Tag: foreign policy

It has been an amazing week in Iran, and you are no doubt seeing images that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago.

For most of us, Iran has been a country about which we know very little…which, obviously, makes it tough to put the limited news we’re getting into a proper context.

The goal of today’s conversation is to give you a bit more of an “insider look” at today’s news; and to do that we’ll describe some of the risks Iranian bloggers face as they go about their business, we’ll meet a blogging Iranian cleric, we’ll address the issue of what tools the Iranians use for Internet censorship and the companies that could potentially be helping it along, and then we’ll examine Internet traffic patterns into and out of Iran.

Finally, a few words about, of all things, how certain computer games might be useful as tools of revolution.

The United States has never been more powerful than it was on September 12th, 2001. On that day, with the sympathy of the world, we had more true power than all the armies in on Earth combined. Strange to think that as we lay smoldering, bleeding in the ruins of our collective self image as the most powerful nation on Earth, we had in fact grown in power by exponent. This is the strange currency of violence. The wealth of martyrs. And this currency is as tangible as a bar of gold.

Rarely discussed, and little understood, this principle is essential to understanding why the war on terror, and the aspirations of global American hegemony, will fail. It is why all empires fail. It is why terrorism fails.

I have been aware of this idea for years. I’ve been trying to distill it down into a fundamental law. But it is not an easy idea. There are nasty lose ends and apparent exceptions to the rule. But as best as I’ve figured it out, the rule is this:

Whenever you cause harm to another, you empower them.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an individual or a country, bombs or words. The moment you strike, or even strike back, you hand your opponent a gift. The people who attacked us on 911 didn’t weaken the American beast. The unleashed it. And when we responded with bombs in Afghanistan, we didn’t weaken radical Islam, we empowered it, justified it.

Unlike real currency, where every exchange is a tit for tat, the currency of violence creates a new specie on every transaction. It’s as though I hand you a $20 bill, and in exchange you hand me another, different $20 bill that had not previously existed. Except also, unlike real currency, it is not wealth that is created in the exchange, it is more hatred and more violence.

While it may seem that this idea should be resigned to the concerns of some dusty philosophy course somewhere, make no mistake, it’s political implications are as practical as they are profound.

How did Mahatma Gandhi defeat the most powerful Empire in the world without firing a single bullet? The currency of violence.

As I’ve watched the discussion on Guantanamo and torture and Dick Cheney’s speech and Obama’s speech and the advertisement for the arms industry that Memorial Day has become, it hit me that none of our leaders understand the nature of true power.

They speak of America’s strength in the world as something that comes from might. But might used, more often than not, is power spent. Just as the mighty British learned.

We are a militant nation. Our national symbol, the eagle, is a predatory animal. We like to pride ourselves on being able to kick some foreign butt, at least we did until Iraq demonstrated the limits of our prowess.

But Americans desperately need to begin to understand what real strength means and where it comes from. And we have to rise above the reptilian impulse to take the easiest path. The voice for strength through peace should be the Left. But the Left, following the lead of Bill Clinton, has long abandoned enlightenment for political expediency. But such primal expediency at home is anything but expedient abroad.

Obama, at least, pays heed to the idea of strength through peace. But it is an empty gesture as he escalates one war while failing to end another. Empty as bombs kill hundreds of women and children and unmanned drones swoop down on peasant villages.

The idea of strength through peace is not new and did not originate with Gandhi. He just demonstrated a mastery of it that was unprecedented in the modern world.

I’ve been trying to pound into my brain this wisdom as I navigate through my own battles. The currency of violence is fully redeemable in all wars, big and small. It is hard for me to remember that when I lash out at my political foes, when I launch ad hominem attacks and call people names, I am actually giving them something – a gift. The gift of martyrdom.

I think this is why Bill Moyers is far more dangerous and persuasive than say, Keith Olbermann or other attack dogs of the Left. And why he is rarely, if ever, invited into the corporate media sphere.

Attack is not Moyers style. He induces the scoop from his guest and allows the user to feel their own outrage. This is the opposite of an Olbermann special comment where he is so busy expressing outrage that we aren’t much allowed room for our own.

I’ve been in attack mode for so long that I almost feel like I’ve lost my voice, my claws to say this. But I’m tired of empowering my opponents with hate and hostility.

I do hate. I hate what has been done to my country. I hate the greed and brutality of corporatism. And I hate the actions of man.

