TANKA, Not Tanks

by Nan Socolow

The following are six comments I submitted to the New York Times yesterday morning.  I wrote all of these comments in TANKA, Japanese form of poetry  using 5 lines of 5,7,5,7,7 syllables each. 

Threaten to Threaten, Tom Friedman:

 

Arab Gulf leaders

 

Support Obama's effort.

 

Syria's amok.

 

We're not the Global Police

 

No need to aid Jihadists.

 

 

Who do you Trust?  Maureen Dowd:

 

 

Pooty-Poot's given

 

Obama and John Kerry

 

The red-line exit.

 

Joe Six-Pack is anti-war

 

He was Bush's base.

 

 

 

Homeland Confusion, Tom Kean, Lee Hamilton:

 

 

Homeland not secure.

 

Congress needs to scrutinize

 

Gaps in oversight.

 

Today Anniversary

 

Of World Trade Towers attack.

 

 

 

The Government and Inequality, Tom Edsall:

 

 

Inequality

 

America's Sin Qua Non

 

The rich are richer

 

The poor struggling for money.

 

Our Middle Class has vanish'd

 

 

 

09/11, My 2 Cents, Mark Bittman:

 

 

We use drones to kill.

 

Isn't gassing people worse?

 

Who will bell Assad?

 

Limited action?  No way.

 

Faint heart never kiss'd the cook.

 

 

The President Speaks on Syria, Ross Douthat:

 

 

I watch'd Obama. 

 

You're alone, wrong pundit!

 

O, insulting?  Not!

 

Ross, your lifetime has been short.

 

Study Putin and Assad.

 

 

Nan Socolow

Cayman Brac

British West Indies

Wargasms on the Potomac: U.S. Weapons Good, Syrian Weapons Bad

By Fred Drumlevitch

cross-posted from freddrumlevitch.blogspot.com (Progressive Food for Thought)

The sound of war drums rose over the Potomac. As did also certain other items. The tumescent political “leadership” and their rent boys of the mainstream media alternated between stroking each other to the point of wargasm and oh-so-seriously rationalizing to the public why they must let loose their dogs of war. Fortunately, many ordinary Americans have begun to realize just how tired they themselves are of getting screwed by the imperial overreach of what is supposed to be their government. Ostensibly elected by public vote, supposedly beholden to the people and meant to serve them, “our” government has over the past 30+ years transformed into one dedicated to delivering benefits to the rich, the banks, the corporations, and the military-industrial-surveillance-security complex — and that perpetuates its malfeasance through lies, manipulation, the marginalization and repression of protest, and the distraction of never-ending war.

Never-ending war? Well, nearly so. And this refers to far more than the duration of our most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or our ongoing assassinations via drones in several sovereign foreign nations including Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Time dulls the memory, especially for those who weren’t active participants, but a recent Associated Press story summarized major U.S. military actions over the past three decades: Beirut (1982-83), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991), Somalia (1992), Iraq (1993), Somalia (1993), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994-96), Iraq (1996), Sudan and Afghanistan (1998), Iraq (1998), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Osama bin Laden (2011). 

It doesn’t end there. The United States probably maintains at least 500 military bases in at least 100 foreign countries, and it is likely that actual numbers are considerably higher. (The exact numbers are hard to know for a variety of reasons including deliberate obfuscation by the U.S. government. See here, here, here, here, and here). We spend more on our military than the next highest-spending fifteen to twenty nations combined. Is our country destined to forever undertake foreign military actions with the compulsion of a salmon swimming upstream to spawn? What will our unending pursuit of worldwide military domination beget?

And I haven’t even yet referenced our covert operations, which, since WWII, have been instrumental in the overthrow of several legitimate foreign governments (and significantly subverted many more). The overthrows of Mohammed Mossadegh (Iran, 1953), Jacobo Árbenz (Guatemala, 1954), Patrice Lumumba (Congo, 1961), and Salvador Allende (Chile, 1973), stand as but the most prominent examples in a long and sordid history of covert U.S. actions.

