What about 9/11?

Although one could find many ills caused by the U.S. military action in Iraq, this conquest has been beneficial for the Bush administration as a diversion from 9/11 and the real threat to this country.

Many commentators have rightly noted that our presence in Iraq has weakened our military's ability to respond to other threats, allowed al-Qaeda to use it as a rallying cry and recruiting boon, and emboldened North Korea and Iran. But for the Republicans in power, it has also provided a needed distraction. The fact stills remains that 9/11 happened under Bush's watch. And, no matter how many attacks Ashcroft and other officials supposedly thwarted, 9/11 still happened. According to Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, and Bob Woodward (in their respective books), the administration did not adequately focus on terrorists and paid more attention to Iraq and other issues. Clarke was surprised at the executive branch's unwillingness to place appropriate resources on the matter and we all remember that August briefing that Bush officials ignored. To be sure, the Clinton administration bears some of the burden, but 9/11 plan still unfolded over 9 months of Bush, a period that included many warning signs coming into the CIA and FBI.

Some may say that this is history--and it is. But one of the purposes of history is to understand how the past functioned. We can also see current motives in coordination with past flaws. The Bush administration may be waging a widely misnamed "war on terror" but much of this looks simply like traditional military tactics combined with secrecy and torture. More than an actual policy, the war on terror is a justification--for domestic spying, for torture, and for the supremacy of the executive. A real "war on terror", that is a policy that seeks to prevent future attacks and to destabilize terror networks, would have done many things differently.

Firstly, such a policy may include the large-scale recruitment (and/or training) of Arab speakers. They can be used for intelligence gather and spying operations. Secondly, protection of our most vulnerable targets would be emphasized; these include increased port security (that means more money for the coast guard, not nativist insecurity over an Arab company running our ports), increased protection of chemical plants and nuclear reactors, as well as an effective screening policy that relies on innovative research and not wholesale denial. Moreover, such an anti-terror policy might seek to do something about nuclear proliferation, since it is the most powerful threat. Instead of eschewing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (as Bush did in 2001) or endorsing India's illegal nuclear program, Bush could have made strides in affirming the worldwide need to control (and never use) nuclear weapons. The administration's rhetoric on nuclear weapons appears closer to Goldwater than anyone else, and who can forget the false mushroom cloud references. Bush and his cohorts lack the necessary seriousness and vigilance than comes with a nuclear-armed reality.

Finally, a war on terror would include a campaign to change the world's image of America. If al-Qaeda was raging against western abuses of the political kind (and don't kid yourself and say that it's simply our way of life), then maybe we should begin to understand how people like them think. One important way to control this problem is by eliminating the demand, just as is the case with drugs. If we can find a way to lessen the demand for bin Laden's hateful ideas, then we may be on the path to lessening the use of terror. Instead of doing this, we inflame the Arab and Muslim world by torturing its citizens, invading one of its countries, showing wholesale indifference toward their feelings, and trying to export our way of life. In fact, many Muslims see "democracy" and "freedom" as antithetical to Islam itself. It's not that they "hate freedom," it just that they believe it to be an epithet for Western decadence or chaos. Many of the U.S. foreign actions since 9/11 constitutes not a war on terror, but a war that bolsters the U.S. economy, shrouds the executive in the justification of wartime secrecy, and ultimately avoids the very thing that attacked us nearly five years ago.

We must remember that the only unprovoked attack on the U.S. was that of September 11th. Even that action by bin Laden could be viewed as response to U.S. attacks against him in Sudan. But bin Laden's actions were criminal in its targeting of civilians. It also caused the U.S. to enter into a new era. But we failed to understand 9/11 and our government has failed us in its response to that horrifying event. The Bush administration has been thoroughly reactionary, preempting our freedoms in the name of security that they fail to provide. I may posit that the war on terror is merely a justification for secrecy, a secrecy that shrouds the administration's sins, such as their failure to heed the al-Qaeda threat as well as their pre-9/11 emphasis on Iraq and mid-East restructuring to ensure oil flow and Israeli safety. Significantly, until now, the war issue has also been used by Republicans to win campaigns. Through emphasizing their claim to protect the U.S., the always-trying-to-seem-tough Bush (and those who rallied behind him) won elections. The distraction from the the real threat (that of terrorists and a radicalized Muslim populace) has not only weakened the U.S. but provided the Bush administration with cover. Unfortunately, we will suffer these mistakes for years to come.

