I LIKE COCKBURN, BUT HOPE HE IS WRONG THIS TIME, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE THE BIG MONEY WANTS MORE WAR, AND IF THAT'S THE CASE, PROBABLY THAT'S WHAT WE WILL GET.
Top Democrats to Voters: Enough Already, Now Shut Up!
"We've Got a War to Run!"
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Let's go first to that moment of good cheer on the morning after. Horrible senators like Allen and Burns lost narrow races. The Republicans got a pasting. A man who called Alan Greenspan "a political hack" and George Bush "a liar" will be Senate majority leader. A woman elected to Congress with the help of thousands of San Franciscan homosexuals, some of them married by Mayor Gavin Newsom, would be Speaker. Who wouldn't want Harry Reid instead of Bill Frist, or Nancy Pelosi instead of fatty Hastert?
It's also the role of elections in properly run western democracies to remind people that things won't really change at all. Certainly not for the better. You can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd lowers expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done. Nowhere was\ there an item on the Democrats' "must do" list saying "Reverse plunge towards fascism. Rescind Patriot Act. Dump the Military Commissions Act. Restore habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights." Pelosi made haste to say: impeachment is off the table.
"Bold new vision" these days means Pelosi pledging a drive to notch up the minimum wage. I don't know about the vineyard, hotel and restaurant that Pelosi co-owns, but the effective minimum wage here in Humboldt country, northern California, is about $10 an hour, which is what you have to promise a young person to mow the yard. The pay-out rises rapidly to $13 an hour if you want to buy the tyke's loyalty for return visits. Maybe on some slave plantation in southern Florida attainment of the federal minimum wage is part of the American Dream , but elsewhere we have to talk about a Living Wage, which is something altogether different.
But who cares! No one believes the Democrats are ever going to mess with the system, and that's not why the voters put them back in charge of Congress. They want America out of Iraq. Pronto, just like Rep Jack Murtha said it should, this time last year. To her credit and the chagrin of the Washington Post as well as Fox News Pelosi backed Jack Murtha against pro-war Steny Hoyer to be House Majority Leader and said that Jane Harmon shouldn't chair the House Intelligence Committee.
A couple of days later the House Democratic caucus sent Hoyher cantering home 149-86, with Hoyer cheered on by the Washington Post, which ran nasty stories about Murtha; also by the New York Times which ran two dreadful stories by Michael Gordon saying this was not the time for the US to leave Iraq.
So at most you can reckon there are 86 antiwar votes on the Democratic side of the aisle in the new House of Representatives. Over on the senate side, Harry Reid, who'd been calling for "redeployment" of US troops out of Iraq "within the next few months" told his fellow Democrats that the issue of what to do in Iraq shouldn't be raised till James Baker and his Iraq Study Group issue their report.
Optimists somehow imagine the Baker Report will explode excitingly under the war's partisans and blow them sky-high. It'll do nothing of the sort. There'll be paragraphs of soggy language about the promise of democratic governance and the rule of law in Iraq, raised fingers of warning about the perils of failure, acres of statesmanspeak about the need for multilateral involvement. Probably, Baker and Co think the US should quit Iraq, but can't think of a way of accomplishing this without jump-starting charges across the next two years that America is cutting and runnng and is this any way to run an Empire? McCain's saying that already.
There is a ferocious battle in the offing and the swift rebuff to Pelosi and Murtha is not an encouraging straw in the wind. On the one side is the majority of Americans sickened of the war in Iraq, who spoke clearly on November 7. Their prime institutional ally is the uniformed military which was against the war from the start, and which gave Jack Murtha the briefings that emboldened him to take his stand last year. Their most plausible presidential candidate, Russell Feingold, has just said he won't run for the nomination.
On the other side is the massed legions of cold war liberalism, of whom the notorious neo-cons now denouncing Bush and Rumsfeld -- are but one battalion. Remember the origins of the neocons, as shock troops of the Israel lobby. Back in the mid-70s Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol , Albert Wohlstetter and the others saw the US facing impending defeat in Vietnam, and feared that the McGovernite peaceniks would rot the resolve of the Democratic Party to stand behind Israel. So they fanned out into the Committee on the Present Danger, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and stoked up the furnaces of the new cold war and greased the wheels of the Reagan campaign.
