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      in World Politics

      Biden’s Cosmetic Battle Against Corruption

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      Yakov Feygin’s professional title as the associate director of the future of capitalism program at the Berggruen Institute reveals with uncanny precision what his mission consists of. The Berggruen Institute seeks to “better understand how a global capitalism can be reshaped and regulated at all levels of governance: regional, national, and international.”

      In other words, it acknowledges serious problems in a system it believes can be reformed. The question that even its thinkers cannot begin to answer is whether those who profit from the system, and thus control its resources, will ever be willing to reform it. In the background lies another question few in governments, industry or think tanks want to entertain: What happens if they don’t agree to reform it?

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      In a detailed analysis of one of the major features of the global financialized economy that appeared in The American Interest with the title, “The Financial Infrastructure of Corruption,” Feygin offers a pertinent observation. “The parallels between ‘tax optimization’ and ‘corruption,’” he writes, “are so strong that the illegality of the latter is only present because in the United States, we have made tax optimization legal and acceptable de jure.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Tax optimization:

      Corruption

      Contextual Note

      This succinct definition is, at least implicitly, Feygin’s own, though he has signaled the tenuous distinction in the law that prevents Americans — and especially American politicians — from acknowledging the identical nature of the two. Tax optimization is, by definition, an activity conducted by people who know the law and are skilled at working within it. So why complain? After all, our entire civilization since the Second World War derives its legitimacy from its alignment around the “rule of law.” If the law is respected by those who know it best, all must be well.

      Embed from Getty Images

      At his virtual Summit for Democracy last week, US President Joe Biden appeared, at least at one point, to be pushing in the same direction as Feygin. He said it was all about the effort to “strengthen our own democracies and push back on authoritarianism, fight corruption, promote and protect human rights of people everywhere,” before ending his litany with this motivational coda: “To act. To act.”

      A week earlier, the White House published the “fact sheet” of its Strategy for Countering Corruption. It declared Biden’s intention to “better hold corrupt actors accountable, and strengthen the capacity of activists, investigative journalists, and others on the front lines of exposing corrupt acts.” Some may have suspected a hint of hypocrisy at the very moment the US was continuing its aggressive pursuit of investigative journalist Julian Assange. 

      There is an explanation. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, targeted the sacrosanct institution known as the defense establishment, not the private purveyors of corruption in the world of commerce. This distinction becomes clearer later in the document expressing the intent “to support, defend, and protect civil society and media actors, including investigative journalists who expose corruption.” War crimes don’t merit the same scrutiny.

      What, after all, does Biden’s anti-corruption initiative concretely propose? Is any of it consistent with Feygin’s critique? The first bullet point in the fact sheet reads: “Better understanding and responding to the transnational dimensions of corruption.” So far, so good. But it immediately tells us this will be done “by prioritizing intelligence collection and analysis on corrupt actors and their networks.”

      “Intelligence collection” quickly trumps the goal of “better understanding.” Understanding is dangerous because it can lead to reform. Intelligence collection typically leads to judicial processes and rarely produces understanding. Moreover, the long track record of intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI, has demonstrated that collecting, storing and using information — primarily against others for purposes of control and intimidation — has consistently impeded not only the will, but more significantly the ability to understand complex problems. 

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      The second bullet point focuses on expected bureaucratic efficiency through the coordination of “anti-corruption work” across “departments and agencies.” The third seeks to increase “law enforcement resources and bolstering information sharing between the intelligence community and law enforcement.” The emphasis is clear. It is more about policing than understanding. Reforming or restructuring can only be an afterthought.

      The document then goes on to list four objectives concerned with regulations that will permit identifying culprits. Perhaps the most worrying promise is this one: “Working with the private sector to improve the international business climate by encouraging the adoption and enforcement of anti-corruption compliance programs.” As Feygin’s analysis shows, the private sector employs and depends on the experts specialized in tax optimization. Talk about letting the fox rule the henhouse.

      Compare Biden’s description with what the Berggruen Institute envisions as the features of a solution: “sovereign wealth funds, publicly supported individual savings institutions, public retirement institutions, and cooperative enterprise ownership.” The institute seeks to convince governments to “envision ways that publics can retain stakes in common goods that are now being commercialized by private actors.” At this point, Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis and the late David Graeber might loudly applaud.

      If Biden is really interested in understanding how to counter corruption, he might begin by reading Feygin’s article and then consulting political economists such as Varoufakis and Thomas Piketty. But, reflecting recent traditions, the president appears focused on reinforcing intelligence networks and law enforcement. Reasonable observers might ask: Isn’t that precisely what the authoritarian regimes are tempted to do, the very regimes Biden contrasts with democracy? Those who do ask the question are rarely cited in the legacy media.

      Historical Note

      The problem of abiding by the rule of law imposed in the name of liberal democracy ends up looking eerily similar to the problem of establishing a moral order within the structural lawlessness of the feudal system capitalism replaced nearly three centuries ago. Feudalism allowed might to conquer right. The hierarchical system allowed evil despotic rulers, but also benevolent ones, to govern within their territories. 

      In today’s age of nation-states, the law itself can be an agent of hierarchy, a system that structures power relationships and tends toward increasing inequality. In some cases, it may be designed to protect the public welfare and the general good, but in others, it serves to defend evil-doers who use the facility of corruption specifically permitted by the laws to reinforce and abuse their power.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The obvious advantage a true liberal democracy possesses lies in the fact that laws can be reformed — and indeed, if required, entirely reformulated — with the consent of the people. But thanks to the unequal distribution of influence, some laws, including the laws that govern the procedures of democracy itself, may be specifically designed to escape even the notice of the people and even the scrutiny of the experts. When that happens, it is no longer the rule of law, but the law of rule, meaning whoever has power over the law can ensure that the law itself protects their own potentially despotic rule.

      Democratically elected governments are not immune to the law of rule for the simple reason that the principle of rule is the power of money. That is why a government in which money plays a major role in elections is bound to be corrupt. It will also be empowered to seek ways of consolidating its preferred forms of corruption, even while calling into question its less preferred forms of corruption. This allows it to maintain the image of combating corruption, but even more significantly, to protect its preferred version.

