Daniel Ellsberg and His Country: An American Love Story

"The Most Dangerous Man in America," a documentary by filmmakers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, is being shown in Los Angeles and New York (until September 29th at the Film Forum) as well as film festivals. I hope it gets a broader release because it's best seen in a theatre, not because of the film's cinematic qualities but because that's one way to feel what Ellsberg and the filmmakers show us: individual conscience is a group activity.

The film, brilliantly edited, tells a number of stories and stories-behind-the-stories (and it was a nice surprise to encounter in the film my friend and co-editor Richard Falk, himself a distinguished anti-war scholar and activist).

As political narrative the opening scenes depicting the Johnson White House's fabrication of Vietnamese aggression to elicit Congressional authorization for the Vietnam War are surreal in their spot-on resemblance to how Cheney obtained approval for the Iraq war. The insidiously crafted bogus threats indicating America was vulnerable worked their magic on two gullible Congresses. In the film, as in life itself, the people's branch of government comes off almost as bad as the imperial presidency.

(When Ellsberg first tries to leak the Rand Corporation's 7,000 page "Top Secret" report documenting U.S. lies behind the conflict dating back to the 1950s, it was to a spineless Senator J. William Fulbright, Chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee who, despite his supposed rejection of U.S. policy, pretended as though the report did not exist. Ellsberg was shocked that politicians who had opposed the war for much longer than he had were too scared to release documents that might have ended it. He spent months carefully organizing the report's copying and delivery, and then nothing happened.)

It took months of smuggling out pieces of the report and then copying them in a secret location before Ellsberg had enough copies to share with key politicians. For this, Ellsberg believed that he might go to prison. In a typically thoughtful choice of honesty over secrecy, which also was an attempt to insure his 14-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter would not think him a kook -- what would they think if one day he's suddenly arrested as a traitor? -- he explained what he was doing as he was doing it. More than that, he wanted to honor them by including them in this important work; one evening his son was making the copies and his daughter was cutting off "Top Secret" at the top.

Ellsberg knew that he was putting his children at risk in various ways, including possibly sentencing them to a father behind bars, but preferred this over the certain calamity of lies. One of the film's motifs is calling into question bourgeois ideals of family and security, suggesting that these values corrode integrity and life itself. (If you care more about what your friends and co-workers think of you than you do about government bombing of civilians, innocent people die.)

Children 10 or older will really enjoy this film.

Why is this an American love story? Because it opens with a recently divorced Ellsberg working as a defense analyst and wooing a woman who, while drawn to him, could not abide by his support of the war. She ends their relationship but it seems that she started a process that profoundly changed him. Later, as Ellsberg is on the brink of leaking the Pentagon Papers, they reunite, marry, and Patricia supports him in this decision and goes underground with him for a while.

But more than their personal relationship, this is a story of Ellsberg's commitment to his government and democracy, faith in the idea that if the people knew the truth, they would do the right thing and end the war. A refrain that occurs more than once is Ellsberg's incitements of his fellow citizens to action. Quotations from Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. come easily to him.

Despite the film's concluding notes indicating Nixon's resignation and the end of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers seem to have played more of a role in the former than the latter. Nixon becomes consumed by revenge after the Supreme Court allows the press to publish the Pentagon Papers and this leads him to establish the secret "plumbers" group that would break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and, later, bug the Democrats at the Watergate complex.

It seems a little sad but also fitting that the virtues of the woman Ellsberg married and that she admired in him meant so little to the country on whose behalf these passions were devoted. At one point Ellsberg quotes the aphorism "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country" and tells us that he never understood why anyone would endorse loyalty to a friend instead of one's country when morality seemed to demand the opposite. There are a few other comrades-against-arms we meet who embody the Ellsbergs' ideals, all allies through the peace movement, but America does not come off as an obviously worthy love interest.