The covert operations and smaller military interventions may seem (by our imperial-capitalist metrics) to be fabulously successful, but are in fact profoundly dangerous, for they set the stage for later blowback, plus overreach elsewhere and spectacular failures. Our frequent foreign interventions, whether large or small, overtly military or instead covert, are part of a highly-dangerous feedback system of U.S. action and arrogance, a runaway self-righteousness that puts our entire foundational national purpose at profound risk. Do we exist to be the world’s policeman? The preamble to the United States Constitution does state that it was established "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity", but these refer to this nation. Nowhere in our founding national documents do I recall any mention of world policeman.

As important as are the issues of imperial overreach, media failure, and perversion of the purposes of a democratic republic, they and their psychological underpinnings have been thoroughly examined countless times, and I will not further pursue them here (beyond including these links to recent posts by Andrew Bacevich, Ira Chernus, and George Lakoff). Instead, my focus in what follows will be on something else: a brief look at U.S. governmental hypocrisy in its current characterization of chemical weapons as so abhorrent as to necessitate U.S. military action in Syria.

To understand the scope of this hypocrisy, we might examine any of a wide variety of weapon systems that have been deployed, used, and, in many cases, provided to others by the United States: napalm and other incendiaries, Agent Orange, cluster munitions, land mines, thermobaric bombs, and nuclear weapons. President Obama, Secretary Kerry, Senator McCain, and all others so eager to militarily strike Syria — surely you are aware of the massive death and suffering these American weapons have inflicted on civilian populations. Please spare us your outraged denunciations of Bashar al-Assad and your insistence that we must act — unless you are also willing to denounce and adequately hold accountable American soldiers (and allies) who have caused the deaths of foreign civilians using the aforementioned weapons. Ah… I thought not.

(The United States is not even willing to properly hold accountable those soldiers who have murdered with more conventional weapons; while Major Nidal Malik Hasan was quite deservedly sentenced to death for his murder of thirteen U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood, Army staff sergeant Robert Bales was allowed to plead guilty and thereby escape the death penalty for his brutal murder of sixteen Afghan civilians. And most American war criminals are never properly punished. For example, in 2012 a U.S. military court would release with absolutely no prison time the leader of a U.S. Marine squad that in 2005 massacred 24 civilian men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq — a war crime within the even broader war crime of a war of choice by the U.S. against a country that posed no threat to us.)

Let’s consider napalm and other incendiary weapons. (Open in front of me is the book Napalm: An American Biography, by Robert M. Neer, published in 2013 by Harvard University Press. Extensive in scope and supporting references, it should be required reading for those wishing to learn how weapons come to be developed, used — and misused. It and Wikipedia are my main sources for what follows).

British RAF bombers using magnesium weapons incinerated eight square miles of Hamburg in July 1943; the death toll from the Hamburg attack was an estimated 44,600 persons. A German doctor wrote “Bodies were frequently found lying in a thick, greasy black mass, which was without doubt melted fat tissue… All were shrunken so that clothes appeared to be too large.” (Neer, p.62-63). The RAF aided by the United States Army Air Forces incinerated fifteen square miles of Dresden in four raids in mid-February 1945, with a death toll estimated at around 25,000 (Wikipedia).

These attacks would be dwarfed by the aggregate of later U.S. incendiary attacks on Japanese cities. The night of March 9-10, 1945, U.S. Air Force general Curtis LeMay dispatched over 300 B-29s to wage an incendiary attack on Tokyo using napalm, magnesium, and white phosphorus, creating a firestorm, incinerating 16 square miles of the city, and producing approximately 100,000 deaths and tens of thousands of injured. But that was just the beginning. “After Tokyo, American bombers attacked Japan’s largest cities with napalm for ten days, […] until supplies ran out on March 19, 1945. After a three week pause to restock, incendiary bombardments started again on April 13, and continued again until the end of the war. […] During the five months until the end of the war over 33 million pounds of napalm in about 13 million M-69 bombs, along with napalm in other bombshells, explosives, and other incendiaries, laid waste to 106 square miles in Japan’s six largest cities, and destroyed or damaged 169 square miles in sixty of its largest metropolises” (Neer, p.83-84).