Time to Check the Power of Ascendant King George

Despite having one of the weakest mandates of any American president (except perhaps Ford), George Bush has decided that he possesses all the powers of the position and more. Not simply does he have those powers outlined in the constitution, but he claims implied ones stemming from his "war president" status. Some Bush admirers may be tempted to compare him to another president that had a weak mandate, Abraham Lincoln. As the 16th U.S. president, Lincoln asserted near dictatorial powers in preservation of the Union. He was rebuked a year after his death in the famous Supreme Court case, Ex Parte Milligan, which condemned not only martial law but specifically his imprisonment of so called enemy combatants without due process. Ultimately, Lincoln was declared wrong in actions. But many forget that he went through Congress to suspend habeus corpus. (Bush has not bothered with that kind of openness.) And, did not Lincoln have a higher moral imperative during the Civil War, a crisis that saw the U.S. itself divided?

Bush certainly thinks that this "war on terror" brings a similar situation. In this apparent Age of Terror, he feels that looming threats grant him overarching powers, such the unchecked detention of "enemy combatants" (even some who are US citizens), the surveillance sans FISA of American citizens, and the ability to manipulate Congress's torture ban through an executive signing statement. (Not to mention using that same final tactic over 700 other times, nearly more than all other past presidents combined.) King George, as we may rightly call him, thinks he can do whatever he wants. But his "higher moral imperative" is deeply questionable.

September 11th, 2001 supposedly changed everything and there's certainly no denying its scale. But this up-to-now isolated incident has yielded immerse violence directed by the U.S. against other parts of the world. The aftermath of regime-toppling actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost thousands of civilian lives and over 2,500 U.S. lives, not to mention 20,000 or more casualties. These actions, their collateral damage, and the U.S. losses are justified in the name of another moral imperative, that of spreading freedom and ending the terror. But our targets have been selective to such a point that they hypocritical. Other nations suffer from intense dictatorships and several also oppress women in ways tantamount to those under the Taliban. (Not too mention that several other states do much more to aid terrorist networks.) But no other nations have been so prominently hostile as Iraq and Afghanistan. Besides Bush's personal gripe with Iraq, the exiles from the country were even more persistent than the old Cubans in pushing for regime-change; and, within the Bush administration, they found friendly ears to give them a whole-hearted listen. Meanwhile, Afghanistan became a (semi-appropriate) scapegoat for our anger and impotency following the September 11th attacks. We regained our self esteem once with this initial war. And then, when things were looking grim again, we boosted it again with a second military action. (How happy we were when Bush declared Mission Accomplished! nearly three years ago.) Now we have post-partum depression for what we have birthed. Afghanistan is a corrupt, poppy-going warlord state where the Taliban still operates. And Iraq teeters on the brink of civil war, while much of its infrastructure remains destroyed. All this and Al Qaeda has two events that bolster their recruiting drives. To top it off, we may be growing home-grown Iraqi anti-Americanism as well.

But our losses are not limited to these chaotic countries that we've created. Our legitimacy and power in the world is as weak as it was in 1973. Not only do we look foolish for our actions, but our economy has been desperately hurt by the war debt from Iraq. We are in a unique position of economic weakness on the world stage. We rely on foreign nations (mainly Asian and Middle-Eastern) to finance our debt, and oil has increasing become a more problematic lifeblood. Another terrorist attack in the U.S. could theoretically cripple the American economy, as could instability in Saudi Arabia or Iraq.

Meanwhile, as we paid attention to our "War of Terror" (as excusively "fought" in Afghanistan and Iraq) we ignored growing problems in North Korea and Iran. Our negotiations with each nation fell apart as a result of wars and our misplaced resources; this allowed these two "axis of evil" nations to buy time, four years in fact. In that time, the threat poses by each country has multiplied many times. We may no longer be able to diplomatically restain them. And we have neither the stategy-advantage nor the human resources to fight a war with either state.

Still, in spite of all these faults, maybe Bush does still have the moral imperative to do as he pleases. Maybe all these points of mine are sidenotes to the main issue, digressions you might say. Perhaps. But the President has not shown that he is using all his powers to protect the U.S from the kind of attack that would justify his power. Ports as well as chemical and nuclear plants have not been sufficiently protected, even though they represent some of the worst case scenarios involving terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the recent decision to help India acquire more nuclear arms not only increases the chance proliferation among other countries, but it represented a rebuke to the Pakastani self esteem. Internal criticism in that state could destabilize the Musharaff regime and lead to hard-line, unfriendly Islamic control of the country. On the domestic side, much of what Bush has done (wiretaps, detention, torture) have not yielded certifiable results. Our country has not been attacked since 9/11 but this may be out of sheer luck. Remember, eight years elapsed between the two attacks on the WTC in New York. Not only do the Bush administration's tactics cross the civil liberties line, they have also not been proven effective.

