Why Do Debacles Like Iraq Happen?

Zeitgeist: What do Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve have in common?

The more you begin to investigate what we think we understand, where we came from, what we think we're doing, the more you begin to see we've been lied to, we've been lied to by every institution...

"Zeitgeist is originally a German expression that means 'the mind of the age', literally translated as 'time (Zeit) mind (Geist)'. It denotes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era." --wikipedia

John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Address to the American Newspaper Publishers, 27 April 1961

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.
...
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence -- on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.
...
Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed -- and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment -- the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution -- not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply "give the public what it wants" -- but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate, and sometimes even anger public opinion.

Zeitgeist 2007: 1 hr 56 min. Or watch the film in parts on the flip.

• Part 1: 26 min: Greatest story ever told



• Part 2: 33 min: All The World's A Stage



• Part 3: 47 min: Don't mind the men behind the curtain

What do Christianity, 911 and The Federal Reserve have in common?

This is the full Zeitgeist production.

"They must find it difficult...
Those who have taken authority as the truth,
rather than truth as the authority."
--Gerald Massey, Egyptologist (1828–1907)

Part 1: 26 min: Greatest story ever told:

This section explores the little known foundations of the Cult of Equinoctial Christolatry (Christianity) which, unannounced to most, rests in the astrotheological belief systems of the ancient world.

Part 2: 33 min: All The World's A Stage:

9/11/2001 was the production of the century. "and the Emmy goes to..."

Part 3: 47 min: Don't mind the men behind the curtain:

The Revolution is Now.

The men behind the curtain?

In order to regain its status as the respected leader of the world's nations, America must eradicate the neoconservative movement from its body politic, and the only '08 presidential candidates committed to that goal appear to be Democrat Dennis Kucinich and Republican Ron Paul. If you think the neoconservatives packed up shop subsequent to their Mesopotamia mistake, think again. The neocons not only didn't learn anything from Iraq, they're betting large that nobody else did either--and that's a bet they stand a good chance of winning.
...
The top tier candidates from both parties talk of new approaches to the Iraq problem, but none of them--with the possible exception of Barack Obama--offer anything realistic that's substantively different from "stay the course." And though Kucinich and Paul touch on the essential task that lies ahead in setting the course of U.S. foreign policy, the mainstream information gatekeepers continue to treat them like pipsqueaks.

Is it possible that, under the surface, all of America's national profile politicians have crawled into the neocons' pockets?
...
With the exception of significantly increasing America's defense spending, the neocons' dreams of U.S. global dominance have dashed themselves against the shoals of reality. Today, though we spend more than the rest of the world combined on defense, friends and enemies alike shun us. We have to kiss up to countries like Turkey and Pakistan while the greatest threats to our national security are backwater outfits like Iran and North Korea, all states whose economies and defense budgets are less than five percent of ours and none of whom would amount to a pimple on our posterior if we hadn't let the neocons persuade us to stick said posterior into the crack its in now. Moreover, our security, prosperity and principles are more in peril than they have been since the beginning of World War II, and as recent events in Pakistan illustrate, our efforts to promote political freedom abroad have been dismal failures.
...
If America were still a true republic, the neocons would have been ridden out of town two years ago at the latest; they don't have enough tar, feathers or rails in Washington D.C. to give those characters the kind of send off they deserve. But they're still around and reeking havoc. Dick Cheney still lurks in undisclosed locations in between appearances at GOP fundraising and warmongering functions. Cheney side buoys like David Addington continue to infest the White House. Backyard variety chicken hawks such as John Bolton, Fred Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Newt Gingrich hang out in the Scholars and Fellows lounge of the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.

There's more: "Why Do Debacles Like Iraq Happen?" >>

It's a Catch-22

Staying humane vs. staying alive.

I'm a couple of days late to this, but Matt Yglesias makes an obvious but crucial point regarding the futility of our adventure in Iraq:

The crux of the matter is that soldiers in ambiguous situations
understandably tend to err on the side of their own personal safety and that of
their fellow soldiers. Likewise, officers faced with ambiguous situations tend
to err on the side of giving the soldiers under their command the benefit of the
doubt. And courts-martial, likewise, err on the side of taking a favorable view
of American soldiers.

All of which is fine. Unless you happen to be an Iraqi. Which is
precisely why people tend not to enjoy being under foreign military
occupation.