      The Berggruen Institute manifestly seeks to identify and eliminate the true roots of corruption in order to save the capitalist system that has spontaneously produced a variety of forms of corruption that have contributed to the economy’s impending divorce from democracy. Its noble effort may resemble an attempt at squaring the circle, although it would be more appropriate to call it the rounding of the dangerously sharp corners of the square.

      The Biden administration prefers to put warning signs on the ever-sharper corners of the square before pursuing those who try to make the corners even sharper. The Berggruen Institute believes the system can be given new life. The Biden administration hopes simply that it will survive a little longer.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Washington’s Tawdry Victory Over Julian Assange

      by

      Last week witnessed the 80th anniversary of a moment in history qualified by Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a date which will live in infamy.” On December 8, 1941, the president announced that the United States was declaring war after Japan’s unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor a day earlier. A nation that had spent two decades wallowing in isolationism instantly became one of the principal and most powerful actors in a new world war. Victory on two fronts, against Germany and Japan, would be achieved successively in 1944 and 1945.

      Last week ended with its own day of infamy when a British court overturned an earlier judgment banning the extradition to the US of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Following in the footsteps of the Trump administration, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department successfully appealed the ban in its relentless effort to judge Assange for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, itself a relic of the history of the First World War.

      Guns and the Wrong Side of Rights

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      Back then, President Woodrow Wilson’s government pulled no jingoistic punches when promoting America’s participation in Europe’s war. It actively incited the population to indulge in xenophobia. Public paranoia targeting Germany, the nation’s enemy, reached such a pitch that Beethoven was banned from the concert stage, sauerkraut was officially renamed “liberty cabbage” and hamburger “liberty steak.”

      The manifestly paranoid Espionage Act sought to punish anyone who “communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver or transmit to any foreign government … any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, etc.” The law, specifically for a state of war, was so extreme it was rarely used until Barack Obama unearthed it as the elegant solution for suppressing the whistleblowers he had vowed to defend in his first presidential campaign.

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      Despite overindulging his taste for punishing whistleblowers, Obama refrained from seeking to extradite Assange. He feared it might appear as an assault on freedom of the press and might even incriminate The New York Times, which had published the WikiLeaks documents in 2010. In the meantime, Democrats found a stronger reason to blame Assange. He had leaked the Democratic National Committee’s emails during the 2016 presidential primary campaign. Democrats blamed the Australian for electing Donald Trump.

      During his 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly praised WikiLeaks for its willingness to expose the undemocratic practices of the Clinton campaign. But once in power, Trump’s administration vindictively demanded Assange’s extradition from the UK for having revealed war crimes that deserved being hidden for eternity from the prying eyes of journalists and historians. 

      Many observers expected Biden to return to the prudent wisdom of Obama and break with Trump’s vindictive initiative. He could have quietly accepted the British judge’s decision pronounced in January. Instead, his Justice Department appealed. Unlike Trump, who sought to undermine everything Obama had achieved, Biden has surprisingly revealed a deep, largely passive respect for his predecessor’s most dangerous innovations — not challenging corporate tax cuts, the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and Trump’s aggressive support for Israel’s most oppressive policies with regard to Palestinians.

      Biden’s eagerness to follow Trump’s gambit aimed at subjecting Assange to the US brand of military-style justice allowed New York Times journalists Megan Specia and Charlie Savage to describe Friday’s decision by the British court as a success for the administration. “The ruling was a victory,” they wrote, “at least for now, for the Biden administration, which has pursued an effort to prosecute Mr. Assange begun under the Trump administration.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Victory:

      Triumph in combat, including, at two extremes, cases marked by heroic action and others prompted by malicious self-serving motives and driven by the perpetrator’s confusion of the idea of justice with sadistic, vindictive pleasure

      Contextual Note

      The Times journalists quote Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, who “said the government was ‘pleased by the ruling’ and would have no further comment.” At no point in the article do the authors evoke the hypothesis that Biden might have sought to overturn Trump’s policy. Nor do they analyze the reasons that could undermine the government’s case. They do quote several of Assange’s supporters, including one who called “on the Biden administration again to withdraw” the charge. Serious observers of the media might expect that a pillar of the press in a liberal democracy might be tempted to express its own concern with laws and policies that risk threatening its own freedom. Not The New York Times. This story didn’t even make its front page. None of its columnists deemed it deserving of comment.

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      Journalist Kalinga Seneviratne, writing for The Manila Times, offered a radical contrast. “If this year’s Nobel Peace Prize is about promoting ‘press freedom,’” he speculates, “the Norwegian Nobel Committee missed a golden opportunity to make a powerful statement at a time when such freedom is under threat in the very countries that have traditionally claimed a patent on it.” He quotes the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, who claims that “what has been done to Julian Assange is not to punish or coerce him, but to silence him and to do so in broad daylight, making visible to the entire world that those who expose the misconduct of the powerful no longer enjoy the protection of the law.” 

      Deutsche Welle’s Matthias von Hein noted the interesting coincidence that three converging events took place on the same day. “In a bitter twist of irony,” he writes, “a court in London has essentially paved the way for Assange’s prosecution on Human Rights Day — of all days. And how ironic that it happened on the day two journalists were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. Last, but not least, it coincided with the second day of the Summit on Democracy organized by US President Joe Biden.”

      Von Hein added this observation: “We’re constantly hearing how Western democracies are in competition with autocratic systems. If Biden is serious about that, he should strive to be better than the world’s dictators.” But, as the saying goes, you can’t teach a 79-year old dog new tricks.

      Historical Note

      The coincidences do not end there. On the same day the news of Julian Assange’s fate emerged, Yahoo’s investigative reporter Michael Isikoff recounted the story of another man “brought to justice” by US authorities: Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The Mauritanian citizen had the privilege of spending 14 years in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba without ever being charged with a crime, even after confessing to the crimes imagined by his torturers.

