The Illusion of Saving Nations From Themselves
Posted on Jun 30, 2008
By William Pfaff
The Bush government was elected in 2000 on a platform including vigorous opposition to the United States Army’s doing “nation-building.” Swedes, Danes, the European Union, and NGOs did nation-building. The U.S. Army was a fighting army.
This was the principle on which the new U.S. volunteer Army was formed after Vietnam. It is the explanation why, after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the Army looked on, bemused, while the people of Baghdad hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, tore down the phone and power wires, dug up the copper pipes, and destroyed the power generators of the city infrastructure, looting their own capital city of everything that had value and could be sold.
U.S. commanders, asked to protect at least the National Archaeological Museum, and the arts museums and universities, politely replied to curators, professors and concerned citizens, “Sorry, Sir (or Ma’am), we don’t do that sort of thing.” We only protect ourselves and the Oil Ministry.
What a difference a five-year-long military disaster can make! It now has cleared the way for another and opposite disaster. In the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that “it is absolutely clear that [the United States] will be involved in nation-building for years to come. Democratic state-building is now an urgent component of our national interest.”
In the U.S. Army, “a new generation of military leaders [is being trained] for stabilization and counterinsurgency missions” for decades to come, part of “our long-term partnerships with Afghanistan and Iraq, our new relationships in Central Asia, and our long-standing partnerships in the Persian Gulf, providing a solid geostrategic foundation for the generational work ahead.”
This means American efforts to place and/or maintain in power, by military means when necessary, pro-American governments that will cooperate in an area-wide American policy of suppressing fundamentalist Islamic movements, and combating Palestine liberation groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, hostile to the United States as well as Israel, or committed to the idea of anti-Western jihad. That’s not the way the secretary of state phrased it; she talks about nation-building and creating democracy. But that is what she was saying.
One might have thought that a decade of laying waste to Vietnam and Cambodia in order to accomplish “democratic state-building” would have taught the eminently practical lesson that the United States cannot democratic-state-build for anyone else. It is not even a total success in doing it at home.
It is a rule in the life of modern nations that nationalism trumps all else. If the government in Saigon, or a government in Baghdad or Kabul, cannot, even with appropriate foreign material assistance, establish and maintain order within its own frontiers and by its own means, armed legions of foreign democracy-teachers, state-builders, and winners of hearts and mind cannot do it for them.
As the British soldier—and state-builder in Bosnia—Paddy Ashdown said recently, the time it takes for a liberation army to turn into an occupation army is very short. The transformation is already well-advanced, if not complete, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In denial of that fact, the Bush administration has ordered reorganization and retraining of American military and political expeditionary forces so as to continue to build nations and democracy, by means of armed intervention and military occupation, for many more years in unlucky Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries (and who knows wherever else).
It is an axiom of history that no government put in place by foreign troops, or needing to be maintained in place by them against internal opposition, can be considered a legitimate government.
The Taliban in Afghanistan are not the Russian army, overrunning Afghanistan with tanks and helicopters, or an invading British colonial army. If they were, the problem would be simple. They are Afghans, members of the 40-million strong Pathan (or Pushtoon) people, who make up the largest part of the Afghan population. If other Pathans, inside Afghanistan, who are not religious fundamentalists, and the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks who make up the rest of the country’s population, do not wish to be ruled by Pathan religious reactionaries, they should not need 60,000 NATO and U.S. troops to defend them. If they will not defend themselves, there is nothing the foreigners can do to save them from their countrymen.
The same is true of the Iraqis. The only foreign army that has invaded Iraq is the American Army. The Iraq government is resisting long-term American extraterritorial presence in the country, and Iraqis increasingly are pressing the United States to get out. They are finding that the Pentagon and the White House have actually been planning to stay indefinitely (for 100 years?). This automatically will sooner or later produce popular uprising against military occupation.
Then what will an Obama or McCain administration do? They might order the troops to pull out. They will be accused of surrendering America to forces of evil.
Or they might order the Army and Marines to do again what was done to Falluja. They could forget about democracy and nation-building.
In the present (post-political-campaign) stage of American foreign policy thinking, and under mounting pressure from AIPAC for military solutions in the region, all of this deserves more reflection than it is receiving.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Salon.com (June 30, 2008)
Bush's top general quashed torture dissent
New evidence shows that despite warnings from across the military, former Gen. Richard Myers shut down legal scrutiny of brutal interrogation tactics.
By Mark Benjamin
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/30/richard_myers/
New evidence shows that despite warnings from across the military, former Gen. Richard Myers shut down legal scrutiny of brutal interrogation tactics.
By Mark Benjamin
Full article here:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/30/richard_myers/
N.Y. Times (June 30, 2008)
June 30, 2008
U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.
The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.
In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.
It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry’s decisions.
The advisers — who, along with the diplomatic official, spoke on condition of anonymity — say that their involvement was only to help an understaffed Iraqi ministry with technical and legal details of the contracts and that they in no way helped choose which companies got the deals.
Repeated calls to the Oil Ministry’s press office for comment were not returned.
At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world’s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry. The contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil companies.
The deals have been criticized by opponents of the Iraq war, who accuse the Bush administration of working behind the scenes to ensure Western access to Iraqi oil fields even as most other oil-exporting countries have been sharply limiting the roles of international oil companies in development.
For its part, the administration has repeatedly denied steering the Iraqis toward decisions. “Iraq is a sovereign country, and it can make decisions based on how it feels that it wants to move forward in its development of its oil resources,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman.
Though enriched by high prices, the companies are starved for new oil fields. The United States government, too, has eagerly encouraged investment anywhere in the world that could provide new oil to alleviate the exceptionally tight global supply, which is a cause of high prices.
Iraq is particularly attractive in that light, because in addition to its vast reserves, it has the potential to bring new sources of oil onto the market relatively cheaply.
As sabotage on oil export pipelines has declined with improved security, this potential is closer to being realized. American military officials say the pipelines now have excess capacity, waiting for output to increase at the fields.
But any perception of American meddling in Iraq’s oil policies threatens to inflame opinion against the United States, particularly in Arab nations that are skeptical of American intentions in Iraq, which has the third-largest oil reserves in the world.
“We pretend it is not a centerpiece of our motivation, yet we keep confirming that it is,” Frederick D. Barton, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “And we undermine our own veracity by citing issues like sovereignty, when we have our hands right in the middle of it.”
United States officials are directly advising Iraq on a host of issues, from electricity to education. But they have avoided the limelight when questions turn to how Iraq should manage its oil endowment, insisting that a decision must rest with the Iraqi government.
The State Department advisers on the Western contracts say they purposely avoid trying to shape Iraqi policy.
“They have not negotiated with the international oil companies since the 1970s,” said the senior State Department official, who was speaking about Iraqi oil officials and who is directly involved in shaping United States energy policy in Iraq.
The advice on the drafting of the contracts was not binding, he said, and sometimes the ministry chose to ignore it. “The ministry did not have to take our advice,” he said, adding that the Iraqis had also turned to the Norwegian government for counsel. “It has been their sole decision.”
The advisers say they were not involved in advancing the oil companies’ interests, but rather treated the Oil Ministry as a client, the State Department official said. “I do not see this as a conflict of interest,” he said. A potential area of criticism, however, is that only Western companies got the bigger oil contracts. In particular, Russian companies that have experience in Iraq and had sought development contracts are still waiting.
Earlier in the occupation of Iraq, American advisers supported the Oil Ministry’s effort to dismiss claims by the Russian company Lukoil to a large Saddam Hussein-era deal. The ministry maintains that the Hussein government canceled the contract three months before the invasion. Lukoil says the attempt to cancel the deal was illegal because Mr. Hussein had not appealed to international arbitration first, as required in the contract terms.
The new oil contracts have also become a significant political issue in the United States.
Three Democratic senators, led by Charles E. Schumer of New York, sent a letter to the State Department last week asking that the deals be delayed until after the Iraqi Parliament passes a hydrocarbons law outlining the distribution of oil revenues and regulatory matters. They contend the contracts could deepen political tensions in Iraq and endanger American soldiers.
Criticism like that has prompted objections by the Bush administration and the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who say the deals are purely commercial matters. Ms. Rice, speaking on Fox News this month, said: “The United States government has stayed out of the matter of awarding the Iraq oil contracts. It’s a private sector matter.”
Advisers from the State, Commerce, Energy and Interior Departments are assigned to work with the Iraqi Oil Ministry, according to the senior diplomat. In addition, the United States Agency for International Development has a contract for Management Systems International, a Washington consulting firm, to advise the oil and other ministries. The agency’s program is called Tatweer, the Arabic word for development.
“The legal department of the Ministry of Oil passed us a draft of the contract,” Samir Abid, a Canadian of Iraqi origin who is an employee of the Tatweer program, said in a telephone interview. “They passed it to us and asked for our comments because we were mentoring them.”
He added: “It was an exercise in deciding how best to do these contracts. I don’t know if they used our comments or not.”
In a statement, the agency said its advisers had reviewed the oil company contracts, known as technical support agreements: “At the request of the Ministry of Oil, the Tatweer Energy Team has done a review of the format, structure and clarity of language of blank draft contracts.”
The statement said the team did not have access to confidential information from the oil companies.
Consultants said the advice was necessary because the Oil Ministry, like other sectors of the Iraqi government, has experienced an exodus of qualified employees and lacks lawyers schooled in drawing up contracts.
A supervisor with the Tatweer program, who was not authorized to speak publicly and declined to be quoted by name, said that ministry officials, many of them near retirement, needed help.
The American government lawyers provided specific advice, the State Department official said, like: “These are the clauses you may want. You will need a clause on arbitration. You will need this clause to make this work.”
U.S. Advised Iraqi Ministry on Oil Deals
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.
The disclosure, coming on the eve of the contracts’ announcement, is the first confirmation of direct involvement by the Bush administration in deals to open Iraq’s oil to commercial development and is likely to stoke criticism.
In their role as advisers to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, American government lawyers and private-sector consultants provided template contracts and detailed suggestions on drafting the contracts, advisers and a senior State Department official said.
It is unclear how much influence their work had on the ministry’s decisions.
The advisers — who, along with the diplomatic official, spoke on condition of anonymity — say that their involvement was only to help an understaffed Iraqi ministry with technical and legal details of the contracts and that they in no way helped choose which companies got the deals.
Repeated calls to the Oil Ministry’s press office for comment were not returned.
At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world’s largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry. The contracts are expected to be awarded Monday to Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Total and Chevron, as well as to several smaller oil companies.
The deals have been criticized by opponents of the Iraq war, who accuse the Bush administration of working behind the scenes to ensure Western access to Iraqi oil fields even as most other oil-exporting countries have been sharply limiting the roles of international oil companies in development.
For its part, the administration has repeatedly denied steering the Iraqis toward decisions. “Iraq is a sovereign country, and it can make decisions based on how it feels that it wants to move forward in its development of its oil resources,” said Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman.
Though enriched by high prices, the companies are starved for new oil fields. The United States government, too, has eagerly encouraged investment anywhere in the world that could provide new oil to alleviate the exceptionally tight global supply, which is a cause of high prices.
Iraq is particularly attractive in that light, because in addition to its vast reserves, it has the potential to bring new sources of oil onto the market relatively cheaply.
As sabotage on oil export pipelines has declined with improved security, this potential is closer to being realized. American military officials say the pipelines now have excess capacity, waiting for output to increase at the fields.
But any perception of American meddling in Iraq’s oil policies threatens to inflame opinion against the United States, particularly in Arab nations that are skeptical of American intentions in Iraq, which has the third-largest oil reserves in the world.
“We pretend it is not a centerpiece of our motivation, yet we keep confirming that it is,” Frederick D. Barton, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “And we undermine our own veracity by citing issues like sovereignty, when we have our hands right in the middle of it.”
United States officials are directly advising Iraq on a host of issues, from electricity to education. But they have avoided the limelight when questions turn to how Iraq should manage its oil endowment, insisting that a decision must rest with the Iraqi government.
The State Department advisers on the Western contracts say they purposely avoid trying to shape Iraqi policy.
“They have not negotiated with the international oil companies since the 1970s,” said the senior State Department official, who was speaking about Iraqi oil officials and who is directly involved in shaping United States energy policy in Iraq.
The advice on the drafting of the contracts was not binding, he said, and sometimes the ministry chose to ignore it. “The ministry did not have to take our advice,” he said, adding that the Iraqis had also turned to the Norwegian government for counsel. “It has been their sole decision.”
The advisers say they were not involved in advancing the oil companies’ interests, but rather treated the Oil Ministry as a client, the State Department official said. “I do not see this as a conflict of interest,” he said. A potential area of criticism, however, is that only Western companies got the bigger oil contracts. In particular, Russian companies that have experience in Iraq and had sought development contracts are still waiting.
Earlier in the occupation of Iraq, American advisers supported the Oil Ministry’s effort to dismiss claims by the Russian company Lukoil to a large Saddam Hussein-era deal. The ministry maintains that the Hussein government canceled the contract three months before the invasion. Lukoil says the attempt to cancel the deal was illegal because Mr. Hussein had not appealed to international arbitration first, as required in the contract terms.
The new oil contracts have also become a significant political issue in the United States.
Three Democratic senators, led by Charles E. Schumer of New York, sent a letter to the State Department last week asking that the deals be delayed until after the Iraqi Parliament passes a hydrocarbons law outlining the distribution of oil revenues and regulatory matters. They contend the contracts could deepen political tensions in Iraq and endanger American soldiers.
Criticism like that has prompted objections by the Bush administration and the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who say the deals are purely commercial matters. Ms. Rice, speaking on Fox News this month, said: “The United States government has stayed out of the matter of awarding the Iraq oil contracts. It’s a private sector matter.”
Advisers from the State, Commerce, Energy and Interior Departments are assigned to work with the Iraqi Oil Ministry, according to the senior diplomat. In addition, the United States Agency for International Development has a contract for Management Systems International, a Washington consulting firm, to advise the oil and other ministries. The agency’s program is called Tatweer, the Arabic word for development.
“The legal department of the Ministry of Oil passed us a draft of the contract,” Samir Abid, a Canadian of Iraqi origin who is an employee of the Tatweer program, said in a telephone interview. “They passed it to us and asked for our comments because we were mentoring them.”
He added: “It was an exercise in deciding how best to do these contracts. I don’t know if they used our comments or not.”
In a statement, the agency said its advisers had reviewed the oil company contracts, known as technical support agreements: “At the request of the Ministry of Oil, the Tatweer Energy Team has done a review of the format, structure and clarity of language of blank draft contracts.”
The statement said the team did not have access to confidential information from the oil companies.
Consultants said the advice was necessary because the Oil Ministry, like other sectors of the Iraqi government, has experienced an exodus of qualified employees and lacks lawyers schooled in drawing up contracts.
A supervisor with the Tatweer program, who was not authorized to speak publicly and declined to be quoted by name, said that ministry officials, many of them near retirement, needed help.
The American government lawyers provided specific advice, the State Department official said, like: “These are the clauses you may want. You will need a clause on arbitration. You will need this clause to make this work.”
ThinkProgress.org (June 30, 2008)
NYT: Diversion of resources to Iraq contributed to al Qaeda resurgence in Pakistan.
In a front page story this morning, the New York Times reports on the story of how Al Qaeda “gained a new haven” in Pakistan’s tribal areas across the border from Afghanistan. According to the Times, “it is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq“:
Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.
[…]
One reason for this, according to two former intelligence officials directly involved in the Qaeda hunt, was that by 2006 the Iraq war had drained away most of the C.I.A. officers with field experience in the Islamic world. “You had a very finite number” of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. “Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.”
Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/washington/30tribal.html?hp
In a front page story this morning, the New York Times reports on the story of how Al Qaeda “gained a new haven” in Pakistan’s tribal areas across the border from Afghanistan. According to the Times, “it is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq“:
Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.
[…]
One reason for this, according to two former intelligence officials directly involved in the Qaeda hunt, was that by 2006 the Iraq war had drained away most of the C.I.A. officers with field experience in the Islamic world. “You had a very finite number” of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. “Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.”
Full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/washington/30tribal.html?hp
Why are people so willfully ignorant?
In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors Are Flying
By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 30, 2008; A01
FINDLAY, Ohio -- On his corner of College Street, Jim Peterman stares at the four American flags planted in his front lawn and rubs his forehead. Peterman, 74, is a retired worker at Cooper Tire, a father of two, an Air Force veteran and a self-described patriot. He took one trip to Washington in 1989 -- best vacation of his life -- and bought a statue of the Washington Monument that he still displays in a glass case in his living room.
He believes a smart vote is an American's greatest responsibility. Which is why his confusion about Barack Obama continues to eat at him.
On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
"It's like you're hearing about two different men with nothing in common," Peterman said. "It makes it impossible to figure out what's true, or what you can believe."
Here in Findlay, a Rust Belt town of 40,000, false rumors about Obama have built enough word-of-mouth credibility to harden into an alternative biography. Born on the Internet, the rumors now meander freely across the flatlands of northwest Ohio -- through bars and baseball fields, retirement homes and restaurants.
Faced with polling that shows about one in 10 Americans thinks Obama is Muslim, the candidate's campaign has launched an aggressive effort to discredit rumors and clarify Obama's past. It created a "Fight the Smears" Web site and a new television ad that reiterates Obama's Christian faith, patriotism and family background. Dozens of volunteers have been sent to Ohio five months in advance of the election so they can spend extra time educating voters.
But on Peterman's block in Findlay, the campaign's efforts may already be too late. A swing voter who entered this election leaning Democratic, Peterson faces a decision that is no longer so simple as a choice between Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain, he said. First, he must pick the version of Obama on which he will stake his vote.