True, there is justice and even poetry when the judge in the Ellsberg and Russo case declares a mistrial and dismisses the charges after a Nixon henchman tried bribing the judge by promising him a high-level FBI appointment, but in the end Ellsberg seems to realize that the leaked report, the words themselves, did not really matter and his country would act in the same stupid way it always had. Ellsberg reflects on what it meant that after all he risked and lost, people seemed not to care.

It is unclear whether Ellsberg believes that his love for America has been betrayed, will remain ineluctably unrequited, or whether America might someday reciprocate. Perhaps that's what makes this such a great story.

UPDATE, 9/28/09: Today's column by Frank Rich shows how these debates from the 1960s are being rehashed in the Obama White House.

Anti-War Arguments: Vietnam v. Iraq

For the last week of the "Law and Politics" course I teach, students attended a screening of "Weather Underground," a 2002 documentary by Sam Green that Obama's presidential campaign made relevant again for its interviews with Bill Ayers. (Ayers, a former key player in the Weather Underground and now a professor at Northwestern University Law School, was the guy whose acquaintanceship with Obama demonstrated the latter's inclinations to terrorism.)

One of the bits of the film that always strikes me is that the Students for a Democratic Society as well as the Weather Underground offshoot objected to the war largely because it was killing and maiming Vietnamese villagers by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and eventually millions.

Like Henry David Thoreau, and unlike the contemporary left rhetoric against U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the protesters in the 1960s objected to a war of aggression because they did not want to be cogs in a machine that was systematically crushing an innocent population, not because they were worried about the deaths of U.S. soldiers.

Here's what Thoreau wrote, in the essay now published as "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" and originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), an inspiration for Gandhi as well as Martin Luther King, Jr.--the reading is paired with their watching "The Weather Underground":

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart."

The injustice Thoreau had in mind was the war on Mexico and Mexicans on behalf of filibuster terrorists (mostly U.S. citizens) trying to establish slavery in northern Mexico in violation of its Constitution. He could not imagine U.S. citizens could rationally support this war and yet despite their objections, he noted that they still served in the army carrying it out. )

Thoreau and other writers never imagined that the government could attract this lemming-like support for imperialism and mass killing without a draft. Nor, one thinks, would they imagine that pacifists would support soldiers for their patriotic service. I know this is not fashionable but I have no patience for sympathy extended by commentators on the Left to "our soldiers" IN A VOLUNTEER ARMY when little is said about the people in the countries who did not choose to be invaded. And yet in their stress on the harms the wars are causing U.S. soldiers and their silence on the civilians killed by U.S. drones attacking homes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Left has capitulated to a cheap provincialism. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann are indistinguishable from Rush Limbaugh in mouthing platitudes about people who have agreed to kill because they are either mercenaries or zealots, neither of which are motives worthy of respect from progressives.

A few days ago I asked students in my class at the University of California at Santa Barbara to discuss the difference between the anti-war arguments in the film and those by the Left today. The response paraphrased:

'The Vietnamese were Communists and this war is fought against terrorists. People in the United States in the 1960s were more open to Communism than they are today to terrorism.'

The course I teach is about theories of sovereignty and offered no information about the Vietnam War; my question was to provoke them to think about why there might be this disparity. The response, both illogical and inconsistent with historical facts, was fascinating to me. The only way that they could imagine an anti-war movement would stress the harms war caused non-U.S. populations was to impute to the U.S. public in the 1960s a sympathy to Communism! (They explained that the Left didn't need to worry about a Right that would attack them for these arguments because the U.S. public was open to Communism, unlike the contemporary U.S. public which is terrified of terrorism, so to speak, and will allow harms against anyone, except U.S. soldiers, apparently, to thwart this.)

But really the weird answer is because of a misleading premise in my question. There is no anti-war movement today. Although the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s spoke on behalf of the Vietnamese under siege by the U.S. government, the fact that there was a draft perhaps made war politically salient to a student population (and their parents) that today finds it a remote sideshow.

