Featured Find: Osama bin Laden's American Legacy

Tom Engelhardt discusses Osama bin Laden's real significance:

As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant.  He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) -- from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking downof our own American world, where we were to cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.

In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after.  As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be his monument, and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).

At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on U.S. military operations, we still have almost 100,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries, and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on.  All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organization which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.

9-11 Nine Years Later: America Finds Itself

photo from Reuters

"It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this.  If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists.  Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel.  At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader.  Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world." - Osama bin Laden

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'Hey I'm on a schedule here!' - East/West Employment Protocol

Last month I stumbled across a job opportunity in Florida that seemed right up my alley. This was pretty exciting for me as jobs and my alley don’t normally hang out in the same neighborhood. The position, involving fingerprint analysis and expensive-looking machines, would jibe perfectly with my advanced education (advanced in age mainly). What tipped my stubborn work/life scales though was the prospect of living year-round within a short bike ride of the sand and surf. This was a place I could almost imagine being gainfully employed. So immediately (meaning within a week) I got to work on the application process. 

As with any application to a law enforcement agency, the paperwork involved a lot of swearing: I swear I don’t have any objectionable tattoos (or a forked tongue, a condition actually spelled out in the ‘no bodily mutilation’ section); I swear I don’t smoke (drinking, by its non-mention, is fine); I swear I have no history of repeated marijuana use beyond ‘experimental’ (Bill Clinton clause); I swear I have no recent DUI convictions. No problem, I’ll swear to all this and lots more, just hook me up to that polygraph. Oh and by the way I’ve got that ‘high school diploma or GED’ thing covered.

Imagine my concern then when I remembered that not two weeks before all this came my way I had agreed to teach a year-long English course at one of Fukushima’s zillion product manufacturing companies. I didn’t agree, exactly; Mr. Sato, an extremely nice guy who has a habit of dumping jobs on me, took my not outwardly disagreeing to take the job as a yes, and had already had three meetings and eight phone calls with the people at ‘Kaisha A’ about this upcoming contract which, it had by now been exhaustively determined, would last for one year. Obviously I needed to be more aggressive in my passively not agreeing to take on this new job, because unless there was an overload of applicants in Florida with high school diplomas or GEDs and no forked tongues I was going to have to take my practiced soft shoe to a higher level. ‘Well you see, Sato-san, right about when class is going into its third month here I’m going to be falling asleep to the soothing sound of the Gulf of Mexico…’

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Five Amorphous Question Marks

Some shallow impressions of the new America of 2010 before my declarative and non-declarative memories and American sense of etiquette are fully restored:

(1.) My mind meld with the Great Economic Spirit upon entering the country suggests things are back on track.  I now look forward to - instead of dreading - the opportunities for putting bread on the table when I come back here more permanently next summer. 

(2.) For all the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day, this time was actually the easiest I've had it in the last five years, and I've been badmouthing the government and the TSA all over the Internets.  Even though our ESTA information was lost, we were not presumed to be terrorists, my children were not groped, and no one got his or her junk touched.  I attribute this entirely to the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day.  

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Obama's Perpetual Mulligan

If there's anything the recent ridiculous Nation/Mark Ames/Yasha Levine incident has revealed other than absurd tribalism or that Mark Ames is the Gwar of journalism, it's that liberals have been giving the Obama Administration a pass on civil liberties violations in favor of pointing out how conservatives did the same thing when Bush was President.  From a Harvard Law Bulletin Jeri Zeder review of Charles and Gregory Fried's new book, "Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror":

The book explores three issues presented by Bush administration policies, primarily from ethical but also from historical and legal perspectives: torture; eavesdropping, surveillance and the right to privacy; and executive prerogative.

f course I think the work the Fried's are doing is great in principle, and I haven't read the book, but this passage in the review ignores the fact that, while the Obama Administration has closed Gitmo and opted for Stalinist show trials instead of secret dungeon torture, the Administration has escalated da warz and the intrusiveness of our security state.  There has also been the unprecedented step taken of ordering an American Citizen to be assassinated.  I mean, holy shit, we're talking like these issues of Executive power are all in the past and the real question now is how do we clean up the mess and deal with the fallout.

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Lying with Math

I lie to and manipulate my students all the time using basic math, but it's okay because I'm better than them.  Here is how I did it today with my class of three eight-year-olds:  

We had some extra time at the end of class, so I let the kids each choose a game they wanted to play.  One of the students chose Crazy Eights.  One of the students chose Old Maid.  One of the students chose Go Fish.  

Normally, I'd just have the students play paper, rock, scissors if they couldn't agree on what game to play, but I really didn't want to play Crazy Eights, since I've been playing way too much Crazy Eights recently, and a regular game of Old Maid usually clocks in at twenty-five minutes or so and we just didn't have that much time, plus, I thought the kids could use a bit of work on using the verb "have", so I really wanted to play Go Fish.  The real dilemma for me was how could I force the kids to play Go Fish without appearing arbitrary and despotic?

