Needlenose

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.

I’ve been warning for some time about the rising levels of wrong-wing hate, and how that hate is again turning to either outright violence, preparing for violence or just simple hate-mongering and hate-speech that can incite others to violence.  Now others are noticing a dramatic resurgence of militia activity that is

“(is) reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s – right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called “sovereign citizens” are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups”

Did you catch the news about the wing-nut who brought and dropped a gun at a political meeting?  I mean I know the reactionaries are crazy and stupid, but do they really believe the Libruhls are gonna attack their crazy tea-bag parties and protests?  Don’t they realize that we aren’t armed?

Back in the Clinton era my own life was threatened by some wing-nut because I had posted a tongue-in-cheek website parodying the ‘black helicoper’ crowd (the main reason why I remain anonymous on this site).  Bad as the Bush years were, the wing-nuts seemed to calm down in spite of the volume and stridency of the reactionary media hate speakers like Billo the Clown and Ann Coulter.

However the massive rejection of the Repugs at the polls and the election of a centrist President seems to have thrown them back into a frenzy that if anything seems even nastier and scarier than before.  Living in San Francisco as I do I rarely encounter reactionaries, but today I was having a conversation with a self-described “moderate” from the South who went on at length about Obama’s Socialist agenda for health care and financial services, and railed about the swelling deficit – a guy who never squawked once about how Shrubya threw Clinton’s balanced budget to the wind and drove up the deficit like a two-bit lobbyist with a federal credit card.

I guess one of the downsides of the end of the “War on Terror” is that the reactionary talking heads have turned the other half of their hate rhetoric, formerly targeted at the Islamic world, at us Libruhls, again firing at us figuratively and literally with ‘both barrels.’

*Update* Bill Clinton better worry if he plans to participate in the contentious health care ‘town hall’ meetings - wing-nuts might use this guy’s technique to conceal an assassination weapon.

President Obama explained his purpose right away in his symbolic address to the Muslim world from Cairo yesterday:

So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation . . . .

I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.

Not surprisingly, Karl Rove — this country’s most infamous practitioner of the politics of division and disrespect — wasn’t amused (via ThinkProgress):

ROVE: You know what? Who cares about whether or not they approve or like the president of the United States?. . .

I thought one commentator put it pretty good. The most powerful thing that Barack Obama has done to win the respect of the Islamic people, of the Muslim people around the world was three well-placed shots to end a negotiation with terrorists who had hijacked a U.S. boat.

As the last couple of U.S. election cycles should have taught him, Rove’s understanding of human nature is backwards. I’ll never forget this chilling anecdote from a Los Angeles Times story in March 2003:

In Doha, just a few miles from the U.S. Central Command base where Gen. Tommy Franks stands ready to run a war against Iraq, a theater audience made up mainly of Qataris breaks into applause as the leading actor reacts to television scenes of the collapsing World Trade Center towers with the words: “Americans go around punishing everyone. Now it’s time to let them feel something.“

Remorseless displays of American power generate not respect, but rather a desire for revenge. That’s why it was so important for the world to see a U.S. president speaking knowledgeably and respectfully about Islam, emphasizing our country’s ideals and a desire to build a future together. And that’s why it’s just as important for Obama to back up these words by disengaging us as rapidly as possible from Iraq and Afghanistan so the Muslim world’s view of us isn’t shaped by images of hostility and destruction.

A changed worldwide view of the United States is our best hope for a more peaceful, less militarized future. Then again, that’s probably exactly what Karl Rove is worried about, isn’t it?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

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.

Via CBC:

A Quebec businessman whose name is one of the many that have erroneously landed on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s flight passenger watch list has decided to change his name to avoid lengthy security hassles at the airport.

Mario Labbé, an executive with a Montreal-based record company, says his Canadian passport triggers a red alert on the computers of U.S. customs agents every time he tries to board a flight to the U.S. — which is about once a month for the past seven years.
…
Although Labbé wrote letters to the U.S. department, his efforts were in vain, prompting him to legally change his name.

“So now, my official name is François Mario Labbé,” he said.

“Then you have to change everything: driver’s license, social insurance, medicare, credit card — everything.”

Although it’s not a big change from Mario Labbé, he said it’s been enough to foil the U.S. customs computers.

It turns out that terrorists aren’t allowed to legally change their name, so I guess we can consider that security hole firmly plugged.

Broken Laws, Broken Lives.

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.

News item: “An internal White House document outlining President Bush’s re-election agenda starts with “War on terrorism (Con’t)” and homeland security,” reports the Associated Press…