Triumphalism Hides Many Important Foreign-Policy Failures

Triumphalism Hides Many Important Foreign-Policy Failures
by Ivan Eland, June 15, 2011

Nationalism in many countries prompts their governments to trumpet foreign-policy successes while sweeping disappointments under the rug. The inclination toward such biases may only be human nature, but democracies should also take the difficult step of heeding and analyzing the failures­that is, if they want to embrace truth and avoid the path to authoritarianism.

Because American nationalism is especially strong, the U.S. government regularly attempts to take maximum credit for events such as the fall of the communist bloc and the killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden­while forgetting about profligate blunders that have made America and its citizens less secure, a failure in the most importance function of government.

Although communism did fall, in most such societal revolutions, domestic factors usually overwhelm external influences. Although Reaganophiles give that president almost sole credit for toppling the communist bloc, an unviable economic system is what ultimately brought down the Soviet Union and its communist allies.

As for killing Osama bin Laden, it took the gold-plated U.S. intelligence community, which probably spends as much on intelligence as the rest of the world combined, a decade and a half to neutralize him. Moreover, the CIA's greatest triumph has been its greatest failure; its encouragement and funding of radical Islam, including the Afghan "freedom fighters," as a counterweight to Soviet communism helped create al-Qaeda in the first place. Moreover, the U.S. government's unneeded meddling and military presence in the Islamic world motivated bin Laden to attack the United States and continue to fuel Islamists' anti-American attacks­for example, the nation-building occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq inflame Islamic jihadists worldwide. Because many anti-American jihadists in Iraq came from eastern Libya, American provision of the air force for the Libyan rebels may replicate the unintended threat-creation experience of U.S. aid to Islamists in Afghanistan. And getting rid of Moammar Gadhafi­whom Ronald Reagan originally demonized and attacked but who had more recently given up his nuclear-weapons program and made nice with the West­won't enhance U.S. security very much.

But such reckless behavior should not be surprising. The U.S. government has made or strengthened enemies before. Recent examples are in Somalia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. In Somalia, the U.S. government recently trumpeted the killing of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, a leader in both the Somali Islamist Shabaab movement and al-Qaeda. Yet the Islamists had little support in the moderate Islamic country of Somalia until the U.S. government began supporting corrupt, violent warlords there. And Somali support for Shabaab against foreign influence really spiked during the catastrophic U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006. The Bush administration's encouragement­with weapons and advisers­of a Christian-led Ethiopian government's invasion of a Muslim country further stoked the fires of radical Islam, coming in the wake of the post-9/11 U.S. invasions of Muslim Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Lebanon, the Shi'ite Islamist group Hezbollah­which formed during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by U.S.-backed Israel and which enhanced its reputation by throwing Reagan's forces out of Lebanon soon thereafter­now dominates the Lebanese government. This result was made possible by Israel's second invasion of Lebanon in 2006, which again enhanced Hezbollah's reputation by demonstrating its ability to withstand an attack by a stronger power.

In Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban did not try to attack targets in the United States­the attempted Times Square bombing­until the United States began to kill Pakistani Taliban fighters with drone attacks in Pakistan. Similarly, Islamist militants in Yemen did not try to attack targets in the United States until our government escalated military involvement in Yemen.

In Iraq, the United States helped bring Saddam Hussein to power, made him the dominant power in the Persian Gulf by supporting him in his successful war with Iran, and then demonized him and fought two wars against him.

Finally, creating an enemy in Iran goes way back to 1953, when the CIA helped overthrow the elected anti-communist government of Mohammed Mossadegh because he had nationalized British oil interests. The United States restored the autocratic shah, who allowed U.S. companies to have some of Iran's oil, oppressed his people with the secret police, and spent too many of the country's resources on U.S.-made weapons and not enough on economic development. He was overthrown by a Shi'ite Islamist regime, which has always been predictably hostile to the United States.

