Needlenose

…if it’s taken them so long to realize that weapons of mass destruction are readily available at gunshows across America.  Or maybe all the hoopla about ‘sleeper cells’ was total Bush bullshit, as I’ve suspected for years.  If there were any sleeper cells, and they had any brains, they’d do the next attack American style, driving Monster Trucks into Oil Refineries in Texas, with retrofitted fully automatics blazing.  At that point they may as well convert to Fundee Christianity and attack abortion clinics…then they’d have Palin and the rest of the Reactionaries rooting for them.

Imagine this WWII headline:

“Japanese attempt to fire a bullet at American forces. Republicans demand Roosevelt’s resignation”.

Now you’ve got a picture of the basic lack of seriousness and rationality associated with the right-wing claims, and the media’s stenography, about the Lap Bomber incident.  The basic premise of the Cheneyites argument is that, while we are engaged in a worldwide war against an implacable and omnipresent foe,  if one enemy footsoldier attempts one act of war anyplace in the world, it signifies that everyone in the administration has failed in their duty and must resign.  Predictably, rather than pointing out that, when at war, enemies fight back and casualties can occur, the media swallows whole the moronic paradigm of risk-free, casualty-free global war as presented by Cheney and Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra.

The Republican strategy for exploiting politically the failed bombing attempt is conveniently outlined in Murdoch’s house organ for the right, the Wall Street Journal.  While Rep. Hoekstra, in a direct mail appeal, calls the Obama administration and Democrats “weak-kneed liberals”, and Cheney clangs his familiar gong of inexperience and mushiness, the best Axelrod can come up with is to call it “unbecoming” of Republicans to exploit national security politically.  WSJ notes that the White House has leaked to bloggers the fact that the Yemeni Al Queda leaders are former Guantanamo inmates released by Bush, and has also publicized some high-profile arrests, like the David Headley case.  The thing that no-one dares do is question the basic premise that the US can be engaged in multiple shooting wars in the Middle East, while also using unmanned drones to target suspects in multiple countries  where we are not officially at war (unfortunately slaughtering a few wedding parties in the bargain), without any cost or interruption to the daily security of Americans at home. 

As illustrated by my fictitous headline, if Republicans really believed their rhetoric of war, it would be obvious that wars presume enemies, and enemies fight back.  Wouldn’t it be refreshing if some intrepid journalist pointed out the fact that, in war, especially guerilla wars with no borders and no defined state actors, civilians are at risk, and that that is the price of “superpower” status and world policeman actions?

So can Obama and Democrats use this line of argument to bolster their case? Unfortunately, the answer is clear.  Unlike the British, who, while thoroughly despicable in their conduct of colonial empire, at least kept the stiff upper lip when the inevitable casualties ensued, the American public, body politic and media is so fundamentally immature that the idea of war without sacrifice (except some poor anonomous farmboys and homeboys whose official portraits scroll by on the evening news) is accepted as the norm, and any hostile act shakes our republic to the core. Any politician who notes that empire has cost, that enemies have resources, and that hypocrisy and abandonment of our core principles, as demonstrated by our support of Israeli exceptionalism and torture for convenience, has a price, would be committing political suicide for stating what any mature advisor would consider obvious. 

Would it have been a tragedy if that plane had been blasted from the sky?  Obviously, as it is a tragedy that the Taliban has murdered an entire CIA station in Afghanistan.  The greater tragedy is the fact that the solidarity in face of war that lead to the defeat of a far more dangerous and implacable foe in WWII has been abandoned by the Babbitts of the Republican right in their desperation to reclaim the right to undo our republic from within, as they have successfully done during every Repug administration in recent history.  And the foundational catastrophe of our age is that the press, in its laziness and frivolity, accepts every shoddy premise put forth by the know-nothing caucus as if it’s a serious critique, without once noting that a lie is a lie, or that a failed party with blood on its hands from 9/11 to Iraq to Abu Ghraib to Palestine to the dismantling of our moral legitimacy and economic stability has little right to give lessons in war policy.

Well at least I’m glad they are finally talking about the ‘new strategies” for the Afghanistan war.  Not sure why they waited so damn long though.

Frankly I’m with Colin Powell on this one – Mr. Obama, please be clear on what you hope to accomplish with U.S. Troops, and what conditions will trigger the end of the operation – give us a frickin’ exit strategy!!

The unspoken exit strategy, of course, is the neutralization of the Taliban & the destruction of Al Qaeda’s safe haven in the region, which as I’ve suggested before, is impossible without expanding the conflict into Western Pakistan.