      It turns out to be a touching moral tale. Even after years of imprisonment and gruesome torture, Slahi “holds no personal animus against his interrogators.” According to Isikoff, “he has even met and bonded with some of those interrogators,” years after the event. “I took it upon myself,” Slahi explained, “to be a nice person and took a vow of kindness no matter what. And you cannot have a vow of kindness without forgiving people.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      It wasn’t the Prophet Muhammad who said, “turn the other cheek” or “Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Those words were spoken by the man George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld claimed to revere and whom Bush considered his “favorite philosopher.” The Quran did continue the original Christian insight, pronouncing that “retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it,” and that reconciliation and forgiveness will be rewarded by Allah.

      There has clearly been no forgiveness in Washington for the “evil” committed by Assange: exposing war crimes conducted in secret with American taxpayers’ money. Slahi’s torture was conducted by the declared proponents of “Judeo-Christian” culture. Shahi’s forgiveness stands as an example of what that culture claims as a virtue but fails to embrace in its own actions.

      Shahi is reconciled with his interrogators. But does he also feel reconciled with those who gave them their orders? In 2019, he said, “I accept that the United States should follow and put to trial all the people who are harming their citizens. I agree with that. But I disagree with them that if they suspect you, they kidnap you, they torture you, and let you rot in prison for 15 or 16 years. And then they dump you in your country and they say you cannot have your passport because you have already seen so many things that we don’t want you to travel around the world to talk about.”

      Despite appearances, Mohamedou Ould Shahi’s case is not all that different from Julian Assange’s.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      10 Problems With US Foreign Policy Under Biden

      by

      The Biden presidency is still in its early days, but it’s not too early to point to areas in the foreign policy realm where we, as progressives, have been disappointed — or even infuriated. 

      There are one or two positive developments, such as the renewal of Barack Obama’s New START Treaty with Russia and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s initiative for a UN-led peace process in Afghanistan, where the United States is finally turning to peace as a last resort, after 20 years lost in the graveyard of empires.

      By and large, though, President Joe Biden’s foreign policy already seems stuck in the militarist quagmire of the past 20 years, a far cry from his campaign promise to reinvigorate diplomacy as the primary tool of US foreign policy. In this respect, Biden is following in the footsteps of Obama and Donald Trump, who both promised fresh approaches to foreign policy but, for the most part, delivered more endless war. 

      Biden’s New Culture of Brinkmanship

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      By the end of his second term, Obama did have two significant diplomatic achievements with the signing of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 and the normalization of relations with Cuba in 2014. So, progressive Americans who voted for Biden had some grounds to hope that his experience as Obama’s vice-president would lead him to quickly restore and build on the achievements of his former boss with Iran and Cuba as a foundation for the broader diplomacy he promised.

      Instead, the Biden administration seems firmly entrenched behind the walls of hostility Trump built between America and its neighbors — from his renewed Cold War against China and Russia to his brutal sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria and dozens of countries around the world. There is also still no word on cuts to a military budget that keeps on growing.    

      Despite endless Democratic condemnations of Trump, President Biden’s foreign policy so far shows no substantive change from the policies of the past four years. Here are 10 of the lowlights.

      1) Rejoining the Iran Nuclear Agreement

      The administration’s failure to immediately rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — aka the Iran nuclear deal — as Senator Bernie Sanders promised to do if he had become president, has turned an easy win for Biden’s promised commitment to diplomacy into an entirely avoidable diplomatic crisis.

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      Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 and the imposition of brutal “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran were broadly condemned by Democrats and US allies alike. But now, Biden is making new demands on Iran to appease hawks who opposed the agreement all along, risking an outcome in which he will fail to reinstate the JCPOA. As a result, Trump’s policy will effectively become Biden’s policy. The administration should reenter the deal immediately, without preconditions.

      2) Waging Bombing Campaigns

      Also following in Trump’s footsteps, Biden has escalated tensions with Iran and Iraq by attacking and killing Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria who played a critical role in the war against the Islamic State (IS) group. US airstrikes have predictably failed to end rocket attacks on deeply unpopular American bases in Iraq, which the Iraqi parliament passed a resolution to close over a year ago.

      US attacks in Syria have been condemned as illegal by members of Biden’s own party, reinvigorating efforts to repeal the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force that presidents have misused for 20 years. Other airstrikes the Biden administration is conducting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are shrouded in secrecy, since it has not resumed publishing the monthly airpower summaries that every administration has published since 2004 but which Trump discontinued in 2020.

      3) Refusing to Hold Mohammed bin Salman Accountable

      Human rights activists were grateful that President Biden released the intelligence report on the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi that confirmed what we already knew: that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved the killing. Yet when it came to holding him accountable, Biden choked. 

      At the very least, the administration could have imposed the same sanctions on Mohammed bin Salman, including asset freezes and travel bans, that the US imposed on lower-level figures involved in the murder. Instead, like Trump, Biden is wedded to the Saudi dictatorship and its diabolical crown prince.

      4) Recognizing Juan Guaido as President of Venezuela

      The Biden administration missed an opportunity to establish a new approach toward Venezuela when it decided to continue to recognize Juan Guaido as “interim president,” ruled out talks with the Maduro government and appeared to be freezing out the moderate opposition that participates in elections. 

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      The administration also said it was in “no rush” to lift the Trump sanctions. This was despite a recent study from the Government Accountability Office detailing the negative impact of sanctions on the economy and a scathing preliminary report by UN Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan, who noted their “devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela.” The lack of dialogue with all political actors in Venezuela risks entrenching a policy of regime change and economic warfare for years to come, similar to the failed US policy toward Cuba that has lasted for 60 years.

      5) Following Trump on Cuba Instead of Obama

      On Cuba, the Trump administration overturned all the progress toward normal relations achieved by President Obama. This included sanctioning the Cuban tourism and energy industries, blocking coronavirus aid shipments, restricting remittances to family members, putting Cuba on a list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” and sabotaging the country’s international medical missions, which were a major source of revenue for its health system.

      We expected Biden to immediately start unraveling Trump’s confrontational policies. But catering to Cuban exiles in Florida for domestic political gain apparently takes precedence over a humane and rational policy toward Cuba.

      Biden should instead start working with the Cuban government to allow the return of diplomats to their respective embassies, lift all restrictions on remittances, make travel easier and work with the Cuban health system in the fight against COVID-19, among other measures.