According to the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women, the source of the image above of graves being prepared for Masmo villagers killed by the U.S., Obama has been worse for Afghan civilians than Bush: In January they estimate between 78-83 civilians were killed by the drones he ordered into Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Perhaps the only way the U.S. public might care about the people the U.S. government invades is to make sure that our youth are also targeted as potential invaders. Hard to know if we would have had more war if our Presidents could call up millions at short notice (the worry of the U.S. Congress that ended the draft in 1973), or fewer, for the same reason.

43 Years Ago Today at 7:15 pm EST...

the United States government's Enola Gay airplane dropped nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, instantly killing tens of thousands and leaving hundreds of thousands to die from their internal and external radiation burns. The United States, which recently invented the Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse to invade Iraq, has been the only country to use nuclear weapons in war, and the only country to kill such a large number of civilians in a single attack.

Here's what one US citizen wrote in his letter to Time magazine on August 6, 1945:

Sirs,
The United States of America has today become the new master of brutal infamy, atrocity. Bataan, Buchenwald, Dachau, Coventry Lidice were tea parties compared the horror which we, the people of the United States of America, have dumped on the world in th form of atomic energy bombs. No peacetime applications of the Frankenstein monster can ever erase the crime we have committed. We have paved the way for the obliteration of our globe. It is no democracy where such an outrage can be committed without our consent!

Walter G. Taylor of New York City

On The Shock Doctrine

On Wednesday, November 28, 2007 I heard Naomi Klein speak at NYU to a standing room only audience about her most recent book, Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein actually was sharing the stage with my colleague Lisa Hajjar, an expert on torture and international law. The main argument Klein put forward was that the Chicago School of economic theory initiated by Milton Friedman advanced a program of what became known as neo-liberalism (and is now called neo-conservatism) that was so unpopular in developing countries that it could be advanced only by the use of brute force. Torture was not used to gain information but to terrorize populations so that they would not resist the economic policies imposed by dictators influenced by an ideology that nurtured cronyism and corporatism.

The argument is an intriguing one but it is not ultimately sustainable because it ignores the role nationalism played in establishing these military regimes, the nationalism of the U.S. as well as the developing countries. Hajjar began her talk by trying to elide the difference between Klein's analysis and Hajjar's own focus on the nationalism informing the Israeli use of torture, subtly mentioning national security as an independent ideology also allowing governments to impose practices that otherwise would be opposed but without mentioning the absence of neo-liberalism in many contexts. During the Q and A I asked Klein about this. To paraphrase, I suggested that there are numerous examples of torture that is not being done to advance neo-liberal agendas; and there are numerous examples of neo-liberal reforms that did not require torture. In fact some populations accept torture and other repressive policies used on their fellow citizens out of nationalist fervor, and not because they are afraid. I also mentioned the U.S. Congress's rejection of the immigration bill last summer as an example of the majoritary's nationalism trumping the alleged neo-liberal values of economic elites.

Klein replied that by privatizing homeland security, neo-liberalism has absorbed
nationalist values. Homeland security and nationalism is another avenue to make money--and the private security firms in Iraq would be another example. Her point was that capitalists have figured out how to make money off of nationalism--a lot of money--and therefore the business community no longer sees nationalism as antagonistic to their agenda.

For reasons I'll explain below, I don't buy this dismissal of the role of nationalism in perpetrating state violence, and nationalism's incommensurability with liberalism, but Klein seemed to know a lot and I bought her book. Although her central political point is not supportable, the narrative masterfully weaves together microanalyses of historically independent episodes from the CIAs mind control research in 1950s Canada to the compromised role of the Ford Foundation in supporting Friedman's South American economic shock troops to detailed stories of neoliberal programs from Chile to South Africa to Poland and Russia. The theory is wrong but Klein's facts are one important piece of the story about government repression and she is an outstanding writer.