The apex neocons are a pretty discredited lot these days but there are legions like them spread across the nation's think tanks and policy institutes, all imbued with exactly the same fears that reverberated across the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Commentary, and the New Republic a generation ago: that America's "resolve" will soften; that there will be accommodation with Iran; that Israel will be abandoned. And in fact such fears are now more vivid. Thirty years ago the weight of the Israel lobby wasn't being excoriated by mainstream professors from Harvard and Chicago. Thirty years ago respectable professors like Tony Judt weren't publicly pillorying the Anti Defamation League. Thirty years the name of Israel, blowing apart children in Beit Hanoun and Gaza didn't stink in as many nostrils as it does today.
So the stakes are very high, and the party of permanent war represented at its purest distillation in the form of senators like Joe Biden and congressmen like Rahm Emanuel are regrouping for a counter-attack, their numbers refreshed by a phalanx of incoming blue dogs, ranged against the 60-80 "out now" Democrats. You think pro-war Tom Lantos one of the most rabid Zionists in Congress -- will be an improvement on antiwar Jim Leach as chair of the House International Relations Committee? The Democratic foreign policy establishment cannot and will not tolerate the notion of Cut and Run in Iraq. Expect the Israel lobby to say, post November 7, "We're back, stronger than ever!" Expect reassertions of the essential nobility of the attack that ousted Saddam Hussein, a deprecation of the destruction of Iraq as a society, a minimization of the outrages committed by US forces.
Expect a fierce campaign spearheaded by the Democrats and the surviving neocons, to wage a "better" war, evocations of the bloodbath that would accompany "over-hasty" us withdrawal (weird: your 2003 attack triggers the killing of maybe half a million and you claim anti-bloodbath credentials?)
Expect a presidential campaign waged among warmongers, from Clinton through to McCain by way of Giuliani. The voters spoke up, but that's the last chance they'll get, at least at the ballot box, for another two years. Top Democrats to voters: Okay. Enough already. Now shut up! In a few weeks we could be looking at Lieberman, Obama and Clinton holding a joint press conference and saying that no military option should be left off the table when it comes to Iran. They have said it often enough already. Ranged against them will be the peaceniks like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft and maybe Robert Gates, though that man is as slippery as an eel. Hagel-Edwards in 2008! (Liz Edwards of course.)
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, will be published in February by CounterPunch Book / AK Press.
Footnote: An earlier version of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.
Top Democrats to Voters: Enough Already, Now Shut Up!
"We've Got a War to Run!"
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Let's go first to that moment of good cheer on the morning after. Horrible senators like Allen and Burns lost narrow races. The Republicans got a pasting. A man who called Alan Greenspan "a political hack" and George Bush "a liar" will be Senate majority leader. A woman elected to Congress with the help of thousands of San Franciscan homosexuals, some of them married by Mayor Gavin Newsom, would be Speaker. Who wouldn't want Harry Reid instead of Bill Frist, or Nancy Pelosi instead of fatty Hastert?
It's also the role of elections in properly run western democracies to remind people that things won't really change at all. Certainly not for the better. You can set your watch by the speed with which the new crowd lowers expectations and announces What is Not To Be Done. Nowhere was\ there an item on the Democrats' "must do" list saying "Reverse plunge towards fascism. Rescind Patriot Act. Dump the Military Commissions Act. Restore habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights." Pelosi made haste to say: impeachment is off the table.
"Bold new vision" these days means Pelosi pledging a drive to notch up the minimum wage. I don't know about the vineyard, hotel and restaurant that Pelosi co-owns, but the effective minimum wage here in Humboldt country, northern California, is about $10 an hour, which is what you have to promise a young person to mow the yard. The pay-out rises rapidly to $13 an hour if you want to buy the tyke's loyalty for return visits. Maybe on some slave plantation in southern Florida attainment of the federal minimum wage is part of the American Dream , but elsewhere we have to talk about a Living Wage, which is something altogether different.
But who cares! No one believes the Democrats are ever going to mess with the system, and that's not why the voters put them back in charge of Congress. They want America out of Iraq. Pronto, just like Rep Jack Murtha said it should, this time last year. To her credit and the chagrin of the Washington Post as well as Fox News Pelosi backed Jack Murtha against pro-war Steny Hoyer to be House Majority Leader and said that Jane Harmon shouldn't chair the House Intelligence Committee.
A couple of days later the House Democratic caucus sent Hoyher cantering home 149-86, with Hoyer cheered on by the Washington Post, which ran nasty stories about Murtha; also by the New York Times which ran two dreadful stories by Michael Gordon saying this was not the time for the US to leave Iraq.
