Our Final Frontier: Keep Space for Peace

Their goal is cosmic: to keep the arms race out of the heavens. That's why October 3-10 is worldwide "Keep Space for Peace Week: International Days of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space," announced the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.

Events this year focus on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan but are controlled by pilots at computer terminals on bases in the US. Death at a distance is still blood on our hands, the group contends. The technology produces massive civilian casualties.

Satellite communication technology drives the remote-control robots that devastate targets around the globe, according Dave Webb, Global Network chairperson. "We must not allow these technologies to go unchallenged. Indeed we must do all we can to stop the spread and rule of violence and destruction," he says. The week reminds the public "what kind of a destabilizing future these systems could create."

Protests are planned throughout the world at city centers and key space related factories and military bases. Groups will hold educational forums featuring space videos throughout the week. The actions are co-sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, and the World March for Peace & Non-Violence. Space Week protest sites are listed at http://www.space4peace.org/actions/ksfpw09.htm

Actual Pentagon Space Command plans for "control and domination" of space are available for public viewing at http://www.gsinstitute.org/gsi/docs/vision_2020.pdf Below is one illustration from the document, a Star Wars-mimicking graphic, captioned: "US Space Command-dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict"

The 2009 Space Week poster

Source: Press release, Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Contact: Bruce Gagnon (207) 443-9502. No copyright restrictions.

Afghanistan

Welp, it looks like more and more Dems are coming around to Senator Russ Feingold's point of view on Afghanistan. And none too soon, given the recent news of rowdy fratboy misbehaviour by U.S. citizens in this deeply conservative Islamic nation.

What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan, anyway? It's a pointless war. The idea was to go in, get bin Laden and whoever else is in charge in al-Qaeda, and get the fuck out. But now, General Stanley McChrystal, top American commander in Afghanistan, is asking for more U.S. troops. And NATO is purportedly planning to increase its commitment to Afghanistan, according to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of NATO. "As long as it takes," says Rasmussen. As long as WHAT takes, sir? What are you hoping to accomplish?

Afghanistan is a pathetically poor nation, historically torn by fighting. Everyone seems to want a piece of that poverty-stricken land, beginning with Sikandar (Alexander the Great to you Greco-Romanists), and moving through Britain and Russia to the United States, and now an alliance of Western powers fronted by NATO. So far, no one's had much luck winning a war there. The British gave up after multiple defeats. The defeat of the Russians occurred within our own lifetimes. And now the US/NATO Coalition of Teh Stupid is getting ground to dust.

Clausewitz has this, among other things, to say about war:

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

Given that Clausewitz is somewhat of an authority on war, it would behoove both NATO and the US to remember that. And what are the politics of Afghanistan?

Historically, Afghanistan has been a land of warring tribes, fierce and intransigent, deeply committed to a harsh version of the Muslim faith it adopted circa 650 AD. United for a little over a century into a kingdom comprising multiple dynasties and tribal alliances, these tribes have long resisted any semblance of comity, being more likely to invest their energies in settling grievances with each other by whatever means and having long since grown adept at manipulating foreigners against each other for their own survival and vengeance.

Thus, the question restates itself: What are the political aims of the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan? Uniting the country? That seems laughable. There is no "country of Afghanistan," only a series of tribes that have fought each other for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years and will continue to fight each other long after the latest in a series of invaders has been crushed into exhaustion by the hostile climate, terrain, and natives. (READ MORE)

Alleviating the lot of the natives? Well, war is the worst possible way to go about that. We appear to be killing lots of innocent, and possibly also not-so-innocent, civilians. In the event, a country torn by war, poverty, corruption, crime, and suffering does not allow democracy to take root in its bitter soil. Democracy requires the active participation of informed people. The people of Afghanistan are too busy fleeing bombs, being killed and maimed, and attempting to stay alive to spend time gathering information. And our presence there, far from alleviating their lot, is killing them.