My greatest fear is that Bush is not committing a political ploy with his power grab (as any token third-world dictactor), but that he actually believes he has this so-called "moral imperative". (I can think of another famous leader who had a similar drive.) If that's the case, no logic or reason will stop him; he is driven by faith in himself, not by the events of the world around him. The only way to stop him is through the Constitutional system of checks-and-balances. Congress must stand up, as should the US Supreme Court. If they both together challenge his power, he will be forced to yield his executive supremacy. If our country fails to do this, the Imperial Presidency (something feared 33 years ago during Nixon's reign) may finally become a reality.

Continuing Death in Darfur...and Now Chad

New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof's op-ed today revisits Darfur and the death sentences that Sudan's government has imposed on thousands of black Africans. He notes that the Khartoum government and their proxies, the janjaweed militias, have crossed the border into Chad and begun razing the ad hoc villages that the refugees have created for themselves. This is horrible not just on the sheer level of how it affects these people, but in that may also tigger an actual war between Sudan and Chad. Currently, each government is backing the rebels in their neighbor's country. The whole thing is a mess.

Two years ago, I argued in a college newsppaer that the world must start paying attention to Darfur before it was two late. I wrote than over 100,000 refugees had to flee their villages to flee violence and at least 10,000 had died. Today, we can multiply these figures by at least 10, maybe more. No, in two years little has been done.

In the summer of 2004, I felt some degree of hope that Darfur would not become another Rwanda (as some people were saying around that time, the 10^th anniversary of that previous genocide). The U.S. House and Senate declared the situation there to be a genocide and the president said the same thing. Surely, with such recognition – using the g-word that Clinton officials would not mention in 1994 – someone would have to be done. Would could not idly sit by and watch during a declared genocide, could we? We have.

I still remember talking with the editor of an alternative newspaper and asking him why he had not paid more attention to Darfur in print. I pledged an article about the crisis. He told me, “Why is it that we pay so much attention to Darfur and not other problems in Africa?” He cited examples like the warfare that’s ongoing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as Uganda’s LRA, which kidnaps children. Implicit in what he was saying was this: Darfur is only an issue because evangelical Christians in the U.S. think Arab Muslims in Sudan are killing black Christians. Somehow, if evangelicals were attached to an issue, it was of lesser importance. Yes, the DRC and Uganda have seriously problems and thousands may have died. But Darfur is a little bit different. For one, nearly 2 million people have been displaced to neighboring Chad. Estimates from 2004 suggested that a million people could eventually die if resources (military and food) were not used to help these Darfurians. Some groups have helped, but the government-backed Janjaweed militia continues to hunt civilians.

One of the common myths is that Darfur is somehow a pure civil war, two factions fighting against each other with some unseemly tactics. But no, this is not case. Instead, the government of Sudan has launched an ethnic cleansing campaign in order to keep control of a region that not too large ago was largely populated by black Africa, who didn’t always agree with their policies and resource exploitation. The concessions that Khartoum granted to the Southern rebels (separate from those in Darfur) only came after years of negotiations and pressure from the U.S. Sudan’s government did not want to be in that position again and, in Darfur, they saw a problem forthcoming. An obvious solution was to eliminate the possible rebel population, to systematically cleanse them from the reason.

Even in terms of the agreement with the Southern rebels, the compromise leader selected from the South—an Ivy-league educated man—died in mysterious circumstances only a couple months after his entry into the government. This again shows that Khartoum does not play fair. They have no interest in doing so.

What’s stopping intervention? China has a very close relationship with Sudan, and France and Russia also have some significant interests in the country. In a globalized world, economic ties prevent us from adequately pressuring criminal government who massacre civilians. The other reason is that is allowed to occur is as a result of the U.S.’s involvement in Iraq. The war there to oust a dictator that systematically killed around 100,000 (most before 1993) or so people may cost the world a million or more Darfurians.

As a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the U.S. now lacks legimacy to do anything in any other bastion of the Islamic world. It would be construed as tantamount to Iraq; another unilateral action to interfere with an Arab country. Not what it really is, an effort to stop an enormous calamity sponspered by an Arab government. And it’s not only a question of legitimacy. The United States has also overextending its human resources (troops, as in those we should be supporting) in Iraq and, thus, they are not available for other police actions. And, books like George Packer’s explain, the neo-con patrons of this administration have no interest in police actions or nation-building. The people of Darfur will just have to die because of our mistakes.

