state. Hypocrisy, anyone?

Let’s show some solidarity with those brave folks in Iran. And let’s start by telling our government to rule out military action against them.

luv u,

jp