Does he choose to trust a TV commercial in which Obama talks about his "love of country"? Or his neighbor of 40 years, Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran who heard from a friend in Toledo that Obama refuses to wear an American-flag pin?
Does he trust a local newspaper article that details Obama's Christian faith? Or his friend Leroy Pollard, a devoted family man so convinced Obama is a radical Muslim that he threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him?
"I'll admit that I probably don't follow all of the election news like maybe I should," Peterman said. "I haven't read his books or studied up more than a little bit. But it's hard to ignore what you hear when everybody you know is saying it. These are good people, smart people, so can they really all be wrong?"
'Funny About Change'
Peterman bought his single-story house here in 1959, a few months after he left the Air Force and married. His wife, Mildred, had grown up in Findlay, and they never considered moving anywhere else. On College Street, the couple found all the hallmarks of America's heartland: a house for $9,000; a neighborhood where their two boys, one handicapped, could play outside after dark; a steady "pencil-pushing" job up the road for Jim at Cooper Tire headquarters.
The neighborhood built up around them. Leroy and Wanda Pollard came in 1962, drawn from southern Ohio by a booming auto industry that offered Leroy plenty of work as a mechanic. Mary Dunson bought the place next door in 1963. Don LeMaster, a police officer, moved in up the street with his wife, Margaret, in 1970.
Every newcomer to the block was white, working-class and Midwestern, and the neighborhood jelled easily. They babysat for one another. They complained to one another about their teenagers. They helped raise one another's grandkids. In all, seven different families have lived on the same block of College Street for at least 35 years.
"We all just found a great place at a great time," Leroy Pollard said.
Peterman hung the American flag on his porch first, in 1960, and the rest of College Street followed his example. By 1980, patriotic displays had grown into an unspoken contest of one-upmanship. Sixty flags planted in one yard on Memorial Day; a living-room window painted red, white and blue; a Buckeye tree decorated with Christmas ornaments celebrating Americana; a gigantic plastic unicorn perched on a front porch and draped in an American flag.
The entire block -- and, soon, the entire town -- shared in unabashed pride and gratefulness for the country that had given them this place. In 1968, a local congressman persuaded the House of Representatives to officially declare Findlay as Flag City, USA.
But with their pride came a nasty undercurrent, one that Obama's candidacy has exacerbated: On College Street, nobody wanted anything to change. As the years passed, Peterman and his neighbors approached one another to share in their skepticism about the unknown. What was the story behind the handful of African Americans who had moved into a town that is 93 percent white? Why were Japanese businessmen coming in to run the local manufacturing plants? Who in the world was this Obama character, running for president with that funny-sounding last name?
"People in Findlay are kind of funny about change," said Republican Mayor Pete Sehnert, a retired police officer who ran for the office on a whim last year. "They always want things the way they were, and any kind of development is always viewed as making things worse, a bad thing."
When people on College Street started hearing rumors about Obama -- who looked different from other politicians and often talked about change -- they easily believed the nasty stories about an outsider.
"I think Obama would be a disaster, and there's a lot of reasons," said Pollard, explaining the rumors he had heard about the candidate from friends he goes camping with. "I understand he's from Africa, and that the first thing he's going to do if he gets into office is bring his family over here, illegally. He's got that racist [pastor] who practically raised him, and then there's the Muslim thing. He's just not presidential material, if you ask me."
Said Don LeMaster: "He's a good speaker, but you've got to dig deeper than that for the truth. Politicians tell you anything. You have look beyond the surface, and then there are some real lies."
Said Jeanette Collins, a 77-year-old who lives across the street: "All I know for sure about Obama is that we're not ready for him."
Only one man on College Street remains open-minded, and recently even Peterman has started to sway. Like most of his neighbors, he dislikes McCain for his stance on the Iraq war and would like to cast his vote for a president who will bring the troops home. But on a recent visit to his son's auto shop, Peterman overheard misinformed customers talking again about a Muslim in the White House.
"I don't know. The whole thing just scares me," Peterman said. "I'm almost starting to feel like the best choice is not voting at all."
The Truth Squad
So far, those who have pushed the truth in Findlay have been rewarded with little that resembles progress. Gerri Kish, a 66-year-old born in Hawaii, read both of Obama's autobiographies. She has close friends, she said, who still refuse to believe her when she swears Obama is Christian. Then she hands them the books, and they refuse to read them. "They just want to believe what they believe," she said. "Nothing gets through to them."
The new advertisement running in Findlay, in which Obama is pictured with his white mother and white grandparents as he talks about developing a "deep and abiding faith in the country I love" while growing up in the Kansas heartland, is dismissed by residents of College Street as the desperate lies of another dishonest Washington politician. And they say that Obama's moves to put distance between himself and the Muslim community, with his campaign declining invitations to visit mosques and Obama volunteers removing two women in head scarves from the camera range at a rally in Detroit earlier this month are just a too-late effort to disguise his true beliefs.
For the past month, two students from the University of Findlay have spent their Tuesday nights walking from door to door in the city to tell voters about Obama. Erik Cramer and Sarah Everly target Democrats and swing voters exclusively, but they've still experienced mixed results. Sometimes, at a front door, they mention their purpose only to have a dozen rumors thrown back at them and the door slammed. "People tell us that we're in the wrong town," Everly said.
Soon, on a Tuesday night, they'll walk down College Street -- past the American flags, past the LeMasters, past the Pollards -- and knock on Jim Peterman's front door. They will ask for two minutes of his time, and Peterman will give it to them. He will listen to their story, weighing facts against fiction. For a few minutes, he might even believe them.
Then he'll close his door and go inside, back to his life. Back to his grocery store, back to his son's auto shop, back to the gossip on College Street. Back to the rumors again.
By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 30, 2008; A01
FINDLAY, Ohio -- On his corner of College Street, Jim Peterman stares at the four American flags planted in his front lawn and rubs his forehead. Peterman, 74, is a retired worker at Cooper Tire, a father of two, an Air Force veteran and a self-described patriot. He took one trip to Washington in 1989 -- best vacation of his life -- and bought a statue of the Washington Monument that he still displays in a glass case in his living room.
He believes a smart vote is an American's greatest responsibility. Which is why his confusion about Barack Obama continues to eat at him.
On the television in his living room, Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
"It's like you're hearing about two different men with nothing in common," Peterman said. "It makes it impossible to figure out what's true, or what you can believe."
Here in Findlay, a Rust Belt town of 40,000, false rumors about Obama have built enough word-of-mouth credibility to harden into an alternative biography. Born on the Internet, the rumors now meander freely across the flatlands of northwest Ohio -- through bars and baseball fields, retirement homes and restaurants.
Faced with polling that shows about one in 10 Americans thinks Obama is Muslim, the candidate's campaign has launched an aggressive effort to discredit rumors and clarify Obama's past. It created a "Fight the Smears" Web site and a new television ad that reiterates Obama's Christian faith, patriotism and family background. Dozens of volunteers have been sent to Ohio five months in advance of the election so they can spend extra time educating voters.
But on Peterman's block in Findlay, the campaign's efforts may already be too late. A swing voter who entered this election leaning Democratic, Peterson faces a decision that is no longer so simple as a choice between Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain, he said. First, he must pick the version of Obama on which he will stake his vote.
Does he choose to trust a TV commercial in which Obama talks about his "love of country"? Or his neighbor of 40 years, Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran who heard from a friend in Toledo that Obama refuses to wear an American-flag pin?
Does he trust a local newspaper article that details Obama's Christian faith? Or his friend Leroy Pollard, a devoted family man so convinced Obama is a radical Muslim that he threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him?
"I'll admit that I probably don't follow all of the election news like maybe I should," Peterman said. "I haven't read his books or studied up more than a little bit. But it's hard to ignore what you hear when everybody you know is saying it. These are good people, smart people, so can they really all be wrong?"
'Funny About Change'
Peterman bought his single-story house here in 1959, a few months after he left the Air Force and married. His wife, Mildred, had grown up in Findlay, and they never considered moving anywhere else. On College Street, the couple found all the hallmarks of America's heartland: a house for $9,000; a neighborhood where their two boys, one handicapped, could play outside after dark; a steady "pencil-pushing" job up the road for Jim at Cooper Tire headquarters.
The neighborhood built up around them. Leroy and Wanda Pollard came in 1962, drawn from southern Ohio by a booming auto industry that offered Leroy plenty of work as a mechanic. Mary Dunson bought the place next door in 1963. Don LeMaster, a police officer, moved in up the street with his wife, Margaret, in 1970.
Every newcomer to the block was white, working-class and Midwestern, and the neighborhood jelled easily. They babysat for one another. They complained to one another about their teenagers. They helped raise one another's grandkids. In all, seven different families have lived on the same block of College Street for at least 35 years.
"We all just found a great place at a great time," Leroy Pollard said.
Peterman hung the American flag on his porch first, in 1960, and the rest of College Street followed his example. By 1980, patriotic displays had grown into an unspoken contest of one-upmanship. Sixty flags planted in one yard on Memorial Day; a living-room window painted red, white and blue; a Buckeye tree decorated with Christmas ornaments celebrating Americana; a gigantic plastic unicorn perched on a front porch and draped in an American flag.
The entire block -- and, soon, the entire town -- shared in unabashed pride and gratefulness for the country that had given them this place. In 1968, a local congressman persuaded the House of Representatives to officially declare Findlay as Flag City, USA.
But with their pride came a nasty undercurrent, one that Obama's candidacy has exacerbated: On College Street, nobody wanted anything to change. As the years passed, Peterman and his neighbors approached one another to share in their skepticism about the unknown. What was the story behind the handful of African Americans who had moved into a town that is 93 percent white? Why were Japanese businessmen coming in to run the local manufacturing plants? Who in the world was this Obama character, running for president with that funny-sounding last name?
"People in Findlay are kind of funny about change," said Republican Mayor Pete Sehnert, a retired police officer who ran for the office on a whim last year. "They always want things the way they were, and any kind of development is always viewed as making things worse, a bad thing."
When people on College Street started hearing rumors about Obama -- who looked different from other politicians and often talked about change -- they easily believed the nasty stories about an outsider.
"I think Obama would be a disaster, and there's a lot of reasons," said Pollard, explaining the rumors he had heard about the candidate from friends he goes camping with. "I understand he's from Africa, and that the first thing he's going to do if he gets into office is bring his family over here, illegally. He's got that racist [pastor] who practically raised him, and then there's the Muslim thing. He's just not presidential material, if you ask me."
Said Don LeMaster: "He's a good speaker, but you've got to dig deeper than that for the truth. Politicians tell you anything. You have look beyond the surface, and then there are some real lies."
Said Jeanette Collins, a 77-year-old who lives across the street: "All I know for sure about Obama is that we're not ready for him."
Only one man on College Street remains open-minded, and recently even Peterman has started to sway. Like most of his neighbors, he dislikes McCain for his stance on the Iraq war and would like to cast his vote for a president who will bring the troops home. But on a recent visit to his son's auto shop, Peterman overheard misinformed customers talking again about a Muslim in the White House.
"I don't know. The whole thing just scares me," Peterman said. "I'm almost starting to feel like the best choice is not voting at all."
The Truth Squad
So far, those who have pushed the truth in Findlay have been rewarded with little that resembles progress. Gerri Kish, a 66-year-old born in Hawaii, read both of Obama's autobiographies. She has close friends, she said, who still refuse to believe her when she swears Obama is Christian. Then she hands them the books, and they refuse to read them. "They just want to believe what they believe," she said. "Nothing gets through to them."
The new advertisement running in Findlay, in which Obama is pictured with his white mother and white grandparents as he talks about developing a "deep and abiding faith in the country I love" while growing up in the Kansas heartland, is dismissed by residents of College Street as the desperate lies of another dishonest Washington politician. And they say that Obama's moves to put distance between himself and the Muslim community, with his campaign declining invitations to visit mosques and Obama volunteers removing two women in head scarves from the camera range at a rally in Detroit earlier this month are just a too-late effort to disguise his true beliefs.
For the past month, two students from the University of Findlay have spent their Tuesday nights walking from door to door in the city to tell voters about Obama. Erik Cramer and Sarah Everly target Democrats and swing voters exclusively, but they've still experienced mixed results. Sometimes, at a front door, they mention their purpose only to have a dozen rumors thrown back at them and the door slammed. "People tell us that we're in the wrong town," Everly said.
Soon, on a Tuesday night, they'll walk down College Street -- past the American flags, past the LeMasters, past the Pollards -- and knock on Jim Peterman's front door. They will ask for two minutes of his time, and Peterman will give it to them. He will listen to their story, weighing facts against fiction. For a few minutes, he might even believe them.
Then he'll close his door and go inside, back to his life. Back to his grocery store, back to his son's auto shop, back to the gossip on College Street. Back to the rumors again.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Linda Blum - Washington Post (June 29, 2008)
Treating Wounds You Can't See
By Linda Blum
Sunday, June 29, 2008; B01
On the wall in my office at Fort Dix, N.J., hung a row of nature photos and some historical documents for my patients to look at: a land grant signed by James Madison, another signed by Abraham Lincoln's secretary in his name, a Lincoln campaign ballot. The soldier from Ohio studied the wall carefully. It was amazing, he said, how much the layout of those picture frames resembled the layout of the street in Tikrit that was seared in his memory; the similarity had leapt out at him the first time he came in for a session. He traced the linear space between the frames, showing me where his Humvee had turned and traveled down the block, and where the two Iraqi men had been standing, close -- too close -- to the road.
"I knew immediately something was wrong," he said. The explosion threw him out of the vehicle, with his comrades trapped inside, screaming. Lying on the ground, he returned fire until he drove off the insurgents. His fellow soldiers survived, but nearly four years later, their screams still haunted him. "I couldn't go to them," he told me, overwhelmed with guilt and imagined failure. "I couldn't help them."
That soldier from Ohio is one of the nearly 40,000 U.S. troops diagnosed by the military with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007; the number of diagnoses increased nearly 50 percent in 2007 over the previous year, the military said this spring. I saw a number of soldiers with war trauma while working as a psychologist for the U.S. Army. In 2006, I went to Fort Dix as a civilian contractor to treat soldiers on their way to and return from those wars. I was drawn by the immediacy of the work and the opportunity to make a difference. What the raw numbers on war trauma can't show is what I saw every day in my office: the individual stories of men and women who have sustained emotional trauma as well as physical injury, people who are still fighting an arduous postwar battle to heal, to understand a mysterious psychological condition and re-enter civilian life. As I think about the soldiers who will be rotating back home from Iraq this summer as part of the "pause" in the "surge," as well as those who will stay behind, I remember some of the people I met on their long journey back from the war.
'We Are Marked'
A high-ranking noncommissioned officer had waged tank warfare during both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Iraq war. This soldier remains in immense distress, like many of the people I treated who needed to grieve for lives they had taken in combat. Once, after he killed at least nine people in one week, he experienced acute anxiety and depression and was taken off work for a week. "They had me pet a dog," he said.
Pet a dog? That struck me as fairly mild treatment, although association with pets has been shown to lower blood pressure and other stress indicators.
"How was that, petting the dog?" I asked.
"It was okay, I think it helped some," he said. "I don't know how it was for the dog."
* * * Another soldier, a sergeant, seemed to be living under a thick, dark cloud. He would come in every week, talk some, then periodically stare off into space. He had injured his back and shoulder and was trying to accept that many of his favorite activities were over: He couldn't run, play tennis, play basketball with his son.
He was always lucid, on point, but since his return from Iraq, he had been having auditory hallucinations in which he'd hear his name being called.
He seemed so lost in his own world that I nagged him to come to a group to try to open him up. When he finally did join us, he was transformed -- talkative, funny, smiling, strikingly different than I'd ever seen him. But later, he told me he'd hated the group: He couldn't stand hearing everyone's problems; he had felt that he had to cheer everyone up; it had been unbearable. He never went back.
Shortly before he left Fort Dix, he said to me: "We [combat vets] are marked. People see us and they know. . . . They know we're different."
Sadly, he was leaving with guilt-driven thoughts. He was in chronic pain, partially disabled, but the thought of separation from the National Guard left him deeply dejected.
He joined when he was 18. The Army had given him years of memories, an identity, a sense of belonging and purpose, a way of life. "My military career is over," he said sorrowfully.
He was medically discharged with a 60 percent disability rating. He came up to say good-bye with his papers in hand. "I'm on my way," he said.
'You Have PTSD, Full-Blown PTSD'
The lieutenant refused to fill out the paperwork and wouldn't sit in the waiting room in case someone in his unit saw him. Recently returned from the war zone, he was visibly shaky. He was in his 30s and had worked in the mental-health field as a civilian. When he went home, he had felt only numbness, a chilling emptiness, when he saw his wife and young children. He'd touched his wife's arm and been flooded with memories from the past year in Iraq: a neck wound, blood, severed body parts. He couldn't have sex with her.
In my office, he seemed bewildered, almost shocked. "Why is this happening?" he asked.
"You have PTSD, full-blown PTSD," I told him. And I wondered how he could have missed his own diagnosis. He had given combat-stress briefings and counseled hurting soldiers.
We went back over his Iraq deployment, which had involved bloody rescue missions and constant mortar fire at his unit's base. He'd been protective of his troops. "I didn't like sending people out on missions," he said, "so I went out myself." As the months rolled on, he felt increasingly remote from his family, who seemed to be going on with life without him. And the vortex of war trauma ultimately engulfed him so fully that he lost the capacity to observe himself.
The unwarranted sense of shame, of depleted self-esteem he conveyed, troubled me. "If you went out on missions instead of sending other people out, you're a hero," I said the second and last time I saw him. He finally smiled.