Throw in the expensive and pointless Korean and Vietnam Wars, the reckless and failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, and the resulting near incineration of the world during the Cuban Missile Crisis for no American strategic gain, and post-World War II U.S. foreign policy doesn't look so successful after all.

http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2011/06/14/triumphalism-hides-many-important-foreign-policy-failures/

Why the Pentagon Papers matter now

Why the Pentagon Papers matter now
While we go on waging unwinnable wars on false premises, the Pentagon papers tell us we must not wait 40 years for the truth
Daniel Ellsberg
Monday 13 June 2011 17.02 BST

The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers -- the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 -- comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)

In other words, today's declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That's because we're mired again in wars -- especially in Afghanistan -- remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don't have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it's likely to go.

What we need released this month are the Pentagon Papers of Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen and Libya). We're not likely to get them; they probably don't yet exist, at least in the useful form of the earlier ones. But the original studies on Vietnam are a surprisingly not-bad substitute, definitely worth learning from.

Yes, the languages and ethnicities that we don't understand are different in the Middle East from those in Vietnam; the climate, terrain and types of ambushes are very different. But as the accounts in the Pentagon Papers explain, we face the same futile effort in Afghanistan to find and destroy nationalist guerrillas or to get them to quit fighting foreign invaders (now us) and the corrupt, ill-motivated, dope-dealing despots we support. As in Vietnam, the more troops we deploy and the more adversaries we kill (along with civilians), the quicker their losses are made good and the more their ranks grow, since it's our very presence, our operations and our support of a regime without legitimacy that is the prime basis for their recruiting.

As for Washington, the accounts of recurrent decisions to escalate in the Pentagon Papers read like an extended prequel to Bob Woodward's book last year, Obama's War, on the prolonged internal controversies that preceded the president's decisions to triple the size of our forces in Afghanistan. (Woodward's book, too, is based on top secret leaks. Unfortunately, these came out after the decisions had been made, and without accompanying documentation: which it is still not too late for Woodward or his sources to give to WikiLeaks.)

In accounts of wars 40 years and half a world apart, we read of the same irresponsible, self-serving presidential and congressional objectives in prolonging and escalating an unwinnable conflict: namely, the need not to be charged with weakness by political rivals, or with losing a war that a few feckless or ambitious generals foolishly claim can be won. Putting the policy-making and the field realities together, we see the same prospect of endless, bloody stalemate – unless and until, under public pressure, Congress threatens to cut off the money (as in 1972-73), forcing the executive into a negotiated withdrawal.

To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now. Not 40 years in the future. Not after even two or three more years of further commitment to stalemated and unjustifiable wars.

Yet, we're not likely to get these ever within the time frame they're needed. The WikiLeaks' unauthorised disclosures of the last year are the first in 40 years to approach the scale of the Pentagon Papers (and even surpass them in quantity and timeliness). But unfortunately, the courageous source of these secret, field-level reports – Private Bradley Manning is the one accused, though that remains to be proven in court – did not have access to top secret, high-level recommendations, estimates and decisions.

Very, very few of those who do have such access are willing to risk their clearances and careers – and the growing possibility (under President Obama) of prosecution – by documenting to Congress and the public even policies that they personally believe are disastrous and wrongly kept secret and lied about. I was one – and far from alone – with such access and such views, as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defence for international security affairs in the Pentagon in 1964-65. (My immediate boss John T McNaughton, Robert McNamara's primary assistant on Vietnam, was another; as documented in the recent publication of his personal diary.)

I've long regretted that it didn't even occur to me, in August 1964, to release the documents in my Pentagon safe giving the lie to claims of an "unequivocal, unprovoked" (unreal) attack on our destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf: precursors of the "evidence beyond any doubt" of nonexistent WMDs in Iraq, which manipulated Congress, once again, to pass the exact counterpart of the Tonkin Gulf resolution.

Senator Morse – one of the two senators who had voted against that unconstitutional, undated blank cheque for presidential war in 1964 – told me that if I had provided him with that evidence at the time (instead of 1969, when I finally provided it to the senate foreign relations committee, on which he had served): "The Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee; and if it had been brought to the floor, it would have been voted down."

That's a heavy burden for me to bear: especially when I reflect that, by September, I had a drawer-full of the top secret documents (again, regrettably, not published until 1971) proving the fraudulence of Johnson's promises of "no wider war" in his election campaign, and his actual determination to escalate a war that he privately and realistically regarded as unwinnable.