Since the Pakistani government is scared to death of inviting US troops into the country to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the ground, and since we can’t invade without their permission, this pretty much rules out the current exit strategy.

So I imagine the conversation is pretty much revolving back to the old Nixon standby “how do we translate ‘Peace with Honor’ into Pashtun.”

Here we are again, ethnic majority actively colonizing a region full of ethnic minorities, promulgating harsh assimilationist policies and then acting surprised when said minority takes to the streets and fights back.  In this case, it’s the Han-Chinese dominated PRC versus the Uighurs in their Western Provinces.

Typically, the PRC fabricated some story about how the Uighurs started it all, blocked any unofficial accounts, and blamed everything on Islamic extremism, terrorism and outside agitators meddling in Chinese internal affairs.  A former Uighur political prisoner provides an alternative, and in my view a more highly likely accounting of the events that lead to the recent riots.

Why do I consider this more likely?  From stories I’ve heard and things I’ve read.  For example, a buddy of mine went to a University in Xian for a couple of years in the early 80s.  At the school were numerous African students.  One night, an African student was seen getting too chummy with a Chinese girl in town.  A vigilante mob armed with various clubs and implements ran around town looking for Africans to beat up.  The students retreated to the dorms and they were locked down for the night, and a curfew was imposed until things calmed down.

In another adventure travel book I read, the author recalled hiring a truck out of Urumchi heading East.  Their young driver didn’t have a truck driving permit.  The truck was stopped, and the driver was hauled out of the car and beaten with truncheons for a few minutes. 

This situation is an familiar slow-motion train wreck.  You’d think some leader, somewhere, would reflect for a minute about the situation in Eastern Turkey with Turks vs. Kurds, or Isreal and it’s occupation of the West Bank, but no.  The PRC followed up on the rights with repressive measures, gunning down Uighur protestors.  I’m sure things will quiet down for a bit, but there are now hundreds of grieving and angry Uighur families out there who won’t forget this anytime soon.

It’s one thing to pick on the Buddhist Tibetans – they aren’t known for suicide bombings and jihads.  The Uighurs certainly aren’t Wahabi wing nuts, but shoot at them and beat them enough and you’ll end up with an Al Qaeda of Western China in no time.

So instead of working with local Uighur leaders (if there actually are any!) to reverse hateful assimilation and colonization policies and trying to mediate the situation, they just pull out the old violent playbook and wave the train on down the track.

Several weeks ago I wrote a despairing post about the state of our war in Afghanistan, criticizing Obama for following Shrubya’s tired strategy of fighting a counter-insurgency conflict in Afghanistan while the enemy thrived, unmolested, across the border in Pakistan.

Since then, Pakistan really bumped up their game and has made major gains in fighting the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their sympathizers in the Swat Valley.

I should probably have posted something about that  earlier, but their past claims of ‘victories’ and gains were either gross hyperbole or outright lies.  However, I’m actually heartened by Osama Bin Laden’s latest missive blaming Obama for “ordering” President Zardari to attack the guerrillas.

Check out the speech – it strikes me as the typical ‘tough talk’ a leader has to give when his followers are backed into a corner – kinda like that some of the speeches given by the (now dead) head of the Tamil Tigers as his guerrillas were increasingly trapped by Sri Lankan forces.  The other comforting thought is that Obama could actually ‘order’ President Zardari to do anything!  Don’t you wish that were true?  I guess American Liberals aren’t the only people that believe Obama has magical powers!

It’s much too early to determine if this is a true sea change in the battle – who knows how many Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors donned burkhas and slipped out among the civilian refugees?  And don’t forget that Pakistan is only one of the countries bordering Afghanistan suitable for a base for the guerrillas, and that is a horribly corrupt country at that.

But it’s definitely cause for optimism – let’s hope this reduces some of the strain on President Karzai and the NATO forces in Afghanistan!

*Update 6/4/09* A friend of mine just got back from a couple of weeks in Karachi – he tells me things are really messy there right now – lots of internal divisions between groups such as the Muhajirs and the Pashtuns are boiling up to the surface resulting in pitched street fighting.

I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’  Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.

After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy.   Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that  enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.

9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror.  They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.

The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.

In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then  install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’   Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.

Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more.  The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains.  The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’

Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.

Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.

Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.

First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror.  It’s impossible.  It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents.  Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.

Terrorists come in many flavors.  Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists.  No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear.    This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!

I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.

This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists.   Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there.  Ergo – stalement.

How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again?  It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground.  And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global?  There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.

Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy.  And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog.  Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds.  Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.

Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs -  and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.

Heading home for the holidays? Dreading the inevitable collision with that Libertarian uncle or redneck cousin where you both unavoidably launch into a heated, and family-alienating political discussion after he/she taunts you with Bush? Well, this year stay cool and stay on-message with these handy talking points on so-called conservative issues:

Fiscal responsibility:
* $1/2 trillion-dollar budget deficit and climbing, of which:
* $300 billion is pure government welfare pork
* $100-200 billion additional pork pending in the Energy and Prescription Drug bills
- Remind him/her that Clinton balanced the budget

Small government
* 12.5% growth in Federal Government last year
- Remind him/her that Gore, working for Clinton, trimmed 300K federal jobs and reduced Federal spending 3% (as share of GDP)

Fighting Terrorism
* Where’s Osama?
* Why are the Taliban operating out of Pakistan with impunity?
* Why weren’t the CIA/FBI heads and their staffs sacked?
* What happened to the 9/11 investigation?
* Why does Bush withhold information about possible Saudi complicity in 9/11
* Why is Al Qaeda still blowing things up around the world?

The War in Iraq
* War crimes (on the basis of Geneva Conventions) due to U.S. criminal negligence:
# 1,500 civilians killed in uncontrolled looting following the fall of Baghdad; insufficient forces on the ground
# 12,000 unique, priceless artifacts looted from the Iraqi Art Museum
# 1 million unique, priceless historical documents burned in the Iraqi National Library
# 8kg of uranium missing from looted Tuwaitha reactor; enough for several ‘dirty bombs’
# Thousands of Arabs ‘ethnically cleansed’ from Kurdistan
# Dozens killed in ‘reprisal’ slayings and ethnic civil war
# Destruction of houses, farms and other personal property in punative raids
# Hundreds of Iraqis being held without trial or tribunal
# Occupational Authority making significant changes to Iraqi legal system
# Occupational Authority making long term committments of Iraqi resources
*War botched:
# Where’s Hussein?
# Where are the WMD?
# 294 casualties since war ‘ended’
# Soldiers suffering dozens of daily guerilla attacks, the pace is increasing
# Guerillas have easy access to Hussein’s old arsenal
# Large political bloc militias still run free and armed
# No credible Coalition Government has been set up
# Strong-arm tactics appear to be further alienating the civilians
- Remind him/her that Clinton won the war against Serbia without a single U.S. soldier lost

Civil Liberties
* Patriot Act ‘sneak and peak’ provisions clearly unconstitutional
* DeLay used Homeland Security to spy on the movements Texas state legislators
* Why do Bush and war opponents end up on ‘no-fly’ lists?
* The FBI is spying on anti-war protestors
*The Secret Service is selectively enforcing ‘free speech areas’ – America is a free speech area!

I’m under no illusion that I can convince any of my reactionary relations to budge from their simplistic world-view, and I won’t try to persuade you that you will have any better luck. We can, however, potentially discourage them from contributing to Bush Co., and maybe, if they are lazy as well as misguided, discourage them from casting a vote next year. BTW, South Knox Bubba has a more comprehensive list of more general Bush failings that might be useful in political discussions with your non-rabid relations.

MSNBC on WMD

It’s Colin Powell’s turn this week as lead dog pulling the administration’s PR sled in Iraq, describing our occupation there as part of the WarOnTerrorWarOnTerrorDon’tAskQuestionsWe’reFightingAWarOnTerror:

He said the security situation remains challenging, with a “major new threat” coming from “terrorists who are trying to infiltrate into the country for the purpose of disrupting this whole process.”

The secretary gave a rough estimate of 100 such infiltrators and said he was confident that the U.S. military can handle the problem.

Wow. If 100 foreigners in the entire country are the cause for 150-plus dead Americans, the 1,200-plus wounded, the destruction of Iraq’s water and electricity infrastructure and more, I’m not sure our military can handle these terrorist supermen!

The fact, of course, is that foreign “terrorists” are at most a small fraction of the problem our military is dealing with. This Knight-Ridder article (link via Juan Cole) shows the real nature of the resistance, from a reporter who interviewed actual guerrilla cell leaders:

The two cell leaders said their fighters primarily were former Iraqi army officers and young Iraqis who had joined because they were angry over the deaths or arrests of family members during U.S. raids in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his supporters.

The group also shelters remnants of a non-Iraqi Arab unit of Saddam’s elite Fedayeen militia force as well as foreigners who slipped across the country’s long and porous borders to battle American troops, they said. Abu Abdullah, who directs the camp near Baquba, said he came to Iraq shortly before the United States invaded it last spring.