It doesn't help to have the examples of other failed wars in Asia: Japan's war in China, and the U.S. involvement in Korea, and VietNam. To quote Bernard Viscount Montgomery,

[...] Rule 2 of war [...] is: "Do not go fighting with your land armies in China". It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives.
In the House of Lords, 30 May 1962 (Hansard, Col. 227)

And subsequently, upon the involvement of the U.S. in the VietNam conflict:

The US has broken the second rule of war. That is, don't go fighting with your land army on the mainland of Asia. [...]

As is always the case, corruption is rife in a land torn by war. No one seems to care about what the Afghanis themselves think about the Taliban, or the puppet dictator, Hamid Karzai, that we have foisted on them.

What exactly are we hoping to achieve in Afghanistan? Because if our aim is to ensure that natural gas flows from the rich fields around the Caspian Sea to ports where it can be transhipped to countries hungry for this rich natural resource, then perhaps we ought to be less hypocritical about it and either sterilize the entire nation of its inhabitants, or just buy it outright and pay the Afghanis to settle elsewhere.

Inhumane, you say? Of course it's inhumane. But how humane is it to prop up a corrupt, American-owned dictator who watches and pockets our riches anyway even as little girls and boys have their arms and legs blown off?

This is a problem that requires a political, not a military solution. So far, 21,000 troops have been sent there to fight and kill and be killed.

Photo by Julie Jacobson, AP

No more. Let's bring them home, people. Supporting the troops means not using them in the Gee, Dumb? Yeah! war of convenience. The Afghanis don't want us there. They want us to give them the training to become adept at defending themselves and then get the fuck out. What the fuck are we waiting for?

Crossposted over at ThePoliticalCat

Howard Dean, M.D. Supports the War Drug

JUAN GONZALEZ: In terms of the—to get back again to other issues right now, I’d like to ask you about the continuation and expansion of the American war in Afghanistan. Do you have concerns about—that this is becoming really President Obama’s war—

HOWARD DEAN: It is.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —and the impact on our country in the future?

HOWARD DEAN: Look, again, you know—and I don’t have to say anything nice; I’m not in the administration. But I’m with Obama on his conduct of the war. I always said, when I was running against the Iraq war, that Afghanistan was different.

Let me tell you what the stakes are now. And what I find incredibly refreshing about this president is he uttered words that Lyndon Johnson never said, which is that we cannot win this war militarily. He knows that from the get-go. Here’s what’s at stake. It’s not just the Taliban. I think we could probably control the Taliban and the al-Qaeda in the Northwest territories by doing some of the things we’re already doing—drones and air power and so forth. Roughly 50 percent of the Afghan people are women. They will be condemned to conditions which are very much like slavery and serfdom in a twelfth century model of society where they have no rights whatsoever. So, I’m not saying we have to invade every country that doesn’t treat women as equal, but we’re there now. We have a responsibility. And if we leave, women will experience the most extraordinary depredations of any population on the face of the earth. I think we have some obligation to try and see if we can make this work, not just for America and our security interests, but for the sake of women in Afghanistan and all around the globe. Is this acceptable to treat women like this? I think not.

AMY GOODMAN: We just interviewed an Afghan parliamentarian, Dr. Wardak. She said the opposite. She said, yes, she agrees with you on the way women are treated, but that this is worsening the treatment, that the increased number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the huge number of troops that are coming in right now, are alienating the Afghan population.

The above is an extract from an interview last week on Democracy Now! with Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont and establishment Democratic celebrity. It was also included in a post at Ten Percent, which I also recommend to readers of The Peace Tree for further context on the escalating, brutal war in Afghanistan.

Cross posted at Antimedius and Blazing Indiscretions.

Photo: Ghazni protest in February against an attack on civilians by coalition forces.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

A breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years—from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to the post-Taliban rebuilding—that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives—the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness—are inextricable from the history playing out around them.

Khaled Hosseini Blog

Winning Dead Hearts and Minds

Mike Whitney tells us 93 children and 25 adult women were killed in an U.S. airstrike on the Afghan village of Bala Baouk.