* * *An older soldier came in, looking pale, a couple of days after getting off the plane. The hardest part of his deployment? "Just riding in a tank," he said. "The confinement. I was afraid we'd get hit from above."
I hadn't heard that before. "Did it remind you of anything?"
He reflected for a moment. "Khe Sanh," he said. "We were in underground bunkers. I thought they'd blow out the entrance, and we were all going to die." He had been 19 when he went to Vietnam; 38 years later, he was in Iraq as an officer in the National Guard, his hair gray, his face seamed and rough. "My wife said, 'It took you 20 years to get over the last war,' " he told me. " 'How long will it take this time?' "
In the 1980s, years after Vietnam, he and his wife had attended a talk on PTSD at their local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. "They were talking about me, that was what I had," he told me. "But before then, we just didn't know."
Years of treatment followed. But the military kept its hold on him; he stayed in the Guard and became an officer after getting his college degree. In Iraq, he recalled, uneasiness and sometimes grief gripped him, rooted in his current experience but also emerging ghostlike from the past.
* * *
The young soldier had been at Rustamiyah, known as perhaps the most mortared U.S. base in Iraq; two months after coming home, when he closed his eyes, he would hear the whish-boom of the mortars coming in. "The clarity is phenomenal," he said, as if describing a recording.
* * *Another soldier, a captain, choked up in my office, describing a day in Iraq nearly two years earlier. "They were just kids, 18, 19 years old," she said. "They were playing like kids all day, jumping, swinging from a rope. And then that night, just a few hours later, they died."
"Did you send them out?" I asked.
Silence.
'Am I Going to Get Better?'
I was continually struck by the different coping techniques, including humor and irony, that my patients employed.
* * * Three soldiers were sightseeing in a Philadelphia park when a water main ruptured nearby, making a noise like an explosion. They recounted that one soldier dove for the wall, another hit the ground and the third ran. "People must have thought we were crazy," one told me. They felt safer indoors, so they went to the Betsy Ross House. "We spent two hours at the Betsy Ross House," another said. "We saw everything."
* * *Another soldier had PTSD and probably a traumatic brain injury; his injuries and the array of medications he was taking had seriously impaired his short-term memory and concentration. Like an amnesiac in the movies, he had notes posted all over his room detailing his appointments and medication schedule.
"Am I going to get better?" he asked urgently. He was just back from the war and would likely improve significantly in the months to come. But I couldn't tell him with any certainty whether he would one day function at his prior level. He was having so much difficulty concentrating that it took him eight hours to watch a movie. "It saves money on DVDs," he said.
* * * When the command for the Warriors Transition Unit -- for the soldiers who were at Fort Dix on medical hold -- scheduled a mandatory holiday party, some recently returned soldiers were terribly anxious about the crowd and noise. They worried for the whole week before the party. I was considering writing waivers to excuse them from going, but I hesitated to reinforce their anxiety. A former squad leader from Iraq resolved the issue: "We will get a table in a quiet corner," he told them. "We will all sit together and we will make it through this party."
* * *One soldier, a medic, recalled a particularly traumatic deployment that had involved collecting numerous bodies of both Iraqis and members of his own unit.
He brought his wife in to see me one day. She complained that he was cold, withdrawn, hostile; he would sit in the darkened bedroom all day. She wanted to know why I wasn't helping him more. I'd been working with him for four months; what was I doing?
There had been some gains, I told her. His mood was brighter, and he was no longer weeping daily, but he was still in great distress. "Your husband has had severe trauma," I said. "It's going to take a long time."
'All You Have To Do Is Stay Alive'
Something that still surprises me is the fact that many soldiers wanted to go back to war. Some thought of the inexperienced soldiers who needed their guidance; some talked about providing for their families. But mostly, they told me the same thing about why they wanted to go back: "You get up every day, and all you have to do is stay alive."
Ordinary daily life -- sustaining once-stable relationships, seeing old friends, paying bills, shopping -- could seem excessively burdensome when they returned. Minds that had been on high alert for so long had become better adapted to war than life at home.
"We're subject to state, federal and military law here [on post]," a soldier said in group one day, though he had never been arrested and was considering going to nursing school. He feared both other people's unpredictability and his own reactions, and he was not alone. Generally, my patients had more control than they thought they did. But in that group, one person had received a recent DUI charge, and another had been demoted after a verbal confrontation with a Department of Defense police officer.
"But what do you think would happen?" I asked the soldier who was worried about running afoul of the law.
"It could be anything," he said. "You let your guard down in the States."
I pressed: "But what might happen?"
"Anything. You just don't know."
Like other soldiers, he was troubled by the changes he noticed in himself.
I told him then what I have said to my patients again and again, trying to explain what had happened to their brains in battle: "If you put enough stress on your back, 10,000 pounds on your back, it doesn't matter how strong your back is. It's going to break. The brain is the same way -- it can only take so much stress." A broken back may not seem like a reassuring analogy, but at least it addresses the shame that my patients so often harbor.
"The brain can't just change the channel, like a TV remote," I tell them. Why do people expect their brains to be endlessly pliable, to be able to heal rapidly and perfectly after such trauma? Perhaps it's because a mental injury is invisible, which encourages the fantasy that it will go away overnight. But the change in emotional reactions and behavior cuts so close to the sense of self. For my patients, the trauma isn't something that happens to you. It is you.
lblum101@verizon.net
Linda Blum is a clinical psychologist in New Jersey.
By Linda Blum
Sunday, June 29, 2008; B01
On the wall in my office at Fort Dix, N.J., hung a row of nature photos and some historical documents for my patients to look at: a land grant signed by James Madison, another signed by Abraham Lincoln's secretary in his name, a Lincoln campaign ballot. The soldier from Ohio studied the wall carefully. It was amazing, he said, how much the layout of those picture frames resembled the layout of the street in Tikrit that was seared in his memory; the similarity had leapt out at him the first time he came in for a session. He traced the linear space between the frames, showing me where his Humvee had turned and traveled down the block, and where the two Iraqi men had been standing, close -- too close -- to the road.
"I knew immediately something was wrong," he said. The explosion threw him out of the vehicle, with his comrades trapped inside, screaming. Lying on the ground, he returned fire until he drove off the insurgents. His fellow soldiers survived, but nearly four years later, their screams still haunted him. "I couldn't go to them," he told me, overwhelmed with guilt and imagined failure. "I couldn't help them."
That soldier from Ohio is one of the nearly 40,000 U.S. troops diagnosed by the military with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007; the number of diagnoses increased nearly 50 percent in 2007 over the previous year, the military said this spring. I saw a number of soldiers with war trauma while working as a psychologist for the U.S. Army. In 2006, I went to Fort Dix as a civilian contractor to treat soldiers on their way to and return from those wars. I was drawn by the immediacy of the work and the opportunity to make a difference. What the raw numbers on war trauma can't show is what I saw every day in my office: the individual stories of men and women who have sustained emotional trauma as well as physical injury, people who are still fighting an arduous postwar battle to heal, to understand a mysterious psychological condition and re-enter civilian life. As I think about the soldiers who will be rotating back home from Iraq this summer as part of the "pause" in the "surge," as well as those who will stay behind, I remember some of the people I met on their long journey back from the war.
'We Are Marked'
A high-ranking noncommissioned officer had waged tank warfare during both the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Iraq war. This soldier remains in immense distress, like many of the people I treated who needed to grieve for lives they had taken in combat. Once, after he killed at least nine people in one week, he experienced acute anxiety and depression and was taken off work for a week. "They had me pet a dog," he said.
Pet a dog? That struck me as fairly mild treatment, although association with pets has been shown to lower blood pressure and other stress indicators.
"How was that, petting the dog?" I asked.
"It was okay, I think it helped some," he said. "I don't know how it was for the dog."
* * * Another soldier, a sergeant, seemed to be living under a thick, dark cloud. He would come in every week, talk some, then periodically stare off into space. He had injured his back and shoulder and was trying to accept that many of his favorite activities were over: He couldn't run, play tennis, play basketball with his son.
He was always lucid, on point, but since his return from Iraq, he had been having auditory hallucinations in which he'd hear his name being called.
He seemed so lost in his own world that I nagged him to come to a group to try to open him up. When he finally did join us, he was transformed -- talkative, funny, smiling, strikingly different than I'd ever seen him. But later, he told me he'd hated the group: He couldn't stand hearing everyone's problems; he had felt that he had to cheer everyone up; it had been unbearable. He never went back.
Shortly before he left Fort Dix, he said to me: "We [combat vets] are marked. People see us and they know. . . . They know we're different."
Sadly, he was leaving with guilt-driven thoughts. He was in chronic pain, partially disabled, but the thought of separation from the National Guard left him deeply dejected.
He joined when he was 18. The Army had given him years of memories, an identity, a sense of belonging and purpose, a way of life. "My military career is over," he said sorrowfully.
He was medically discharged with a 60 percent disability rating. He came up to say good-bye with his papers in hand. "I'm on my way," he said.
'You Have PTSD, Full-Blown PTSD'
The lieutenant refused to fill out the paperwork and wouldn't sit in the waiting room in case someone in his unit saw him. Recently returned from the war zone, he was visibly shaky. He was in his 30s and had worked in the mental-health field as a civilian. When he went home, he had felt only numbness, a chilling emptiness, when he saw his wife and young children. He'd touched his wife's arm and been flooded with memories from the past year in Iraq: a neck wound, blood, severed body parts. He couldn't have sex with her.
In my office, he seemed bewildered, almost shocked. "Why is this happening?" he asked.
"You have PTSD, full-blown PTSD," I told him. And I wondered how he could have missed his own diagnosis. He had given combat-stress briefings and counseled hurting soldiers.
We went back over his Iraq deployment, which had involved bloody rescue missions and constant mortar fire at his unit's base. He'd been protective of his troops. "I didn't like sending people out on missions," he said, "so I went out myself." As the months rolled on, he felt increasingly remote from his family, who seemed to be going on with life without him. And the vortex of war trauma ultimately engulfed him so fully that he lost the capacity to observe himself.
The unwarranted sense of shame, of depleted self-esteem he conveyed, troubled me. "If you went out on missions instead of sending other people out, you're a hero," I said the second and last time I saw him. He finally smiled.
* * *An older soldier came in, looking pale, a couple of days after getting off the plane. The hardest part of his deployment? "Just riding in a tank," he said. "The confinement. I was afraid we'd get hit from above."
I hadn't heard that before. "Did it remind you of anything?"
He reflected for a moment. "Khe Sanh," he said. "We were in underground bunkers. I thought they'd blow out the entrance, and we were all going to die." He had been 19 when he went to Vietnam; 38 years later, he was in Iraq as an officer in the National Guard, his hair gray, his face seamed and rough. "My wife said, 'It took you 20 years to get over the last war,' " he told me. " 'How long will it take this time?' "
In the 1980s, years after Vietnam, he and his wife had attended a talk on PTSD at their local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. "They were talking about me, that was what I had," he told me. "But before then, we just didn't know."
Years of treatment followed. But the military kept its hold on him; he stayed in the Guard and became an officer after getting his college degree. In Iraq, he recalled, uneasiness and sometimes grief gripped him, rooted in his current experience but also emerging ghostlike from the past.
* * *
The young soldier had been at Rustamiyah, known as perhaps the most mortared U.S. base in Iraq; two months after coming home, when he closed his eyes, he would hear the whish-boom of the mortars coming in. "The clarity is phenomenal," he said, as if describing a recording.
* * *Another soldier, a captain, choked up in my office, describing a day in Iraq nearly two years earlier. "They were just kids, 18, 19 years old," she said. "They were playing like kids all day, jumping, swinging from a rope. And then that night, just a few hours later, they died."
"Did you send them out?" I asked.
Silence.
'Am I Going to Get Better?'
I was continually struck by the different coping techniques, including humor and irony, that my patients employed.
* * * Three soldiers were sightseeing in a Philadelphia park when a water main ruptured nearby, making a noise like an explosion. They recounted that one soldier dove for the wall, another hit the ground and the third ran. "People must have thought we were crazy," one told me. They felt safer indoors, so they went to the Betsy Ross House. "We spent two hours at the Betsy Ross House," another said. "We saw everything."
* * *Another soldier had PTSD and probably a traumatic brain injury; his injuries and the array of medications he was taking had seriously impaired his short-term memory and concentration. Like an amnesiac in the movies, he had notes posted all over his room detailing his appointments and medication schedule.
"Am I going to get better?" he asked urgently. He was just back from the war and would likely improve significantly in the months to come. But I couldn't tell him with any certainty whether he would one day function at his prior level. He was having so much difficulty concentrating that it took him eight hours to watch a movie. "It saves money on DVDs," he said.
* * * When the command for the Warriors Transition Unit -- for the soldiers who were at Fort Dix on medical hold -- scheduled a mandatory holiday party, some recently returned soldiers were terribly anxious about the crowd and noise. They worried for the whole week before the party. I was considering writing waivers to excuse them from going, but I hesitated to reinforce their anxiety. A former squad leader from Iraq resolved the issue: "We will get a table in a quiet corner," he told them. "We will all sit together and we will make it through this party."
* * *One soldier, a medic, recalled a particularly traumatic deployment that had involved collecting numerous bodies of both Iraqis and members of his own unit.
He brought his wife in to see me one day. She complained that he was cold, withdrawn, hostile; he would sit in the darkened bedroom all day. She wanted to know why I wasn't helping him more. I'd been working with him for four months; what was I doing?
There had been some gains, I told her. His mood was brighter, and he was no longer weeping daily, but he was still in great distress. "Your husband has had severe trauma," I said. "It's going to take a long time."
'All You Have To Do Is Stay Alive'
Something that still surprises me is the fact that many soldiers wanted to go back to war. Some thought of the inexperienced soldiers who needed their guidance; some talked about providing for their families. But mostly, they told me the same thing about why they wanted to go back: "You get up every day, and all you have to do is stay alive."
Ordinary daily life -- sustaining once-stable relationships, seeing old friends, paying bills, shopping -- could seem excessively burdensome when they returned. Minds that had been on high alert for so long had become better adapted to war than life at home.
"We're subject to state, federal and military law here [on post]," a soldier said in group one day, though he had never been arrested and was considering going to nursing school. He feared both other people's unpredictability and his own reactions, and he was not alone. Generally, my patients had more control than they thought they did. But in that group, one person had received a recent DUI charge, and another had been demoted after a verbal confrontation with a Department of Defense police officer.
"But what do you think would happen?" I asked the soldier who was worried about running afoul of the law.
"It could be anything," he said. "You let your guard down in the States."
I pressed: "But what might happen?"
"Anything. You just don't know."
Like other soldiers, he was troubled by the changes he noticed in himself.
I told him then what I have said to my patients again and again, trying to explain what had happened to their brains in battle: "If you put enough stress on your back, 10,000 pounds on your back, it doesn't matter how strong your back is. It's going to break. The brain is the same way -- it can only take so much stress." A broken back may not seem like a reassuring analogy, but at least it addresses the shame that my patients so often harbor.
"The brain can't just change the channel, like a TV remote," I tell them. Why do people expect their brains to be endlessly pliable, to be able to heal rapidly and perfectly after such trauma? Perhaps it's because a mental injury is invisible, which encourages the fantasy that it will go away overnight. But the change in emotional reactions and behavior cuts so close to the sense of self. For my patients, the trauma isn't something that happens to you. It is you.
lblum101@verizon.net
Linda Blum is a clinical psychologist in New Jersey.
N.Y. Times (June 29, 2008)
June 29, 2008
Editorial
More Waste, Fraud and Abuse
Representative Henry Waxman recently asked a question for which we would also like an answer: “How did a company run by a 21-year-old president and a 25-year-old former masseur get a sensitive $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces?” Mr. Waxman raised the issue after executives of a Miami Beach arms dealer, AEY, were indicted on fraud charges this month, accused of pawning off tens of millions of banned and decrepit Chinese cartridges on the United States Army to supply Afghan security forces.
The Pentagon’s folly with the fly-by-night trafficker is just the latest example of the Bush administration’s cynically cozy contracting practices and shockingly weak oversight that have wasted billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
Congressional investigators took testimony from a United States military attaché who accused the American ambassador in Albania of helping to cover up the Chinese ammunition’s origins. The ambassador, John Withers, denies wrongdoing. But Rep. Waxman is wisely working to map the dimensions of fraud and waste.
The AEY fraud case followed a detailed investigation by The Times, which found the company scored the Afghan contract despite a record of failure and risky corner-cutting in a half-dozen other plum contracts. (Along the way, Efraim Diveroli, the company president who is now indicted, had the gall to fight off a court case accusing him of abusing his girlfriend by claiming national security privilege “in the fight against terrorism.”)
AEY’s record, including a failed $5.6 million contract for 10,000 pistols needed by Iraqi security forces, should have been obvious to anyone consulting a State Department watch list of 80,000 — count them, 80,000 — suspect traffickers in illegal arms. American contractors must avoid such crooked middlemen. The Pentagon is exempted by law from having to consult the list.
How, indeed, could such scheming profiteers find their way onto the Pentagon gravy train? The answer is one more example of this administration’s disastrous mismanagement of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Editorial
More Waste, Fraud and Abuse
Representative Henry Waxman recently asked a question for which we would also like an answer: “How did a company run by a 21-year-old president and a 25-year-old former masseur get a sensitive $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces?” Mr. Waxman raised the issue after executives of a Miami Beach arms dealer, AEY, were indicted on fraud charges this month, accused of pawning off tens of millions of banned and decrepit Chinese cartridges on the United States Army to supply Afghan security forces.
The Pentagon’s folly with the fly-by-night trafficker is just the latest example of the Bush administration’s cynically cozy contracting practices and shockingly weak oversight that have wasted billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
Congressional investigators took testimony from a United States military attaché who accused the American ambassador in Albania of helping to cover up the Chinese ammunition’s origins. The ambassador, John Withers, denies wrongdoing. But Rep. Waxman is wisely working to map the dimensions of fraud and waste.
