Tag Archives: NPR

Political Rants

Bombs and debt.

As I begin to write this, I am hearing a TV commentator quoting David Brooks in writing that Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner is someone worthy “of some sympathy.” You read that correctly – the impossibly wealthy protege of our phony-ass billionaire president, a man with zero qualifications or apparent ability to perform even one of the many portfolios handed to him over the past few months … that man is worthy of sympathy. THAT’S the kind of week this has been.

Nevertheless, I am not going to grab the low-hanging fruit of writing about the Trumpster fire, even though the fucker pulled out of the Paris Accords this week. I’ll deal with his ass next time around.

Yeah, they owe us, right?Talk about ungrateful. I heard a story this week on NPR about a loan the government of Cambodia owes to the United States, in the amount of about $500 million. There were a couple of remarkable points about this story. For one, the piece actually acknowledges that some scholars think the massive bombing of Cambodia may have contributed to the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge. That’s a pretty big step forward for mainstream media, which usually follows the line that Cambodia was a peaceful, happy country before the arrival of Pol Pot. They also mention the bombing itself – another practical miracle. What they leave out is that the loan in question was made to a coup regime installed with the full support of the United States. Slight omission there, right?

My favorite part is the quote from U.S. Embassy spokesperson Jay Raman saying that (1) we’ve given Cambodia close to a billion dollars in aid since the 1990s and (2) we “lack the legal authority to write off debts for countries that are able but unwilling to pay.” Really? The loan was supposedly to pay for food to replace crops destroyed by years of carpet bombing – bombing that began well before the 1970 U.S. invasion, by the way. What legal authority did we have to terror bomb them in the first place? What legal authority did we have to push a coup regime on them, or to invade them in 1970?

Don’t tell me this is beyond our ability. We owe the Cambodian people a hell of a lot more than the amount of this odious debt.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

The end, again.

Troops are rolling into Fallujah once again, under the cover of our air force and whatever deadly ordinance it’s dropping this time around. Last time, during the “second battle of Fallujah,” our arsenal included depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Fallujah was one of the first points of resistance to our 2003 invasion. U.S. forces rolled into town and set up shop in a school building. There were protests about their presence as well as their use of the facility and on April 28, 2003 and again two days later, members of the U.S. 82nd Airborne fired on the crowd, killing 17 Iraqis. (See this synopsis in TruthOut, drawing on reporting by Jeremy Scahill.) That was the start of a long and beautiful friendship.

What "success" looks like.Today, the Baghdad government is ripping Fallujah yet another new asshole. It’s worth recalling that the ISIS militants they are fighting in that unfortunate city are mostly disaffected Sunnis, the most senior of which were probably part of Saddam’s army, the younger ones simply kids with no future, like so many Gazans or West Bank Palestinians. Malcolm Nance reminds us that, prior to our 2003 invasion, there were no Al Qaida to speak of in Iraq; after the invasion, they numbered in the low thousands. It wasn’t until the utter failure of the post-invasion regime to incorporate Sunnis into society (and, yes, the arrest and disappearance of many at the hands of the Iraqi security forces) that these young people became fodder for opportunistic Salafi organizations like ISIS.

Trouble is, we don’t remember much about even our most recent wars, let alone those fought decades ago. I heard an interview on NPR today with two New York Times reporters based in Beirut, reporting on the Syrian conflict, and they suggested that the rules of war are being broken in an unprecedented way in Syria. My first thought upon hearing this was, hadn’t these people heard of, say, Fallujah in 2004? Then a few minutes later in the broadcast, the reporters said one of them had covered the second Fallujah battle. So …. were we following any rules of war worth mentioning? Do we ever? Did we in Vietnam, really? Where did the Phoenix program fit into those “rules”? How about Operation Ranch Hand?

The Syrian conflict is horrible, truly. It won’t stop until the belligerents and all interested parties (including us) let go of their maximal objectives. But let’s not pretend it’s uniquely horrible. Not when we have the rubble of Fallujah to consider.

luv u,

jp

 

Political Rants

Memory’s minefield.

It’s always interesting when American Presidents in particular visit nations we have destroyed in past wars. This past week President Obama traveled to Hiroshima to deliver the resounding message that we are not sorry …  repeat, not sorry …  for using the most destructive weapons in the history of mankind on this unfortunate community. He also delivered some claptrap about reducing the number of nuclear weapons, even as his administration moves forward with an ambitious plan to engineer a highly destabilizing new generation of nuclear weapons.

U.S. to mankind: still not sorry.Empire means more than never having to say you’re sorry. It mostly means never even contemplating the concept of “sorry” – an imperial value not lost on the likes of NPR, whose Morning Edition host Renee Montagne reliably informed us that “in America – the view of the bombing – though everyone recognizes this as horrific – the view of the bombing is it was done because it had to be done.” So that’s what “the view” is, eh? Thanks, Renee. Up to your usual journalistic standards.

Obama’s previous stop was in Vietnam. No apologies there, either. Though the central thrust of his mission was to announce the lifting of an arms embargo on Vietnam that has been in place since the American war began, tightened under Reagan. Obama referred to this as a vestige of the Cold War, though the Cold War was not so cold in Vietnam, it bears reminding. Interestingly, the President’s aims in Vietnam are not dissimilar from the aims of the American war itself. One of the core objectives of U.S. policy in its Indochina wars was that of keeping the region from accommodating to China so that they would instead provide materials, markets, and cheap labor to Japan – an American version of the “co-prosperity sphere” imperial Japan aggressively sought to establish in the 1930s and ’40s.

Today, the goal is … well … to have Vietnam integrated into the American-led global economic order, via the TPP and other instruments, thereby containing what our government perceives as China’s expansionism. It is, in some respects, an effort to reclaim the maximal objective of the Vietnam war, which proved beyond our reach. (I tend to agree with Chomsky, however, that the U.S. did, in fact, essentially prevail in the Vietnam war by destroying three countries and ensuring that Indochina’s crippled post-war independence would serve as a model for no one.)

The coverage of this trip has been pretty abysmal. No surprise there. Once the mainstream media has worked out what “the view” is on a given topic, there’s no point in wasting any energy on actual reporting.

luv u,

jp