      6) Ramping Up the Cold War With China

      Biden seems committed to Trump’s self-defeating Cold War and arms race with China, talking tough and ratcheting up tensions that have led to racist hate crimes against East Asian people in the United States.

      But it is the US that is militarily surrounding and threatening China, not the other way round. As former President Jimmy Carter patiently explained to Trump, while the United States has been at war for 20 years, China has instead invested in 21st-century infrastructure and in its own people, lifting 800 million of them out of poverty.

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      The greatest danger of this moment in history, short of all-out nuclear war, is that this aggressive military posture not only justifies unlimited US military budgets, but it will gradually force China to convert its economic success into military power and follow the Americans down the tragic path of military imperialism.

      7) Failing to Lift Sanctions During a Pandemic

      One of the legacies of the Trump administration is the devastating use of US sanctions on countries around the world, including Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea and Syria. UN officials have condemned them as “crimes against humanity” and compared them to “medieval sieges.” 

      Since most of these sanctions were imposed by executive order, President Biden could easily lift them. Even before taking power, his team announced a thorough review, but months later, it has yet to make a move. 

      Unilateral sanctions that affect entire populations are an illegal form of coercion — like military intervention, coups and covert operations — that have no place in a legitimate foreign policy based on diplomacy, the rule of law and the peaceful resolution of disputes. They are especially cruel and deadly during a pandemic, and the Biden administration should take immediate action by lifting broad sectoral sanctions to ensure every country can adequately respond to the health crisis.

      8) Doing Enough for Yemen

      Biden appeared to partially fulfill his promise to stop US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen when he announced that the US would stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia. But he has yet to explain what that means. Which weapons sales has he canceled?

      We think he should stop all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, enforcing the Leahy Law, which prohibits military assistance to forces that commit “gross human rights violations,” and the Arms Export Control Act, under which imported US weapons may be used only for legitimate self-defense. There should be no exceptions to these US laws for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Egypt or other allies around the world.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The US should also accept its share of responsibility for what many have called the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today, and provide Yemen with funding to feed its people, restore its health care system and rebuild its devastated country. A recent donor conference netted just $1.7 billion in pledges, less than half the $3.85 billion needed. Biden should restore and expand funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American financial support to the UN, the World Health Organization and World Food Program relief operations in Yemen. He should also press the Saudis to reopen the air and seaports and throw US diplomatic weight behind the efforts of UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to negotiate a ceasefire.

      9) Backing Diplomacy With North Korea

      Trump’s failure to provide sanctions relief and explicit security guarantees to North Korea doomed his diplomacy. It became an obstacle to the diplomatic process underway between Korean leaders Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Moon Jae-in of South Korea. So far, Biden has continued this policy of Draconian sanctions and threats.

      The Biden administration should revive the diplomatic process with confidence-building measures. This includes opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American and North Korean families, permitting US humanitarian organizations to resume their work when COVID-19 conditions permit, and halting US-South Korea military exercises and B-2 nuclear bomb flights.

      Negotiations must involve concrete commitments to non-aggression from the US side and a commitment to negotiating a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. This would pave the way for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and the reconciliation that so many Koreans desire and deserve.

      10) Reducing Military Spending

      At the end of the Cold War, former senior Pentagon officials told the Senate Budget Committee that U.S. military spending could safely be cut by half over the next 10 years. That goal was never achieved. Instead of a post-Cold War “peace dividend,” the military-industrial complex exploited the crimes of September 11, 2001, to justify an extraordinary one-sided arms race. Between 2003 and 2011, the US accounted for nearly half of global military spending, far outstripping its own peak during the Cold War.

      Now, the military-industrial complex is counting on Biden to escalate a renewed Cold War with Russia and China as the only plausible pretext for further record military budgets that are setting the stage for World War III.

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      Biden must dial back US conflicts with China and Russia and instead begin the critical task of moving money from the Pentagon to urgent domestic needs. He should start with at least the 10% cut that 93 representatives and 23 senators already voted for in 2020. In the longer term, Biden should look for deeper cuts in Pentagon spending, as in Representative Barbara Lee’s bill to cut $350 billion per year from the US military budget, to free up resources we sorely need to invest in health care, education, clean energy and modern infrastructure.

      A Progressive Way Forward

      These policies, common to Democratic and Republican administrations, not only inflict pain and suffering on millions of our neighbors in other countries, but they also deliberately cause instability that can at any time escalate into war, plunge a formerly functioning state into chaos or spawn a secondary crisis whose human consequences will be even worse than the original one.

      All these policies involve deliberate efforts to unilaterally impose the political will of US leaders on other people and countries, by methods that consistently only cause more pain and suffering to the people they claim — or pretend — they want to help.

      President Biden should jettison the worst of Obama’s and Trump’s policies and instead pick the best of them. Trump, recognizing the unpopularity of US military interventions, began the process of bringing American troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, which Biden should follow through on.  

      Obama’s diplomatic successes with Cuba, Iran and Russia demonstrated that negotiating with US enemies to make peace, improve relations and make the world a safer place is a perfectly viable alternative to trying to force them to do what the United States wants by bombing, starving and besieging their people. This is, in fact, the core principle of the United Nations Charter, and it should be the core principle of Biden’s foreign policy.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Guns and the Wrong Side of Rights

      by

      The land that continues to pray for the well-being and continued prosperity of its Second Amendment has, according to Education Week, seen “30 school shootings this year, 22 since August 1.” The most spectacular multiple shooting occurred on November 30, when 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley used the “Christmas present” his parents had purchased four days earlier to randomly kill four students and wound seven others at his high school in Oxford, Michigan.

      With the possible exception of his own parents, even before the shooting everyone agreed with Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox News that Crumbley was a “troubled kid.” Pirro is one of those judges who doesn’t need to hear the evidence before identifying the true culprit: “liberals.” In that, she stands in the noble company of other purveyors of accusatory news, such as The New York Times, when it consistently suspects Russia of the imaginary Havana syndrome attacks.