Of course, the above statistics do not convey any of the specifics of the human suffering experienced. “‘In the dense smoke, where the wind was so hot it seared the lungs, people struggled, then burst into flames where they stood’. … Jammed bridges became funeral pyres. Civil guard commander Kinosuke Wakabayashi and his daughter, shielded by a concrete warehouse, saw thousands ‘streaming towards the Sumida River bridges, and leaping into the river, clothes and even their bodies aflame. Soon both banks of the river were clogged with bodies. The bridges were so hot that anyone who touched a bit of iron or steel was seared like bacon on a grill.’ On the Kototoi Bridge, another recalled, ‘The steel grew white-hot and people who touched the metal were seared like steaks on a barbeque’. ‘[I]n some of the smaller canals the water was actually boiling from the intense heat’ recounted a U.S. government after-action report. Pools and ponds vaporized.” (Neer, p.79). “‘The updrafts brought with them a sickening odor, an odor that I will never be able to get completely out of my nostrils — the smell of roasting human flesh. I later learned that some pilots and crewmen gagged and vomited in reaction to this stench, and that a few had passed out,’ [ace pilot Robert] Morgan wrote.” (Neer, p.81). … “Dr. Shigenori Kubota […] described his travels in freezing temperatures through the devastated area just before dawn on March 10: ‘There was no one to rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties, turned into carbon.’” (Neer, p.82).

 

"Charred remains of Japanese civilians after the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945" (Wikipedia/Wikimedia)

photographer: Kōyō Ishikawa 1904-1989

Charred bodies of woman and child, firebombing of Tokyo
photo taken March 10, 1945 (Wikipedia/Wikimedia)
photographer: Kōyō Ishikawa 1904-1989

Such barbarism was not unique to World War II. I could continue with similar details from U.S. use of incendiary weapons and strategic bombing in Korea and Vietnam. I could describe the birth defect and cancer effects on the Vietnamese (and on U.S. veterans) produced by Agent Orange, the contamination of which during manufacture by a[n at that time unidentified] toxic substance was known to the U.S. government as early as 1952, long prior to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. I could document the continuing deaths and maimings (including of children) produced by anti-personnel land mines — an international treaty on which the U.S. has refused to sign. But I believe that I have made my point. War is indeed hell, and any attempt to characterize chemical weapons as somehow worse than other weapons that have been widely used by the United States is not just disingenuous, it is a bald-faced lie, and cannot be used to justify military strikes. It is in fact just one of many bald-faced lies that have come to dominate the U.S. political stage and been used to manipulate us during the past several decades. Those lies must end. The manipulations must end.

We, the people of the United States, do hereby declare that we will no longer offer blood and treasure to the gods of war. We will not replenish the coffers of the military-industrial complex. We will not sacrifice our own lives — nor will we take the lives of others — for the delusions of small men in high places. We ourselves hold no delusions about our ability to dominate the world, and we have no desire to do so. We will not be bamboozled into believing that our security is dependent on us acting militarily every two or three years in some far-off land. We will not accept being spied upon by our government, nor will we tolerate governmental repression of our dissent. We are reclaiming our country, and rededicating it to the purposes envisioned by its founding fathers. We will fight, but it will be domestically, for our Constitutional rights, opportunity for all, and social and economic justice. To the current politicians of this land we say: Understand that, accommodate yourselves to that, or vacate your offices, for you will be irrelevant to the future.

Text Copyright: Fred Drumlevitch

Fred Drumlevitch blogs irregularly at www.FredDrumlevitch.blogspot.com
He can be reached at FredDrumlevitch12345(at)gmail.com

Farewell to Arms?