But hate is just the bank in which the currency of violence is deposited. I am going to try -try- to stop trying to harm my enemies with vitriol and invective. They already have too much power as it is.

P.S., I also have a new blog. Check it out if you want. Visit often if you like it.

Crossposted from Antemedius

Pepe Escobar:

No one really knows the fate of the man who was the reason for the Bush administration-proclaimed “war on terror”. Some influential Pakistanis say the Americans don’t know it. The Americans admit they don’t know it. President George W. Bush wanted him dead or alive. No one really knows whether he’s dead or alive. President Barack Obama says he and his organization remain the number one threat to the U.S. But even America’s most media-savvy general admits his organization is not in Afghanistan anymore. Would that be reason enough for the U.S. to finally leave Afghanistan? On the contrary: now there’s a new – counterinsurgent – top boot on the ground.

Real News Network – May 15, 2009

Obama and Osama – McChrystal clear

The more it changes, the more the “war on terror” stays the same

And What I Really Think Of Eric Holder, too.

I suspect, or hope rather, to give them the benefit of the doubt, that what they might be trying to do is rather than fight or go head to head with the plutocracy that has them surrounded and controls foreign and economic policy and the judiciary and the CIA and the NSA and the military and the media, is to find a way to coopt that plutocracy, get them to see that it is also in their best interests to stop all the looting of society and warmongering, and get them on their side.

I don’t know if they have a chance in hell of accomplishing that though, if that is what they are trying, or if they will end up with everyone simply throwing their hands up in disgust and concluding that it is Obama and Holder on the plutocracy’s side, as it looks so far.

Matt Welch is a journalist, blogger, pundit, and libertarian. Since 2008, he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the online magazine, Reason. From 2006 to 2007, he was the Editorial Page Editor for the Los Angeles Times.

In a so far two part discussion with more to come, Welch talks with Real News CEO Paul Jay with an analysis of President Barack Obama’s campaign statements on various topics, including Foreign Policy, his speech to AIPAC, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others, and Obama’s inaugural address, in an attempt to get a handle on what can be expected from an Obama presidency.

Welch says in Part 1 that, “Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were the first “progressive” reformers who started the process of bringing monarchial symbols to the presidency. George W. Bush famously came up with the idea of the unitary executive, whereby the president is somehow constitutionally above the law. What is interesting about Barack Obama is that he started his campaign as someone who attacked that aspect of the presidency, but then stopped talking about it.

During the inauguration speech Obama said “we reject the false choice between security and our ideals,” but supported Bush in his overriding of the rejected bailout to the auto industry, and in Part 2 below Welch concludes that Obama is going to maintain much of Bush’s second term politics, which saw him more willing to talk to regimes that were “unfavorable” to the United States.

Real News: January 26, 2009 – 9 min 54 sec

The cult of the Presidency

Pt.1/2

How will George W. Bush’s concept of the “unitary executive” play out under Barack Obama?

Everyone knows that the first Presidential Debate is supposed to take place tonight, but once again we have a member of the GOP trying to put the skids on Democracy, read the 2000 election and the supreme’s, by refusing to show because, admitted himself he understands little about economics, he’s going to save Wall Street Bankers and the Country from Collapse. Now he’s coming to the rescue some 10 or so days after all the bad economic news started survicing, but for Our Savior “Better late than never, Not!”.

My guess is that if there is a Debate tonight it won’t be on the main subject lines it was to cover: Foreign Policy and National Security. It will be covering the economy or at least much of it will be because of the News that has sucked the air out of everything else.

But wether it covers the intended subject matter, tonight or in another, or not, just in case there are extremely important things to be brought to the Debate about our now lack of a Foreign Policy especially as to our National Security.

You gotta get your ducks all in a row there before tooting those horns:

At a press conference she and Zebari said the negotiators were close to signing the deal but cautioned it had not yet been clinched.

Everyone says how intelligent you are, and after all you’re the Secretary of State with a whole department working for you, or are they being allowed to.

Not since the first utterance of Mission Accomplished has a politician proved himself to be so breathtakingly out of touch with reality.

This is John McCain on “This Week” with George Stephanopolous:

Steph: But there was a fundamental difference regarding the original reason to go to war [in Iraq]. He [Obama] said it would inflame the Muslim world and become a recruitment tool for Al Quaeda. You said and you wrote that it would lessen antipathy in the Muslim world and that we would be greeted as liberators. Wasn’t Senator Obama right about that?