Here's the problem: Klein is partly right but neoliberalism is not the complete story, and not even the most important one in most contexts. Everyone from Israel to Iraq tortured for reasons that had nothing to do with neoliberalism, and the U.S. "war on terror" has nothing to do with neoliberal agendas, though these accommodate the war. Klein does not want to discuss noneconomic motives for torture and state violence because focusing on the nationalism explicitly invoked by the various political and military leaders who are her protagonists in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and Russia, is not good for Klein's 1990s "anti-globalization" agenda. Klein comes out of the anti-NAFTA, anti-GATT, anti-WTO movements that were advancing the very parochial, nationalist commitments of the juntas who were torturing people.

This is not to say that so-called indigenous peoples protesting in Seattle favored torture or any other policies of the death sqauds, but it is to say that the belief in a "native" people that should be protected from "outsiders" was also an ideology the Nazis shared and that in less dramatic circumstances appears in political contexts worldwide.

For instance, in today's elections, Putin did not receive 61% of the vote in Russia because people are pleased with his economic reforms, or because he is torturing people, but because he has been bellicose in defying the U.S. on Russian defense (recently withdrawing from a treaty that would have limited Russian army presence near European borders), renationalization (not privatization) of oil, and feeding bigotry against non-Russian residents. And in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is telling voters that voting against the Constitutional change that would make him a dictator is the same as voting for George Bush. In other words, dictators are gaining power from majorities to deprive people of civil rights from the people themselves because of nationalism and not merely compliance under the threat of force.

Klein's story is one of WTO strong arm tactics against suffering developing economies, but the truth always has been that rich countries have had more money to devote to protecting their domestic industries than have poor countries. As long as the WTO could be enforced across the board and rich countries did not evade the rulings it promised to help developing countries, and now this promise is bearing fruit as developing countries are using the WTO mechanism to file complaints against the U.S., a fact Klein ignores. For instance, in July, 2007 Brazil filed a claim against the U.S. for subsidizing agricultural exports.

The Left seems still to have an easy time talking about economic inequality and political economic structures of oppression, but a very hard time grappling with nationalism and embracing cosmopolitanism. Today's Left would not be responsive to servants of aristocrats worried about the fading of old world culture alongside the demise of feudalism, but reveal a misplaced sentimentality for "indigeneity," a code word for nativism or nationalism. (For more on the nationalist and not economic motives for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see this posting.) Perhaps a way to bring together Klein's persuasive account of the state robberies that required extreme violence with the nationalism that accompanied this is to refuse to use the Chicago
School's language of liberalization altogether. As Klein points out, the main thrust of the plans was privatization. Robbers also like to privatize. This has nothing to do with liberalism.

Instead of a compatbility between liberalism, neo- or otherwise, and nationalism--the ostensible narrative--Klein's is a story of nationalism and force, assisted by a lie that these were outcomes of open markets and choice. If only these reforms really were liberal, and not the expression of U.S. military priorities determined by its Cold War with Russia, as well as the nationalism and greed motivating the repressive forces in other countries as well. Klein herself begins with the CIA's Cold War development of shock therapy but then fails to see how the facts she discovers mark a trail of nationalist and not just economic pathways of violence.

Again, this is a compelling book presenting fascinating material with clarity, intelligence, and passion.

Citizenship Fast Track for Mercenaries

The military-industrial complex is at it again. After failing to ram the nightmare Nuremberg laws for the 21st century through the U.S. Senate, the forces that crave a two-tiered labor system have broken up the old omnibus immigration bills (s. 1348 and s. 1639) into pieces that they're trying to pass through smaller bills.
The next one up for a vote next week is a Defense Department authorization bill that would give citizenship to undocumented residents who arrived when they were 15 or younger and serve two years in the military.
This means that while the Department of Homeland Security is threatening fines and criminal sanctions against private employers whose workers lack documentation, the military will be cheerfully recruiting these people. An immigrant can be hired by one branch of government security to kill Iraqis, but will be imprisoned by another branch of government security for picking a tomato.

