Dubya – or as Jon Stewart calls him, “still-President Bush” – pulled another grand tour this past week, dropping in on our various European allies, mugging with the crypto-fascist Sarkozy (perhaps comparing notes on how to be slightly less unpopular than he is right now), and generally doing all he can to undermine any chance of a reduction in international tensions. He took a few ceremonial swings at the Iranian punching bag, made some thinly veiled threats against Syria, etc. Quite a performance. What a pity he has to come home so soon. Wouldn’t it be great if he just kept traveling until after inauguration day? Though I suppose it doesn’t do any harm for people to see him around the White House with some regularity, if only to serve as a grim reminder of how idiotic we were to put him there in the first place. Not that a simple trip to the gas station shouldn’t be enough to accomplish that.

One place he hasn’t stopped in on lately is the failed state he created out of what was once Iraq. Whereas they managed to drop his wife into a section of Afghanistan that wasn’t blowing up long enough for her to say how sweet it is there, no surprise visit to Baghdad was conjured for junior himself. It’s almost as though they don’t want to draw too much attention to the conflict; that people are now focused on other difficulties closer to home, and that’s the way they like it. They can pursue their deeply unpopular (on both sides of the ocean) agenda without undue scrutiny, such as their status of forces agreement that would essentially authorize permanent U.S. bases in Iraq, with highly favorable terms towards American defense contractors. They’re probably hoping we won’t be thinking about that when we march into the voting booth – that we’ll instead be obsessing over Obama’s ex-preacher for his persistent blackness, or pondering how Cindy-Lou McCain looks like a refugee from Petticoat Junction (at least when she’s visiting the heartland).

Bush did spare a half-hour or so to play consoler-in-chief in the flood ravaged mid-west. (“You’ll come back better,” he reportedly told some Iowans – don’t know about them, but I was certainly scratching my head over that one.) If nothing else, he’s becoming the master of disaster; a kind of political Irwin Allen. It’s almost as if things were just waiting for him to arrive before they started totally falling apart. (Some things, of course, took a little coaxing.) Hell, even his “success stories” are disasters. More U.S. soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, for instance, than in Iraq. And while they are portraying Iraq as quiet and safe, it is still too dangerous for any of the 4.5 million refugees to return home, as Amnesty International has pointed out. For many, there are no homes to go to. They brought about a Bosnian-style ethnic cleansing, and now that it’s over, they call it success. Except that we can’t leave… because it’s not over. Got all that?

I’ve said it before – we’re not staying in Iraq to achieve some lofty goal. They’re merely inventing lofty goals because they intend to stay. That was always the intention, and so it remains. So wherever Bush goes from now on, he’ll always be in Iraq… and if we do nothing to stop it, so will we.

luv u,

jp

This seems like a good time to talk about all of the reasons why we should stay and fight in Vietnam. No, that’s not a typo nor a brain fart – Vietnam is exactly what I mean. Totally different war, of course, but the reasoning in both the public and the internal planning spheres is very much the same. It’s kind of instructive to look back at how that war was sold to us – swap a few nouns around and you’ve got the Iraq narrative, post 2003. Interestingly enough, opportunity presented itself this past week in the shape of various remembrances of Robert Kennedy on the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Amy Goodman played a tape of a talk RFK gave at St. Lawrence University in 1966 (I believe my cousin was at that event, as it happens) in which the senator responded to a question about Vietnam with a somewhat lengthy defense of LBJ’s escalation policy, in progress at the time. His justification, in essence, was the contention that the Vietcong (NLF), Hanoi, and China were hoping that the U.S. was going to “turn and run from Vietnam” and that to pull out would be “disastrous”.