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      Though the horror of the massacre was enough to make it eminently newsworthy, this story offered a new dimension when Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald made the decision to charge the suspect’s parents for involuntary manslaughter. Considering them accomplices in a crime, she explained her reasoning in the following terms: “Gun ownership is a right, and with that right comes great responsibility.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Right:

      A fundamental concept built into the culture of consumerist individualism that confuses the acknowledgment of the tolerance by the state of different types of behavior with the idea of individuals’ possessing the absolute and unencumbered power to harness that tolerance for consciously antisocial purposes

      Contextual note

      In US culture, the notion of “rights” is less a philosophical or legal concept than it is an object of a certain secular faith tantamount to a religious dogma. The first 10 amendments of the US Constitution are called the “Bill of Rights.” Because many Americans view the Constitution as something similar to divine scripture, the fundamental rights it defines, instead of being treated as principles that help define the inevitably flexible relationship that obtains between established authority, society as a collective entity and citizens as individuals, the rights thus defined have been elevated to the status of divine commands.

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      The First Amendment guaranteeing free speech stands out in most people’s minds as the most sacred of the lot. It defines the very nature of American democracy. Freedom of speech ensures that everyone is empowered to “speak up” and cannot be reduced to silence. But as the current debates about what should be allowed or suppressed on social media demonstrate, only dogmatic libertarians are prepared to define that right as absolute.

      The Third Amendment has been relegated to the status of a museum piece. It reads: “No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” The “right” still stands, but with military practice having evolved in the meantime, the situation it describes no longer exists.

      Several of the first 10 amendments deal with defining due process and expectations with regard to the functioning of the judicial system. The Eighth Amendment, barring “cruel and unusual punishment,” may be the least absolute of the 10, since the US criminal justice system has found multiple innovative ways to apply punishment that only escapes being unusual by the fact that it has become usual.

      The Ninth Amendment provides for the possibility that other rights than those listed in the Bill of Rights may also emerge and be acknowledged. The 10th Amendment states that the federal government has only those powers specifically designated in the Constitution. All other powers belong either to the states or the people. From a historical rather than a legal point of view, it could be argued that the sacred status of the 10th Amendment disappeared after the Civil War. Once it was affirmed that the United States was “one nation, indivisible” rather than a federation of independent states, federal laws not derived from the Constitution have consistently trumped the original powers assumed to belong to the state.

      As a private citizen, McDonald may or may not appreciate how variable the meaning of the rights specified in the first 10 amendments may be. As a public official, she must accept the received majority opinion that “gun ownership” according to the Second Amendment is an absolute right. To attenuate the risk this has created for the lives of ordinary citizens and increasingly for school children, she employs the generally accepted moral notion that rights entail responsibilities. But from a strictly legal point of view, this makes little sense. Unless the nature of those responsibilities is clearly delineated, Americans assume that a right is so fundamental that only a generally accepted rule can qualify it, such as the suggestion that freedom of speech does not include shouting “fire” in a theater. It does, however, include crying wolf, even if it is fake news.

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      Within the hyper-individualistic culture of the country, Americans have been taught that rights, just like guns, are something the individual can literally own. Indeed, the debate concerning the interpretation of the Second Amendment focuses exclusively on the question of ownership. In many other cultures, rights are perceived not as something the individual possesses, but as areas of tolerance that describe the nature of relationships within the society.

      Historical note

      The understanding and practice of the rights in the Bill of Rights have undergone a lot of serious evolution in the way laws, customs and everyday activities reflect the reality — sacred or secular — of those ordained “rights.” No one appears obsessed about defending the rights outlined in the Third or even the Eighth Amendment. As for speech and even the freedom of religion, there has been room for considerable ambiguity in public debate.

      Curiously, the Second Amendment is the one deemed most worthy of solemn respect by those who insist on the sacred character of the Bill of Rights. Logically, we should consider it with the same critical regard we apply to the Third Amendment. The situation that gave it meaning simply no longer exists. Attentive (and honest) readers easily understand that lacking the historical persistence of the militias it mentions, the thinking behind it cannot be transposed to modern conditions.

      Because many Americans have been conditioned to think of the very notion of rights as something transcendent, they readily accept the notion that stating something as a right means it must be interpreted literally rather than understood historically. There is a sense in which many Americans believe it would be sacrilegious to call into question a text in the Constitution.

      In the case of the Second Amendment, the right in question concerns ownership rather than the actual use of the weapons in question. Owning a gun does not imply using the gun for any purpose, but it has become increasingly apparent that the use of guns is now a specific social problem linked to the ownership of guns. If one is looking for meaning in the Second Amendment, the key word would be “well-regulated.” Today, the entire issue appears beyond the possibility of regulation.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Karen McDonald uses the only weapon at her disposal: the moral idea of responsibility. But as a prosecutor, she is certainly aware that the notion of responsibility has no weight in the law. That is why Kyle Rittenhouse earned his acquittal for shooting two men dead and wounding a third on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020. His actions were irresponsible but not illegal.

      The real problem lies in the fact that there is no reasonable answer or antidote to the fundamental reality of the elevated symbolic status of firearms within US gun culture. A broad consensus attributes strong cultural value to guns as objects, to the belief that guns are legitimate instruments of justice, to the idea that every individual has the “right” to live in their own moral world, and that in a world of threats, an attitude of active self-defense is natural, not exceptional.

      Cultures are partially shaped in schools, but also in families, the marketplace, the neighborhood streets and religious institutions. Schools have increasingly become environments in which gun culture always risks making its presence known. Individuals can learn to be responsible. But how does a society learn it?

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Biden’s New Culture of Brinkmanship

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      Taiwan is a problem. Historically separate from but linked to China, Taiwan was colonized by the Dutch and partially by the Spanish in the 17th century. Through a series of conflicts between aboriginal forces allied with the Ming dynasty and European colonial forces who also fought amongst themselves, by 1683, Taiwan became integrated into the Qing Empire. For two centuries, it evolved to become increasingly an integral part of China. In 1895, due to its strategic position on the eastern coast of China at the entry of the South China Sea, it became one of the spoils of the Sino-Japanese war and for half a century was ruled by the Japanese.