The AEY fraud case followed a detailed investigation by The Times, which found the company scored the Afghan contract despite a record of failure and risky corner-cutting in a half-dozen other plum contracts. (Along the way, Efraim Diveroli, the company president who is now indicted, had the gall to fight off a court case accusing him of abusing his girlfriend by claiming national security privilege “in the fight against terrorism.”)
AEY’s record, including a failed $5.6 million contract for 10,000 pistols needed by Iraqi security forces, should have been obvious to anyone consulting a State Department watch list of 80,000 — count them, 80,000 — suspect traffickers in illegal arms. American contractors must avoid such crooked middlemen. The Pentagon is exempted by law from having to consult the list.
How, indeed, could such scheming profiteers find their way onto the Pentagon gravy train? The answer is one more example of this administration’s disastrous mismanagement of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Frank Rich - N.Y. Times (June 29, 2008)
June 29, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
If Terrorists Rock the Vote in 2008
By FRANK RICH
DON’T fault Charles Black, the John McCain adviser, for publicly stating his honest belief that a domestic terrorist attack would be “a big advantage” for their campaign and that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination had “helped” Mr. McCain win the New Hampshire primary. His real sin is that he didn’t come completely clean on his strategic thinking.
In private, he is surely gaming this out further, George Carlin-style. What would be the optimum timing, from the campaign’s perspective, for this terrorist attack — before or after the convention? Would the attack be most useful if it took place in a red state, blue state or swing state? How much would it “help” if the next assassinated foreign leader had a higher name recognition in American households than Benazir Bhutto?
Unlike Hillary Clinton’s rumination about the Bobby Kennedy assassination or Barack Obama’s soliloquy about voters clinging to guns and faith, Mr. Black’s remarks were not an improvisational mishap. He gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine. He did so without thinking twice because he was merely saying what much of Washington believes. Terrorism is the one major issue where Mr. McCain soundly vanquishes his Democratic opponent in the polls. Since 2002, it’s been a Beltway axiom akin to E=mc2 that Bomb in American City=G.O.P. Landslide.
That equation was the creation of Karl Rove. Among the only durable legacies of the Bush presidency are the twin fears that Mr. Rove relentlessly pushed on his client’s behalf: fear of terrorism and fear of gays. But these pillars are disintegrating too. They’re propped up mainly by political operatives like Mr. Black and their journalistic camp followers — the last Washington insiders who are still in Mr. Rove’s sway and are still refighting the last political war.
That the old Rove mojo still commands any respect is rather amazing given how blindsided he was by 2006. Two weeks before that year’s midterms, he condescendingly lectured an NPR interviewer about how he devoured “68 polls a week” — not a mere 67, mind you — and predicted unequivocally that Election Day would yield “a Republican Senate and a Republican House.” These nights you can still find Mr. Rove hawking his numbers as he peddles similar G.O.P. happy talk to credulous bloviators at Fox News.
But let’s put ourselves in Mr. Black’s shoes and try out the Rove playbook at home — though not in front of the children — by thinking the unthinkable. If a terrorist bomb did detonate in an American city before Election Day, would that automatically be to the Republican ticket’s benefit?
Not necessarily. Some might instead ask why the Bush White House didn’t replace Michael Chertoff as secretary of homeland security after a House report condemned his bungling of Katrina. The man didn’t know what was happening in the New Orleans Convention Center even when it was broadcast on national television.
Next, voters might take a hard look at the antiterrorism warriors of the McCain campaign (and of a potential McCain administration). This is the band of advisers and surrogates that surfaced to attack Mr. Obama two weeks ago for being “naïve” and “delusional” and guilty of a “Sept. 10th mind-set” after he had the gall to agree with the Supreme Court decision on Gitmo detainees. The McCain team’s track record is hardly sterling. It might make America more vulnerable to terrorist attack, not less, were it in power.
Take — please! — the McCain foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. He was the executive director of the so-called Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, formed in 2002 (with Mr. McCain on board) to gin up the war that diverted American resources from fighting those who attacked us on 9/11 to invading a nation that did not. Thanks to that strategic blunder, a 2008 Qaeda attack could well originate from Pakistan or Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden’s progeny, liberated by our liberation of Iraq, have been regrouping ever since. On Friday the Pentagon declared that the Taliban has once more “coalesced into a resilient insurgency.” Attacks in eastern Afghanistan are up 40 percent from this time last year, according to the American commander of NATO forces in the region.
Another dubious McCain terror expert is the former C.I.A. director James Woolsey. He (like Charles Black) was a cheerleader for Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Iraqi leader who helped promote phony Iraqi W.M.D. intelligence in 2002 and who is persona non grata to American officials in Iraq today because of his ties to Iran. Mr. Woolsey, who accuses Mr. Obama of harboring “extremely dangerous” views on terrorism, has demonstrated his own expertise by supporting crackpot theories linking Iraq to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On 9/11 and 9/12 he circulated on the three major networks to float the idea that Saddam rather than bin Laden might have ordered the attacks.
Then there is the McCain camp’s star fearmonger, Rudy Giuliani, who has lately taken to railing about Mr. Obama’s supposed failure to learn the lessons of the first twin towers bombing. The lesson America’s Mayor took away from that 1993 attack was to insist that New York City’s emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center. No less an authority than John Lehman, a 9/11 commission member who also serves on the McCain team, has mocked New York’s pre-9/11 emergency plans as “not worthy of the Boy Scouts.”
If there’s another 9/11, it’s hard to argue that this gang could have prevented it. At least Mr. Obama, however limited his experience, has called for America to act on actionable terrorist intelligence in Pakistan if Pervez Musharraf won’t. Mr. McCain angrily disagreed with that idea. The relatively passive Pakistan policy he offers instead could well come back to haunt him if a new 9/11 is launched from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Should there be no new terrorist attack, the McCain camp’s efforts to play the old Rove 9/11 fear card may quickly become as laughable as the Giuliani presidential campaign. These days Americans are more frightened of losing their jobs, homes and savings.
But you can’t blame the McCain campaign for clinging to terrorism as a political crutch. The other Rove fear card is even more tattered. In the wake of Larry Craig and Mark Foley, it’s a double-edged sword for the G.O.P. to trot out gay blades cavorting in pride parades in homosexual-panic ads.
Some on the right still hold out hope otherwise. After the California Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, The Weekly Standard suggested that a brewing backlash could put that state’s “electoral votes in play.” But few others believe so, including the state’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has vowed to enforce the law and opposes a ballot initiative to overturn it. Even Bill O’Reilly recently chastised a family-values advocate for mounting politically ineffectual arguments against same-sex marriage.
Mr. McCain is trying to swing both ways. While he no longer refers to the aging old-guard cranks of the religious right as “agents of intolerance,” his actions, starting with his tardy disowning of the endorsement he sought from the intolerant Rev. John Hagee, sometimes speak as loudly as his past words.
The Ohio operative behind that state’s 2004 anti-same-sex marriage campaign was so alienated by Mr. McCain’s emissaries this year that he told The Los Angeles Times, “He doesn’t want to associate with us, and we don’t want to associate with him.” Mr. McCain instead associated himself with Ellen DeGeneres. He visited her talk show to extend his good wishes for her forthcoming California nuptials while seeming almost chagrined to admit his opposition to same-sex marriage, a stand he shares with Mr. Obama. Since then, Mr. McCain has met with the gay Log Cabin Republicans.
He and Mr. Obama also share the antipathy of James Dobson, the Focus on the Family fulminator so avidly courted by the Bush White House. Perhaps best remembered for linking the cartoon character SquareBob SpongePants to a “pro-homosexual video,” Mr. Dobson last week used the word “fruitcake” in a rant against Mr. Obama. He has been nearly as dyspeptic, if not quite as “fruit”-fixated, about Mr. McCain.
Mr. Dobson’s embarrassing lashing out is the last gasp of an era. His dying breed of family-values scold is giving way to a new and independent generation of evangelical leaders (and voters) who don’t march to the partisan beat of Mr. Rove or his one-time ally, the disgraced Ralph Reed. Perhaps in belated recognition of this reality, Mr. Rove has been busy lately developing a new fear card for 2008 — fear of the Obamas.
Its racial undertones are naked enough. Earlier this year, Mr. Rove wrote that Mr. Obama was “often lazy,” and that his “trash talking” during a debate was “an unattractive carry-over from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard.” Last week Mr. Rove caricatured him as the elitist “guy at the country club with the beautiful date.” Provocative as it is to inject Mr. Obama into a setting historically associated with white Republicans, the invocation of that “beautiful date” is even more so. Where’s his beautiful wife? Mr. Rove’s suggestion that Mr. Obama might be a sexual freelancer, as an astute post at the Web site Talking Points Memo noted, could conjure up for a certain audience the image of “a white woman on his arm.”
But here, too, Mr. Rove reeks of the past. Should Mr. Black and Mr. McCain follow this ugly lead, I bet it will help them even less than the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Op-Ed Columnist
If Terrorists Rock the Vote in 2008
By FRANK RICH
DON’T fault Charles Black, the John McCain adviser, for publicly stating his honest belief that a domestic terrorist attack would be “a big advantage” for their campaign and that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination had “helped” Mr. McCain win the New Hampshire primary. His real sin is that he didn’t come completely clean on his strategic thinking.
In private, he is surely gaming this out further, George Carlin-style. What would be the optimum timing, from the campaign’s perspective, for this terrorist attack — before or after the convention? Would the attack be most useful if it took place in a red state, blue state or swing state? How much would it “help” if the next assassinated foreign leader had a higher name recognition in American households than Benazir Bhutto?
Unlike Hillary Clinton’s rumination about the Bobby Kennedy assassination or Barack Obama’s soliloquy about voters clinging to guns and faith, Mr. Black’s remarks were not an improvisational mishap. He gave his quotes on the record to Fortune magazine. He did so without thinking twice because he was merely saying what much of Washington believes. Terrorism is the one major issue where Mr. McCain soundly vanquishes his Democratic opponent in the polls. Since 2002, it’s been a Beltway axiom akin to E=mc2 that Bomb in American City=G.O.P. Landslide.
That equation was the creation of Karl Rove. Among the only durable legacies of the Bush presidency are the twin fears that Mr. Rove relentlessly pushed on his client’s behalf: fear of terrorism and fear of gays. But these pillars are disintegrating too. They’re propped up mainly by political operatives like Mr. Black and their journalistic camp followers — the last Washington insiders who are still in Mr. Rove’s sway and are still refighting the last political war.
That the old Rove mojo still commands any respect is rather amazing given how blindsided he was by 2006. Two weeks before that year’s midterms, he condescendingly lectured an NPR interviewer about how he devoured “68 polls a week” — not a mere 67, mind you — and predicted unequivocally that Election Day would yield “a Republican Senate and a Republican House.” These nights you can still find Mr. Rove hawking his numbers as he peddles similar G.O.P. happy talk to credulous bloviators at Fox News.
But let’s put ourselves in Mr. Black’s shoes and try out the Rove playbook at home — though not in front of the children — by thinking the unthinkable. If a terrorist bomb did detonate in an American city before Election Day, would that automatically be to the Republican ticket’s benefit?
Not necessarily. Some might instead ask why the Bush White House didn’t replace Michael Chertoff as secretary of homeland security after a House report condemned his bungling of Katrina. The man didn’t know what was happening in the New Orleans Convention Center even when it was broadcast on national television.
Next, voters might take a hard look at the antiterrorism warriors of the McCain campaign (and of a potential McCain administration). This is the band of advisers and surrogates that surfaced to attack Mr. Obama two weeks ago for being “naïve” and “delusional” and guilty of a “Sept. 10th mind-set” after he had the gall to agree with the Supreme Court decision on Gitmo detainees. The McCain team’s track record is hardly sterling. It might make America more vulnerable to terrorist attack, not less, were it in power.
Take — please! — the McCain foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. He was the executive director of the so-called Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, formed in 2002 (with Mr. McCain on board) to gin up the war that diverted American resources from fighting those who attacked us on 9/11 to invading a nation that did not. Thanks to that strategic blunder, a 2008 Qaeda attack could well originate from Pakistan or Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden’s progeny, liberated by our liberation of Iraq, have been regrouping ever since. On Friday the Pentagon declared that the Taliban has once more “coalesced into a resilient insurgency.” Attacks in eastern Afghanistan are up 40 percent from this time last year, according to the American commander of NATO forces in the region.
Another dubious McCain terror expert is the former C.I.A. director James Woolsey. He (like Charles Black) was a cheerleader for Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled Iraqi leader who helped promote phony Iraqi W.M.D. intelligence in 2002 and who is persona non grata to American officials in Iraq today because of his ties to Iran. Mr. Woolsey, who accuses Mr. Obama of harboring “extremely dangerous” views on terrorism, has demonstrated his own expertise by supporting crackpot theories linking Iraq to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On 9/11 and 9/12 he circulated on the three major networks to float the idea that Saddam rather than bin Laden might have ordered the attacks.
Then there is the McCain camp’s star fearmonger, Rudy Giuliani, who has lately taken to railing about Mr. Obama’s supposed failure to learn the lessons of the first twin towers bombing. The lesson America’s Mayor took away from that 1993 attack was to insist that New York City’s emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center. No less an authority than John Lehman, a 9/11 commission member who also serves on the McCain team, has mocked New York’s pre-9/11 emergency plans as “not worthy of the Boy Scouts.”
If there’s another 9/11, it’s hard to argue that this gang could have prevented it. At least Mr. Obama, however limited his experience, has called for America to act on actionable terrorist intelligence in Pakistan if Pervez Musharraf won’t. Mr. McCain angrily disagreed with that idea. The relatively passive Pakistan policy he offers instead could well come back to haunt him if a new 9/11 is launched from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Should there be no new terrorist attack, the McCain camp’s efforts to play the old Rove 9/11 fear card may quickly become as laughable as the Giuliani presidential campaign. These days Americans are more frightened of losing their jobs, homes and savings.
But you can’t blame the McCain campaign for clinging to terrorism as a political crutch. The other Rove fear card is even more tattered. In the wake of Larry Craig and Mark Foley, it’s a double-edged sword for the G.O.P. to trot out gay blades cavorting in pride parades in homosexual-panic ads.
Some on the right still hold out hope otherwise. After the California Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, The Weekly Standard suggested that a brewing backlash could put that state’s “electoral votes in play.” But few others believe so, including the state’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has vowed to enforce the law and opposes a ballot initiative to overturn it. Even Bill O’Reilly recently chastised a family-values advocate for mounting politically ineffectual arguments against same-sex marriage.
Mr. McCain is trying to swing both ways. While he no longer refers to the aging old-guard cranks of the religious right as “agents of intolerance,” his actions, starting with his tardy disowning of the endorsement he sought from the intolerant Rev. John Hagee, sometimes speak as loudly as his past words.
The Ohio operative behind that state’s 2004 anti-same-sex marriage campaign was so alienated by Mr. McCain’s emissaries this year that he told The Los Angeles Times, “He doesn’t want to associate with us, and we don’t want to associate with him.” Mr. McCain instead associated himself with Ellen DeGeneres. He visited her talk show to extend his good wishes for her forthcoming California nuptials while seeming almost chagrined to admit his opposition to same-sex marriage, a stand he shares with Mr. Obama. Since then, Mr. McCain has met with the gay Log Cabin Republicans.
He and Mr. Obama also share the antipathy of James Dobson, the Focus on the Family fulminator so avidly courted by the Bush White House. Perhaps best remembered for linking the cartoon character SquareBob SpongePants to a “pro-homosexual video,” Mr. Dobson last week used the word “fruitcake” in a rant against Mr. Obama. He has been nearly as dyspeptic, if not quite as “fruit”-fixated, about Mr. McCain.
Mr. Dobson’s embarrassing lashing out is the last gasp of an era. His dying breed of family-values scold is giving way to a new and independent generation of evangelical leaders (and voters) who don’t march to the partisan beat of Mr. Rove or his one-time ally, the disgraced Ralph Reed. Perhaps in belated recognition of this reality, Mr. Rove has been busy lately developing a new fear card for 2008 — fear of the Obamas.
Its racial undertones are naked enough. Earlier this year, Mr. Rove wrote that Mr. Obama was “often lazy,” and that his “trash talking” during a debate was “an unattractive carry-over from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard.” Last week Mr. Rove caricatured him as the elitist “guy at the country club with the beautiful date.” Provocative as it is to inject Mr. Obama into a setting historically associated with white Republicans, the invocation of that “beautiful date” is even more so. Where’s his beautiful wife? Mr. Rove’s suggestion that Mr. Obama might be a sexual freelancer, as an astute post at the Web site Talking Points Memo noted, could conjure up for a certain audience the image of “a white woman on his arm.”
But here, too, Mr. Rove reeks of the past. Should Mr. Black and Mr. McCain follow this ugly lead, I bet it will help them even less than the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thinkprogress.org (June 27, 2008)
Sens. Craig and Vitter team up to co-sponsor Marriage Protection Amendment.
Larry Craig and David Vitter — “two United States Senators implicated in extramarital sexual activity” — have named themselves as co-sponsors of S.J. Res. 43, the Marriage Protection Amendment. If passed, the bill would amend the Constitution to declare that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.”
Hilarious.
Larry Craig and David Vitter — “two United States Senators implicated in extramarital sexual activity” — have named themselves as co-sponsors of S.J. Res. 43, the Marriage Protection Amendment. If passed, the bill would amend the Constitution to declare that marriage “shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.”
Hilarious.
