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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tonka552000 who wrote (39952)	3/19/2004 11:52:02 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Re-writing history Spinning the Past, Threatening the Future by Norman Solomon Political aphorisms don't get any more cogent: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell's famous observation goes a long way toward explaining why -- a full year after the invasion of Iraq -- the media battles over prewar lies are so ferocious in the United States. Top administration officials are going all out to airbrush yesterday's deceptions on behalf of today's. And tomorrow's. The future they want most to control starts on Election Day. And with scarcely seven months to go in the presidential campaign, the past that Bush officials are most eager to obscure is their own record. In late 2002 and early last year, whenever the drive to war hit a bump, they maneuvered carefully to keep the war caravan moving steadily forward. There was no doubt, they were a hard-driving bunch. The most powerful squad of the Bush foreign-policy team ran on the fuel of certitude at such a prodigious rate that even their momentum had momentum -- maybe, in part, because their lives' trajectories seemed to demand it. War had been declared first within themselves. Perhaps such steeliness has been almost boilerplate in history; excuses for aggressive war have never been hard to come by. In this case, no amount of geopolitical analysis -- from media pundits, academics and other commentators -- could really do more to shed light than the lightbulb comprehension that these people in charge had from the outset made the determination that war it would be. So, every attempt at civic engagement and demonstrations against the war scenario was, in effect, trying to impede "leaders" who had already gone around the bend. A very big bend. One of the American mass media taboos was to seriously suggest the possibility that the lot of them -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and, yes, Powell -- were, in their pursuit of war on Iraq, significantly deranged. Working back from their conclusion of war's necessity, top Bush administration officials -- with assistance from many reporters and pundits -- were reading the calendar backwards, hellbent on getting the invasion underway well before the extreme heat of summer. There was also political weather to be navigated. Though much more susceptible to manipulation than the four seasons, the electoral storms would be starting for the 2004 presidential contest, and a secured victory over Iraq well in advance seemed advisable. The peace-seeking pretense was dripping with charade in the months before the invasion. Journalists kept writing and talking about the chances of war as though President Bush hadn't already made up his mind to order it. Yet what Bush said in public was exactly opposite to reality -- a "one-eighty." When he talked about preferring to find an acceptable alternative to war, he was determined to bypass and destroy every alternative to war. Rational arguments would not work to forestall the presidential order to unleash the Pentagon. Despite the obstacles, which included vital activism and protests for peace, the chief executive easily got to have his war -- the best kind, to be fought and endured only by others. Eighteen months ago, looking out at Baghdad from an upper story of a hotel, I thought of something Albert Camus once wrote. "And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions." Later, any and all words were to be vastly outmatched by the big guns trained on Iraq. One afternoon, 14 months ago, inside a little shop in Baghdad's crowded souk, a young boy sat behind an old desk, brown eyes wide, quietly watching his father unfurl carpets for potential customers, and I wondered: "Will my country's missiles kill you?" Key questions of the past are also crucial for the future. For instance, can the United States credibly wage a "war on terrorism" by engaging in warfare that terrorizes civilians? Close to 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died because of the war during the past year. Does the mix of mendacity and deadly violence from the Oval Office really strike against terrorism, or does it fuel terrorist cycles? And, in the realm of news media, how many journalists are willing and able to go beyond reliance on official sources enough to bring us truth about lies that result in death? commondreams.org lurqer

To: tonka552000 who wrote (39952)	3/21/2004 11:55:26 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Software of Democracy _________________________ By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN OP-ED COLUMNIST THE NEW YORK TIMES March 21, 2004 nytimes.com My favorite building in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, is a corporate complex called the "Golden Enclave." In some ways, the whole tech sector in Bangalore could be called India's "Golden Enclave" — disconnected from the country's bad governance, as companies create their own walled enclaves, with their own electricity, bus service, telecommunications and security, and disconnected from the countryside, where many Indians still live in abject poverty. As long as these two liabilities of inept governance and endemic poverty are not addressed, India can't really take off and become a big-time technology competitor of the United States. The information revolution, though, has given India, for the first time, some real resources and tools to address its chronic ailments. Will it seize this opportunity? This is India's "to be or not to be" question. Says Vivek Paul, president of the cutting-edge Indian software giant Wipro: "In some sense, all that this globalization of information technology and [outsourcing] has done is to give India pin money to reform itself." If India "blows it," well, the opportunities may still be out there, "but India won't be a beneficiary in the long run," he said. "The beneficiaries will be those who are most flexible and able to organize themselves around the opportunities." Mr. Paul said he believed India would seize this moment. But it will require some radical changes in politics: While India has the hardware of democracy — free elections — it still lacks a lot of the software — decent, responsive, transparent local government. While China has none of the hardware of democracy, in the form of free elections, its institutions have been better at building infrastructure and services for China's people and foreign investors. When I was in Bangalore recently, my hotel room was across the hall from that of a visiting executive of a major U.S. multinational, which operates in India and China, and we used to chat. One day, in a whisper, he said to me that if he compared what China and India had done by way of building infrastructure in the last decade, India lost badly. Bangalore may be India's Silicon Valley, but its airport (finally being replaced) is like a seedy bus station with airplanes. Few people in India with energy and smarts would think of going into politics. People don't expect or demand much from their representatives and therefore they are not interested in paying them much in taxes, so most local governments are starved of both revenues and talent. Krishna Prasad, an editor for Outlook magazine and one of the brightest young journalists I met in India, said to me that criminalization and corruption, caste and communal differences have infected Indian politics to such a degree that it attracts all "the wrong kind of people." So India has a virtuous cycle working in economics and a vicious cycle working in politics. "Each time the government tries to put its foot in the door in IT [information technology]," he said, "the IT guys say: `Please stay away. We did this without you. We don't need you now to mess things up.' " That attitude is not healthy, because you can't have a successful IT industry when every company has to build its own infrastructure. America's greatest competitive advantages are the flexibility of its economy and the quality of its infrastructure, rule of law and regulatory institutions. Knowledge workers are mobile and they like to live in nice, stable places. My hope is that the knowledge workers now spearheading India's economic revolution will feel compelled to spearhead a political revolution. There are signs. Consider Ramesh Ramanathan, an Indian-born former Citibank executive, who returned to India to lead an N.G.O., Janaagraha, dedicated to improving local governance. India's independence revolution in 1947 began in urban India and its political reform revolution is also going to begin in urban India — "this time fueled by the forces of globalization," he said to me in his Bangalore office, surrounded by young volunteers. "Globalization is creating the affluent urban Indian who is going to demand more from government and is not going to be content with islands of affluence. [Because] it will be impossible for them to fully take advantage of the opportunities globalization is giving them without airports and roads and sidewalks . . . acceptable in any city in the world. And the only way they are going to get that delivered is if they get engaged in government. We have [in India] a motto: `Elect and forget.' And what we need is to `elect and engage.' "