Absurdity

ThinkProgress.org had an article detailing the concerns of some generals that Iraq could be “worse than Vietnam” for the United States.

One of the reasons I have been so long in posting is because my desperation and dumbfoundedness have been growing exponentially in correlation to the amount I learn about this country’s leadership. Perhaps I will awaken from my stupor long enough to vote in 2008, and perhaps on the next morning I will awaken to a Democratic President-elect and hope for the future. The Neoconservative school of foreign policy will lead this nation down a calamitous path, to say the least. “Of Biblical proportions,” is right. I can confidently say without hyperbole that we are in a worse state, on the world stage, than we were when this Little Gentleman took office, and many times over at that.

The absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the outright lies propagated by this “leadership” in its death throes are enough to drive one man insane. If my readers long for a replacement, I highly recommend ThinkProgress.org , which is adept at aggregating the evidence of and exposing the administration’s penchant for doublespeak. I despair as well that the idea of Impeachment, the only solution – the only solution – to this crisis, remains in the margins of the political discourse, as if the instrument invented by the Forefathers for just this purpose is best left alone. Our Republic is dying, I have no doubt of that.

In the mean time, I am taking a leave of hiatus of undecided length.

Alberto Gonzales on Habeus

I just caught a minute of Attorney General Gonzales answering questions on Habeus on CSPAN. The sentence I came in on ended with, “we’re not taking habeus corpus away from these people, because they never had it to begin with.”

Well, first of all, let’s ditch semantics. Just because militants in Iraq don’t ‘have’ habeus in their own country doesn’t mean we are denying them it when they come here. There’s the rub: by “taking it away” I understand “denying.” It is now easier to say that we are denying these people habeus.

But you don’t need to be content with that stretch of reason. Understand that American citizens, like Jose Pedilla, have been branded enemy combatants and had their right to habeus stripped from them. Indeed, any American citizen could fall into such a situation. Would Gonzales really argue that American citizens don’t have habeus to begin with? Certainly not. Additionally, Gonzales and the Administration’s platitudinal repetition of “picking people up off the battle field” is at least misleading and at worst a blatant lie. What battle field was Pedilla on? American soil? What battle field is that? Please, don’t act like every single person in Guantanamo was found holding an AK-47 and staring down US troops in the middle of a fire fight. I will grant no such absurdity.

With a somewhat loose interpretation, we can argue that the Constitution applies to all people under US jurisdiction: if we claim the ability to abduct these people, a decent respect the dignity of mankind commands we give them the chance to challenge their detention. Any other position is untenable.

Existential quandary

In 1991 when British troops invaded Iraq to fight the First Gulf War, they wore forest camouflage, having sold all of their desert camo to the Iraqis to fight the Iranians just a few years earlier.

Senator Orrin Hatch said that, “capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.”

Every Diebold AccuVote electronic voting machine in the country can be opened with the same key.

The US government recently put online documents that are allegedly Hussein’s government’s plans to build an atomic bomb. The plans, untranslated from Arabic, they later realized, could likely be used to actually build a bomb. In a panic, they took the documents down. Never mind that The Progressive published plans to build a hydrogen bomb in 1979 after defeating the United States government in the Supreme Court. (This is parallel to Bush lambasting the New York Times for revealing a program tracking international money transfers after Bush himself had revealed the program to the public in the aftermath of September 11th.)

The frustrated and flabbergasted state in which I now find myself, because of the contemporary political atmosphere, is the state of a man repeatedly confronted by the absurd. I’m nearly dumbfounded by the world around me, and those who are pulling the strings.

I urge all of you to vote next Tuesday (however few people will read this). As Plato said,

one of the consequences of refusing to participate in politics is that you find yourself being governed by your inferiors.

Without Representation

I find it ironic that, here in the United States, our representatives are doing a decidedly poor job of actually representing public opinion. For example, eighty-six percent of Americans disbelieve some aspect of the 9/11 Commission Report — but there is clearly no organized effort by our Representatives to open a new investigation. (Why did Congress spend more than ten times as much money investigating Bill Clinton than they did 9/11? I can’t ask that question enough.)

Three-quarters of Americans think it is time for the United States to leave Iraq — that is, they think we have “done enough” and that it is time for the Iraqis to start ’stepping up’ and taking care of their own country. And that’s a Fox News poll.

A majority of the Americans think Congress should impeach President Bush if it can be shown he deliberately misled the nation into the Iraq war. And: fifty-eight percent of Americans actually do believe Bush misled us into war. (Which means five percent somewhere believe he misled us, but that Congress should not investigate him.)