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9-11 Nine Years Later: The Definition of Insanity

Creating new enemies?This is Part III of a five-part series on the ninth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and their effects are the biggest issues of our time, they should not be discussed only briefly on or around that date, but the attacks and their implications should be explored and examined repeatedly until the problems we have created for ourselves are resolved.

It remains unclear whether Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein first said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."  If this quote is to be taken as truth, then our policy since September 11th, 2001 is insane.  Two principle direct, observable causes of the September 11th attacks were (1) bureaucratic incompetence - a lack of communication between the FBI and the CIA resulted in the terrorists who perpetrated the September 11th attacks falling off the grid and not re-emerging until mid-flight; and (2) aggressive policy in the Middle East - the Middle East is a fairly complicated place.  By playing politics with the Middle East, basically breaking it up into meaningless nation states - meaningless because the Middle East is largely organized along tribal or ethnic lines - we created power vacuums, which usually we tried to micromanage by supporting dictators loyal to us over the Soviets.  This stirred up grassroots hatred and caused otherwise disparate peoples to organize and unite around mutual anti-Americanism (for example, Iran's fervent support for Palestine, al Qaeda in Afghanistan).  It might have turned out differently if, while maintaining a firm grip on political control of the region, we had also encouraged economic and infrastructure development in conjunction with intra-regional competition (our East Asia strategy under MacArthur).  

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9-11 Nine Years Later: Getting Past "Is"

I was seventeen years old when the Twin Towers fell, in the last year of my secondary education.  I was sitting in front of an iMac managing a stock portfolio of 100,000 imaginary dollars.  It was 8:45 in the morning, and my economics class had reserved the computer lab at Corcoran Library of Boston College High School.  I was looking at Yahoo Finance for stock tips, and my partner for the Stock Market Game was reading CNN.com, trying to translate news stories into investments.  

Minutes after the first plane flew into the North Tower, it was on his screen.  It must have been a computer malfunction, we thought, a tragic accident.  The Y2K hysteria was still fresh on our minds, and it was probably this that led everybody (at least every seventeen-year-old in the computer lab) instantly to such a conclusion.  When the second plane crashed into the South Tower about fifteen minutes later, we thought no differently.  The machines were clearly out of control.  There was never a grounding in reality.  There was never a grand realization.  We were all living in a fantasy world created by the mass media; a world which we didn't know would become even more fantastic.  We were the quintessential children of the nineties: breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed, breakfast, school, football practice, dinner, homework, AIM, Napster, bed... 

I'm twenty-six now, and for the past nine years my generation has largely continued to stand on the sidelines and watch a public conversation which seems incoherent.  From our sheltered, privileged, structured childhoods we were suddenly and viscerally exposed to a destabilizing truth.  We suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what happened on September 11th, 2001; and we suspect that there may be something fundamentally odd and wrong about what has happened since; but the world of the War on Terror and the USAPATRIOT Act is all we really know as adults, so we wonder if it isn't perhaps the way things have always been, or whether it is simply beyond our control.  Hence the existential dread.

During our university years, we were called out by old left culture warriors for being apathetic and indifferent, privileged and selfish; but I prefer to think the information generation is simply collecting information to use when it's our turn to build a better world.  Here is some of that information vis-a-vis September 11th, 2001.

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9-11 Nine Years Later: Introduction

Imaginationland

Lloyd: I'm only human, Harry! Come on! Stop being a baby. So we backtracked a tad!
Harry: A tad? A tad, Lloyd? You drove almost a sixth of the way across the country in the wrong direction! Now we don't have enough money to get to Aspen, we don't have enough money to get home, we don't have enough money to eat, we don't have enough money to sleep!
Lloyd: Well, it's not gonna do us any good sitting here whining about it. We're in a hole. We're just going to have to dig ourselves out.

Saturday marked the 9th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  

Today, nine years later, we're mired in two intractable and goalless wars, with several more potential goalless wars looming; the size, scope, and power of the government and particularly that government which does not serve the American people in any tangible way has grown out of proportion; individual freedom has objectively declined as more and more Americans acquiesce to a security state central reality; the culture war has had a second, or third, or fourth, or nth renaissance; we now have national debates about whether or not minority groups can be trusted to participate in social and economic life; our economy is in the worst shape it's been since the 1930s and projected to get even worse before it gets better; our military is extended, exposed, and weak, presenting a long-awaited opportunity for regional despot wannabes the world over as well as major players like Russia and China to make whatever power grabs they can; American soft power and cultural prestige has declined across the globe; we have betrayed our historic missions of nonalignment, plurality, heterodoxy, freedom, opportunity, equality, and peace; the average American has been exposed as - or has become - an uninformed, manipulated, fear-driven animal willing to sacrifice the most valuable things in the world in favor of emotional insulation from a cold and distant, imaginary and insignificant threat; our media is complicit as huge news conglomerations try to out-shock each other; even our best politicians prioritize rape-like soundbites over being reelected over getting pork for their constituency over representing the country that they have sworn to serve; and we have put our full civilizational capacity up in a total war against a nebulous, undefinable, undefeatable abstract noun.