Emily Bazelon - Slate.com (June 26, 2008)
The Headmaster and the SchoolboyDavid Addington and John Yoo visit the Hill.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 8:05 PM ET
Two hostile witnesses are better than one. This we learn today on Capitol Hill from the mashup of David Addington, the vice president's consiglieri, and John Yoo, author of the 2002 and 2003 torture memos. Appearing before a House subcommittee, Yoo-Addington is like the witness version of good cop-bad cop. Yoo is wide-faced, plaintive, perplexed as to why anyone in Congress might be upset about anything he's written or done or his refusals to answer their questions. He goes for schoolboy sympathy. Addington, on the other hand, is all stern-faced headmaster. No one is schooling him today, thank you very much.
The purpose of hauling in these reluctant witnesses, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., says at the outset of the hearing, is to examine the role of Bush administration lawyers in developing interrogation policy—the policy that led to water-boarding and other harsh methods that are hard to square with the Geneva Conventions, no matter how long you squint at them. Addington and Yoo listen politely to Nadler's wishful thinking. Their lawyers have already done their best to whittle today's substance to the barest of bones. When the House judiciary committee initially asked Addington to testify, the Office of the Vice President said no, with lots of fighting words about how Congress couldn't compel Dick Cheney or anyone who works for him to talk. It seemed a foregone conclusion that Addington would go the way of nonwitnesses like Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten: to court rather than to the committee room.
Then, in May, Cheney's top aide and his office relented. Sort of. Addington would show up but only with a long off-limits list. As he and his lawyer understood it, Congress would not ask him to speak with authority about the nature and scope of presidential power in wartime, the administration's approach to those questions under U.S. and international law, or U.S. policy relating to interrogation by the CIA or the military. What would Addington discuss? This is the mystery when the gavel raps at 10 a.m.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., optimistically opens with his own list. He wants Addington and Yoo to come clean about 1) the torture memos: how they were drafted and why; 2) the effect of Yoo's legal advice on interrogation at Guantanamo Bay; 3) the so-called War Council in which Addington and Yoo reportedly participated, which "made key legal decisions on national security issues outside of normal channels," as Conyers puts it in a written version of his remarks.
Addington parries with no written statement, just a list of exhibits, most of them about the back-and-forth between his lawyer and the subcommittee. (Oh, and a speech by the president, in case we missed it on C-SPAN.) He has five minutes to open. He uses about 30 seconds to correct two small errors in Nadler's rendition of his bio. Then he's done. Nadler is thrown off balance. "Is that the entirety of your statement?" he asks.* Addington sits back and nods. It's a great move—his version of nimbly stepping out of the way as his opponent lunges forward.
Yoo, on the other hand, has a written statement that is supposed to shield him with a shrinking spell. The Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, where he worked when he wrote his infamous memos, "was not involved in the making of policy decisions," he asserts. He continues, "Those policy choices—adopting particular techniques within the lines that OLC had determined to be lawful—were not mine to make, and I did not make them." Also, he wants the subcommittee to know that his bosses at the Office of the Attorney General reviewed and edited everything he wrote. This opening gambit implicitly denies that Yoo had any role on any War Council, thereby refuting the much-cited reports of Jack Goldsmith, the OLC guy who later pulled Yoo's torture memos and denounced them (and then left the DoJ, too, and is now tapping away somewhere for Slate on the latest Supreme Court decisions).
Yoo is so determined to distance himself from interrogation-related policymaking that he pulls Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., into a tug-of-war over the meaning of the word implemented. Ellison wants to know whether the legal advice was implemented that reduced the definition of torture to acts that damage a suspect's internal organs. By which he means, Did interrogators use the tactics allowed by Yoo's theory of the law? The answer to this, of course, is yes, and to know that answer, all Yoo would have to admit is that he reads the newspaper. But he won't go there. "The memo was signed," he offers after much demurral. This exchange peters out, as do the next few, leading a further questioner, Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., to grimly mutter, "You guys sure are good at beating out the clock." To which Yoo replies, with an innocent shrug, "I don't play basketball." Too busy being captain of the debate team.
The next point, though, goes to Rep. Nadler. He asks a series of questions that other questioners have also gone through, along these lines: Did Yoo's memos allow the president to bury a suspect alive? To torture the child of a suspect? To cut off a suspect's fingers? To which Yoo replies with some variation of, "An American president would not issue such an order." Nadler responds that he hadn't asked what the president "would do. I asked what he could do," given Yoo's legal theory and advice.
"It's not fair to ask that question without any facts," Yoo complains. But that's not really what his questioners are doing. They're trying to establish whether anything is off limits to the president in Yoo's legal universe. And Yoo doesn't come up with a single example, even as he insists that "my memo does not authorize anyone to torture anyone." This is an assurance that's not reassuring.
As a result of all this back-and-forth, Addington gets less air time. That seems odd, since he's the higher-up and the one who's still in office. But if you could choose between going after the slightly whiny student and the caustic, blustery headmaster, what would you do? Addington does a lot of smacking down of the questioners. (I understand what I mean. I'm not sure exactly what you mean.) He doesn't admit to making interrogation policy, either, only to "monitoring what was going on" and, during a handful of visits to Guantanamo, observing "a detainee in an orange jumpsuit sitting in a chair talking" to an interrogator. It's all so benign that it bores him. As for the War Council, that was a name the Department of Defense seems to have come up with for a regular gathering that also included former DoD General Counsel William Haynes, former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, and a few deputies. "To me, it was just the lawyers getting together to talk," Addington says. Need I add that his tone was dismissive?
Addington also gets in a little fear-mongering: When the torture memos were written, he says, "the smoke was still rising" from 9/11. Actually, by 2003, that was no longer the case. But never mind: Addington's point is that things were different then, "but not as different today as a lot of people may think. … No American should think that we're free, or that the war is over. Because that's wrong." He's the teacher. That's the lesson. Now, go copy it onto the blackboard 500 times, Congress.
Correction, June 27, 2008: The original sentence misattributed the reaction to Addington's opening, and the subsequent quote, to Rep. John Conyers rather than Rep. Jerrold Nadler.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 8:05 PM ET
Two hostile witnesses are better than one. This we learn today on Capitol Hill from the mashup of David Addington, the vice president's consiglieri, and John Yoo, author of the 2002 and 2003 torture memos. Appearing before a House subcommittee, Yoo-Addington is like the witness version of good cop-bad cop. Yoo is wide-faced, plaintive, perplexed as to why anyone in Congress might be upset about anything he's written or done or his refusals to answer their questions. He goes for schoolboy sympathy. Addington, on the other hand, is all stern-faced headmaster. No one is schooling him today, thank you very much.
The purpose of hauling in these reluctant witnesses, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., says at the outset of the hearing, is to examine the role of Bush administration lawyers in developing interrogation policy—the policy that led to water-boarding and other harsh methods that are hard to square with the Geneva Conventions, no matter how long you squint at them. Addington and Yoo listen politely to Nadler's wishful thinking. Their lawyers have already done their best to whittle today's substance to the barest of bones. When the House judiciary committee initially asked Addington to testify, the Office of the Vice President said no, with lots of fighting words about how Congress couldn't compel Dick Cheney or anyone who works for him to talk. It seemed a foregone conclusion that Addington would go the way of nonwitnesses like Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten: to court rather than to the committee room.
Then, in May, Cheney's top aide and his office relented. Sort of. Addington would show up but only with a long off-limits list. As he and his lawyer understood it, Congress would not ask him to speak with authority about the nature and scope of presidential power in wartime, the administration's approach to those questions under U.S. and international law, or U.S. policy relating to interrogation by the CIA or the military. What would Addington discuss? This is the mystery when the gavel raps at 10 a.m.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., optimistically opens with his own list. He wants Addington and Yoo to come clean about 1) the torture memos: how they were drafted and why; 2) the effect of Yoo's legal advice on interrogation at Guantanamo Bay; 3) the so-called War Council in which Addington and Yoo reportedly participated, which "made key legal decisions on national security issues outside of normal channels," as Conyers puts it in a written version of his remarks.
Addington parries with no written statement, just a list of exhibits, most of them about the back-and-forth between his lawyer and the subcommittee. (Oh, and a speech by the president, in case we missed it on C-SPAN.) He has five minutes to open. He uses about 30 seconds to correct two small errors in Nadler's rendition of his bio. Then he's done. Nadler is thrown off balance. "Is that the entirety of your statement?" he asks.* Addington sits back and nods. It's a great move—his version of nimbly stepping out of the way as his opponent lunges forward.
Yoo, on the other hand, has a written statement that is supposed to shield him with a shrinking spell. The Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, where he worked when he wrote his infamous memos, "was not involved in the making of policy decisions," he asserts. He continues, "Those policy choices—adopting particular techniques within the lines that OLC had determined to be lawful—were not mine to make, and I did not make them." Also, he wants the subcommittee to know that his bosses at the Office of the Attorney General reviewed and edited everything he wrote. This opening gambit implicitly denies that Yoo had any role on any War Council, thereby refuting the much-cited reports of Jack Goldsmith, the OLC guy who later pulled Yoo's torture memos and denounced them (and then left the DoJ, too, and is now tapping away somewhere for Slate on the latest Supreme Court decisions).
Yoo is so determined to distance himself from interrogation-related policymaking that he pulls Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., into a tug-of-war over the meaning of the word implemented. Ellison wants to know whether the legal advice was implemented that reduced the definition of torture to acts that damage a suspect's internal organs. By which he means, Did interrogators use the tactics allowed by Yoo's theory of the law? The answer to this, of course, is yes, and to know that answer, all Yoo would have to admit is that he reads the newspaper. But he won't go there. "The memo was signed," he offers after much demurral. This exchange peters out, as do the next few, leading a further questioner, Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., to grimly mutter, "You guys sure are good at beating out the clock." To which Yoo replies, with an innocent shrug, "I don't play basketball." Too busy being captain of the debate team.
The next point, though, goes to Rep. Nadler. He asks a series of questions that other questioners have also gone through, along these lines: Did Yoo's memos allow the president to bury a suspect alive? To torture the child of a suspect? To cut off a suspect's fingers? To which Yoo replies with some variation of, "An American president would not issue such an order." Nadler responds that he hadn't asked what the president "would do. I asked what he could do," given Yoo's legal theory and advice.
"It's not fair to ask that question without any facts," Yoo complains. But that's not really what his questioners are doing. They're trying to establish whether anything is off limits to the president in Yoo's legal universe. And Yoo doesn't come up with a single example, even as he insists that "my memo does not authorize anyone to torture anyone." This is an assurance that's not reassuring.
As a result of all this back-and-forth, Addington gets less air time. That seems odd, since he's the higher-up and the one who's still in office. But if you could choose between going after the slightly whiny student and the caustic, blustery headmaster, what would you do? Addington does a lot of smacking down of the questioners. (I understand what I mean. I'm not sure exactly what you mean.) He doesn't admit to making interrogation policy, either, only to "monitoring what was going on" and, during a handful of visits to Guantanamo, observing "a detainee in an orange jumpsuit sitting in a chair talking" to an interrogator. It's all so benign that it bores him. As for the War Council, that was a name the Department of Defense seems to have come up with for a regular gathering that also included former DoD General Counsel William Haynes, former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, and a few deputies. "To me, it was just the lawyers getting together to talk," Addington says. Need I add that his tone was dismissive?
Addington also gets in a little fear-mongering: When the torture memos were written, he says, "the smoke was still rising" from 9/11. Actually, by 2003, that was no longer the case. But never mind: Addington's point is that things were different then, "but not as different today as a lot of people may think. … No American should think that we're free, or that the war is over. Because that's wrong." He's the teacher. That's the lesson. Now, go copy it onto the blackboard 500 times, Congress.
Correction, June 27, 2008: The original sentence misattributed the reaction to Addington's opening, and the subsequent quote, to Rep. John Conyers rather than Rep. Jerrold Nadler.
Truthdig.com Interview with Naomi Klein (June 26, 2008)
The Truthdig Interview With Naomi Klein
Posted on Jun 26, 2008
By Kasia Anderson
Critics and challengers of Naomi Klein’s work had better take a close look at her latest book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” before launching their attacks. This is one writer whose research and documentation are so exhaustive that would-be detractors will not only find her analysis to be dauntingly watertight, even if they don’t share her views about the unnatural disasters enabled by free-market capitalism, but they might also discover that some of her source material seems strangely familiar.
That’s because she took a page—or several hundred pages, rather—from just the sort of think tanks, government officials, scholars and publications that would seem to oppose her ideas most forcefully. But instead of trying to explain recurring socioeconomic patterns in the wake of various global crises by using a familiar “lefty” lens to justify her claims, Klein looks to the likes of Milton Friedman, the Cato Institute, Henry Kissinger and the Financial Times to bolster her argument about how “disaster capitalism” was cooked up decades ago and how it can explain what happened following Hurricane Katrina, Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 Chilean coup, and more recent events like Burma’s cyclone and the floods in the American Midwest.
The inner workings and key subscribers of disaster capitalism were exposed when the book first came out last September. Klein called in just before the June 24 paperback release of “The Shock Doctrine” to discuss with Truthdig’s Associate Editor Kasia Anderson this scary piece of nonfiction, as well as the resource-rich Shock Doctrine Web site, and how she believes the notion of disaster capitalism is, unfortunately, still relevant at this moment.
Kasia Anderson: So, I have read your book and was very alarmed, and I think it was a nice wake-up call for me. But let’s start out by talking a little bit about disaster capitalism, which is the central idea of your book. I was reading your L.A. Times article from earlier this year and you say, “Over the last four years, I have been researching a little-explored area of economic history: the way that crises have paved the way for the march of the right-wing economic revolution across the globe. A crisis hits, panic spreads and the ideologues fill the breach, rapidly reengineering societies in the interests of large corporate players. It’s a maneuver I call ‘disaster capitalism.’ ” So that lays the groundwork a little bit.
Now, with all due respect to your keen perception, why do you think this is a “little-explored area of economic history” when you’re looking at events that go back as far as five decades?
Naomi Klein: Well, I think largely because this is our contemporary history, and there hasn’t been that much looking back at how ... the economic model that has been dominant since Reagan—how it has spread throughout the world, and when there is a look back, the people doing the looking back are the people who imposed the policies in the first place. It’s been a victor’s history, and it’s been a history told by the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and there have been some important left-wing academics who have begun to provide a counter-history like David Harvey at CUNY University ... a couple of years ago [he] wrote “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” which was really the first alternative history of how these ideas swept the globe.
But, in terms of why the crisis has not been understood by popular audiences before—popular readers before—has to do with the fact that, not that this is a secret, but that it’s a tactic that has been discussed exclusively in technocratic circles. So my sources on this are, you know, Washington conferences attended by central bank presidents, think tanks, the International Monetary Fund. And there is a kind of an armor that goes up around how highly technical and specialized the language is around these discussions—it’s almost designed to make laypeople’s eyes roll back into their heads.
So, I was fortunate to work with some wonderful researchers, graduate students, who were working in these areas of researching World Bank policies, and came across this sort of cache of literature, of technocratic literature, and we found the smoking-gun quotes like John Williamson, who was the man who coined the term the Washington consensus, a very powerful Washington economist, admitting that there had never been a case of a developing world country accepting the Washington consensus without a crisis, and he gave a name for this, he called it “The Crisis Hypothesis.” And it turns out that there had been all these studies conducted by think tanks, by academic economists, studying the interrelationship between what they call deep crisis and deep reform. And once again, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you wouldn’t necessarily read a paper with that title, you know?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: But once I knew what I was looking for, I started to see it all over the place.
Anderson: So, can you briefly walk us through how a seemingly politically unrelated disaster, like a natural disaster, creates the condition for economic shock therapy and how it plays out from there?
Klein: Yeah, I think what this comes out of is a profound understanding that the more radical pieces of the right-wing economic program like privatizing Social Security or privatizing water just don’t enjoy popular support, and that creates a problem in a democracy—it doesn’t create a problem in a dictatorship, because you can do it anyway in a dictatorship.
Anderson: Right.
Klein: In fact, it was only dictatorships that were willing to impose these policies for the first decade in the ’70s. It was Pinochet’s Chile, Videla’s Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay under military regimes that experimented with Chicago-school economics. It wasn’t until the ’80s that democratic governments started imposing them. And that’s when Milton Friedman wrote this sentence that I quote in the book: “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change, and when that crisis occurs, the change that occurs depends on the ideas that are lying around.”
And I think that phrase, “ideas that are lying around,” is really key to understanding how this works. Because it’s essentially a mission statement for the Washington think tanks, which Friedman was tremendously instrumental in building and inspiring and supporting. And, you know, what we saw in the ’70s and early ’80s was an explosion of right-wing think tanks whose mission statement really was to get the ideas ready for when the next crisis hits. And in some cases, what we see from a lot of these think tanks is that they also create atmospheres of crisis.
Just for fun, I would look at the list of papers published by the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, looking for how many times the word crisis appears in a paper—“the coming crisis in Medicare,” “the coming crisis in Social Security”—so, they really specialize in claiming that countries are just doomed unless they follow this set of unwanted reforms.
But, to answer your question about natural disasters, the think tanks are instrumental in having the ideas ready, and the best example to me is Hurricane Katrina ...
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: ... because the levees broke, and the state—all three levels of government failed—municipal, state, federal. And really, the whole thing was an indictment of this very ideology. Everyone was saying, “Where is the government? Where’s the government when you need it?” And maybe this whole idea of vilifying the state wasn’t such a great idea after all. And even people like Jonah Goldberg were saying, you know, “Where’s big government when you need it?”