Why are none of these thoughts mirrored by the very people elected to represent the public opinion?

Iraq

Iraq is a mess and it’s no secret. Without having to calling it a “civil war,” the fact is that 100 people are dying every day, because of insurgent attacks that average only fifteen minutes apart. What would you think of your occupiers if your home city suffered attacks every fifteen minutes?

Iraq is clearly worse off than when we invaded – more than half a million civilians have been killed, according to a new study published in The Lancet. Twice as many civilians have perished at the hands of the United States as reported by the worst accusations made against Saddam. Much of the infrastructure is still crippled, and our moral ground on the world stage has been irreparably damaged. Eighty percent of Iraqis want us out.

What have we done?

I don’t propose to have the solution, but as the election approaches, it’s time to dedicate serious energy and thought to the options. Bush has said that when to pull out will be the next President’s problem. The Army plans to keep troops in Iraq through 2010, according to a new report. Are these viable options? At the current rate, that means we’re only halfway done, and that another half million civilians will die. When will the public wake up?

We do not need more partisan bickering – the time has come to agitate for a solution. This problem crosses the aisle and crosses the Earth’s oceans. We have decimated a country and a population; it is time to turn our heads to a solution. And fast.

A solution will require international cooperation, and our allies with interests in the region should understand that, although they may have had no hand in the destruction, it would behoove them to assist us in repairing the country. It is a concern of the entire world, now to fix Iraq. Things are only getting worse.

Injustice anywhere

The New York Times quickly breezes through a handful of atrocious policies OK’d by the Senate recently:

…suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

What do we have there, three breaches of the Bill of Rights? As well, the bill formalizes the absolutely astonishing ability of the President to rob a citizen of their Constitutional guarantees. I’m simply sickened. I don’t understand how denying an American citizen their right to trial protects my freedom. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” –Martin Luther King

I want my Constitution back.

Christian terrorism: possible?

A ‘Christian suicide bomber’ attempted to blow up his car at an alleged abortion clinic on Tuesday by ramming his vehicle through the doors of the buidling and soaking it in gasoline. At the last moment, he decided not to light himself or his car on fire. Second degree arson is the charge.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment: A ‘Muslim suicide bomber’ attempted to blow up his car at a church on Tuesday by ramming his car through the doors and soaking it in gasoline. At the last moment, he decided not to light himself or his car on fire.

What do you expect the charge would be in that case? Still second degree arson? Or would Homeland Security have ushered him off in secrecy to a black site somewhere? Would he be in Cuba, in Eastern Europe, in Turkey? Would he have the right to counsel? Almost certainly not. We must ask ourselves why this man is not being classified as a terrorist — what specifically about his actions or his religion are excusing him from the horrid death sentence label of Terrorist?

Is it because he failed to light himself on fire or blow up his car? Certainly he had still done material damage to the façade of the building. Additionally, the administration glories in telling us of terrorist plots it disrupts when they are still in the planning stage, long before the perpetrators could have dreamt of driving a car into a building.

Is it because this is an alleged abortion clinic (in truth, it did not perform abortions)? Is it because this man is a Christian, or an American citizen? No sensible person would excuse him from the Label simply because he is a Christian, that’s simply prejudice. And American citizens have been held and extradited in the aforementioned fashion, as well as stripped of their Constitutional guarantees with the execution of a simple rubber stamp.

Or is it some other reason? Perhaps it is because he is a Christian, and perhaps this nation is so black-and-white, so prejudiced and so consumed of the “Us versus Them” mentality that they refuse to believe that one of their own could possibly be a Terrorist. A good chunk of the American populace, as well as the District Attorney responsible for charging this man, should rethink their arguments.

Confirming what we already knew

The New York Times is reporting today on a leaked intelligence report which confirms what we all (on the Left) already knew: that the war in Iraq has decidedly exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, international terrorism. The report, detailed to the Times by twelve government employees, all talking under condition of anonymity, is the work of sixteen separate administration intelligence agencies.

Two comments: First of all, I laud the Times for reporting this. Despite the fact the report was Classified information (highly classified, almost certainly), it’s of dire importance that the American people know they are being decieved by their leadership. (Additionally, the details leaked are entirely vague and nonthreatening to “national security.” All that has come to light is that the administration has made a grave mistake, and these several separate agencies all know it. The article leaks no security secrets, or anything that would be aiding the enemy — as I suspect Bush will claim while denouncing our free press.)