At present the government already has waived legal residency requirements for those who have "performed active duty during World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, [or] on or after Setpember 11, 2001." (U.S. Congressional Budget Office. "immigration Policy in the United States." Table A-1, Requirments for Naturalization (2006), p. 18.
True, the distance between being part of the military and active service is now largely hypothetical, but the proposed legislation should be a call to action against the current measures, not grounds for their extension.

The Political Science of Love and Hate

That's the title of the paper I'm about to give at the American Political Science meetings in Chicago. Leaving for the airport shortly but if you're interested in my day job, here you go: "The Political Science of Love and Hate."

U.S. Taxpayers Paying $30.4 Billion for Bigoted Gated Community: Israel

According to the New York Times (7/28/07 A1), the U.S. will be ratcheting up its aid to Israel to $30.4 billion for military aid alone over the next ten years. Israel already tops the world in its per capita military spending. In fact, Israel's military spending is virtually off the chart, at $1,429.03 per person over 40% higher than the second country on the list, Singapore, which spends $1,009.94. Third on the list is the United States, at $935.64/person annually, a number that is stunning when one considers that, like Iceland, which spends nothing on its military, the U.S. has secure borders. Its only enemies are there as a result of the U.S. military occupation in the Middle East. If the U.S. had not put military bases in Saudi Arabia and supported Israel, Al Qaeda would not be targeting the U.S.

In other words, the high military budgets are creating conflicts for Israel and the U.S., not solving them. Think about the negotiated settlements Israel would have to contemplate without a virtually infinite military budget allowing them to assassinate and imprison Palestinians, and about the absence of a terrorist haven in Iraq if the U.S. had not overthrown the guy maintaining, if not law, at least order in that country, which posed no threat to the U.S. until the U.S. army invaded.

Challenging the idea of checkbook security is that despite (because!) of hundreds of billions spent in Iraq, the area is a disaster zone on numerous dimensions, from the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed and maimed to the absence of running water. Even in Afghanistan, where the U.S. had a more legitimate claim to invade, military spending is not leading to anyone's safety. One reporter writes for the Boston Globe:

one thing that money can't buy these days in Afghanistan is security. Although the United States, which now has about 35,000 trained troops, members of the Taliban walk the streets openly in four provinces. Resurgent Taliban fighters recently executed a female prison warden and three men accused of being foreign spies.

Instead of giving $30.4 billion to the Israeli military, why not reduce their budget to zero until it becomes a civilized country? Israel shocks the rest of the world's conscience because they have done to Palestinians what the Nazis did to Jews in Europe under the Nuremberg laws: deny previously legal residents citizenship based strictly on criteria of heredity. I, who have spent very little time there (when I was visiting through a program designed to turn teenage Jews into Zionists--the result was my allergy to nationalism), am eligible for citizenship that has been denied to people who were born and raised there. It is appalling that the U.S. government, which claims to support civil rights and equality, would tolerate much less gild the military regime attached to this illiberal, repressive, and decidedly undemocratic country. The image is from last summer, July 28, 2006, when Israel launched a missile landing on an apartment building in Lebanon.

Forget about the Gym, Join the Army!

I was just working on some ideas for the global politics game I'm designing for my teaching, a spin-off from the agoraXchange project, and was thinking about incorporating features from the NBA lottery so I did a google search and ended up on InsideHoop.com. When I clicked on the link I wanted the image on top popped up.

The text stating "The benefits of being in the Army last a lifetime" sounds like a recruiting pitch from Gold's Gym. The rest of the ad stresses "Allowances and Bonuses" and "Vacation Time," leaving out the bits about being targeted for a violent death and having to kill people. Nor is there any mention of the substantive purpose of the military presence there, even the pretextual one of stopping terrorism.