And I think a lot of people assumed that Katrina would be a wake-up call, an ideological wake-up call. There was one writer who said it should be for the neocons, the breaking of the levees should be for the neocons what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Communists. And you know what, it should have been, but it wasn’t, and it’s for two reasons: One, progressives were tentative and unwilling to really, I think, fill the breach with ideas of our own for how to reconstruct New Orleans in a completely different way, in a much more democratic way, and also to talk about global warming when there was a feeling of, you know, we don’t want to be. ... You often heard people say ... “This isn’t a time for politics.”
Anderson: Right.
Klein: Well, meanwhile, at the Heritage Foundation, two weeks after the levees broke, they had a meeting—and we have the minutes from this meeting, which we can link to. ...
Anderson: On the Documents and Resources section?
Klein: Yeah, yeah—we definitely should link to this one. The heading on the document is. ... Well, first of all, the people who attended the meeting were from a variety of right-wing think tanks, as well as the Republican Study Group—highly placed Republican congresspeople. And they came up with 32 free-market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. And it was everything from give parents school vouchers instead of rebuilding the public schools; mixed-use housing instead of repairing the public housing; drill in ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] ...; build more oil refineries. I mean, it was just the wish list!
And so what you see there is just, you know, the readiness of the right—aided by these think tanks, funded by multinational corporations and the richest families in the United States—to seize on a crisis that they themselves created with their ideology to push for more of the same. I mean, Katrina was a catastrophe, the flooding of New Orleans was a catastrophe created by heavy weather linked to global warming, because the increase in category 5 hurricanes is directly linked to warming ocean temperatures, and weak infrastructure, which is linked to the systematic neglect of the public sphere as a result of the campaign to destroy the New Deal.
And what is their solution? It’s more fossil fuels ... and destroying the public infrastructure altogether. And the fact is much of this has happened. The public housing in New Orleans is being destroyed. The hospitals—the public hospital in New Orleans is still not open, Charity Hospital. The school system ... has been handed over to charter schools.
Anderson: So you would say that think tanks having these ideas lying around is kind of a way of cuing each other with their inside language to potential future opportunities?
Klein: Well, I mean, the ideas are the same no matter what the crisis is. They just get rebranded to meet the crisis, right? So, suddenly privatizing Social Security is an economic stimulus to deal with the recession. And suddenly, you know, school vouchers are part of reconstructing from a hurricane. It’s the same ideas. So, it’s easy to have them lying around, because you’ve got the same answers to every problem.
And we’re seeing it now with this huge push, led by [Newt] Gingrich, now picked up by Bush and McCain, to deal with the cost of high gas prices by drilling offshore, and they want to drill in ANWR—Gingrich does, and a lot of the right-wing think tanks. So whatever the crisis is, it’s an opportunity to just push harder for the same old policies that they haven’t been able to get through without a crisis. ... As soon as ... people started to really talk about recession, [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson started talking about privatizing Social Security—a huge piece of the Bush platform that they could not get through without a crisis.
Anderson: I could see how maybe some followers of Milton Friedman might say you’re drumming up conspiracy theories, but it’s hard to argue with the evidence that you’re presenting here and in your book. So, what do you say, or what might you say, to critics who think you’re making connections and seeing deliberate actions on the part of these governments that just aren’t there?
Klein: Well, everything in my book is documented. And calling me a conspiracy theorist is just a political strategy. It’s not actually an argument—it’s a way to not have an argument. It’s an argument avoidance strategy. And, you know, I’m really careful not to make any claims that I can’t source. And my sources are the right-wing economists themselves, which is what I think drives them most crazy. I mean, one of my most favorite reviews for the book was a negative review in the Financial Times where he says, “The worst thing she does is quote the Financial Times to bolster her argument.”
Anderson: Consider the source.
Klein: It’s true! I found the Financial Times enormously [helpful]. ... And, you know, I don’t quote other “lefty,” you know, analysts to support my claims, much as I may enjoy reading their writing. That’s not what’s supporting this argument. Now, I think there is a real pushback now from the true, you know, hard-core Friedman fanatics, like the Cato Institute has published an attack paper on the book, and ... Reason [magazine] has sort of an unnatural obsession and so on.
But this is really about the Friedman legacy. ... It’s not really about my book, because my book really isn’t about Milton Friedman. My book talks about where Friedman fit into large historical forces. And I’m very clear in the book that if Milton Friedman hadn’t played this role, somebody else would have let the counterrevolution against the New Deal, because it wasn’t just his idea—it was a revolt of the elites who were tired of big trade unions, and they were tired of paying high taxes. It was a pushback after many, many victories from the left.
And the University of Chicago, for various reasons, became ground zero for that pushback, for that counterrevolution. And Milton Friedman, because he is a tremendous popularizer, really led the way and played an important historical role, meeting with many political leaders, acting as their adviser.
But this isn’t about him. And, for instance, in this Cato Institute background paper, the writer talks a lot about how Milton Friedman only went to Chile once and met with Augusto Pinochet once, you know, that hardly constitutes influence. Well, first of all, I make that clear in my book that he only went there once, but the whole point of those three chapters is that there was a massive program that was started by the U.S. State Department to bring hundreds of Latin American students to the University of Chicago to study.
Anderson: Right, the exchange program.
Klein: Yeah, and then to go back to Chile and take up top positions in Pinochet’s government as finance minister, head of the Central Bank. So, this is so much bigger than Friedman, and the response is only focused on Friedman. And it’s only focused on redeeming his name. And ... the truth is that the far right doesn’t have, or the far economic right, doesn’t have a lot of gurus, right ... [they] don’t have a lot of heroes like this. There’s Reagan ... but intellectual heroes—there really aren’t many, right?
Anderson: Right.
Klein: I mean, who—Ayn Rand? It’s a thin bunch. And Friedman and his family are really quite obsessed with legacy. In one of his last interviews—I just saw a clip of it on the Cato Institute Web site—he talks about how the real test of his influence is not what people think of him now but what they’ll think of him in 25 years. So, there was, you know, a great deal of consciousness about securing a place in history. And when Milton Friedman died in 2006, it seemed that his place was pretty secure, I mean, the obituaries and memorials were just across-the-board hagiography. And that’s changing, you know, and that’s threatening. And so now there’s this pushback that I think is really not about the economic legacy of these policies but much more about a man and his fans and his family wanting to protect their version of the role he played in history.
And what’s interesting is that ... the fiercest fight is actually happening right now at the University of Chicago, where it was announced three weeks ago that there’s going to be a Milton Friedman Institute—a $200-million Milton Friedman Institute—to carry his legacy forward, and it was launched by Gary Becker, who was one of his students and a real disciple—a true Chicago-school ideologue who still teaches at the school. And what’s interesting is that there’s been a little bit of a rebellion of academics at the University of Chicago. And more than 100 of these professors, faculty members, have signed a protest letter talking about how it’s already so difficult for them ... and these are not economists—they’re anthropologists, they’re historians, political scientists ... how difficult it is for them to travel in the global South, like in Latin America and Africa, and be associated with the Chicago School of Economics, because it is seen as having done so much damage around the world. This is really unprecedented—the idea that Milton Friedman’s name would be seen as a liability at his own alma mater!
And what’s striking to me is, when I read the letter, is that, you know, at the height of the Pinochet controversy in the ’70s, when Orlando Letelier accused Milton Friedman of being complicit in the human rights abuses and Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize, there was like a sort of flurry of protests, but only three professors at the time signed their names to this protest letter. So, even at the height of these huge debates about torture, only three people sign their names, but now in 2008, more than 100 faculty members at the University of Chicago are willing to sign their names.
Anderson: Do you think it was out of fear before—or maybe losing their position, at the lower end of the crisis scale?
Klein: Well, I don’t know, I think it still would be risky, right?
Anderson: Yeah, sure.
Klein: I mean, especially because this is a $200-million, you know, endowed gift to the university that it’s easy to fundraise for precisely because Milton Friedman’s policies are so very profitable! And, you know, in this day and age, it’s actually really rare for any building to be named after an academic, you know.
Anderson: Mmm-hmm.
Klein: Usually they’re named after corporations or donors. So, I mean, it says something about Milton Friedman in a sense that ... I think that it’s because he has been such a gift to corporate America that corporate America is willing to give back.
Anderson: In the form of a building.
Klein: Yeah.
Anderson: Now, speaking of more recent events - on your Shock Doctrine Web site I’ve been following updates and stories about more recent crises and catastrophes, and I thought of you yesterday because I read a headline about President Bush visiting flood-damaged Iowa and saying, “You’ll come back better!” from the damage and the floodwaters. So can you talk a little bit about other events that have happened since the release of your book and contextualize them according to your ideas?
Klein: Well, first of all, always be afraid when George Bush says he’s going to build back better, because we’ve heard that line before. What happens after disasters is that—it’s not mysterious—what we need to do is look at what the pre-existing agenda was, right?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: And what was it that the business lobby in any given area wanted to do but couldn’t because of people—because of people being there to defend their interests. And it’s a pretty good bet that those ideas will immediately resurface after the crisis hits and when people are least able to organize an effective opposition. The most dramatic example of this is right now in Burma. There was recently a piece in The Washington Post about how the Burmese regime immediately started parceling out the highly fertile land of the Irrawaddy Delta, which was the hardest-hit region by the cyclone, to their cronies, and just essentially treating the disaster ... in the same way the tsunami was treated—as if it cleared the land and was now free to be parceled out. ...
Anderson: To fancy resorts.
Klein: Yeah, or more profitable agribusiness companies and industrial fishing because that area—which is Burma’s rice bowl, the most fertile agricultural land—was like the coasts of Sri Lanka, was inhabited by small-scale farmers and fishing people. They were in the way. And it was an immediate shock doctrine move.
The other thing, of course, that generals did was use the disorientation and chaos to push through this constitutional referendum, which would have been, according to Burmese activists—it would’ve been a focal point for a new wave of protests after the protests had been so brutally repressed last September. But of course, there was no chance of that happening in the midst of the disaster. So that’s a pretty classic example of what I write about in the book—a really tragic one.
You know, China is a really interesting example, because, I think. ... One of the things I write about in the book is that the crises are volatile, and they can go either way, and the right has developed this shock doctrine strategy to have their ideas ready and move immediately when a crisis hits precisely because the fear is that the left will move—that it will unleash forces that are quite damaging.
Milton Friedman developed his crisis philosophy in response to watching how progressives responded to the Great Depression. As far as Milton Friedman was concerned, everything went wrong with the response to the Great Depression, because that was what created the New Deal; it was what created all the social programs that his ideological movement has been bent on dismantling for the past half-century.
So, he was well aware that these sort of market shocks can go in progressive directions, and there’s many cases of this. One example is Mexico in 1985 where there was an earthquake—terrible earthquake hit Mexico City. But what happened was that the buildings that immediately fell apart, immediately collapsed, were overwhelmingly public housing, housing for poor people. And buildings right next to those public housing buildings—privately owned or government buildings—sustained minimal damage.
So what the earthquake showed was what people suspected already, which was that the government had been cutting corners in building homes for poor people, that they hadn’t respected safety codes, that they had probably taken all kinds of bribes along the way. And it launched a democracy movement in Mexico that ultimately unseated the PRI—the 60-year rule of the PRI. And there’s a whole analysis in Mexico about how everything started with that earthquake, and there’s a book I read while I was researching “The Shock Doctrine” called “Cracking Open Mexico” that talks about the role of the earthquake.
So, if we look at what’s happening in [China’s] Sichuan province, it’s quite striking, because you have this same phenomenon with the schools, where many schools have collapsed—an estimated 10,000 children were killed in the earthquake. And you have all these photographs of a school that just collapsed completely right next to a building that’s standing intact. And then you have the rage of the parents, and you have this added factor in China which is that the state told these parents that they could only have one child. That was a state policy. And you have these children who represent the hope for six adults—the grandparents and the parents—and now the state that forced these parents to have one child now appears to not have taken care of that child, neglected that child. And, you know, there’s something extremely powerful about the rage of the parent with nothing left to lose. ...
Anderson: I’ve seen those photos.
Klein: Amazing, right?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: So, China could end up being a counter-example to the shock doctrine, where I think the predictable response is what the Chinese government has already said, you know, we’re going to build back better, with even bigger factories, you know, and they’ve been very open about this, and we should expect nothing less. China’s economic development model is extraordinarily land-hungry. Any land that is cleared they will obviously redesign, and they will put to the use of their vision of economic development. So, that wouldn’t be a surprise if that happened. They pretty much do that anyway.
But what would be really interesting is if this kick-started a democracy movement in China, and I don’t think it’s out of the question, because China’s in a really tough position right now in terms of timing with the Games. We are seeing repression and a locking down of critical coverage of the earthquake in the Chinese press, but I really feel like there’s only so much they can do. I mean, the Games are in two months, and I think after the crackdown in Tibet, they’re very wary of more backlash.
Anderson: What do you think about what’s going to happen in the Midwest? Any prognostications?
Klein: You know, I don’t have any yet. What do you think?
Anderson: Well, I think that there will be parts of big cities that might be hard-hit, and that might find themselves restructured differently later. I don’t know too much about the city layouts of these places that were affected most, like Cedar Rapids, places like that. So, I’m interested, in kind of a morbid way, unfortunately, to see if something like what’s gone on in New Orleans and other places that you describe in your book—if that’s going to be the case. ...
Klein: Well, I think that ... what’s gonna happen is that it’s intersecting with the global food crisis and the fact that the price[s] of crops are at record highs right now, because of scarcity, and the agribusiness companies like Monsanto and Cargill are reporting record profits in the midst of a food crisis. And I think there will be more land grabs; I think that the few small-scale farmers, independent farmers, that are left are probably going to be gobbled up.
Anderson: Are you at all optimistic about a possible regime change in the U.S., if a Democrat in the White House would, in fact, represent this ... ?
Klein: You know, I’m optimistic about the possibility of social movements in the U.S. demanding a change in ideology. I’m optimistic because I’ve been blown away by the responses I’ve been getting from the book and just how receptive people are to talking about systems as opposed to just people. And I feel like the electoral campaigns—even though [Barack] Obama’s campaign has been inspiring in many ways, it’s also been a way of not talking about politics at a moment when we have so many urgent issues calling out for real policy debates. And instead we have been stuck in the political equivalent of “American Idol,” right?
So, my optimism is entirely contingent on whether we can build counter-movements of the type that generated the New Deal, because I don’t really think it’s about the man in power. I think if we look at Obama’s economic inclinations, this is not where he’s prone to take risks. I think he’s prone to take some risks with foreign policy much more than with domestic economic policy.
Anderson: He’s been criticized for that.
Klein: Well, look at who he appointed as his chief economic adviser.
Anderson: Well, I think that just about does it for me. We will certainly direct our readers and listeners to your Shock Doctrine Web site to look at all the documents and also all the updates. ...
Posted on Jun 26, 2008
By Kasia Anderson
Critics and challengers of Naomi Klein’s work had better take a close look at her latest book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” before launching their attacks. This is one writer whose research and documentation are so exhaustive that would-be detractors will not only find her analysis to be dauntingly watertight, even if they don’t share her views about the unnatural disasters enabled by free-market capitalism, but they might also discover that some of her source material seems strangely familiar.
That’s because she took a page—or several hundred pages, rather—from just the sort of think tanks, government officials, scholars and publications that would seem to oppose her ideas most forcefully. But instead of trying to explain recurring socioeconomic patterns in the wake of various global crises by using a familiar “lefty” lens to justify her claims, Klein looks to the likes of Milton Friedman, the Cato Institute, Henry Kissinger and the Financial Times to bolster her argument about how “disaster capitalism” was cooked up decades ago and how it can explain what happened following Hurricane Katrina, Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 Chilean coup, and more recent events like Burma’s cyclone and the floods in the American Midwest.
The inner workings and key subscribers of disaster capitalism were exposed when the book first came out last September. Klein called in just before the June 24 paperback release of “The Shock Doctrine” to discuss with Truthdig’s Associate Editor Kasia Anderson this scary piece of nonfiction, as well as the resource-rich Shock Doctrine Web site, and how she believes the notion of disaster capitalism is, unfortunately, still relevant at this moment.
Kasia Anderson: So, I have read your book and was very alarmed, and I think it was a nice wake-up call for me. But let’s start out by talking a little bit about disaster capitalism, which is the central idea of your book. I was reading your L.A. Times article from earlier this year and you say, “Over the last four years, I have been researching a little-explored area of economic history: the way that crises have paved the way for the march of the right-wing economic revolution across the globe. A crisis hits, panic spreads and the ideologues fill the breach, rapidly reengineering societies in the interests of large corporate players. It’s a maneuver I call ‘disaster capitalism.’ ” So that lays the groundwork a little bit.
Now, with all due respect to your keen perception, why do you think this is a “little-explored area of economic history” when you’re looking at events that go back as far as five decades?
Naomi Klein: Well, I think largely because this is our contemporary history, and there hasn’t been that much looking back at how ... the economic model that has been dominant since Reagan—how it has spread throughout the world, and when there is a look back, the people doing the looking back are the people who imposed the policies in the first place. It’s been a victor’s history, and it’s been a history told by the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and there have been some important left-wing academics who have begun to provide a counter-history like David Harvey at CUNY University ... a couple of years ago [he] wrote “A Brief History of Neoliberalism,” which was really the first alternative history of how these ideas swept the globe.
But, in terms of why the crisis has not been understood by popular audiences before—popular readers before—has to do with the fact that, not that this is a secret, but that it’s a tactic that has been discussed exclusively in technocratic circles. So my sources on this are, you know, Washington conferences attended by central bank presidents, think tanks, the International Monetary Fund. And there is a kind of an armor that goes up around how highly technical and specialized the language is around these discussions—it’s almost designed to make laypeople’s eyes roll back into their heads.