The reality of the matter is that to succeed, our troops would need to
behave the way police officers do. But they're not cops, they're soldiers. And
there's a good reason that soldiers act the way soldiers do. There's no way that
it would be politically feasible -- or even appropriate -- for the US military
to start treating Iraqi lives as more important than American lives. But that
would be the only way to actually pull off what they've been asked to pull off.
It's an impossible situation, and not one we should be putting people in.

The impossible situation isn't just limited to Iraq, however. This is a question I have wrestled with for a long time: can this war actually be conducted while maintaining the ideals of freedom and human rights that Americans and the West hold dear? I wanted to believe it was possible, but I don't really see it. It is always easy to talk about preserving the rights of those you fight against, but it's much more difficult to tell soldiers whose friends are dying before their eyes to respect the human rights of the people doing the shooting. (I can attest to this from personal experience: the only time I have actually wished someone dead was when he was shooting at me.)

The problem only gets worse when you start talking about assymmetrical warfare in which the enemy doesn't just look like a regular citizen, he is a regular citizen (or at least a subset of the regular citizenry that is indistinguishable from the rest of them). Given the choice between self-protection and large geopolitical goals (not that I'm convinced we have any), the Iraqis are going to lose every time.

So what do we do about this? We can't legitimately tell our brave sons and daughters and their families to go out there and take one for the team, but the more vigorously they protect themselves, the more innocent Iraqis die, and the further from our goal of establishing a peaceful rule-of-law democracy we get.

The result has been a mishmash of lofty rhetoric at the strategic level ("we do not torture") and hard-as-nails pragmatism at the tactical level (we torture). Soldiers are told that their safety is priority number one, then sent out into the battlespace with rules of engagement that ensure the enemy will get off a few shots before our guys have time to react. To say that this situation is untenable is to understate the case by quite a bit: it's a situation in which the soldiers are scarcely able to act without either breaking the rules or putting themselves at extra risk.

This is why being the "shining city on the hill" pretty much precludes preemptive war, leaping into battle without a coherent strategy and/or ill-defined objectives, overthrowing dictators who pose no threat to our nation's security, and occupation of foreign lands: everything we do in the interest of these things is either done counter to our values as a nation or at an especially great risk to our soldiers. Essentially we're telling our soldiers that they must find a balance between dying with honor or living with ignominy. That they tend to find ways to muddle through this with their consciences intact is a testament to their resilience, but they should have never been put in that position in the first place.

Yet another reason why "supporting the troops" doesn't mean supporting the way the President uses them, it means opposing the Presidents who would capriciously send them into needless, poorly planned and unwinnable wars.

There's more: "It's a Catch-22" >>

In Search Of A Reality

Good opinion piece from the NYT yesterday... for the most part.

They start off so well it's tempting to go with them all the way...

In Search of a Congress
NYT, Friday 21 September 2007

If you were one of the Americans waiting for Congress, under Democratic control, to show leadership on the war in Iraq, the message from the Senate is clear: "Nevermind." The same goes for those waiting for lawmakers to fix the damage done to civil liberties by six years of President Bush and a rubber-stamp Republican Congress.

The NYT editors have missed the boat in two places, however. They've nailed the problem with the GOP, but make the I think badly mistaken assumption that the Democratic Leadership is not complicit with Bush's goals, with:

The Democrats don't have, or can't summon, the political strength to make sure Congress does what it is supposed to do: debate profound issues like these and take a stand. The Republicans are simply not interested in a serious discussion and certainly not a vote on anything beyond Mr. Bush's increasingly narrow agenda.

And they do it again in my opinion, with:

Democrats and Republicans who oppose the war have a duty to outline alternatives. Those who call for staying in Iraq have a duty to explain what victory means and how they plan to achieve it. Both sides are shirking an obligation to deal with issues that must be resolved right now, like the crisis involving asylum for Iraqis who helped the American occupation.

They're right that both parties need to be articulating clear alternatives, but they're still stuck in the quicksand of assuming that Iraqis are incompetent children incapable of finding their own path and managing their own affairs to their own satisfaction in their own ways, regardless of what the rest of the world, or the "Washington Consensus", wants Iraqis to do.

If Iraqis want help they'll ask for it. It cannot be forced on them, and any attempt to force "help" on them has, is, and will continue to backfire.

If Iraqis have sectarian differences and kill each other in a civil war, it is their civil war, and neither The U.S. nor any other country has any more right to intervene for U.S. benefit than any other more powerful country had the right to intervene in the American Civil War for their benefit.

All that Washington's "help" has ever done for Iraq is make the situation worse. Continually. Never better. Only worse.