      Japan used Taiwan during the Second World War as the launching pad for its aggressive operations in Southeast Asia. At the end of the war, with the Japanese defeated and Mao Zedong’s communists in control of mainland China, Mao’s rival, Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang, fled to Taiwan. This put the dissident government out of Mao’s reach. Chiang declared his government the Republic of China (ROC) in opposition to Mao’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). For forty years a single-party regime ruled Taiwan following Chiang Kai-shek’s initial declaration of martial law in 1949.

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      Because the United States had defined its post-war identity as anti-communist, Taiwan held the status of the preferred national government in what was then referred to as “the free world.” The fate of Taiwan — still referred to by its Portuguese name, Formosa — figured as a major foreign policy issue in the 1960 US presidential campaign that pitted John F. Kennedy against Richard Nixon. The debate turned around whether the US should commit to defending against the People’s Republic two smaller islands situated between continental China and Taiwan.

      In short, Taiwan’s history and geopolitical status over the past 150 years have become extremely complex. There are political, economic and geographical considerations as well as ideological and geopolitical factors that make it even more complex. These have been aggravated by a visible decline in the supposed capacity of the United States to impose and enforce solutions in different parts of the globe and the rise of China’s influence in the global economy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Complexity, when applied to politics, generally signifies ambiguity. In the aftermath of the Korean War, the Eisenhower administration established a policy based on the idea of backing Taiwan while seriously hedging their bets. Writing for The Diplomat, Dennis Hickey explains that in 1954, the US “deliberately sought to ‘fuzz up’ the security pact [with Taiwan] in such a way that the territories covered by the document were unclear.”

      Following President Nixon’s historic overture in 1971, the US established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. This led to the transfer of China’s seat at the United Nations from the ROC to Mao’s PRC. The status of Taiwan was now inextricably ambiguous. US administrations, already accustomed to “fuzzy” thinking, described their policy approach as “strategic ambiguity.” It allowed them to treat Taiwan as an ally without recognizing it as an independent state. The point of such an attitude is what R. Nicolas Burns — President Joe Biden’s still unconfirmed pick for the post of US ambassador to China — calls “the smartest and most effective way” to avoid war.

      Recent events indicate that we may be observing a calculated shift in that policy. In other words, the ambiguity is becoming more ambiguous. Or, depending on one’s point of view, less ambiguous. There is a discernible trend toward the old Cold War principle of brinkmanship. A not quite prepared President Biden recently embarrassed himself in a CNN Town Hall for stating that the US had a “commitment” to defend Taiwan. The White House quickly walked back that commitment, reaffirming the position of strategic ambiguity.

      This week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared to be pushing back in the other direction, threatening the Chinese with “terrible consequences” if they make any move to invade Taiwan. Blinken added, the Taipei Times reports, that the US has “been very clear and consistently clear” in its commitment to Taiwan. 

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Consistently clear:

      In normal use, unambiguous. In diplomatic use, obviously muddied and murky, but capable of being transformed by an act of assertive rhetoric into the expression of a bold-sounding intention that eliminates nuance, even when nuance remains necessary for balance and survival.

      Contextual note

      If Donald Trump’s administration projected a foreign policy based on fundamentally theatrical melodrama that consisted of calling the leader of a nuclear state “rocket man” and dismissing most of the countries of the Global South as “shitholes,” while accusing allies of taking advantage of the US, the defining characteristic of the now ten-months-old Biden administration’s foreign policy appears to be the commitment to the old 1950s Cold War stance known as brinkmanship.

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      In November, the CIA director, William Burns, comically threatened Russia with “consequences” if it turned out — despite a total lack of evidence — that Vladimir Putin’s people were the perpetrators of a series of imaginary attacks popularly called the Havana syndrome. This week, backing up Biden’s warning “of a ‘strong’ Western economic response” to a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was more specific. “One target,” France 24 reports, “could be Russia’s mammoth Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany. Sullivan said the pipeline’s future was at ‘risk’ if Russia does invade Ukraine.” This may have been meant more to cow the Europeans, whose economy depends on Russian gas, than the Russians themselves.

      These various examples have made observers wonder what is going on, what the dreaded “consequences” repeatedly evoked may look like and what other further consequences they may provoke. The US administration seems to be recycling the nostalgia of members of Biden’s own generation, hankering after what their memory fuzzily associates with the prosperous years of the original Cold War.

      Historical Note

      Britannica defines brinkmanship as the “foreign policy practice in which one or both parties force the interaction between them to the threshold of confrontation in order to gain an advantageous negotiation position over the other. The technique is characterized by aggressive risk-taking policy choices that court potential disaster.”

      The term brinkmanship was coined by Dwight Eisenhower’s Democratic opponent in both of his elections, Adlai Stevenson, who dared to mock Secretary of State John Foster Dulles when he celebrated the principle of pushing things to the brink. “The ability to get to the verge,” Dulles explained, “without getting into the war is the necessary art…if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.” Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, inherited the consequences of Dulles’ brinkmanship over Cuba, the nation that John Foster’s brother, CIA Director Alan Dulles, insisted on invading only months after Kennedy’s inauguration. This fiasco was a prelude to the truly frightening Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when Kennedy’s generals, led by Curtis Lemay, sought to bring the world to the absolute brink.

      When, two years later, Lyndon Johnson set a hot war going in Vietnam, or when, decades later, George W. Bush triggered a long period of American military aggression targeting multiple countries in the Muslim world, the policy of brinkmanship was no longer in play. These proxy wars were calculated as bets that fell far short of the brink. The risk was limited to what, unfortunately, it historically turned out to be: a slow deterioration of the capacities and the image of a nation that was ready to abuse its power in the name of abstract principles — democracy, liberation, stifling terrorism, promoting women’s rights — that none of the perpetrators took seriously. Threats and sanctions were features of the daily rhetoric, but the idea at the core of brinkmanship — that some major, uncontrollable conflagration might occur — was never part of the equation.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Biden administration may have serious reasons for returning to the policy of brinkmanship. The position of the United States on the world stage has manifestly suffered. Some hope it can be restored and believe it would require strong medicine. But there are also more trivial reasons: notably the fear of the administration being mocked by Republicans for being weak in the face of powerful enemies. 

      Both motivations signal danger. We may once again be returning to the devastating brinkman’s game logic illustrated in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Will the US Wake Up From Its Post-9/11 Nightmare?