It used to be mercenary armies were made up of foreigners, but now the government is running a private war and can only recruit citizens by the same incentives Halliburton might use. It's common knowledge that the army cannot meet its recruiting goals, but alas Cheney-Bush have only a very partial affinity for the free market. If the army cannot recruit because this war is so unpopular that it cannot overcome knee-jerk nationalism, then perhaps this is a sign that it's not worth fighting.

Why Not Indict Rumsfeld for Lying to Congress?

Seymour Hersch's latest expose of the Bush Administration's thuggery is another juicy collection of insider information. He's had a long talk with Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who tells Hersch that under Rumsfeld the U.S. violated the Geneva Convention--ammunition for a war crime charge that the Center for Constitutional Rights has been trying to make stick for the last couple of years. And while this is certainly a noble cause, in the meantime why not take the low fruit, a simple open and shut case of lying to Congress (USC Title 18, section 1001) about his knowledge of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib?

As Hersch's article and other articles make clear, most of the evidence against Rumsfeld is in the public record. Hersch writes:

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January [2004, when the abuses first were reported] information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

(Uncharacteristically, Hersch omits the details of this testimony and I have not been able to find the date or committee to which it was given. The dates and committees for other statements by officials are well-documented in the article.)

In the next paragraph Hersch writes: "Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th [2004], claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. "It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn't say, 'Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,'' Rumsfeld told the congressmen. 'I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn't."

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, 'it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.'"

So leaving aside all the inferences from Rumsfeld's control-freak personality, knowledge of how the chain-of-command works, and the statements about the specific instructions for interrogation transported via General Miller from Guantanamo, if Hersch is right about the public record, this means that:

1) The Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress that information about the "abuse" at Abu Grahib had been given "to me and the Secretary..." in January, 2004, or three months before Rumsfeld told Congress he first knew of it.

Also:

2) In a newspaper article published on July 15, 2005, Stephen Hedges writes in the Baltimore Sun that General George Miller, the guy who brought Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, said he briefed Rumsfeld aides Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Cambone in Fall, 2004, after returning from Iraq: ""Following our return in the fall, I gave an outbrief to both Dr. Wolfowitz and Secretary Cambone." Hedges says that Congress never asked Wolfowitz about what he knew and when he knew it.

(For more highly persuasive circumstantial evidence on what Rumsfeld knew, see Lila Rajiva's post "The Don in Denial" on her blog The Mind-Body Politic.)

Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were in frequent, daily contact. Documentation of these conversations in some form must exist and now that the Democrats are running Congress this might be a good time to subpoena them. Likewise, the old guard is crumbling and it might be easier now to find remorseful ex-officials happy to relieve their consciences.

The Congressional testimony and documents can be obtained immediately but the trial needs to wait until Bush leaves office, which still leaves Rumsfeld's crime within the statute of limitations. One sad lesson the Republicans have taught is that it's not enough to convict government officials for them to go to jail; the Bush criminal gang needs to be thrown out so that they might be actually punished. The statute of limitations on lying to Congress is five years. And the penalty is five years, too. If there's one brave U.S. Attorney General still standing, perhaps she will take this to heart, but she needs to wait until late January, 2008 or the only accomplishment will be another Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card issued by what Taguba aptly calls the Mafia. Images from People's Daily article on Rumsfeld's Congressional testimony for May 7, 2004.

Pink Pistol Whipping Lesbians

Heard about this one from my friend Lisa Duggan, Director of the American Studies Program at NYU and primo observer of all things pink and lesbian, who sent a few queer theory professors a link to a Bill O'Reilly segment on "Lesbian Gangs."

After viewing it, someone on the list wrote: "At last! My long cherished hope that the moral panics around race, gender, and sexuality would just get it over with and converge
one stable scapegoat has at long last been realized!!"

As I was watching it, my girlfriend said it looked like a "Daily Show" spoof, and indeed it does, all these earnest middle aged guys talking about the lesbian threat in tones usually reserved for Al Qaeda. Turns out that among other inventions, revealed and linked on a well-documented posting about this by Jeff Hoard here, O'Reilly used a montage of footage from a youtube video of a "chick fight" over a man and a few other lies and exaggerations to make it seem that, just as he'd feared all along, lesbians have finally resorted to guns to win converts.