Some will argue that the same logic and role that brought us into Iraq—that of the benevolent hegemon protecting the world—would be at play in any Darfur intervention. But it’s not just us, many countries have also condemned this action, and the African Union—a local body—has already sent peacekeepers to the region. We just have to provide them with ample support. But for the reasons that I have outlined, we are not doing so. Some may say that France or some other nation should take up the cause, and maybe that is the case. But Bush has placed us as the protector of freedom on the international stage and what greater freedom is there than freedom to live once born. The right in the U.S. cares so dearly for the un-aborted fetuses, but we don’t see quite the righteous indignation toward those living meek lives in the U.S. or abroad. Over a million Darfurians are homeless, without proper health care or sufficient food, and they are constantly raided by camel-riding militias who rape them, machine-gun them, and burned their ad hoc villages to the ground.

It’s too late, we’ve screwed up. The world has watched while a hundred thousand die. But there’s no reason to turn away forever from our moral lapse. Instead, we can save the millions of others clinging to life, hoping for some miraculous help from abroad. It’s damn time that, as I said two years ago, we give it to them.

An Upset Win for CRASH ?

It's been about 3 and half hours since Crash unexpectedly defeated Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture crown. Nikki Finke, on her LA Weekly blog, gives us a big "told ya so"! She wrote an article a month ago about the Brokeback backlash, that is the whispers that homophobic male Academy members refused to see Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal rought it up. As a result, she predicted that less-controversial (and certainly not gay) Crash would end up with the Academy's top prize. She was right, but she was also wrong. Around the same time as Finke's article, Larry Gross wrote about how Brokeback wasn't really all that gay in the first place. (The old: I'm gayer than you. Sorta like: I'm blacker than you.) But authencity aside, Gross made some good points. Most of the people involved in Brokeback tried to sell it as a love story that transcends its gay roots. It may be that they had little personal stake in the film; none of the filmmakers or actors are gay. I tend to think that Brokeback comes up short, both in its gay rights campaign and in its aesthetic virtues. It has a highly effective score (honored tonight), some solid performances, but it's essentially a closet story and a slow one at that. And, for a gay rights, hearing "I ain't no queer" doesn't really help in any context.

So Brokeback wasn't that gay and it lost. No, I am not trying to prove any cause-and-effect, but I wouldn't dare say that its defeat is purely a result a homophobia in the Academy, though this could have partially contributed. It lost because it was slow and because it wasn't the best film of the year. Crash may not have been either, but it was set in L.A. Plus, it featured everyone's favorite black actor of the moment Don Cheadle (deserving so I must say) and a dozen other sigificant actors. What's not to love? If this film came out in Decemeber, no one would question it's ascendence. Another side story is the campaign launched by Lions Gate. While Universal put forward expensive mini-books in the trades, Lions Gate responded by showcasing the film itself to every member of nearly every significant guild. If memory serves, about 20,000 copies. That's one sizable campaign. And they were helped by the fact that so many of those people, and the Academy members specifically, live in Los Angeles. What Crash does is provide a touchstone for Angelenos? They applaud their own understanding of the situation. (Yeah, I know about this racism, I LIVE HERE!) If the Oscars are a self-congraduating affair (they are), then Crash is the ultimate self-congraduating film---celebrating their star city, a diverse colleciton of film stars, and everyone's favorite million dollar baby Paul Haggis, not to mention social issues and, lest I forget, Don Cheadle.

Sure, tonight's Oscars were about George Clooney; no one's name was dropped more --- even the 3-6 Mafia got in on the action. But Crash was part of the side story, of course. It won the biggest prize and upset the most-joked-about film of year. Hopefully, those will now go by the wayside. Hollywood has selected a pretty good film for its showcase and one that has the potential to connect with a mass audience if people seek it out. Brokeback doesn't have that (business in the deep south, for example), nor does Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. All of the latter films are either too slight or obscure. Crash has the greatest universal relevance and it comes as no surprise then that it's the least subtle. No film this year pulls the strings greater than Crash, a quality which is both laudable and detestable. I do really appeciate the film, but I find it's stab at social issues to be more duh! than revelation. And it makes us feel good at any right. We're all racist--and maybe that's okay. The only problem is that it's not.

THE RETURN

Yeah, it's been about 10 months since I last posted. It wasn't like this log was all that interesting for the five or six post before that. But I hope in the future that this will become a place of interesting commentary about everything. Yes, everything. It will be slanted toward political and entertainment commentary (much like something like Drudge, in subjects tackled if not ideology), but I will try to cover several different pages. I am giving up on the idea of formality and, instead, I will just write whatever, whenever, in whichever format I desire at the time. So, there it is. - (e)