Bush and his cronies have long portrayed the war in a highly favorable light, through rose-colored glasses, and have refused to acknowledge any regrets or anything they would do differently, had they another chance.

My second point is that the confirmation of our fears is somewhat bittersweet. We on the left undoubtedly feel the shameful joy of being vindicated in our shouts of “Told you so,” but it is unfortunate we had to be right about a claim with such dire consequences. The world, it appears, has indeed been stirred to action, the opposite action we were hoping for. Much of the Muslim world is united against us, because of our foreign policy.

Now it’s no secret, and the administration will have a tough time explaining this one away. Sixteen separate American spy agencies have come to a “unanimous” conclusion, as the Times put it. The war, meant to combat terrorism — indeed, “taking the war to the enemy” — has been a colossal disaster, a mistake costing hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and worsening the problem it sought to alleviate. And the administration has no regrets.

Hindsight is 20/20

The U.S. invasion “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it again, we would do exactly the same thing,” [Cheney] said.

I would like to think that that’s a metaphorical defense — that we would remove Saddam from power, and remove his oppressive regime and all that, but that the intricacies would be better planned.

If, however, Cheney does me that we would do the exact same thing, he means that, knowing what we know now, we would have no qualms about plunging a country into chaos, or igniting a bloodbath that, while short of civil war, is widespread and anarchic. And we’d also kill an estimated hundred thousand civilians. Knowing what we know now, those were all good choices. And we’d gladly do it all over again.

World Development Aid

I have previously commented on the United States’ failure to contribute the requested 0.7 per cent of its GDP to the United Nations for international development. It seems the idea has run headlong into fierce opposition here in the States, and has been painted as an unnecessary and draconian ‘tax’ implemented by an authority outside the jurisdiction of a national government.

That’s true to some extent, just as it is true that judges are unelected. But there are few in government who do not, at some point, answer to an elected official. Judges in many local municipalities, for example, are elected directly. At higher levels, like at the Supreme Court, judges are nominated by the elected President, questioned by the elected legislature, and then voted on democratically by our elected representatives. Your government in action, people. Though it is true the judges may be a step or two removed from the democratic process, they ultimately are chosen by the people. Republicans thusly have no one to blame for the ‘tyranny of the judges’ except for the people.

Our representative to the United Nations, John Bolton, underwent similar rigors, for which the Democrats were criticized, when he was nominated to represent this country to the world. He was nominated by the elected President and withstood the interrogation of the elected legislature, and sent as an emissary to the world stage. The United States, with its powerful standing in the United Nations, should have the power, one would think, to prevent something like this “tax” from coming into existence. As well, this is nary a tax in the traditional sense — there have been no penalties for our repeated failure to pay, there are no jack-booted thugs coming to repossess our cars. The chest beating and shouting is nothing but a symbolic gesture against a demi-authority that has time and again proven itself impotent. The people have nothing to fear but right-wing demagoguery.

In spite of my point thus far, I find it somewhat atrocious that the government has not seen fit to donate such a scant portion of its Gross Domestic Product to international aid.

Economist Lord P. T. Bauer, said, “The argument that aid is indispensable for development runs into an inescapable dilemma. If the conditions for development other than capital are present, the capital required will either be generated locally or be available commercially from abroad to governments or to businesses. If the required conditions are not present, then aid will be ineffective and wasted.”

But I contest this statement — oftentimes what is lacking is knowledge of the vicious Zero Sum game of capitalism that the West requires for survival. Africans may very well have the land to farm, but to assert that wealth will spring forth spontaneously from natural resources — when the truth is that these people are, if productive and knowledgeable, certainly the target of robber barons and economic tyrants — is absurd. You cannot expect a person to be born into this world with Wealth of Nations ingrained in their mind and an intimate knowledge of the world’s market economy. It is very much possible — and observable today — that a wealth of resources and a dearth of only capital will not necessarily generate capital in the magical inerrant Free Market way that the Right so dearly wishes it would. The fact that sweatshops in, say, Mexico have been set up at incredible rates in recent decades has led to an influx of capital into the region, but not the development of the local populace. Arguably, it has increased the amount of poverty.

One need only look around to see that the third world, left to the West’s Free Market devices, does not benefit. The need for aid and, perhaps more so, education, remains. And the United States’ reluctance to provide aid for the basic needs and development of foreign countries belies its claim to compassion.