One sentiment popping up all over the blogosphere is a "wishful thinking" sentiment: if ONLY there were lesbian avengers, so to speak. For instance, Chris Dykstra writes: "I am ready to be a foot-soldier in a lesbian gang! Choose me! Me! Me! Me!" Fear of violence focuses attention. Following 9-11 sales of the Koran immediately quintupled and Penguin had to airlift copies into the U.S. to keep up with demand. A reporter for the Boston Globe wrote on October 5, 2001, "Interest in Islam - a religion that was largely unknown to many Americans before Sept. 11 - is suddenly pervasive. Today, Oprah Winfrey is dedicating her television talk show to the topic 'Islam 101.'"

Alas, the lesbian gangs and Al Qaeda are far less violent and becoming more legitimate than the ones being run under the flag of the United States. Maybe Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush are right about one thing: when the U.S. is militarily defeated in the Middle East it will lose its ideological stature there as well. And not a second too soon. This is by no means to say that the other gangs waiting in the wings are an improvement, but that a world without U.S. hegemony is better than one with it.

What Bush Knew and When We Knew It

Just leaving Halifax where I attended a workshop called "Democracy in Crisis: Alterity, Violence, and Community." The purpose is to produce a book with, alas, a similar title. (I have an allergy to jargon-y words such as "alterity," which has many meanings in scholarly texts, none of which are especially obvious or consistent.)

It was terrific meeting new scholars and seeing my old friend and colleague, Jodi Dean, a political theorist who runs a well-established political, psychoanalytic, cultural theory blog icite. Her paper "Credibility and Certainty: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories" raises questions about the conspiracy theory blog world, especially the popularity of the video "Loose Change," which suggests that the story of suicide terrorists using commercial planes on 9-11 was a government hoax.

Dean points out the difficulties for a democracy in which only the government's revealed secrets are deemed important, and the openly available government policies are generally ignored. Dean writes:

"By way of an example, we might note how various Democrats and journalists
contested the Bush administration’s classifying of previously public knowledge, its removal of all sorts of documents from the internet after 9/11. It’s unlikely that these Democrats and journalists knew or even cared about this information while it was public."

It's true that under the auspices of the Presidency, elected leaders and their henchmen have abused the public trust. In just the last three decades the break-ins authorized during the Nixon administration, the Iran-Contra subterfuges, the NSA wiretaps, the Office of the President's Legal Council's authorization of torture, provide a sample of numerous good reasons to distrust the Executive Branch.

Still, this does not mean most of government's heinous lies and misdeeds occur in secret. Anyone who reads a newspaper has sufficient evidence about the government's damning record, and looking for the revealing secret is largely a distraction. An excellent example of the Purloined Lie is the debate about whether the Bush Administration deliberately hid their knowledge that Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or whether the U.S. was just acting on bad intelligence.

Some background. The U.S. has tended to base its foreign policy on "deterrence theory": the belief that dictators can be evil and still be trusted not to launch wars as long as they fear retribution. The U.S. relied on this theory for close to half a century, during Cold War: as long as the USSR feared mutual annhilation, the U.S. could rest assured that the USSR would not launch a first strike nuclear attack.

After 9-11 a new theory began to be circulated in official U.S. policy documents, articulated most clearly in the National Security Strategy (NSS) written by the White House National Security Council and published in September, 2002. The argument was that "rogue states," i.e., states not conforming to the U.S. foreign policy agenda, were no longer sanely calculating the odds of retribution. Therefore, their weaponry would have to be taken out immediately in order to pre-empt attacks against the U.S. The NSS report states:

In the Cold War, especially following the Cuban missile crisis, we faced a generally
status quo, risk-averse adversary. Deterrence was an effective defense. But deterrence based only upon the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people, and the wealth of their nations.