So at most you can reckon there are 86 antiwar votes on the Democratic side of the aisle in the new House of Representatives. Over on the senate side, Harry Reid, who'd been calling for "redeployment" of US troops out of Iraq "within the next few months" told his fellow Democrats that the issue of what to do in Iraq shouldn't be raised till James Baker and his Iraq Study Group issue their report.
Optimists somehow imagine the Baker Report will explode excitingly under the war's partisans and blow them sky-high. It'll do nothing of the sort. There'll be paragraphs of soggy language about the promise of democratic governance and the rule of law in Iraq, raised fingers of warning about the perils of failure, acres of statesmanspeak about the need for multilateral involvement. Probably, Baker and Co think the US should quit Iraq, but can't think of a way of accomplishing this without jump-starting charges across the next two years that America is cutting and runnng and is this any way to run an Empire? McCain's saying that already.
There is a ferocious battle in the offing and the swift rebuff to Pelosi and Murtha is not an encouraging straw in the wind. On the one side is the majority of Americans sickened of the war in Iraq, who spoke clearly on November 7. Their prime institutional ally is the uniformed military which was against the war from the start, and which gave Jack Murtha the briefings that emboldened him to take his stand last year. Their most plausible presidential candidate, Russell Feingold, has just said he won't run for the nomination.
On the other side is the massed legions of cold war liberalism, of whom the notorious neo-cons now denouncing Bush and Rumsfeld -- are but one battalion. Remember the origins of the neocons, as shock troops of the Israel lobby. Back in the mid-70s Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol , Albert Wohlstetter and the others saw the US facing impending defeat in Vietnam, and feared that the McGovernite peaceniks would rot the resolve of the Democratic Party to stand behind Israel. So they fanned out into the Committee on the Present Danger, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and stoked up the furnaces of the new cold war and greased the wheels of the Reagan campaign.
The apex neocons are a pretty discredited lot these days but there are legions like them spread across the nation's think tanks and policy institutes, all imbued with exactly the same fears that reverberated across the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Commentary, and the New Republic a generation ago: that America's "resolve" will soften; that there will be accommodation with Iran; that Israel will be abandoned. And in fact such fears are now more vivid. Thirty years ago the weight of the Israel lobby wasn't being excoriated by mainstream professors from Harvard and Chicago. Thirty years ago respectable professors like Tony Judt weren't publicly pillorying the Anti Defamation League. Thirty years the name of Israel, blowing apart children in Beit Hanoun and Gaza didn't stink in as many nostrils as it does today.
So the stakes are very high, and the party of permanent war represented at its purest distillation in the form of senators like Joe Biden and congressmen like Rahm Emanuel are regrouping for a counter-attack, their numbers refreshed by a phalanx of incoming blue dogs, ranged against the 60-80 "out now" Democrats. You think pro-war Tom Lantos one of the most rabid Zionists in Congress -- will be an improvement on antiwar Jim Leach as chair of the House International Relations Committee? The Democratic foreign policy establishment cannot and will not tolerate the notion of Cut and Run in Iraq. Expect the Israel lobby to say, post November 7, "We're back, stronger than ever!" Expect reassertions of the essential nobility of the attack that ousted Saddam Hussein, a deprecation of the destruction of Iraq as a society, a minimization of the outrages committed by US forces.
Expect a fierce campaign spearheaded by the Democrats and the surviving neocons, to wage a "better" war, evocations of the bloodbath that would accompany "over-hasty" us withdrawal (weird: your 2003 attack triggers the killing of maybe half a million and you claim anti-bloodbath credentials?)
Expect a presidential campaign waged among warmongers, from Clinton through to McCain by way of Giuliani. The voters spoke up, but that's the last chance they'll get, at least at the ballot box, for another two years. Top Democrats to voters: Okay. Enough already. Now shut up! In a few weeks we could be looking at Lieberman, Obama and Clinton holding a joint press conference and saying that no military option should be left off the table when it comes to Iran. They have said it often enough already. Ranged against them will be the peaceniks like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft and maybe Robert Gates, though that man is as slippery as an eel. Hagel-Edwards in 2008! (Liz Edwards of course.)
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's new book, End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, will be published in February by CounterPunch Book / AK Press.
Footnote: An earlier version of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.
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