The youngest was an eight-day-old baby.

Whitney notes that, “Neither Obama nor anyone in his administration has acknowledged that 93 children were killed,” because they're too busy winning hearts and minds to notice.

That’s progress for you. Now we conduct a My Lai from the air. It’s neater that way.

It helps that our supine media doesn’t bother to rush any photojournalists into the area to record the carnage.

What carnage?

--Case Wagenvoord

14 Protesters of Drone Use in Afghanistan, Pakistan Arrested at USAF Base

Friday afternoon fourteen peace activists were arrested at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. These arrests occurred in the context of the activists' ten day vigil at the base to raise public awareness about the increasing use of unmanned drones in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zones. Air Force personnel based at Creech control the Predator and Reaper drones that are used to launch offensives in Central Asia.

The activists provoked their arrest by walking through the base's open main gate shortly after 3:00 p.m. in an attempt to dialogue with the Air Force service members controlling the drones. In a gesture of good will, they offered share pizza with Air Force personnel. Air Force security personnel blocked them.


The Nevada State Highway Patrol and Las Vegas Metro Police Department responded to the intrusion. Activists were arrested on the charge of trespass and transported to the Clark County Detention Facility where they were booked and processed.


Those arrested include Kathy Kelly (twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; Illinois), John Dear, S.J. (author, speaker; New Mexico) and activists from AZ, IA, NY, CA, IL, and Washington DC.

The group, calling themselves Ground the Drones, provide information on the drones and on their opposition to the use of that drone technology at the website http://NevadaDesertExperience.org.

An interactive map of US airstrikes in Pakistan is found: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/03/pakistan_map.html

image credit: CREECH AFB, Nev. -- As seen from an MQ-1B Predator, Close Air Support Subject Matter Experts for the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron coordinate via radio with a Predator student for a simulated Hellfire strike on a building while smoke is used to simulate missile impact on a building. One important aspect of Predator Initial Qualification Training is students receiving live Joint Terminal Attack Controller training. In order to enhance their training capabilities, Air Combat Command recently hired contracted Close Air Support Subject Matter Experts. (Courtesy photo)

Reinventing America's Relations With the Muslim World: An Interview With Former CIA Analyst Emile Nakhleh

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

Building consensus within America’s body politic and national security establishment for a new way forward with Muslims worldwide is a formidable challenge. Many Americans still don’t appreciate the complex nuances of Muslim society and remain stubbornly Islamophobic almost seven and half years after 9/11. Equally formidable is earning the goodwill of Muslims worldwide following the Iraq War as well as American atrocities perpetrated upon Islamic detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Hopefully, President Obama’s historic election has finally opened a path for constructive conversation about how America can most effectively engage the Muslim world.

The CIA’s former point man on Islam, Emile Nakahleh, has vigorously entered this conversation with his new book, A Necessary Engagement: Reinventing America’s Relations With the Muslim World (Princeton University Press). From 1991 to 2006, Nakahleh served as the director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program in the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA. He holds a PhD in international relations and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nakhleh’s book combines a revealing memoir with in-depth analysis and proposals for the future. Ever since his retirement from the CIA in 2006, Nakhleh has been a vociferous critic of the Bush Administration’s legacy with respect to American-Muslim relations. Indeed, in September 2006, Nakhleh told Harper’s Magazine that because of Bush’s policies,

“We've lost a generation of goodwill in the Muslim world.”

Nakhleh's proposals for improving American-Muslim relations stems from his conversations with Muslim "interlocutors" spanning three decades. These conversations include government ministers, Islamic activists, academics and radicals. Nakhleh also examined and analyzed considerable polling data of Muslims worldwide.