In other words, Saddam Hussein might have to be taken out because the U.S. cannot rely on Hussein's self-interest to prevent him from launching a first strike. The report continues: "In the Cold War, weapons of mass destruction were considered weapons of last resort whose use risked the destruction of those who used them. Today, our enemies see weapons of mass destruction as weapons of choice." If you put these statements together, and also in the context of allegations that Iraq possessed WMDs, then the only recourse is to invade: Hussein is not the rational actor whose self-interest would deter him from aggression. He's a demented bully so bent on destroying the U.S. that he'll risk provoking hell on earth for his subjects. Since rational deterrence won't work, the only alternative is to preempt his adduced aggression and WMDs by attacking first.

More from the NSS report:

We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means. They know such attacks would fail. Instead, they rely on acts of terror and, potentially, the use of weapons of mass destruction—weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning. The targets of these attacks are our military forces and our civilian population, in direct violation of one of the principal norms of the law of warfare. As was demonstrated by the losses on September 11, 2001, mass civilian casualties is the specific objective of terrorists and these losses would be exponentially more severe if terrorists acquired and used weapons of mass destruction.

Based on the public record here are five clear-cut facts

1. The U.S. believes rogue states will not be deterred from using WMDs against U.S. military and civilian targets. (Above.)

2. The U.S. believed that Iraq was a rogue state. (Colin Powell speech to the United Nations.)

3. The U.S. government stated that Iraq had WMDs. (Ditto.)

4. The U.S. knew that Iraq had SCUD missiles and that it used these missiles in the Middle East in the 1991 Gulf War.

5. The U.S. placed over 180,000 troops in the Middle East within easy firing range of Iraq's SCUD missiles, and left them there for two months before actually invading. (Lexis-Nexis article from February, 2003.)

Based simply on the public record, it is evident that one of these facts must be wrong. (I published an essay stating this in Turkish Foreign Policy (2003), three months after the invasion, when the Cheney administration was still insisting that the WMDs would show up.)

That is, either the U.S. believed that Hussein had WMDs but would be deterred from using them against U.S. troops, so it was safe to post hundreds of thousands of soldiers and leave them there as sitting ducks prior to the invasion (and hence the preemption premise is a ruse); or, the U.S. believed that Hussein would use WMDs against the U.S. military, but knew from the weapons inspections that he did not have them.

In the event, it makes no sense to claim that Hussein had WMDs, would not be deterred from using them against U.S. targets; AND THEN to place over 180,000 troops within easy firing range of his SCUDS that, if filled with anthrax or mustard gas and used against the U.S. military in the Middle East, would create what theU.S. itself claimed would be a major public relations coup were Hussein able to kill U.S. military targets in the Middle East. It's true that the troops had some gas suits and so forth, but nothing on the scale that would be necessary to prevent attacks of what the U.S. claimed are weapons of MASS destruction, and not a few clouds of anthrax here and there.

It's also true that armies sometimes make tactical risks for strategic benefits. But in the event Hussein used his weapons on U.S. troops there would be neither tactical nor strategic advantage reaped. The U.S. itself in the NAS report is clear on the strategic, i.e., political, victory Hussein would reap from a massively deadly military attack on U.S. soldiers based in Kuwait and other nearby countries.

In addition to the public record documenting the Cheney-Bush administration's knowledge of WMDs we are beginning to have private confessions, secrets revealed. Powell's former top aide, a Republican Marine, Laurence Wilkerson, has in the meantime come forward to state that the speech given by Powell to the United Nations was a "I participated in a hoax played on the American people," and to apologize for his role in this hoax, but the sort of open secret that should be grounds for impeaching the U.S. President, but it has been sadly ignored. Perhaps if Seymour Hersch had secretly recorded Wilkerson stating this to Scooter Libbey over coffee in a Congressional cafeteria then it would count as news, whereas a mortified former public official coming on the David Brancaccio show is somehow uninteresting. Alas.