Had I or one of the scores of other officials who had the same high-level information acted then on our oath of office – which was not an oath to obey the president, nor to keep the secret that he was violating his own sworn obligations, but solely an oath "to support and defend the constitution of the United States" – that terrible war might well have been averted altogether. But to hope to have that effect, we would have needed to disclose the documents when they were current, before the escalation – not five or seven, or even two, years after the fateful commitments had been made.

A lesson to be drawn from reading the Pentagon Papers, knowing all that followed or has come out in the years since, is this. To those in the Pentagon, state department, the White House, CIA (and their counterparts in Britain and other Nato countries) who have similar access to mine then and foreknowledge of disastrous escalations in our wars in the Middle East, I would say:

Don't make my mistake. Don't do what I did. Don't wait until a new war has started in Iran, until more bombs have fallen in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq or Yemen. Don't wait until thousands more have died, before you go to the press and to Congress to tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. Don't wait 40 years for it to be declassified, or seven years as I did for you or someone else to leak it.

The personal risks are great. But a war's worth of lives might be saved.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/13/pentagon-papers-daniel-ellsberg

What Is "Fair"?

What Is "Fair"?
by Don Crawford
Posted June 15, 2011

When taxes are under discussion, we often hear a call for rich people to "pay their fair share." The message is that tax rates on those with higher incomes should be raised to make sure that fairness is achieved. However, if we look at this honestly, as a real-life ethical issue, we will have to conclude that people with higher incomes are already paying more than their fair share. Let's try a thought experiment.

Suppose we are part of a group of friends from work who decide to go out to dinner together. "We" includes the owner of the business, the new person in the mailroom, and two of us in between. We choose a nice restaurant and enjoy our meal together. For some reason we cannot get separate checks and are given one large bill. What are some fair ways to pay for this meal -- and what are some unfair ways?

Normally what happens is this: each person puts money into the kitty based on what he or she ordered. Often after the check goes around the table it isn't quite enough because people forget to add in enough money to cover the tip or their second drink or the taxes or something. So the check goes around again while everyone refigures the cost and puts in a little more. So each pays based on what each received. That is what we ordinarily regard as fair.

Now suppose the bill isn't itemized and we can't find out what each person received and therefore what each person owes. People might try to guess, but generally we feel that one fair way is for each to pay the same amount. If we do that, we recognize that people who ordered a more lavish dinner or an extra bottle of wine will be getting more than their fair share, but still the same amount for each person seems close to fair. So each person paying the same amount without regard to any other criterion looks fair to us. This is equivalent to a per capita or per person tax. But that is not how we do taxes in America. We don't all pay the same amount or the same amount per person, do we, despite the fact that it's impossible to construct an itemized list of each taxpayer's liability for government services received?

So let's go back to the arrival of the unitemized bill for the group's dinner. How should we divide it up fairly?

When the check came, the boss could offer to pay for everyone's dinner. That would be voluntary, private charity. But imagine if, when that happened, the new mail oom guy said, "Wow. This is great. I got this fabulous meal for free. I propose we do this every night! How many people are in favor?" Perhaps most of us who received the boss' charity would vote to make him give it more often, but that would be clearly unfair.

No one would dream that three people should "vote" to make the fourth person pay for them. Why does it become right when we do it through the government?

The boss would be well within his rights to say, "You guys can do this again if you want, but count me out. I'm not interested in paying for everyone's meal night after night." Would it be fair or right to claim that he must do so because it was a "majority vote?" People shouldn't just be able to vote to oblige others to give them things, should they? In normal, face-to-face interactions, in a small group of four people no one would dream that three people should "vote" to make the fourth person pay for them. Why does it become right when we do it through the government?

Now imagine this. Imagine that someone in the group said, "Let's take a vote. Who thinks we should base what we pay on how much income each of us has? Wouldn't that be fair?" Several things come to mind right away. First, it's extremely rude to require people to tell you what they earn. It is simply not anyone else's business. But we do it as a country when we make people fill out their income tax returns so that a progressive tax can be levied. We intrude in a way we ordinarily don't think is right or fair -- because we do it through the government. Does that make it fair?