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      Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA — the Transportation Security Administration — to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a US phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion, compared with over $28 trillion today.

      We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001, “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the US government’s disastrous response to them. That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.  

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      Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the US response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses — activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy. 

      Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.” 

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      “You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.” 

      “Insurgent Math”

      Even the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the US created 10 new enemies. Thus, the so-called global war on terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it. 

      By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the US vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the first place. In Libya and Syria, only 10 years after 9/11, US leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11 by recruiting and arming al-Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.

      The US response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. Lincoln Chafee, the only Republican senator who voted against the war on Iraq, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted in 2002 for the US to invade Iraq paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House. 

      Failure in Afghanistan

      Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the US defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the 9/11 attacks. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war. 

      Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against the war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut US military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every US taxpayer $20,000, one would think that Representative Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.

      Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for health care, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.

      These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proved worthless, as President Biden has acknowledged. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by the US and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see. 

      But the different paths chosen by American and Chinese leaders are not predestined. Despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the US corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than their country’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in US foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the people.

      Weapons and More Weapons

      The perennial handicap that has dogged US diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” 

      Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force. 

      The rote declarations of US leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the US development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.

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      By contrast, US leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain US “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. 

      A “new American century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Adolf Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.  

      America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s US war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.    

      Time to Get Serious

      But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a down payment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy — if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard. 

      First, we must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Second, we must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the US war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”  

      Third, we must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending” US vital interests, humanitarian intervention, the war on terror and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” — whose rules only apply to others but never to the United States. 

      Finally, we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including US weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes, and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia. 

      Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Remembering What to Remember in America

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      As America approaches the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 disaster, there are still terrorists hanging out in many of the world’s shadowy recesses, some of whom are probably hoping for another opportunity to bring down another shrine to capitalism somewhere in the American homeland. Even with this continuing threat still looming over the nation and after years of a “war on terror” fought in far-off lands, it now seems that the greatest terrorist threat to the US comes from its homegrown “patriots,” who no longer have to hang out in America’s shadowy recesses.

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      Now that the American political and military exit from Afghanistan has stumbled to completion, a key component of America’s egregious and deadly response to 9/11 is finally ended after 20 years of failed policy. But failed policies should have consequences, and this one surely did, both here and abroad. The loss of life in Kabul during the withdrawal is just the latest reminder of yet another “gallant” American adventure gone bad in some foreign land. For 20 years, throughout the Muslim world, we made enemies we didn’t have to make, and we created a whole new cadre of wounded warriors in our midst ready to vanquish the incoming hoards at all cost to save the homeland from itself.

      Imposing Its Will by Force

      To make matters worse, there is a shocking ignorance about even relatively recent history and its relevance to the present and the future. Few Americans seem to fathom that in response to the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, the national government set out to extract a bloody bounty to avenge each of those lost lives. While the US mourned its losses, there was hardly a thought or a moment of introspection before the nation’s leaders charted their deadly and destructive course around the world.

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      In every far-off land where the US government seeks to impose its will by force, no matter the reason for doing so in the first place, the people in those invaded lands pay a terrible price. And it always ends the same way. It is important to know that America has not won a war since 1945 and has not fought a war on its own soil since the Civil War. Yet in Afghanistan alone, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Afghans have been killed, maimed and wounded, with millions more displaced, by an invasion that those men, women and children neither sought nor provoked.

      As in Vietnam, US government operatives found elements of the local populace in Afghanistan that they assured themselves were welcoming. Then the killing started. And as always, the people we paid in those lands loved us, and the people we killed maimed and devastated hated us. And here is the lesson to be learned: There are always more of the latter than the former. When the payments stop coming, love is quickly lost, but the hatred of the devastated never dies.

      Repeating the Vietnam Playbook

      If there is anything to be gained from the crushing defeat and exit from Afghanistan, it is that after 20 years of repeating the same essential Vietnam playbook, while dealing death and destruction at every turn, many in America may finally understand how Vietnam ended as it did. When one nation invades another, it never ends well. When the invading nation has some messianic notion that it alone can succeed in supplanting existing cultural, social and political norms, and does so at the point of a gun, the invaded nation will eventually rebel, unite and drive out the invaders.

      So, as another 9/11 anniversary looms, Americans must again try to comprehend that our national loss on September 11, 2001, was not sufficient cause to scream at the world like some out-of-control toddler. It was a horrible day because so many innocent people lost their lives and so many more were left injured and broken. But when the US government set out to exact revenge, the worst that we could be was unleashed on others, many of whom were just as innocent as those who lost their lives in America on 9/11.

      In doing so, the US not only failed to wipe out terrorism, but it failed to create even a semblance of a new era of American heroism driven by an army of new American heroes. Rather it succeeded in creating an international force devoid of morality that it then had to sell at home as some group of avenging angels. Selling that narrative became even harder when our own soldiers, as always, started to come home in body bags.

      The US Failed

      There is a tragic symmetry to all of this. President Joe Biden seems to be a truly decent man, and when faced with a difficult choice that paralyzed his predecessors, he made the right choice and stuck to it. But as he did so, he was unable to seize that critical moment to tell the nation that we had failed, as before.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Once again, it seemed impossible to say that we as a nation must be better and do better. When the end in Afghanistan became most tragic at a cost of American lives, Biden echoed George W. Bush after 9/11 in leading the nation to believe in a new sacred mission to root out and kill the cockroaches who did us harm. This is the worst of who we are, and it never leads to anything good. Biden could have and should have done better at that moment. Instead, he felt compelled to affirm that if you kill us, we will kill you, and it will always be disproportionately tilted toward the others, anyone in the way be damned.

      It can only be hoped that no more young men and women, ours or theirs, will be sacrificed on the long-blackened stones of the alters constructed by their elders. There remain many people in the world who do not revere America the way so many here seem to think they should, and some of those will threaten the nation. Yet, after 20 years of fighting terrorism on the soil of others, the threat from afar seems minimally diminished.