This wildly undirected civilizational octopus reaches its tentacles out to grasp even the elements of being a human which have no bearing, no connection, no relation at all to establishing peaceful international relations.  Liberals, conservatives, moderates, radicals, the religious of all stripes, the non-political, non-believers, bankers, teachers, janitors, the unemployed, the old, the young, dead heroes and villains, and the unborn should be outraged, outraged because all of this was preventable, and all of this was the direct, objective result of checking our collective capacity for reason, analysis, dispassionate problem-solving, and justice at the door and entering the deepest nether regions of fear-driven collective tantrums and the darkest id.  

And we still haven't rebuilt the towers or captured bin Laden.

Democratic Militarism

One of the best known theories of Political Science is the "Democratic Peace Theory" which notes that democracies rarely go to war with one another.  The most prominent explanation for this historical trend is that voting brings accountability preventing leaders from unnecessarily engaging in war.  However, Daniel Larison emphatically skewers the notion that Democracies aren't particularly warlike:

States that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

In other words, China does lots of nasty things to its own citizens, but the U.S. is a hell of a lot more likely to go invade another country and do nasty things to those citizens.

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Google v. China in the Court of Public Opinion

cartoon from China DailyGoogle's story: 

Google operations in China began in 2006, with a censored, Chinese-language search engine.  In the words of Google, this was because:

...(T)he benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. 

On March 2009, Chinese authorities blocked access to Google's YouTube site and began denying users access to other Google services on a case-by-case basis.  Over the course of the last year, there were further attempts by the Chinese government to limit free speech on the web.  On January 12, 2010, Google announced it was considering ending its Chinese operations:

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Eagle and Bear: Who's a Hawk?

Russia’s big week in the headlines proved a mixed blessing.  The announced START nuclear arms reduction agreement represented new progress and cooperation with the United States and brought a renewed sense that Cold War clash of civilizations is forever past; meanwhile the graphic violence of the subway bombings demonstrated that Islamic terrorism‘s barbarism has radicalized even the most violent asymmetric conflict in the world with new methods of casual murder.  The stories critically inform one another: the juxtaposition reminds of the opportunities that lie in even slightly improving on policy currently executed counter-productively, even if that just means finding a crappy equilibrium rather than struggling deeper into the quicksand.

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The Gift that Never Gives

Jeffery Goldberg doesn't like the trend he sees in Israel's foreign policy:

A pattern has emerged in recent weeks of an Israeli government that seems to go far out of its way to alienate countries it has no business alienating. First, there was the gross insult directed at the Turkish ambassador to Israel by the deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon. [...]

Then came the assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai. Israel hasn't claimed responsibility for the assassination, but evidence points to the Mossad. It is one thing to kill Hamas officials -- Hamas, after all, has declared a war of destruction on Israel -- but it is another to do so in the United Arab Emirates, the most open-minded country in the Gulf, especially on matters related to Israel, and a country that is obviously important to the formation of a broad, anti-Iran coalition. 

Then, of course, came the humiliation dealt to Vice President Biden on his visit to Israel, about which enough ink has been spilled. [...]

Then this week came a snub by Danny Ayalon's boss, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who boycotted a speech to the Knesset by the president of Brazil because Lula apparently wouldn't pay a visit to the grave of Theodore Herzl, who is now spinning in said grave, because he was a pragmatist as well as a dreamer and he knew that the Jews, a small, embattled people, need friends to survive. [...]

Bibi Netanyahu is not in control of his government. He has brought into his coalition parties -- Lieberman's party, the Shas Party -- that are narrow-focused, excessively-rightist, stubborn and prideful, and now he's paying the price. The problem is that Israel is paying the price as well. America can afford stupid politicians. Israel can't.  

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Iraq Elections: A Small Step, Not a Giant Leap

After a year of worry, heightened by the drama of the de-Ba'athification candidate purge, the Iraqi elections went off without many hitches.  Which is to say that there were plenty of bombings, 38 people were killed, but turnout was high with two-thirds of the country voting including a majority of the Sunni population which boycotted the last election in 2005.  That's good news for the Iraqis and it's better news for us, because it means that we are on pace to leave on schedule by the end of 2011.  What the election does not do, however, is retroactively vindicate the decision to invade Iraq.  

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Our Spendthrift Uncle, Sam

We have focused on debt and deficits quite a lot around here lately, and it's not hard to see why: the U.S. deficit is at a record level even as Europe struggles with the consequences of excess deficits in the Greek debt crisis.  Deficits are not intrisinctly bad, pretty clearly some situations demand deficit spending: the choice between running a deficit and say, being conquered by Nazis and Imperial Japan, or a decade long economic collapse accompanied by death from famine and deprivation, isn't difficult to make.  However, the existence of persistent deficits, through good times and bad, indicates a political failure in this country.  To illustrate the problem, let's consider a thought experiment: imagine the U.S. government as a person- someone you know, your wacky, rich Uncle Sam.

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