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Overall, Nakhleh contends that the vast majority of Muslims and America have common interests and values. His blueprint includes robust dialogue with mainstream Islamic political parties as well as a tangible commitment towards democracy in the Muslim world, even if we don’t always like the short-term electoral results. His book is an accessible 160 pages and divided into four chapters: (Chapter 1) Political Islam and Islamization, (Chapter 2) Intelligence, Political Islam, and Policymakers, (Chapter 3) Public Diplomacy: Issues and Attitudes and (Chapter 4) Public Diplomacy: A Blueprint.

Nakhleh was born in Galilee, north of Nazareth in Palestine and raised a Greek Catholic. He emigrated from Israel to the United States approximately 50 years ago and attended a Benedictine university in Minnesota for his B.A., a Jesuit university in Washington, D.C., for an M.A. and was awarded a Ph.D. from the American University in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the CIA he taught at a catholic college in Maryland for 26 years.

Nakhleh agreed to a telephone interview with me in podcast format. Among the topics we discussed was whether he believes the surge in Iraq worked, the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran inside Iraq, President Obama’s new strategy in Afghanistan, Hamas and America’s role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his argument that American commitment to democracy in the Muslim world is imperative to our long term interests.

Some of Nakhleh’s answers and views may surprise many listeners. Our conversation was just over 47 minutes. Please refer to the flash media player below.



Either searching for the “Intrepid Liberal Journal” or “Robert Ellman” can also access this interview at no cost via the Itunes Store.

Please not that I erred in audio introduction when I said Emile Nakhleh worked for the CIA between 1991 and 1996. I meant to say he worked for the CIA between 1991 and 2006. Also, my apologies for the echo on Emile Nakhleh's side. Sometimes technology has its limits.

Some Thoughts on Obama by David Rovics

David Rovics is a singer/songwriter and unashamed socialist based in
Portland, Oregon. I'm on his email list. He recently sent the following letter, which Pagan Sphinx's 11/13 post has encouraged me to reprint here:

Friends around the world keep asking me questions. Are you excited? What do you think of Obama? Others are simply congratulating me. And I must say, it was a thrilling moment.

As a teenager, in 1984, I volunteered for the Mondale/Ferraro campaign, mostly pushing bumper stickers. An anti-nuclear group was doing this, in the belief that Mondale would be less likely to cause Armageddon. I grew up in an overwhelmingly white, Republican town. I was a news junky from an early age, though, and politically active in one way or another. Of the Democratic candidates my favorite was Jesse Jackson, but looking around me I reasoned he had a slim chance of getting elected.

As an adult, living in urban areas all over the US, I saw little to dispel this illusion. There were more African-Americans getting elected to political office, but usually we were talking about mayors of majority-Black cities or Congresswomen from hotbeds of progressivism like Berkeley. But here I was, hanging out with my toddler, listening to my favorite local band, the Pagan Jug Band, sitting in a pub in Portland, hearing that Barack Obama has been elected President.

My initial reaction was that of Jesse's. I got a lump in my throat, and tears came to my eyes, thinking about the insanity of all the suffering that has gone down for so many centuries, the homes, dreams, and bodies broken by slavery and racism. And in fact until very recently, on the news broadcasts when they would mention the number of Black people in the Congress, in order to be factually accurate they always had to include the caveat, "since Reconstruction." More than that is rarely said about this ten-year period of Union Army occupation that allowed something approximating democracy, and even serious land redistribution, to exist in the South, before the Union withdrew and the South was plunged into at least a century of Apartheid rule.

Whether South or North, the prisons are filled with mostly dark-skinned people from places where you can graduate from high school without having learned how to read, where you can get asthma from breathing the air, where the police shoot first and ask questions later. They're in prison, but Barack Obama's not, he's on the TV giving a humble victory speech, quoting Lincoln. And this crowd of mostly young white people around me at the pub are all cheering at the TV screen, shouting his name, laughing, crying, and drinking. I'm pretty sure they all voted for him. Or if some of them were slacking too much to get around to it, they would have voted for him.