So, I was fortunate to work with some wonderful researchers, graduate students, who were working in these areas of researching World Bank policies, and came across this sort of cache of literature, of technocratic literature, and we found the smoking-gun quotes like John Williamson, who was the man who coined the term the Washington consensus, a very powerful Washington economist, admitting that there had never been a case of a developing world country accepting the Washington consensus without a crisis, and he gave a name for this, he called it “The Crisis Hypothesis.” And it turns out that there had been all these studies conducted by think tanks, by academic economists, studying the interrelationship between what they call deep crisis and deep reform. And once again, if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you wouldn’t necessarily read a paper with that title, you know?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: But once I knew what I was looking for, I started to see it all over the place.
Anderson: So, can you briefly walk us through how a seemingly politically unrelated disaster, like a natural disaster, creates the condition for economic shock therapy and how it plays out from there?
Klein: Yeah, I think what this comes out of is a profound understanding that the more radical pieces of the right-wing economic program like privatizing Social Security or privatizing water just don’t enjoy popular support, and that creates a problem in a democracy—it doesn’t create a problem in a dictatorship, because you can do it anyway in a dictatorship.
Anderson: Right.
Klein: In fact, it was only dictatorships that were willing to impose these policies for the first decade in the ’70s. It was Pinochet’s Chile, Videla’s Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay under military regimes that experimented with Chicago-school economics. It wasn’t until the ’80s that democratic governments started imposing them. And that’s when Milton Friedman wrote this sentence that I quote in the book: “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change, and when that crisis occurs, the change that occurs depends on the ideas that are lying around.”
And I think that phrase, “ideas that are lying around,” is really key to understanding how this works. Because it’s essentially a mission statement for the Washington think tanks, which Friedman was tremendously instrumental in building and inspiring and supporting. And, you know, what we saw in the ’70s and early ’80s was an explosion of right-wing think tanks whose mission statement really was to get the ideas ready for when the next crisis hits. And in some cases, what we see from a lot of these think tanks is that they also create atmospheres of crisis.
Just for fun, I would look at the list of papers published by the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, looking for how many times the word crisis appears in a paper—“the coming crisis in Medicare,” “the coming crisis in Social Security”—so, they really specialize in claiming that countries are just doomed unless they follow this set of unwanted reforms.
But, to answer your question about natural disasters, the think tanks are instrumental in having the ideas ready, and the best example to me is Hurricane Katrina ...
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: ... because the levees broke, and the state—all three levels of government failed—municipal, state, federal. And really, the whole thing was an indictment of this very ideology. Everyone was saying, “Where is the government? Where’s the government when you need it?” And maybe this whole idea of vilifying the state wasn’t such a great idea after all. And even people like Jonah Goldberg were saying, you know, “Where’s big government when you need it?”
And I think a lot of people assumed that Katrina would be a wake-up call, an ideological wake-up call. There was one writer who said it should be for the neocons, the breaking of the levees should be for the neocons what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Communists. And you know what, it should have been, but it wasn’t, and it’s for two reasons: One, progressives were tentative and unwilling to really, I think, fill the breach with ideas of our own for how to reconstruct New Orleans in a completely different way, in a much more democratic way, and also to talk about global warming when there was a feeling of, you know, we don’t want to be. ... You often heard people say ... “This isn’t a time for politics.”
Anderson: Right.
Klein: Well, meanwhile, at the Heritage Foundation, two weeks after the levees broke, they had a meeting—and we have the minutes from this meeting, which we can link to. ...
Anderson: On the Documents and Resources section?
Klein: Yeah, yeah—we definitely should link to this one. The heading on the document is. ... Well, first of all, the people who attended the meeting were from a variety of right-wing think tanks, as well as the Republican Study Group—highly placed Republican congresspeople. And they came up with 32 free-market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. And it was everything from give parents school vouchers instead of rebuilding the public schools; mixed-use housing instead of repairing the public housing; drill in ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] ...; build more oil refineries. I mean, it was just the wish list!
And so what you see there is just, you know, the readiness of the right—aided by these think tanks, funded by multinational corporations and the richest families in the United States—to seize on a crisis that they themselves created with their ideology to push for more of the same. I mean, Katrina was a catastrophe, the flooding of New Orleans was a catastrophe created by heavy weather linked to global warming, because the increase in category 5 hurricanes is directly linked to warming ocean temperatures, and weak infrastructure, which is linked to the systematic neglect of the public sphere as a result of the campaign to destroy the New Deal.
And what is their solution? It’s more fossil fuels ... and destroying the public infrastructure altogether. And the fact is much of this has happened. The public housing in New Orleans is being destroyed. The hospitals—the public hospital in New Orleans is still not open, Charity Hospital. The school system ... has been handed over to charter schools.
Anderson: So you would say that think tanks having these ideas lying around is kind of a way of cuing each other with their inside language to potential future opportunities?
Klein: Well, I mean, the ideas are the same no matter what the crisis is. They just get rebranded to meet the crisis, right? So, suddenly privatizing Social Security is an economic stimulus to deal with the recession. And suddenly, you know, school vouchers are part of reconstructing from a hurricane. It’s the same ideas. So, it’s easy to have them lying around, because you’ve got the same answers to every problem.
And we’re seeing it now with this huge push, led by [Newt] Gingrich, now picked up by Bush and McCain, to deal with the cost of high gas prices by drilling offshore, and they want to drill in ANWR—Gingrich does, and a lot of the right-wing think tanks. So whatever the crisis is, it’s an opportunity to just push harder for the same old policies that they haven’t been able to get through without a crisis. ... As soon as ... people started to really talk about recession, [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson started talking about privatizing Social Security—a huge piece of the Bush platform that they could not get through without a crisis.
Anderson: I could see how maybe some followers of Milton Friedman might say you’re drumming up conspiracy theories, but it’s hard to argue with the evidence that you’re presenting here and in your book. So, what do you say, or what might you say, to critics who think you’re making connections and seeing deliberate actions on the part of these governments that just aren’t there?
Klein: Well, everything in my book is documented. And calling me a conspiracy theorist is just a political strategy. It’s not actually an argument—it’s a way to not have an argument. It’s an argument avoidance strategy. And, you know, I’m really careful not to make any claims that I can’t source. And my sources are the right-wing economists themselves, which is what I think drives them most crazy. I mean, one of my most favorite reviews for the book was a negative review in the Financial Times where he says, “The worst thing she does is quote the Financial Times to bolster her argument.”
Anderson: Consider the source.
Klein: It’s true! I found the Financial Times enormously [helpful]. ... And, you know, I don’t quote other “lefty,” you know, analysts to support my claims, much as I may enjoy reading their writing. That’s not what’s supporting this argument. Now, I think there is a real pushback now from the true, you know, hard-core Friedman fanatics, like the Cato Institute has published an attack paper on the book, and ... Reason [magazine] has sort of an unnatural obsession and so on.
But this is really about the Friedman legacy. ... It’s not really about my book, because my book really isn’t about Milton Friedman. My book talks about where Friedman fit into large historical forces. And I’m very clear in the book that if Milton Friedman hadn’t played this role, somebody else would have let the counterrevolution against the New Deal, because it wasn’t just his idea—it was a revolt of the elites who were tired of big trade unions, and they were tired of paying high taxes. It was a pushback after many, many victories from the left.
And the University of Chicago, for various reasons, became ground zero for that pushback, for that counterrevolution. And Milton Friedman, because he is a tremendous popularizer, really led the way and played an important historical role, meeting with many political leaders, acting as their adviser.
But this isn’t about him. And, for instance, in this Cato Institute background paper, the writer talks a lot about how Milton Friedman only went to Chile once and met with Augusto Pinochet once, you know, that hardly constitutes influence. Well, first of all, I make that clear in my book that he only went there once, but the whole point of those three chapters is that there was a massive program that was started by the U.S. State Department to bring hundreds of Latin American students to the University of Chicago to study.
Anderson: Right, the exchange program.
Klein: Yeah, and then to go back to Chile and take up top positions in Pinochet’s government as finance minister, head of the Central Bank. So, this is so much bigger than Friedman, and the response is only focused on Friedman. And it’s only focused on redeeming his name. And ... the truth is that the far right doesn’t have, or the far economic right, doesn’t have a lot of gurus, right ... [they] don’t have a lot of heroes like this. There’s Reagan ... but intellectual heroes—there really aren’t many, right?
Anderson: Right.
Klein: I mean, who—Ayn Rand? It’s a thin bunch. And Friedman and his family are really quite obsessed with legacy. In one of his last interviews—I just saw a clip of it on the Cato Institute Web site—he talks about how the real test of his influence is not what people think of him now but what they’ll think of him in 25 years. So, there was, you know, a great deal of consciousness about securing a place in history. And when Milton Friedman died in 2006, it seemed that his place was pretty secure, I mean, the obituaries and memorials were just across-the-board hagiography. And that’s changing, you know, and that’s threatening. And so now there’s this pushback that I think is really not about the economic legacy of these policies but much more about a man and his fans and his family wanting to protect their version of the role he played in history.
And what’s interesting is that ... the fiercest fight is actually happening right now at the University of Chicago, where it was announced three weeks ago that there’s going to be a Milton Friedman Institute—a $200-million Milton Friedman Institute—to carry his legacy forward, and it was launched by Gary Becker, who was one of his students and a real disciple—a true Chicago-school ideologue who still teaches at the school. And what’s interesting is that there’s been a little bit of a rebellion of academics at the University of Chicago. And more than 100 of these professors, faculty members, have signed a protest letter talking about how it’s already so difficult for them ... and these are not economists—they’re anthropologists, they’re historians, political scientists ... how difficult it is for them to travel in the global South, like in Latin America and Africa, and be associated with the Chicago School of Economics, because it is seen as having done so much damage around the world. This is really unprecedented—the idea that Milton Friedman’s name would be seen as a liability at his own alma mater!
And what’s striking to me is, when I read the letter, is that, you know, at the height of the Pinochet controversy in the ’70s, when Orlando Letelier accused Milton Friedman of being complicit in the human rights abuses and Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize, there was like a sort of flurry of protests, but only three professors at the time signed their names to this protest letter. So, even at the height of these huge debates about torture, only three people sign their names, but now in 2008, more than 100 faculty members at the University of Chicago are willing to sign their names.
Anderson: Do you think it was out of fear before—or maybe losing their position, at the lower end of the crisis scale?
Klein: Well, I don’t know, I think it still would be risky, right?
Anderson: Yeah, sure.
Klein: I mean, especially because this is a $200-million, you know, endowed gift to the university that it’s easy to fundraise for precisely because Milton Friedman’s policies are so very profitable! And, you know, in this day and age, it’s actually really rare for any building to be named after an academic, you know.
Anderson: Mmm-hmm.
Klein: Usually they’re named after corporations or donors. So, I mean, it says something about Milton Friedman in a sense that ... I think that it’s because he has been such a gift to corporate America that corporate America is willing to give back.
Anderson: In the form of a building.
Klein: Yeah.
Anderson: Now, speaking of more recent events - on your Shock Doctrine Web site I’ve been following updates and stories about more recent crises and catastrophes, and I thought of you yesterday because I read a headline about President Bush visiting flood-damaged Iowa and saying, “You’ll come back better!” from the damage and the floodwaters. So can you talk a little bit about other events that have happened since the release of your book and contextualize them according to your ideas?
Klein: Well, first of all, always be afraid when George Bush says he’s going to build back better, because we’ve heard that line before. What happens after disasters is that—it’s not mysterious—what we need to do is look at what the pre-existing agenda was, right?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: And what was it that the business lobby in any given area wanted to do but couldn’t because of people—because of people being there to defend their interests. And it’s a pretty good bet that those ideas will immediately resurface after the crisis hits and when people are least able to organize an effective opposition. The most dramatic example of this is right now in Burma. There was recently a piece in The Washington Post about how the Burmese regime immediately started parceling out the highly fertile land of the Irrawaddy Delta, which was the hardest-hit region by the cyclone, to their cronies, and just essentially treating the disaster ... in the same way the tsunami was treated—as if it cleared the land and was now free to be parceled out. ...
Anderson: To fancy resorts.
Klein: Yeah, or more profitable agribusiness companies and industrial fishing because that area—which is Burma’s rice bowl, the most fertile agricultural land—was like the coasts of Sri Lanka, was inhabited by small-scale farmers and fishing people. They were in the way. And it was an immediate shock doctrine move.
The other thing, of course, that generals did was use the disorientation and chaos to push through this constitutional referendum, which would have been, according to Burmese activists—it would’ve been a focal point for a new wave of protests after the protests had been so brutally repressed last September. But of course, there was no chance of that happening in the midst of the disaster. So that’s a pretty classic example of what I write about in the book—a really tragic one.
You know, China is a really interesting example, because, I think. ... One of the things I write about in the book is that the crises are volatile, and they can go either way, and the right has developed this shock doctrine strategy to have their ideas ready and move immediately when a crisis hits precisely because the fear is that the left will move—that it will unleash forces that are quite damaging.
Milton Friedman developed his crisis philosophy in response to watching how progressives responded to the Great Depression. As far as Milton Friedman was concerned, everything went wrong with the response to the Great Depression, because that was what created the New Deal; it was what created all the social programs that his ideological movement has been bent on dismantling for the past half-century.
So, he was well aware that these sort of market shocks can go in progressive directions, and there’s many cases of this. One example is Mexico in 1985 where there was an earthquake—terrible earthquake hit Mexico City. But what happened was that the buildings that immediately fell apart, immediately collapsed, were overwhelmingly public housing, housing for poor people. And buildings right next to those public housing buildings—privately owned or government buildings—sustained minimal damage.
So what the earthquake showed was what people suspected already, which was that the government had been cutting corners in building homes for poor people, that they hadn’t respected safety codes, that they had probably taken all kinds of bribes along the way. And it launched a democracy movement in Mexico that ultimately unseated the PRI—the 60-year rule of the PRI. And there’s a whole analysis in Mexico about how everything started with that earthquake, and there’s a book I read while I was researching “The Shock Doctrine” called “Cracking Open Mexico” that talks about the role of the earthquake.
So, if we look at what’s happening in [China’s] Sichuan province, it’s quite striking, because you have this same phenomenon with the schools, where many schools have collapsed—an estimated 10,000 children were killed in the earthquake. And you have all these photographs of a school that just collapsed completely right next to a building that’s standing intact. And then you have the rage of the parents, and you have this added factor in China which is that the state told these parents that they could only have one child. That was a state policy. And you have these children who represent the hope for six adults—the grandparents and the parents—and now the state that forced these parents to have one child now appears to not have taken care of that child, neglected that child. And, you know, there’s something extremely powerful about the rage of the parent with nothing left to lose. ...
Anderson: I’ve seen those photos.
Klein: Amazing, right?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein: So, China could end up being a counter-example to the shock doctrine, where I think the predictable response is what the Chinese government has already said, you know, we’re going to build back better, with even bigger factories, you know, and they’ve been very open about this, and we should expect nothing less. China’s economic development model is extraordinarily land-hungry. Any land that is cleared they will obviously redesign, and they will put to the use of their vision of economic development. So, that wouldn’t be a surprise if that happened. They pretty much do that anyway.
But what would be really interesting is if this kick-started a democracy movement in China, and I don’t think it’s out of the question, because China’s in a really tough position right now in terms of timing with the Games. We are seeing repression and a locking down of critical coverage of the earthquake in the Chinese press, but I really feel like there’s only so much they can do. I mean, the Games are in two months, and I think after the crackdown in Tibet, they’re very wary of more backlash.
Anderson: What do you think about what’s going to happen in the Midwest? Any prognostications?
Klein: You know, I don’t have any yet. What do you think?
Anderson: Well, I think that there will be parts of big cities that might be hard-hit, and that might find themselves restructured differently later. I don’t know too much about the city layouts of these places that were affected most, like Cedar Rapids, places like that. So, I’m interested, in kind of a morbid way, unfortunately, to see if something like what’s gone on in New Orleans and other places that you describe in your book—if that’s going to be the case. ...
Klein: Well, I think that ... what’s gonna happen is that it’s intersecting with the global food crisis and the fact that the price[s] of crops are at record highs right now, because of scarcity, and the agribusiness companies like Monsanto and Cargill are reporting record profits in the midst of a food crisis. And I think there will be more land grabs; I think that the few small-scale farmers, independent farmers, that are left are probably going to be gobbled up.
Anderson: Are you at all optimistic about a possible regime change in the U.S., if a Democrat in the White House would, in fact, represent this ... ?
Klein: You know, I’m optimistic about the possibility of social movements in the U.S. demanding a change in ideology. I’m optimistic because I’ve been blown away by the responses I’ve been getting from the book and just how receptive people are to talking about systems as opposed to just people. And I feel like the electoral campaigns—even though [Barack] Obama’s campaign has been inspiring in many ways, it’s also been a way of not talking about politics at a moment when we have so many urgent issues calling out for real policy debates. And instead we have been stuck in the political equivalent of “American Idol,” right?
So, my optimism is entirely contingent on whether we can build counter-movements of the type that generated the New Deal, because I don’t really think it’s about the man in power. I think if we look at Obama’s economic inclinations, this is not where he’s prone to take risks. I think he’s prone to take some risks with foreign policy much more than with domestic economic policy.
Anderson: He’s been criticized for that.
Klein: Well, look at who he appointed as his chief economic adviser.
Anderson: Well, I think that just about does it for me. We will certainly direct our readers and listeners to your Shock Doctrine Web site to look at all the documents and also all the updates. ...