Now, if you go to the speech and substitute “Mahdi Army” for “Vietcong”, “Syria” for “Hanoi”, “Iran” for “the Chinese”, and “cut and run” for “turn and run”, you’d swear he was speaking for the Bush administration circa, I don’t know, last week. This, recall, is an iconic liberal talking – people like Ronald Reagan were advocating flattening the place, paving it over, and painting stripes on it at that time (I kid you not), which is not so different from what some have said recently about Iran in polite company, come to think of it. Goodman also played an excerpt of a speech Kennedy made two years later, during a presidential campaign stop, when he had turned against the war. Much of what he said on that occasion reflects the kind of pragmatic opposition you often hear from liberals about the Iraq war these days – that it was a “mistake”, that it has been mismanaged, and that we have not been sufficiently insistent on the client government to clean up its act. Remarkably similar rhetoric.

RFK said a lot of things that year, some of it more principled, and you had the feeling that there was some movement in him along the lines of what the entire country was going through. Really, today, we have less of an excuse than folks did in those days – we have the experience of Vietnam to draw on, whereas this was new territory politically in the 1960s. And I suppose, for sentimental reasons, I always assumed that he would have ended that war sooner if elected, though I have very little concrete to go on in that regard. Same thing with Obama. His statements on Iraq carry a certain amount of equivocation, and it’s hard to say with any certainty that he will bring the Iraq hell-disaster to a close. One thing we can be sure of – the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being foisted on Iraq as we speak reflects the actual planning goals of this war more accurately than any public statements from our fearless leaders. That document will set us up for the long term military presence the war’s authors sought from the very beginning – a goal that’s very unpopular in the U.S. and in Iraq… which is why they’re not talking about it much.

So… from Bush/Cheney/McCain’s point of view, the war is nearly won, whether they’ll say so or not. That SOFA is the brass ring – worth the lives of all the U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed thus far and yet to be killed in its defense. Let’s call Washington and tell them we want no part of it.

luv u,

jp

Had to kind of shake my head a few times this week at the thought that Robert Kennedy’s assassination was 40 years ago. I mostly remember the morning after he died of his wounds, more than a day after the actual shooting, I woke to the sight of my mom pulling the Kennedy bumper sticker off my bedroom door, her grave expression rendering the news superfluous. A sliver of the sticker remained on that door for some time. Nasty days indeed.

So are these, of course, only the pain seems more concentrated in the lower echelons of society than it was in 1968, as polarized as we were in those days. Today, only volunteers are sent to war, and they are drawn overwhelmingly from the working class and poor… so a needless war like the one we started in Iraq can grind on year after year without any sign of ending, just arrogant squawkery about how much more successfully the enterprise is proceeding. Likewise, income inequality is now so extreme that those with the greatest insecurity are hobbled by even moderate rises in fuel prices, for instance, while those at the top reap the benefits of unprecedented corporate profits.

There is such a profound separation between the rulers and the ruled in this country that it seems there’s no longer any expectation on the part of ordinary people that they will have any significant voice in the conduct of public affairs. Our political leaders can literally get away with mass murder, flaunt their guilt, and remain confident in their immunity from sanction. How much more does anyone need to know about what was said and done in the lead up to the Iraq war? Is there really, really any question remaining about the Bush administration’s distortions and misrepresentations of intelligence on WMDs and Saddam’s purported links to Al Qaeda? And yet no attempt is made to hold these people accountable – not even symbolic gestures. The Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Abramses, and Rices of the world assume that we will do nothing. Thus far, they’ve been right – probably one of the only things they’ve gotten right up to now.

We need to fix this – this tendency we have to sit on our hands while outrageous crimes are committed in our names. We need to stand up when we’re being ripped off by the pirates and speculators whose representatives currently occupy the White House and halls of Congress. Failure to do so only encourages them to continue doing the same thing. Even now they’re talking about Iran almost constantly; even now they’re blackmailing the Iraqi government into allowing permanent U.S. bases in that country. They feel confident in doing all this (and more) because, aside from a little harmless unpopularity, their crimes have cost them nothing.

Time to crash Bush’s party. Can you say “censure”? How about “The Hague”?

luv you,

jp