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Politics : The Left Wing Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (5662)	9/11/2002 7:44:42 PM
From: Poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6089

Hi Thamesy :-) I thought this was interesting: The evening of Sept. 11, I wrote an essay that ended with a plea that "the insanity stop here," that the brutal act of terrorism not spark more terrorism, theirs or ours. But the insanity didn't stop. Instead, the Bush administration cynically manipulated people's grief and rage to unleash an unlimited war against endless enemies, which has made the world more dangerous and the American people less secure in any land, home or abroad. A year later, it's clear the so-called "war on terrorism" is primarily a war to project U.S power around the world. Its goal is to extend and deepen U.S. control, especially in the energy-rich Middle East and Central Asia. Ordinary people have not benefited, and will not benefit, from this war or the economics that drive it. The antiwar movement argued from the start that conventional war could not produce security from terrorism, and we were right. Administration officials this summer acknowledged that the attack on Afghanistan didn't significantly diminish the terrorist threat and may have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers. Those of us who criticized the mad rush to war also suggested the Bush administration would use terrorism as a pretext to justify a wider war; again, we were right. Officials have floundered trying to justify an attack on Iraq with claims about Iraqi connections to al-Qaida or other terrorist networks that are so unconvincing they have largely been abandoned. Claims about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction are more plausible, but riddled with inconsistencies. Iraq may have developed, or be developing, limited biological or chemical weapons programs, but no one has offered proof or a scenario in which Iraq might use them, except in the case of a U.S. attack. And the Bush administration has repeatedly announced that it won't be satisfied with renewed weapons inspections and is determined to topple the Saddam Hussein regime, destroying hopes for the diplomacy needed for multilateral regional arms control. Bush's talk of democracy in Afghanistan or Iraq is a bad joke. U.S. manipulation of the political process in Afghanistan to install a handpicked puppet, Hamid Karzai (now being guarded by U.S. troops and agents to protect him from his own people), was barely concealed. In Iraq, "democracy" will be acceptable to the Bush administration so long as a democratic process produces a similarly pliant leader. These failed attempts to build a case for war only highlight what has long been clear: The war in Afghanistan and a possible war in Iraq are about U.S. dominance, at two levels. The first involves the specific resources of those regions. In the case of Afghanistan, the concern is pipelines to carry the oil and natural gas of the Caspian region to deep-water ports. In Iraq, it's about controlling the country with the world's second-largest oil reserves. Beyond those direct interests, the logic of empire requires violence on this scale; when challenged, imperial powers strike back to maintain credibility and extend control. U.S. control is through mechanisms different from Rome or Britain in their imperial phases, but there can be no doubt that we are an empire. Much of the world is frightened by these imperial ambitions. A friend traveling in Europe reports back that people talk of their fear of America's militarism. Politicians in allied nations are questioning, or openly repudiating, American war plans. The task for U.S. citizens is clear: We must ensure that the U.S. empire is the first empire dismantled from within, through progressive political movements that reject world dominance that perpetuates inequality in favor of our place in a world struggling for justice and peace. On Sept. 11, we got a glimpse of what it might look like if the empire is taken down from the outside. Today we still have a choice. We can learn from history and step back from empire, or suffer the fate that history makes clear lies down the imperial path. We still have time to turn away from empire and toward democracy, away from unilateralism toward engagement, away from hoarding power and toward seeking peace. We still have time to demand of our government that the insanity stop here. --------------- Robert Jensen, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and a member of the Nowar Collective . He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. uts.cc.utexas.edu

To: thames_sider who wrote (5662)	9/16/2002 5:24:39 AM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6089

A Real War on Terrorism - series complete. Excellent read, IMO. Here's the last URL, has links to all the others. slate.msn.com In short: A few decades from now, there will need to be a "global civilization" in which both words are literally accurate—a planetwide community of mutually cooperative nations, bound by interdependence and international law, whose citizens are accorded freedom and economic opportunity. This is the goal we're forced toward by some of the creepier aspects of technological evolution: ever-more-compact, ever-more-accessible, ever-more-lethal munitions, and the ever-more-efficient crystallization of interest groups, including hateful ones, via information technology. History seems to be pushing us toward idealism with an awful realism. This idealism explains the ambitious array of policies I've said we should pursue and the large number of traditional interest groups we'd have to resist in the process. If we follow all the prescriptions in this series, we'll do outrageous things like kill the farm lobby's subsidies, tell the textile lobby to take a hike, and alienate dictators that our oil companies are fond of. (Among the little things I haven't had time to mention is that it would also be nice to conserve energy, thus cutting our reliance on these dictators and leaving us freer to alienate them.) We also have to resist the cheaply patriotic rhetoric of sovereignty fanatics, ranging from quasi-isolationists like Pat Buchanan to economic nationalists like Ralph Nader to unilaterists like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. All these people oppose at least some part of the interlocking system of transnational governance that could help congeal global civilization. Absolutely.