Second, voting on this proposition doesn't seem right, because the boss makes more than any of the rest of the group, and will always have to pay more, yet he has only one vote. So of course, voting for this proposition is self-serving for everyone else. It is the same as the other case, when the boss was made to pay the whole tab: we are voting to force the boss to subsidize us.

Charity performed voluntarily is one thing. It is common for people who are better off to pay a bit more than their equal share, voluntarily. But where do the lower paid people get the right to vote to force the higher paid person to pay more? Does that strike you as fair? Again, what if we voted to regularize it by law, so that he had to do it every night? Would that make it fair?

This unfair situation is equivalent to the flat income tax that people propose from time to time. The flat tax would have everyone pay the same percentage. If you made more money, you would therefore pay more, whether you received more from the government or not. When we take this down to the personal level in our thought experiment, basing the fair share calculation on someone's income level is embarrassingly unfair, yet it is criticized as being not fair enough. They aren't paying their fair share, that's true. They are paying more than their fair share.

But instead of having a flat tax, which requires people to pay more if they earn more, we have a tax system in which the percentage goes up as they earn more. The harder they work, the more money they make, the higher the percentage of their income is taken. The federal income tax percentage goes up to 35% for some people, while others, with lower incomes, pay 10%, and many pay nothing at all. Yet people are calling for the top tax brackets to go even higher, so that wealthy people will be required to "pay their fair share."

Well, how will we know when fairness is achieved? How will we establish the "fair share"? We will take a vote, of course -- because that's really the fair way to decide.



About this Author
Don Crawford lives in Portland OR, where he manages a group of six charter schools.


http://libertyunbound.com/node/586

One of many ob lies

 *What a lying bastard! Can you imagine the Media outcry if this were a
 Republican?*
 **
 **
 *Obama's father served in WW II, really?*
 **
 *Of all the things I've seen or heard about Obama on the Internet, NONE has
 hit me like this!!  How can we not believe some of the charges about
 citizenship, religion, etc., after hearing what he says on this? *
 *  *
 *Obama said his father served in WWII?  Barack's father served in WW II? *
 *  *
 *He said so in a speech.  **Here is an 18 second video**: *
 *  *
 *CNN News clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv4jnlkxOaw *
 *  *
 *Is he a compulsive liar?  Were there no reporters who checked or
 double-checked these statements and called the party on this?  They did for
 everyone else…Why not him? *
 **
 *Like it or not, here are the facts: *
 **
 *Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (Obama's father), Born: 04/04/1936 – Died:
 11/24/1982 at the age of 46.  Obama was 5 years old when WW II started, and
 less than 9 1/2 yrs old when it ended.*

 *Lolo Soetoro (Obama's step father) Born: 01/02/1935 - Died: 03/02/1987 at
 the age of 52.  He was 6 years old when WW II started, and 10 years old when
 it ended.  He must have been the youngest Veteran in the war.*

 *Watch the video. **RIGHT OUT OF HIS MOUTH!!!**  And the Media doesn't say
 anything!!!  If you doubt it, Google both of these guys. *

 *It appears this guy doesn't know how to tell the truth -- or he doesn't
 care about telling the truth!  Or perhaps he doesn't know when he isn't
 telling the truth (which is also a very scary angle).  Talk about **STOLEN
 HONOR**!!! *

 *Had this been Bush, the Media would still be on this! *

 *The CNN clip of Obama is surprising.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised that
 this lie wasn't uncovered, questioned or debated before the November 2008
 election. *
 **
 *Oh well, he must have just "forgotten" the facts, again.  Or perhaps he
 really doesn't even know the difference between truth and fabrication? *
 **
 *LET'S MAKE THIS GO VIRAL*
 **
 *BE WHO YOU ARE AND SAY WHAT YOU FEEL...... BECAUSE THOSE THAT MATTER DON'T
 MIND..... AND THOSE THAT MIND DON'T MATTER.*




--
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

Sinclair Lewis

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More fun and games with Weiner - now Gloria Allred is involved

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/alright-my-package-and-i-are-not-going.html

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