Now that he has apparently been given a huge out by Uncle Vlad after getting all mucked in his own red line, President Obama's appearance before the nation tonight might as well consist of just two words:

After all the high drama that has distracted us from such important crap as the debt ceiling and where Hillary ate lunch, Herr Assad Hitler is, according to reports, giving up his CW stash in exchange for not getting blown to bits (not that the presidential palace or the royal presidential person itself was ever on Obama's hit list, or anything untoward like that.)

So, there is reason to be optimistic today that through no fault of our own dear leaders, there will be Not-War for the time being.

 By the way, my suspicion is that Obama had again desperately tried to engage Putin over staging a CW intervention and sending Assad to Sarin rehab at last week's G-20, and Putin probably just played him like a cat toys with a mouse. Then, after enjoying the American political spectacle for several more days, Putin finally pounced on Kerry's "off-the-cuff" offer, and put them all out of their misery.

It looks like Barack Obama is joining Edward Snowden in that new club called Russian Asylum.

Oh, and Michelle is against war on Syria. After all, she does send her kids to a Quaker school. No wonder Obama looked so testy in St. Petersburg and so downright ebullient in his TV interviews last night. He'd just made both a political and domestic escape from his surgical, tiny, pinprick of a Tomahawk missile bunker ball buster of a war. 

Unless, of course, bombing Syria was never about chemical weapons and children and human misery at all, and they're now scrambling to find another excuse/locale for their Mideast power/land grab.

Oh well. It's always something. But, as he is likely droning in the ear of his National Security Blanket Advisor Susan Rice, "We'll always have our Terror Tuesdays."
<

Screw the Psy-Ops

In another sign of how tenuous the Empire's case for attacking Syria is becoming, New York Times columnist Bill Keller "went there" today. He implied that to oppose this war (he never calls it a war, of course, because that would defeat the purpose of his sanitization) is to be anti-Semitic. He compares today's anti-war sentiment to the "armchair isolationism" that allowed Hitler to come to power:

Many pro-Israel and Jewish groups last week endorsed an attack on Syria, but only after agonizing about a likely backlash. And, sure enough, the first comment posted on The Washington Post version of this story was, “So how many Americans will die for Israel this time around?” This is tame stuff compared with 1940, when isolationism was shot through with shockingly overt anti-Semitism, not least in the rhetoric of the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh.

When a solid reason for going to war is not available, you pivot to shaming the recalcitrants into developing the required patriotism -- and while you're at it, play the old divide and conquer card by very lazily and derisively shuffling the right and the "left" into the same demented deck:

Isolationism is strong in the Tea Party, where mistrust of executive power is profound and where being able to see Russia from your front yard counts as mastery of international affairs. But sophisticated readers of The New York Times are not immune, or so it seems from the comments that arrive when I write in defense of a more assertive foreign policy. (In recent columns I’ve advocated calibrated intervention to shift the balance in Syria’s civil war and using foreign aid to encourage democracy in Egypt.) Not our problems, many readers tell me.

Isolationism is not just an aversion to war, which is an altogether healthy instinct. It is a broader reluctance to engage, to assert responsibility, to commit. Isolationism tends to be pessimistic (we will get it wrong, we will make it worse) and amoral (it is none of our business unless it threatens us directly) and inward-looking (foreign aid is a waste of money better spent at home).

Get it? We are all Sarah Palin now, our opposition to bombing for corporate profit simply an indication of our brain cell loss. Keller's classic of a doublethink column is obviously part of the Obama administration's "full court press" underway this week to win hearts and minds. It is how they psy-op the Enemy (which, let's face it, is us.)

 But judging from the reader responses to Keller's pabulum, our psyches are refusing to be opped. My posted comment:

Were George Orwell still alive to write a revised edition of "Politics and the English Language", he might have used this column as an example of the pompous verbiage necessary to get people to go along with war. Obfuscation trumps elucidation every single time.

Examples: Mr. Keller substitutes "spine in your diplomacy" for bombing the hell out of Syria. "Foreign engagement" and "activist foreign policy" become euphemisms for maiming and killing and destroying everything in sight.