Since Bush started a fire that is burning the Iraqi house down the first thing to do is stop throwing fuel into the fire. And since Bush's invasion destroyed the infrastructure of the house before he started the fire and he made no effort to rebuild it, once we stop throwing fuel in and get out of the way before we are thrown out of the way, someone else will rebuild it.

It probably won't look anything like what the "Washington Consensus" would like it to look like when they're done, but too bad.

The vast majority of Iraqis DO NOT want U.S. troops occupying their country.

It is time to recognize that reality, and face up to it.

The Washington Consensus Of Iraq Reality Is Delusion, and the NYT, even in their criticism of both parties, is still buying the delusion. And still selling the delusion.

What will help to begin fixing Iraq is not "doing" something.

What will help to begin fixing Iraq is "not doing" something.

Not funding the occupation any longer and complete and total withdrawal of all U.S. military from the country is what will begin fixing Iraq.

Iraq will be fixed. Eventually. But it will not be republicans or democrats, or even the U.S. that fixes it. It will be, and can only be, Iraqis that fix Iraq.

The U.S. presence in Iraq, and the refusal to leave, is the problem.

It is time to leave Iraq. Long past time.

There's more: "In Search Of A Reality" >>

Islam Isn't the Problem

Cross-Posted at Decline and Fall.

Regarding the motivations of the insurgents I interrogated in Iraq, a week ago I wrote:

The vast majority of them weren't radical Muslims, bin Laden acolytes or Saddam hardliners; they were motivated by nationalism. They opposed the U.S. occupation of what they saw as their sovereign land (silly them!) so they lashed out in the most meaningful way they could: at the "collaborators" in their midst aiding and abetting the occupying, colonial power. It's basic insurgency doctrine, folks. In my experience, "religious fanaticism" is the veneer that some in Iraq, and even more in the West, use to cover what is essentially the struggle to get out from under the thumb of a strongman.

Later last week, The Washington Monthly published an article by Andrew Tilghman, former Stars & Stripes reporter, that came to a similar conclusion, and on Tuesday Gallup released a poll analysis that supports my anecdotal experience. (Thanks to Framing Science for the link) The pollsters discovered that political grievances, rather than religious ones, are the prime motivating factors behind Violent Islamic Extremism:

After analyzing survey data representing more than 90% of the global Muslim population, Gallup found that despite widespread anti-American sentiment, only a small minority saw the 9/11 attacks as morally justified. Even more significant, there was no correlation between level of religiosity and extremism among respondents. Among the 7% of the population that fits in the politically radicalized category -- those who saw the 9/11 attacks as completely justifiable and have an unfavorable view of the United States -- 94% said religion is an important part of their daily lives, compared with 90% among those in the moderate majority. And no significant difference exists between radicals and moderates in mosque attendance.

Gallup probed respondents further and actually asked both those who condoned and condemned extremist acts why they said what they did. The responses fly in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority country in the world, many of those who condemned terrorism cited humanitarian or religious justifications to support their response. For example, one woman said, "Killing one life is as sinful as killing the whole world," paraphrasing verse 5:32 in the Quran.

On the other hand, not a single respondent in Indonesia who condoned the attacks of 9/11 cited the Quran for justification. Instead, this group's responses were markedly secular and worldly. For example, one Indonesian respondent said, "The U.S. government is too controlling toward other countries, seems like colonizing."

The real difference between those who condone terrorist acts and all others is about politics, not piety. For example, the politically radicalized often cite "occupation and U.S. domination" as their greatest fear for their country and only a small minority of them agree the United States would allow people in the region to fashion their own political future or that it is serious about supporting democracy in the region. Also, among this group's top responses was the view that to better relations with the Muslim world, the West should respect Islam and stop imposing its beliefs and policies. In contrast, moderates most often mentioned economic problems as their greatest fear for their country, and along with respecting Islam, they see economic support and investments as a way for the West to better relations. Moderates are also more likely than the politically radicalized to say the United States is serious about promoting democracy.

Note how counter-intuitive this all seems from the Clash of Civilizations perspective through which the entire GWOT has been filtered for us. No significant difference in mosque attendance between radicals and moderates. The Quran cited only as justification for abhorring violence, not condoning it. American occupation and lack of respect are the reasons the radicals fight us, not the results of their fight against us.