Both cell leaders said they were willing to talk because they didn’t want the story of what was going on in Iraq to be told only from the American military’s standpoint. Abu Abdullah said he wanted to tell people he didn’t consider himself a terrorist, but the enemy of “U.S. imperialism.”

. . . Both spoke disdainfully of “Wahabbis,” as hard-line Sunni Muslim followers are called. Abu Mohammed said there was no contact with members of al Qaida at his level; Abu Abdullah broke off the interview before the question could be asked. But he said his fighters were too valuable to participate in suicide missions, a hallmark of al Qaida, and he rejected the label of terrorist.

“Can you describe a man who defends his country as a terrorist?” asked Abu Abdullah, who said he was 31. “Iraq is the land of prophets and the birthplace of civilization. We will fight until we shed the last drop of our blood for this country.”

This is really a fascinating article, by the way, with glimpses of how the guerrillas operate — I strongly recommend reading it.

Another example of how revenge feeds the anti-U.S. resistance is shown in this article on the funerals of the Iraqi policemen we killed a few days ago:

Mourners gathered under tribal banners and vowed to spill “the blood of the American killers” for the death of an Iraqi policeman and eight security guards killed when US troops opened fire during a high-speed police chase.

Many of the scores of gunmen in the town 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad wore masks. A few carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) and one pledged “we will conduct an operation tonight to avenge the martyrs.”

And they were as good as their word, with one American killed and three wounded near Fallujah that very evening.

Meanwhile, the killing of the Iraqi police is bound to encourage the “terrorist” sympathizers in other police departments:

KHALDIYA, Iraq, Sept. 13 — The convoy of U.S. military engineers had just entered this rough-and-tumble town when disaster struck. They had a flat tire, stopping the convoy along a ribbon of desert asphalt some Iraqis have nicknamed “the highway of death.”

Soon after, masked guerrillas fired two rocket-propelled grenades. Machine guns crackled across the late afternoon sky. When it ended an hour later, witnesses said, homes were gouged with large holes, two U.S. vehicles were burning, and the soldiers had beat a retreat.

On the sidelines throughout the clash Thursday were Khaldiya’s police, who are supposed to be the allies of the U.S.-led occupation in restoring order to Iraq. Not only was it not their fight, several said this week, but the guerrillas fighting U.S. soldiers had their blessing.

“In my heart, deep inside, we are with them against the occupation,” said Lt. Ahmed Khalaf Hamed, an officer with the 100-man force trained, equipped and financed by U.S. authorities. “This is my country, and I encourage them.”

And I guess these people are more terrorists:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Black-robed women wept for lost sons. Old men brandished death certificates with photos of bombed homes and scarred bodies. Jobless men begged for work.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell visited the main U.S. headquarters in Baghdad Sunday, desperate Iraqis kept up a daily ritual at barbed wire barriers outside.

Knowledge that Powell was just a stone’s throw away — meeting Iraq’s U.S. governor Paul Bremer inside one of the former palaces of deposed President Saddam Hussein — heightened the clamor beyond the gates.

“He must be told that the Iraqi people have gained nothing from the American war. Now it is much worse than under Saddam,” said Mushtaq Talib, 28.

A message from the cluephone for Secretary Powell: Until your administration admits that its problems in Iraq are homegrown — and often of our own making — it’s going to be very hard to believe that you’re serious about solving them.

Only really stupid terrorists would unleash germs on an enemy – and terrorists are usually crazy, not stupid.The as-yet-unexplained anthrax spore attacks following September 11th had an effect missing from the twin towers event – they struck terror in the heart of Main Street U.S.A. The Al Qaeda attacks, horrific as they were, seemed isolated, freakish, and…obvious. The anthrax attacks were spread across several states, with seemingly random casualties. But how seriously should we take the threat of germ-based bioterror?

Don’t be ridiculous, we can’t take it seriously at all.  Bioweapons are games for superpowers.   But even if a motley gang of terrorists were given something like a souped-up weaponized smallpox, why would they use it?  Sure, they’d give the Great Satan a black eye, killing a few hundred thousand or even a million people - but the West has groups like the CDC and modern infrastructure.

The major die-off would be in the third-world – in those failed or failing states where the terrorists and their extended families live.  In the earliest moments of a super plague, people would be jumping on planes and spreading the pathogen across the globe.

Terrorists may be crazy, but I wouldn’t call them stupid.