McCain: I don’t believe so. We were greeted as liberators.

Link to the vid here: http://abcnews.go.com/video/pl…

The General Election is on!

Obama, speaking in Las Vegas this afternoon, slammed McCain on a number of issues, including the Bush-McCain fundraiser, noting McCain’s position on Iraq.

Earlier today, McCain had attacked Obama on foreign policy. Interupted four times by protestors, chanting, “End this War,” John McCain continued his attacks on Obama as being “naive” during his speech on Nuclear Security Policy.  

-Edward Luttwak



On Memorial Day, a day that is intended to be one of somber remembrance and the recognition of our nation’s war dead although it is perversely come to be more associated with boozing barbecues, silly assed NASCAR races and the inevitable retail extravaganzas at the shopping emporiums throughout the land it is no longer necessary to most Americans to pay tribute. They are the type who just wear those stupid assed American flag pins as though they were some sort of star spangled merkin, festoon their gas guzzlers with yellow ribbon stickers that in and of themselves are gauche take offs on a lousy country western song and wrongly believe that they are being truly patriotic. Such garbage only serves to dishonor those who have sacrificed and perished in past conflicts and will continue to do so in the new American century due to the illegal wars of aggression and conquest that have been thrust upon us due to the criminal Bush regime and it’s neocon policy makers who conspire in secret to launch their schemes of global conquest all justified by that one great and fortuitous ‘terrorist’ attack that tore open a hole to a parallel universe where up is down, black is white, freedom is slavery, war is peace and most importantly: ignorance is strength.

Just moments ago, Obama fired back on Bush’s outrageous comparison to “Appeasement of Hitler” stating:

“I want to be perfectly clear with George Bush and John McCain, if George Bush and John MCain want to have a debate about protecting America, that is a debate I am willing to have anytime and any place, and that is a debate that I will win, because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.”

Obama Fires Back on Bush & McCain

Obama set the record straight, saying that he has never stated he will negotiate with terrorists and pointed out McCain’s hypocrisy on this issue which McCain readily denied today:

McCain camp denies he ‘flip-flopped’ on Hamas

The McCain campaign said Friday that his position had remained consistent: no dialogue with rogue or suspected terrorist nations or parties without pre-conditions.

“There should be no confusion, John McCain has always believed that serious engagement would require mandatory conditions and Hamas must change itself fundamentally — renounce violence, abandon its goal of eradicating Israel and accept a two-state solution,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said.

The Arizona senator has criticized Barack Obama for his stated willingness to speak with hostile nations like Iran, and repeatedly raised what he has described as Hamas’ approval of Obama’s candidacy.

In perhaps the first major act of unity of the General Election, Democratic leaders are standing up to Bush’s despicable comparison to “appeasement of Hitler” remarks.

This morning, John Edwards appearing on the Today Show, defended Obama on Bush’s comparison of “apppeasement of Hitler” stating, “It is beneath the President of the United States to make these kind of clearly political accusations when he is addressing the people of Israel on the 60th anniversary of Israel. It shouldn’t have been done, particularly in combination with what has been an absolutely disasterous foreign policy.”

Edwards also said he’s not interested in taking the Vice President position but will work with Obama’s team during the campaign and his administration stating, “right now we’ve got to focus on getting Barack Obama elected as the President of the United States.”

As TomP reported in his diary on DailyKos, “Democrats Coming Together: Clinton and Rubin Defend Obama from Bush Charges” Senator Clinton and her foreign policy advisor, Rubin, also defended Obama:

Rubin stated, “The Obama campaign was right to criticize the president for his remarks and for engaging in partisan politics while overseas.”

Biden weighed in by calling it “bullsh*t:”

Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that if the president disagrees so strongly with the idea of talking to Iran, then he needs to fire his secretaries of state and defense, both of whom Biden said have pushed to sit down with the Iranians.

“This is bulls**t. This is malarkey. This is outrageous. Outrageous for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement,” he said.

“He’s the guy who’s weakened us. He’s the guy that’s increased the number of terrorists in the world. His policies have produced this vulnerability the United States has.”

Even Chris Matthews offered a reality check on Bush’s remarks pointing out that appeasement is not talking with leaders but giving up the farm.

As Obama stated today, Bush and McCain have a lot to answer for. The days of lies and fear mongering are quickly coming to an end.

It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 6Oth anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack. It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power — including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy – to pressure countries like Iran and Syria. George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the President’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

abc news