I had just gone there to hear the music, but it turned into a spontaneous Obama party, at that pub and at pubs and sidewalks and streets in cities all across the US, and apparently in other parts of the world as well. I remember being near the front of a march of tens of thousands of people back in 1985 or so, seeing Jesse Jackson at the front of the march with many of his volunteers lining the marchers, all wearing football-style shirts that read "88" on them, for his next Presidential campaign effort. I remember seeing on the faces and the placards of this mostly white crowd of marchers, an admiration and affection for the man at the front of the march, and I was wishing the whole country could be more like this crowd. And I feel so gratified that all the people talking about the so-called Bradley effect were wrong, that a majority of our eligible voters(not counting those millions of ineligible felons) would really end up voting for Obama.

There was one black-clad young man from Olympia who happened to be at the crowded pub, which was more crowded than I had ever seen it before. He bummed a light from me and started to talk. "This is great, you know, but I just can't help but think, 'meanwhile, in Afghanistan...'"

Every party needs a spoiler, and here he was. Too cynical to be entirely swept up in the moment, he was worried about the possibility that Obama might actually follow through with his campaign promises and send more troops to Afghanistan. And then over the past few days, the news gets more and more grim. Rahm Emanuel, a zealous supporter of Israeli Apartheid for Secretary of State. Larry Summers, Clinton's chief advocate for the World Trade Organization and deregulation of the financial sector, is being suggested as an economic advisor. Joe Biden, who voted for the war in Iraq, is already his VP.

Expand the post +/-

Obama is surrounding himself with folks from Bill Clinton's administration. I remember those eight years well, I was protesting his policies the whole time. Welfare was reformed and social spending was gutted even more. The prisons became even more crowded with nonviolent drug offenders. The sanctions and ongoing bombing campaign in Iraq that happened on Clinton's watch killed hundreds of thousands of children, and his Secretary of State said the price was worth it. NAFTA was passed and then the WTO was formed, all with Clinton's blessings. These trade deals that Clinton and most of his party supported plunged millions of people around the world into poverty and an early death. Yugoslavia and Iraq will glow for thousands of years because of the nuclear waste littering the land that fell during the Clinton years.

Of course, Clinton inherited the mess in Iraq, and Clinton certainly did not invent neoliberal economics, nor did Clinton start the process of the de-industrialization of the US, the growth of Mexican sweatshops, or the support of the death squad regime in Colombia. But he embraced all of that, and much, much more.

On the other hand, in previous generations, things were different. Before the export of America's manufacturing base, before all the free trade agreements, before real wages in the US lost half their value, the US was run by liberals. Liberals like FDR and Nixon. Nixon? Yes, well, I studied economics a little, and social spending in the US actually continued to increase from the time of FDR to the time of Nixon. It was under Nixon that the EPA, the NEA and other such institutions were born. It was after Nixon that the budget-cutting began in earnest. From FDR to Nixon, whether the administration was Democratic or Republican, social spending increased. Since Nixon, under Democratic and Republican administrations, social spending has decreased.

There have, of course, been variations. FDR enthusiastically bombed Japan into the stone age, killing millions of innocents. Eisenhower was a Republican president, he preferred to bomb Koreans and Vietnamese. Johnson bombed them a lot more, killing millions. Nixon did it, too, of course. All along the way, by and large, there was overwhelming bipartisan support for these policies. Not among the population, but among the elite who rule it.

Several days ago I was exchanging email messages about the state of the world with my good friend Terry Flynn, a professor of economics and the social sciences at Western Connecticut State University. In one email he wrote, "a damn interesting time. The hegemon is rocked. I'm sure we're witnessing a re-configuration of the global order on par with the post-WW2 period." I asked what kind of reconfiguration did he see happening, and this was his eloquent reply:

It's a shift from one hegemonic era to another. The U.S. took over from the U.K. after the war. But our time is up. Don't know which country or alliance will dominate in the next cycle. The major contenders are China and India. But Russia is working very hard to leverage its massive geopolitical presence, natural resources, and techno-military culture, despite huge demographic deficits in comparison with the former countries. Russia has Europe by the balls due to, e.g., Germany's utter dependency on Russian natural gas. And it's far superior to India and China in many important ways. It's still a fucking wreck in terms of law and economic and social policies. But this whole transition is probably a 20 year affair. I just think that the catastrophic U.S. response to 9/11 and the current financial crisis push the regime change hard against the U.S.