The implications of a study such as this are enormous. The most obvious is that if we are going to claim to be serious about fighting terrorism, we need to focus our efforts on the factors that actually motivate people to become terrorists, not the factors we continue to insist motivate them. Killing or incarcerating a terrorist or insurgent may take one of them out of circulation, but if you create two new ones for every one you destroy, you are going backward, not forward.

I saw this dynamic when I was an interrogator in Iraq. Coalition forces would arrest an insurgent, humiliate him in front of his family, keep him in prison for months, and then release him without charges. In the meantime he learned to hate us (even if he hadn't before) and, more importantly, his family learned to hate us. While he was learning to hate us, he was in a population that was uniquely qualified to fan the flames of his hatred and teach him how he might better act on it. Meanwhile his family and close friends were now easy targets for recruitment. In getting rid of one "terrorist," we created several. Is it any wonder that the estimated number of insurgents in Iraq jumped from 5,000 (total) in 2003 to 70,000 (Sunni) in 2007, while the prison population skyrocketed from 10,000 to 60,000? (See pp. 25-26 of this Brookings Institute report for details.)

When will we realize that our presence in the Middle East and our support of tyrants such as Mubarek and the Saudi Royal Family are not only not helping ease the troubles in the region, they are the primary cause for those troubles? Middle Easterners are not stupid. They can see that America has a long history of supporting brutal dictators (remember the Shah?) and they have learned from that experience that we are not to be trusted. They see us stomping around the world with our big stick and turn to whatever means of resistance they can find to resist what they see as the assault on their culture by the biggest bully on earth. The fact that militant Islam is their only major option should not cause us to confuse their motives.

There's more: "Islam Isn't the Problem" >>

American Exceptionalism In Iraq

This film by John Pilger was made before George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, but after George H.W. Bush attacked Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War in response to the Iraqi invasion Of Kuwait. "After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations (backed strongly by the US and UK) imposed harsh sanctions on Iraq that lasted for 10 years (1991-2001); the harsh restrictions on imports of everything, including access to key medicines, resulted in over a million deaths, more than half a million of which were women and children. That's more deaths than the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan and 9/11 combined." The film is an hour and fifteen minutes long. Watch it. While you're watching it, keep in mind that George W. Bush's Iraq and Mid-East Debacle has happened to Iraq since this film was made.

I saw someone earlier today make the claim that the Democratic control of Congress is too narrow for a fast, effective action to get us out of Iraq. That, in the sense that matters most, is utter, unadulterated, self-deceiving bullshit. The only sense in which it is true is that too many Democrats in Congress are placing their own interests ahead of the the lives of the soldiers and the Iraqis that are dying everyday, while those Democrats cynically try to use supporting/funding/continuing the debacle to win elections next year.
If the Democrats don't want to do the right thing... it becomes obvious that they want to continue the occupation.

For what? Cheap gasoline? Or the neocon vision of world domination?

What has been needed all along and is needed now is for the Democrats to show that they have some balls and display A Measure of Morality in Congress:

If you could secretly tell a magic genie "Yes" and suffer horribly and die but save the lives of a million people you've never met, would you say No? This one they don't even ask in philosophy school, much less Congress. But let's think about it for a minute. What's the worst fate a Congress Member could face as a result of voting against funding the war? For most it must be the loss of their seat. How horrible is that? Some of these congress members are freshmen, first elected last November campaigning on promises to end the war. Now they're prepared to vote $100 billion for the war in hopes of getting elected again in 2008. What in the hell did they want to get elected for in the first place? What district is going to receive less money if we end the war and redirect our spending to useful projects than if we continue the war but fund special pieces of pork here and there?

So what if they chance losing their seats. How horrible is that?

Personally, I think it is the best way for them to retain their seats.

The continuous whine that "we don't have the votes" is also part of the big lie.

If the Democrats stand up NOW and announce that they will no longer fund the occupation and that there will be no more emergency supplementals introduced when the current one runs out, the situation will become one of NO votes needed to NOT pass a bill. The ball will be in Bush's court.

The Democrats have absolute power in this debate. What good is it and why should voters let them retain it next year if they are too weak kneed to use it to end the Debacle? If they will not, then by default they proclaim their complicity with Bush.

The argument that 'defunding endangers the troops' is utter bullshit and is completely and irrefutably debunked. Let the rethugs try to accuse Democrats of it. Democrats will win that political argument, but ONLY if they have the cohones to do what they know is the right thing. ........................................................... Maybe America needs an Exceptional new National Anthem.

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse, Out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown, the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.

There's more: "American Exceptionalism In Iraq" >>