And above all, instill the guilt. Because in the absence of any hard evidence of exactly who ordered the gas attacks (and the Obama administration is refusing to supply proof, even when confronted by an Associated Press FOIA request), guilt is all they've got. So absolutely, compare launching an unprovoked attack on Syria with FDR defending us against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. And while half-heartedly admitting that likening Assad to Hitler could well be over the top, do it anyway. Some of it just might sink in to guilt-ready pliable minds.

How does Mr. Keller shame us? Let me count the ways. We are anti-social, irresponsible, isolationist, selfish, cynical. We are not getting with the official program. What is wrong with us anyway, that we can't patriotically cheer murder by drone, Tomahawk missile and bunker buster bomb in order to make ourselves feel all warm and gooey inside? You'd think we didn't believe in Biblical revenge, or something.

If it wasn't the New York Times and if they don't constantly threaten to cut you off at the knees if your language lacks sufficient sophistication, respect, and "thoughtfulness", I would have added this: 

Happy Birthday, Pearl

Please join me in congratulating regular commenter Pearl Volkov on the occasion of her 90th birthday.

Pearl has brought a lifetime of erudition and compassion to this forum and also to the New York Times reader commentariat, where she posts under the handle "pvolkov." I got to know Pearl several years ago, when a bunch of us diehard Times posters started an email correspondence circle.  

Here's wishing you a happy day with your children, Pearl, and many more years of agitating and educating....  here, there, and everywhere. L'Chaim!

New York Times Casts Obama As Tragic Hero

Sickening:

The next phase of the campaign will be more individualized, and more from Mr. Obama himself. Democrats who are balking are being asked at least to vote against Republican procedural moves meant to delay or derail an up-or-down vote. After all the arguments are exhausted, aides said, it will come down to a personal pitch: the president needs you to save him from a debilitating public defeat.

That paragraph is hidden within the latest paroxysm of chest-thumping by the Gray Lady, characterizing Barack Obama's fight for military strike votes in Congress a "taut, uphill battle" the most intense fight of his entire political career. More intense than fighting for a public option in public and pandering to insurance predators in private. More intense than fighting back against Wall Street while taking the money of Wall Street. More intense than championing the little guy while schmoozing with corporate titans. More intense than crowing about transparency while prosecuting whistleblowers and defending the NSA.

If, according to the Times, his "Save the Children" casus belli falls flat, truth will eventually out. Because in the grand scheme of things and as much as he pretends to deny it, the drumbeats of war are, indeed, All About Him. And to that end, his desperate  P.R. flacks in the White House and on Times Square have resorted to casting him as tragic King Sisyphus, all alone in the world as he rolls his boulder valiantly (and tautly) uphill. Obama may be getting grizzled, poor guy, but he is still ripped, by golly!

Bomb Syria because you feel sorry for him.

Sickening.

 

 

Sisyphus, too, is here
In our own lives; we see him as the man
Bent upon power and office, who comes back
Gloomy and beaten after every vote.
To seek for power, such an empty thing,
And never gain it, suffering all the while,
This is to shove uphill the stubborn rock
Which over and over comes bouncing down again
To the flat levels where it started from. (Lucretius, De Rerum Natura III 995-1002)

The People Strike Back, cont.

Welcome to another chapter in the endless soap opera known as War/Not-War, brought to you today by yet another lonely voice in Not-Corporate Media. This edition will comprise three New York Times comments I wrote in response to Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat. (I skipped Tom Friedman, because I just ate. And besides, Secretary of State of Rage John Kerry, during his Congressional harangue last week remarked that he agrees with almost everything Tom Friedman writes. And that is probably all you need to know.)

First Dowd, who gleefully pushes the buttons of Obamabots everywhere as she refers to angst-ridden "Barry" in almost every single paragraph in a piece about Peace Barry and War Barry battling each other inside the empty suit that they each inhabit. My response: 

In all the spin on War/Not-War, we don't even know the half of it. Congressman Alan Grayson doesn't know the half of it. In this, a putative representative democracy, he is not even allowed to take notes in the top-secret briefings which appear designed to quash dissent and foment fear at the highest levels.