BBC Newsnight (May 2008)
Report on BBC Newsnight about the last British resident to be held in Guantanamo Bay, Binyam Mohamed. Allegations of torture and rendition by the U.S. and surrogates abroad.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7428862.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7428862.stm
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Arianna Huffington - Huffingtonpost.com (June 25, 2008)
FearWatch '08: Keeping an Eye Out for GOP Fear-Mongering
Posted June 25, 2008 | 06:15 PM (EST)
Last week, as expected, the GOP, unable to run on its disastrous record, pulled out its 2004 playbook and opened it to "Scare Tactics," offering up fear-mongering hatchet men Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and John Bolton to deliver the message that we should all be afraid -- very, very afraid -- of what an Obama presidency could lead to. Little things like the obliteration of a U.S. city (Gingrich) and more terrorist attacks (Bolton).
This fright-fest came in the wake of McCain telling us that al Qaeda will increase its violent attacks to try to defeat him, and that Hamas wants Obama to win.
In case we didn't get the message, up popped McCain's chief campaign advisor Charlie Black with his considered opinion that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil "certainly would be a big advantage" for McCain.
McCain quickly disavowed the comment and claimed, "I cannot imagine why he would say it." Really, Senator, you cannot imagine why your top advisor would follow in the footsteps of Karl Rove, who made scaring the bejesus out of the American people the centerpiece of GOP strategy for the last six years?
Let me break it down for you: fear is a frighteningly effective sales pitch -- one that has worked like a charm for Republicans since the days of the Cold War Red Scares, and especially since 9/11.
It proved less effective in 2006 -- not that the Republicans didn't give it everything they had, including a right-before-Election-Day TV ad featuring Osama bin Laden saying 9/11 was "nothing compared to what you will see next," and Dick Cheney repeatedly mentioning the possibility of "mass death in the United States."
As we've seen, the McCain campaign has little else to fall back on. The latest USA Today/Gallup poll showed that people feel Obama would do a better job on health care, energy policy, economy, taxes, and moral values (the candidates were tied on Iraq). The issue on which McCain was viewed most favorably was terrorism. So as we head into the dog days of summer leading to the conventions, we can expect more efforts to appeal to our collective lizard brain.
But things are always less scary when the lights are on -- so throughout the campaign HuffPost will be conducting a FearWatch, keeping our eyes peeled for the lowest, most base attempts to scare voters into voting their fears, and collecting them on a FearWatch08 page.
And we'd like your help. So be on the lookout for examples of fear-mongering in speeches, in press releases, in local TV spots, and in direct mail come-ons -- and send any you come across to fearwatch08@huffingtonpost.com so we can add them to our collection.
And use the comments section below to let me know whether you think the fear card will work in 2008. Will McCain and the GOP be able to appeal to voters' fears by raising the specter of pre-election terror attacks, madrassa schools, foreign sounding middle names, missing lapel pins, fulminating preachers, or terrorists celebrating over the election of a specific candidate?
Or will Democrats be able to make the case that the war in Iraq -- a war McCain is passionately, almost perversely, committed to continuing -- has made us less safe by taking our eye off the real terrorist threats, depleting our military, and draining resources from our infrastructure and homeland security?
Posted June 25, 2008 | 06:15 PM (EST)
Last week, as expected, the GOP, unable to run on its disastrous record, pulled out its 2004 playbook and opened it to "Scare Tactics," offering up fear-mongering hatchet men Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and John Bolton to deliver the message that we should all be afraid -- very, very afraid -- of what an Obama presidency could lead to. Little things like the obliteration of a U.S. city (Gingrich) and more terrorist attacks (Bolton).
This fright-fest came in the wake of McCain telling us that al Qaeda will increase its violent attacks to try to defeat him, and that Hamas wants Obama to win.
In case we didn't get the message, up popped McCain's chief campaign advisor Charlie Black with his considered opinion that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil "certainly would be a big advantage" for McCain.
McCain quickly disavowed the comment and claimed, "I cannot imagine why he would say it." Really, Senator, you cannot imagine why your top advisor would follow in the footsteps of Karl Rove, who made scaring the bejesus out of the American people the centerpiece of GOP strategy for the last six years?
Let me break it down for you: fear is a frighteningly effective sales pitch -- one that has worked like a charm for Republicans since the days of the Cold War Red Scares, and especially since 9/11.
It proved less effective in 2006 -- not that the Republicans didn't give it everything they had, including a right-before-Election-Day TV ad featuring Osama bin Laden saying 9/11 was "nothing compared to what you will see next," and Dick Cheney repeatedly mentioning the possibility of "mass death in the United States."
As we've seen, the McCain campaign has little else to fall back on. The latest USA Today/Gallup poll showed that people feel Obama would do a better job on health care, energy policy, economy, taxes, and moral values (the candidates were tied on Iraq). The issue on which McCain was viewed most favorably was terrorism. So as we head into the dog days of summer leading to the conventions, we can expect more efforts to appeal to our collective lizard brain.
But things are always less scary when the lights are on -- so throughout the campaign HuffPost will be conducting a FearWatch, keeping our eyes peeled for the lowest, most base attempts to scare voters into voting their fears, and collecting them on a FearWatch08 page.
And we'd like your help. So be on the lookout for examples of fear-mongering in speeches, in press releases, in local TV spots, and in direct mail come-ons -- and send any you come across to fearwatch08@huffingtonpost.com so we can add them to our collection.
And use the comments section below to let me know whether you think the fear card will work in 2008. Will McCain and the GOP be able to appeal to voters' fears by raising the specter of pre-election terror attacks, madrassa schools, foreign sounding middle names, missing lapel pins, fulminating preachers, or terrorists celebrating over the election of a specific candidate?
Or will Democrats be able to make the case that the war in Iraq -- a war McCain is passionately, almost perversely, committed to continuing -- has made us less safe by taking our eye off the real terrorist threats, depleting our military, and draining resources from our infrastructure and homeland security?
Nicholas Kristof - N.Y. Times (June 26, 2008)
Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times
Saad is an Iraqi refugee from Falluja. He dropped out of school for two years but has recently restarted -- with grave reservations. "I'm a good student," he said, "but I don't like school because the other children beat me up."
June 26, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Books, Not Bombs
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
AMMAN, Jordan
The dirty little secret of the Iraq war isn’t in Baghdad or Basra. Rather, it’s found in the squalid brothels of Damascus and the poorest neighborhoods of East Amman.
Some two million Iraqis have fled their homeland and are now sheltering in run-down neighborhoods in surrounding countries. These are the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability.
Many youngsters are getting no education, and some girls are pushed into prostitution, particularly in Damascus. Impoverished, angry, disenfranchised, unwanted, these Iraqis are a combustible new Middle Eastern element that no one wants to address or even think about.
American hawks prefer to address the region’s security challenges by devoting billions of dollars to permanent American military bases. A simpler way to fight extremism would be to pay school fees for refugee children to ensure that they at least get an education and don’t become forever marginalized and underemployed.
We broke Iraq, and we have a moral responsibility to those whose lives have been shattered by our actions. Helping them is also in our national interest, for we’ll regret our myopia if we allow young Iraqi refugees to grow up uneducated and unemployable, festering in their societies.
“My husband and I have decided to pull our three children out of school,” said Yussra Shaker, a college-educated English teacher who fled Iraq and went to Jordan when her 15-year-old son was shot in the leg in a kidnapping attempt. Ms. Yussra deeply believes in education, and her eyes welled with tears as she described the decision to withdraw her children because of school fees and beatings by Jordanian students.
“My children are very good students, and the teachers like them,” Ms. Yussra explained, “and so the local children beat them up even more.”
Ms. Yussra’s family is Christian, but most of those fleeing Iraq are Sunni Muslims — and some of them may have shot at Americans or brutalized Shiites in the ongoing sectarian conflict. One Sunni family I visited came from Falluja after their house was blown up, possibly by Americans, and they have decorated their leaking apartment with a huge poster of Saddam Hussein.
This family was composed of two wives of one man (who was back in Iraq, living in a tent) and their five children. The eldest son was a surly young man in his 20s who looked as if his preferred interaction with Americans might have involved an AK-47 in his arms.
Yet the family also has four small children and was nine months behind in its rent and in danger of being thrown out on to the street. I visited them at 2 p.m., and nobody in the house had eaten anything so far that day.
Iraqi refugees don’t get help in part because this is a problem that almost everybody wants to hide. Syria and Jordan worry that if the refugees get assistance, then they will stay indefinitely. The U.S. doesn’t want to talk about a crisis created by our war, and Iraq’s Shiite leaders don’t much care about Sunnis or Christians displaced by Shiite militias.
“It’s among the largest humanitarian crises in the world today,” said Michael Kocher, a refugee expert at the International Rescue Committee, which recently published a report on the crisis. “It’s getting very little attention from the Security Council on down, which we feel is scandalous and also bad strategy.”
It’s easy to blame the surrounding countries, such as Jordan and Syria, for not being more hospitable to Iraqis. But those countries have, however grudgingly, tolerated the influx despite the burden and political risk.
Iraqi refugees are hard to count but may now amount to 8 percent of Jordan’s population of six million. The average Jordanian family, which opposed the war in the first place, is now bearing a cost that may be as much as $1,000 per year for providing for the refugees.
In contrast, last year the United States took in only 1,608 Iraqis. European countries have done better, but they believe that America created the refugee crisis and should take the lead in resolving it.
“Apathy towards the crisis has been the overwhelming response,” Amnesty International said in a report last week.
We have already seen, in the case of Palestinians, how a refugee diaspora can destabilize a region for decades. If Jordan were to collapse in part from such pressures, that would be a catastrophe — and the best way to prevent that isn’t to give it Blackhawk helicopters, but help with school fees and school construction.
If we let the Iraqi refugee crisis drag on — and especially if we allow young refugees to miss an education so that they will never have a future — then we are sentencing ourselves to endure their wrath for decades to come. Educating Iraqis may not be as glamorous as bombing them, but it will do far more good.
Roger Cohen - N.Y. Times (June 26, 2008)
June 26, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque
By ROGER COHEN
ISTANBUL
I’ll admit it: I’m thin-skinned about the kinds of slurs and innuendo about Muslims that have accompanied Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Years of being subjected to them while I covered the Bosnian war did that.
We heard the whole gamut back then: how the European Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo were really “Turks” engaged in a “demographic genocide” (through high birth rates) against Christians, and how they were engaged in a plot to establish a “Muslim crescent” looping up from Turkey through the Balkans, and how they roasted enemy prisoners alive on spits.
All the while, of course, said Bosnian Muslims were being herded by Christian Serbs into concentration camps that were centers of torture and systematic killing of a cruelty Europe believed it had forever banished.
That was before 9/11, of course, and before the Egyptian-born writer who uses the pseudonym Bat Yeor popularized the term “Eurabia” to express her vision of a Muslim-infiltrated Europe capitulating Munich-like to Islamism, and before Pat Buchanan’s apocalyptic “The Death of the West,” and before Americans were encouraged in numberless ways to equate Islam with terrorists plotting Armageddon.
Give Americans the Rorschach test today and what they’ll detect in the ink blots are bearded Muslim “suiciders.”
I’ll admit something else: my own feelings about Islam have veered back and forth in recent years. Most of us were ignorant when the planes-turned-missiles struck. We’ve been searching for bearings: even the word “jihad” is variously described as a holy war against the infidel and an inner struggle for higher spiritual attainment.
When, in 2005, I talked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born Dutch author, in a meeting in The Hague that had to be organized like an undercover operation because of threats to her life from Islamic radicals, I was struck by her words:
“Islam is not a religion of peace, or only of peace with other Muslims. We should acknowledge that it’s a very violent religion, instead of pretending, like Bush, that this violence is not true Islam.”
Certainly, the threat to her made in its name was violent. Certainly, the Koran is a long way from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Certainly, there are Koranic verses that Al Qaeda and other extremists have been able to use in attempts to sanctify their murderous acts. Certainly Islam, politically expressed, has often proved irreconcilable with modern notions of pluralism, democracy and women’s rights.
But a “very violent religion?” No. From Beirut to Baghdad to Cairo to here in Istanbul, I have often felt the wonders of hospitality and generosity and wisdom that seem to well from Islam.
At Obama’s old school in Jakarta earlier this year, an establishment scurrilously described as a madrassa” in all the innuendo, a gentle principal showed me the large mosque and small Christian prayer room. He then invoked the words emblazoned on the coat of arms of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country: “Unity in diversity.”
That’s what I saw among the kids at the school, 85 percent of whom are Muslim, and the rest Christian. That’s also what America’s supposed to be about, not religious slurring and stereotyping.
Yet, because he’s named Barack Hussein Obama, and because his Kenyan grandfather was a Muslim, and because his commitment to Israel has been questioned, and because the U.S. Rorschach test is Muslim-menace mired, he’s had to tread carefully.
As Andrea Elliott chronicled in an important article in The Times, Obama has visited churches and synagogues, but no mosque. He had to apologize after two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred from appearing behind him at a recent rally in Detroit.
Obama should visit a mosque. He has repeatedly shown his courage during this campaign; Americans have responded to his intellectual honesty. One of the important things about him is the knowledge his Kenyan and Indonesian experiences have given him of Islam as lived, rather than Islam as turned into monstrous specter.
This enables him to break the monolithic, alienating view of a great world religion that is as multifaceted as Judaism or Christianity.
I’ve no doubt that Obama is a strong supporter of Israel. But what I find as important is that he would come to Islam without prejudice. That’s the precondition for dialogue, whether with Iran or between Israel and Palestine.
Here in Turkey, a Muslim country of myth-dispelling permissiveness, I met with Joost Lagendijk, the chairman of the Turkish delegation of the European Parliament. He’s Dutch. What he hears at home is: “Fear of Islam and fear of Muslims and fear of immigrants.”
Fear-mongering about Islam is a global industry. It thrives on ignorance. Obama has a unique power to break the cycle, not least by emboldening moderate Muslims to denounce terror. Nothing would do more in the long run for the security of the world.
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque
By ROGER COHEN
ISTANBUL
I’ll admit it: I’m thin-skinned about the kinds of slurs and innuendo about Muslims that have accompanied Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Years of being subjected to them while I covered the Bosnian war did that.
We heard the whole gamut back then: how the European Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo were really “Turks” engaged in a “demographic genocide” (through high birth rates) against Christians, and how they were engaged in a plot to establish a “Muslim crescent” looping up from Turkey through the Balkans, and how they roasted enemy prisoners alive on spits.
All the while, of course, said Bosnian Muslims were being herded by Christian Serbs into concentration camps that were centers of torture and systematic killing of a cruelty Europe believed it had forever banished.
That was before 9/11, of course, and before the Egyptian-born writer who uses the pseudonym Bat Yeor popularized the term “Eurabia” to express her vision of a Muslim-infiltrated Europe capitulating Munich-like to Islamism, and before Pat Buchanan’s apocalyptic “The Death of the West,” and before Americans were encouraged in numberless ways to equate Islam with terrorists plotting Armageddon.
Give Americans the Rorschach test today and what they’ll detect in the ink blots are bearded Muslim “suiciders.”
I’ll admit something else: my own feelings about Islam have veered back and forth in recent years. Most of us were ignorant when the planes-turned-missiles struck. We’ve been searching for bearings: even the word “jihad” is variously described as a holy war against the infidel and an inner struggle for higher spiritual attainment.
When, in 2005, I talked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born Dutch author, in a meeting in The Hague that had to be organized like an undercover operation because of threats to her life from Islamic radicals, I was struck by her words:
“Islam is not a religion of peace, or only of peace with other Muslims. We should acknowledge that it’s a very violent religion, instead of pretending, like Bush, that this violence is not true Islam.”
Certainly, the threat to her made in its name was violent. Certainly, the Koran is a long way from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Certainly, there are Koranic verses that Al Qaeda and other extremists have been able to use in attempts to sanctify their murderous acts. Certainly Islam, politically expressed, has often proved irreconcilable with modern notions of pluralism, democracy and women’s rights.
But a “very violent religion?” No. From Beirut to Baghdad to Cairo to here in Istanbul, I have often felt the wonders of hospitality and generosity and wisdom that seem to well from Islam.
At Obama’s old school in Jakarta earlier this year, an establishment scurrilously described as a madrassa” in all the innuendo, a gentle principal showed me the large mosque and small Christian prayer room. He then invoked the words emblazoned on the coat of arms of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country: “Unity in diversity.”
That’s what I saw among the kids at the school, 85 percent of whom are Muslim, and the rest Christian. That’s also what America’s supposed to be about, not religious slurring and stereotyping.
Yet, because he’s named Barack Hussein Obama, and because his Kenyan grandfather was a Muslim, and because his commitment to Israel has been questioned, and because the U.S. Rorschach test is Muslim-menace mired, he’s had to tread carefully.
As Andrea Elliott chronicled in an important article in The Times, Obama has visited churches and synagogues, but no mosque. He had to apologize after two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred from appearing behind him at a recent rally in Detroit.
Obama should visit a mosque. He has repeatedly shown his courage during this campaign; Americans have responded to his intellectual honesty. One of the important things about him is the knowledge his Kenyan and Indonesian experiences have given him of Islam as lived, rather than Islam as turned into monstrous specter.
This enables him to break the monolithic, alienating view of a great world religion that is as multifaceted as Judaism or Christianity.
I’ve no doubt that Obama is a strong supporter of Israel. But what I find as important is that he would come to Islam without prejudice. That’s the precondition for dialogue, whether with Iran or between Israel and Palestine.
Here in Turkey, a Muslim country of myth-dispelling permissiveness, I met with Joost Lagendijk, the chairman of the Turkish delegation of the European Parliament. He’s Dutch. What he hears at home is: “Fear of Islam and fear of Muslims and fear of immigrants.”
Fear-mongering about Islam is a global industry. It thrives on ignorance. Obama has a unique power to break the cycle, not least by emboldening moderate Muslims to denounce terror. Nothing would do more in the long run for the security of the world.
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