If Obama wins the election, he might very well be a fine negotiator for the new, diminished role for this country. He can sell it as enlightened internationalism, not the decline of the American Empire. Of course, the patriots here will insist on waving the flag and encouraging the barbarians to bring it on. They won't go down without a fight. However, the U.S. simply can't afford to sustain its customary role. And there's no reason that China will continue to lend money for us to do so.

Anyway, that's a taste of my thinking on this matter. Oh, by the way, I don't for one minute expect that the new regime will be any kinder to the working classes. They'll still be global capitalists with a lust for power. In principle, no better or worse than the present crew. But as our country is diminished we might start talking seriously about peace and environmental degradation, etc. That could be ironic.

The Democrats have gotten more corporate donations than the Republicans in this last election cycle. The corporate elite has mostly decided that the Dems are better for business now. Better to send them in to clean up the mess. Obama is most definitely his own man, and an extremely intelligent, eloquent, youthful, good-looking and well-organized one at that. He has a brilliant background in community organizing and a first-hand familiarity with reality, the realities, for starters, of poverty, racism and US foreign policy -- those realities that, among others, so desperately need to be changed. Not only is he his own man, but he's the man of the people, of so many people, who so enthusiastically have supported his campaign, going door to door as part of his well-oiled campaign machine, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in small donations, packing stadiums around the country and around the world, and waiting in line for hours to vote for him in the polls.

But he is also the man of the corporations, of the banks, of the insurance industry, who have funded his campaign massively, and are expecting a dividend for their investments. And they're getting it already, in the form of the appointment of those "liberals" (whatever that means) who supported Clinton's wars, sanctions and neoliberal economic reforms.

Obama has promised to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were under Clinton. I haven't carefully studied the numbers, but I believe we are talking about increasing the income tax on anything above $100,000 from 35% to 38%. Nobody is talking about returning it to what it was when the Progressive Income Tax was formed -- 90%. He is talking about taking soldiers out of Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan -- not bringing them all home and cutting military spending by 90%, in line with international norms, and doing away with this rapacious empire. He is talking about the middle class, and sure, he had to do that to get elected, but when does he ever talk about the poor, the imprisoned millions, the thousands of homeless walking cadavers haunting the streets of every major American city? Every politician talks about building schools, but what about free education through graduate school like they have in most European countries?

No, the scope of debate is far more limited than that. It is a scope defined by that increasingly narrow grey area in between "conservative" and "liberal." There are distinctions, some of them important. That 3% tax increase will do good things for many people, I hope. Perhaps we won't start any new wars, I don't know. Perhaps we'll withdraw from Iraq, but I'll bet no reparations for what we've done there will be forthcoming. Perhaps there will be no new wars on our civil liberties in the next few years, but I'll bet the prison population will not get much smaller.

I hope I'm wrong. But if I am to be proven wrong and there are to be serious changes in the welfare of people in the US and around the world, it will only be as a result of a popular uprising of people calling for a real New Deal for the 21st century, an end to the empire, housing, health care and education for all, and so on. Because even if Obama secretly wants all of these things, as so many of us would desperately like to believe, he's going to need plenty of popular pressure to point to if any of these things are going to become reality. If he really is the socialist wealth redistributor his opponents said he is, he's going to need massive popular support just to avoid being impeached for treason by those corporate stooges who dominate both parties in the Congress.

And if, on the other hand, he really believes his own campaign promises of meager tax increases for the rich, raising the salaries of teachers a bit, fighting terrorism, passing more free trade agreements, being Israel's best friend, and so on, then what we have in store is another Democratic administration. Different kind of like Starbucks is different from McDonald's -- they both pay poverty wages and feed you shit, but Starbucks includes health insurance.