      Rather, a whole new generation of wounded warriors walks among us. Some are surely heroes and some are surely villains, but way too many of them are integrated into the squads of self-styled patriots in every community, mostly out in the open, dangerously armed and supported by a significant cohort of those who will be most vocal about the ravages of 9/11. I have never quite understood why you get a patriotism merit badge for killing people in far-off lands or for simply wearing a uniform that to many in the world is synonymous with death, not dignity.

      The Heroes

      But this isn’t about merit or merit badges. Together, as a nation, Americans have to begin to walk away from violence and its always tragic end, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or Chicago. One image stands out to me from the chaos of the Afghanistan exit. It is the photo of two US soldiers in full battle gear lifting a baby over a razor-wired wall to a place of safety. Those soldiers are my heroes. I hope they come home and remember that moment above all else and find their voice to urge others to lift other babies over barriers to safety wherever they may be.

      I give my thanks to Joe Biden for having the courage to end this futile war in Afghanistan. I hope he finds those two soldiers and tells them and the nation that they were the most heroic of all.

      *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Congress Adjourns While the Nation Burns

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      While the fate of many in Afghanistan hangs in the balance, at least Americans at home can breathe a sigh of relief. Both the US House of Representatives and the Senate are on vacation for weeks to come. Citizens of the nation’s capital can recapture their identity from the out-of-town blowhards who give Washington a bad name. The trick now will be to encourage as many Republicans as possible to stay away for good. Admittedly, this may take another election to accomplish, but it is important to get to work on it now.

      On the Senate side of the Capitol, both Democrats and Republicans are leaving town with their party balloons still in the air in celebration of a bill to fund repair and replacement of a portion of the nation’s hard infrastructure that has crumbled before their very eyes for decades. It has become so rare that both parties can agree on anything that the celebration far outweighs the accomplishment. After all that hard work, it seems that it is time for a “well-deserved” weeks-long vacation, the other topic that receives regular bipartisan support.

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      On the House of Representatives side, things are a little more complicated. That group of dedicated public servants adjourned on July 30 for seven weeks, although a short recall is possible for a symbolic vote or two along the way. To be fair, they did pass some meaningful legislation in the last few months. However, only one such piece of legislation has passed the Senate as well and been signed into law — Joe Biden’s initial COVID-19 relief bill (American Rescue Plan). But at least they tried to find legislative solutions on some significant issues, the most important of which are voting rights and police reform.

      With all those senators and representatives now vacationing, it would be easy to conclude from this casual approach to governance that the nation is smoothly sailing to its appointed destiny of renewed greatness. Nothing could be further from the truth.

      There is so much that is so obviously wrong at the moment in today’s America that even the appearance of a weeks-long hiatus should ethically disqualify those vacationing legislators from further service. A “grateful” nation should retire all of them. But that won’t happen, in part because each of them will have a spin machine at work full-time rolling out the tale of just how hard they are working on the issues of the day back in their districts.

      While You Were Vacationing

      Lest you think that I am being a little hard on these self-congratulatory public servants, let’s take a look at what is going on around the nation and around the world while the US Congress has freed itself of its legislative responsibilities.

      Embed from Getty Images

      First, and most obvious, COVID-19 is again ravaging the nation. So, instead of collectively working on urgent public health initiatives, like vaccination mandates, the vacationing legislators are individually on the stump creating more public health confusion. Much of the idiocy makes enough local news that it fortifies those in the caves, covens and churches in Republican districts and states as they go about their communities spreading the disease. The only upside is that many of the vacationing Republican congresspersons are spending their time hanging out with their unmasked and unvaccinated constituents.

      Meanwhile, a country that clings to the notion that the current version of universal suffrage has become a critical component of its “democratic” foundation is in the throes of an unrelenting Republican-led effort to do everything possible to make voting more difficult and less universal. The reasons for this are simple: racism and privilege. Universal suffrage to white conservatives is only a good thing if the “universe” is overwhelmingly composed of right-wing white people. Unfortunately for that dwindling crowd, the universe includes a lot of black and brown people, and a whole bunch of young people who see “universal” as a plus.

      There is an easy way to stop the reversal of the democratic process in America. It is to pass legislation at the national level that sets clear voting rights standards, that increases access to the ballot for all eligible voters and that provides fierce enforcement measures to ensure legal compliance. But you can’t do any of this on vacation.

      While many of those vacationing legislators may come face-to-face with constituents in places where everything is burning, and heatwaves, drought and smoke spread daily devastation, nothing can be done about this either while on vacation. Therefore, environmental laws, climate change legislation, and economic incentives and regulatory mandates remain on hold. The legal framework for cleaner energy production, research and use remains unchanged and woefully inadequate to meet today’s planetary challenges.

      While climate change is taking its deadly toll during the congressional vacation season, we should not forget about gun violence and police violence. Hardly a day goes by in America without multiple firearm deaths and some measure of police overreaction or undertraining resulting in the death or serious injury of someone in some community that the cops are supposed to be protecting. It will be hard to get a full tally from these events over the coming vacation weeks, but every congressperson knows that critically-needed federal legislation to address rampant gun violence and police reform will be on hold, as well.

      No matter how completely oblivious most Americans have become to gun violence (until it hits very close to home), America remains the most likely developed country in which at any moment someone is being killed or killing themselves with a firearm. Since it has been a few weeks now since the nation’s latest high-profile mass killing, it will be hard to make it to the end of this congressional vacation without another one. Thoughts and prayers are all we get when Congress is in session, so their absence shouldn’t change the landscape much on this one. But we should all be disgusted that these public servants can go on vacation while the gun carnage continues unabated and has remained unaddressed in meaningful federal legislation for decades.

      The List Goes On

      I could go on. The list is long. But so is the vacation. Think about how a functioning legislature might be able to make some legislative progress in the coming weeks on universal access to meaningful health care, child care and family leave, a living minimum wage, tax reform and access to quality education.

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      There might even be the opportunity to debate the crippling and continuing impact of America’s systemic racism and how to do something about it. And maybe if they weren’t all on vacation, they could do something constructive, instead of sound bites, about the implementation of America’s long-overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan and its human rights implications, about immigrants and refugees, and about ensuring that the vaccines that Americans are throwing away get into the arms of those begging for them elsewhere.

      They could be doing some of this, but they are doing none of it. They are on vacation.

      *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More