As Hawkette Dianne Feinstein (D-Surveillance State) chided on TV the other day, if we only knew what she knows, we'd shut up post-haste. Thank God we are not shutting up.

I am happy that for once, the Powers That Be have failed miserably to herd the rest of us into the usual partisan veal pens, pitting North Against South, Democrat vs Republican. It's 100% of the people vs. a tiny handful of elite deciders. Watching them squirm as they are forced to reveal their true allegiances in all their depravity is a sight to behold. A broad bottom-up anti-war coalition is building. It could even spell the resurgence of the Occupy movement, or something like it.

So, despite all his own failings, we do have "Barry" to thank for pulling back the curtain on the travesty of Kabuki Democracy, whether that was his original intention in punting to Congress or not.

We are sadder and wiser, having learned from Iraq and the financial collapse that swallowing all the lies told us by corrupt politicians to wage war for profit and then put profits over people has come at a terrible price.

That we are paying attention now must be shocking the hell out of all of them. Awesome.

*****************************************************************

Next up, the Pasty Little Putz (h/t Marion of Savannah over at FDL), aka Ross Douthat and his blather about Amerika losing its prestige because of Obamian dithering. My comment:

 I think you're overstating the negative impact that a Congressional "no" vote on war would have on the credibility of the president. To the contrary: a resounding "Nay" would send a signal that democracy, if not exactly thriving in the USA, is not completely dead, either. I think the rest of the world would breathe a sign of relief. Even the "bad actors" might think twice before acting, once they realize the American government is not as omnipotent as it likes to pretend.

We need to end the unitary executive power of the imperial presidency that rose to truly dangerous levels during the tortured and torturing reign of President Dick Cheney. We need Congress to repeal indefinite detention by presidential fiat, the Oval Office hit list of drone strikes (yes, our drones have killed at least hundreds of children. But since drone bombs serve to either vaporize their victims or render them into bugsplat, there aren't many guilt-inducing photos of casualties in little white shrouds to embarrass our elite corps of Collateral Damagers.)

I don't want to live in a country whose highest goal is "prestige." I don't want to live in a country where whistleblowers are prosecuted and war criminals are celebrated. I definitely don't want to live in a country whose next Temp Emp (temporary emperor) might be named Chris Christie or Ted Cruz.

Forget prestige. If we're going to drop anything, let's drop gas masks, food packages and medicine. Bring on the humanity, both at home and abroad.

******************************************************************

Finally, Frank Bruni wrote an excellent column bemoaning the shallow, personality-driven media coverage of the Syrian crisis. My response:

Frank's piece is all the more scathing, given the simultaneous offerings of Maureen Dowd (Obama Doppelgangers!) and Ross Douthat (OMG, American prestige!).

It's a testament to the profit-driven business model of journalism and the profit-driven corporate ownership of our politics that a bloody tragedy across the globe is being packaged as mass market infotainment. The death-rattle and the sabre-rattle are among the commonest sounds of any Empire in its last throes.

There's plenty of in-depth nuanced reportage on Syria. But for the most part, we're being hit with garish graphics on the "Whip Count". The numbers needed to bomb are treated like the numbers needed to win a primary.

In a sick off-year hybrid of the Olympics and the Elections, one day the Firm Noes and the Leaning Noes are yards ahead of the Yeses and the Maybes. The next day, the Firm Noes start faltering and falling behind the bellicose pack. "Politico" is especially adept at this, breathlessly gifting each new publicity-hungry Decider his/her own personality profile. Ka-ching! (another sound of Empire.)

And since the Internet has given politicians control of their own messages, the elite among them bypass journalists completely. For example, once Hillary has completed her own evolution (via a close examination of polls and the wind direction) she will no doubt make her grand War/Not-War declaration in a slickly produced webcast complete with emotive background music selected just for her special occasion.