Dec 2006 – resurrected blog entries

Wade Davis Originally published in the International Herald Tribune, Paris, on July 6, 2002, and in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, on the same date. Reprinted in González, Roberto J. (ed.) Anthropologists in the Public Sphere, University of Texas Press, Austin pp.165-169

On Sept. 11, 2001, in the most successful act of asymmetric warfare since the Trojan horse, the world came home to America. “Why do they hate us?” asked President Bush. This was not a rhetorical question. Americans really wanted to know, and still do, for their innocence had been shattered. The president suggested that the reason was the very greatness of America, as if the liberal institutions of government had somehow provoked homicidal rage in fanatics incapable of embracing freedom. Other, dissenting voices claimed that, to the contrary, the problem lay in the tendency of the United States to support, notably in the Middle East, repressive regimes whose values are antithetical to the ideals of American democracy. Both sides were partially right, but both overlooked the deeper issue, in part because they persisted in examining the world through American eyes.

America has always looked inward. A nation born in isolation cannot be expected to be troubled by the election of a president who has rarely been abroad, or a Congress in which 25 percent of members do not hold passports. As recently as 1940, with Europe and Asia already at war, the United States maintained an army that was smaller that that of either Bulgaria or Portugal. Wealth too can be blinding. Americans spend each year as much on lawn maintenance as the government of India collects in federal tax revenue. The National Post, Canada’s conservative newspaper of record, reports that the 30 million African-Americans collectively control more wealth than the 30 million Canadians. The economy of New York is the size of that of Russia or Brazil. New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston together have a larger economy than China. If American cities were countries, they would comprise 47 of the largest 100 national economies in the world.

A country that effortlessly supports a defense budget larger than the entire economy of Australia does not easily grasp the reality of a world in which 1.3 billion people get by on less than a dollar a day. A land wired for the Internet readily forgets that the majority of the world’s population has never had a phone call, let alone sent an email. A new and original culture that celebrates the individual at the expense of family and community — a stunning innovation in human affairs, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom — has difficulty understanding that in most of the world the community still prevails, for the destiny of the individual remains inextricably linked to the fate of the collective.

Even as the United States came to dominate the geopolitical scene, as it has since 1945, the American people resisted engagement with the world, maintaining an almost willful ignorance of what lay beyond their borders. A Roper poll commissioned by the National Geographic Society in 2002 revealed that a sizeable percentage of Americans aged 18-24 could not put the Pacific Ocean on a map. Whereas 34% could identify the location where the most recent episode of the television series Survivor had been shot, fewer than one in seven could accurately locate either Iraq (13%), Iran (13%), Israel (14%) or Afghanistan (17%). Sixty-three percent of these young adults could not identify the location of England, historically America’ strongest ally.

Such cultural myopia, never flattering, was rendered obsolete in an instant on the morning Sept. 11. In the immediate wake of the tragedy, I was often asked as an anthropologist for explanations. Condemning the attacks in the strongest possible terms, I nevertheless encouraged people to consider the forces that gave rise to Bin Laden’s movement. While it would be reassuring to view al Qaeda as an isolated phenomenon, I feared that the organization was a manifestation of a deeper and broader conflict, a clash not between cultures, but between those who have and those who have nothing. Bin Laden himself may be wealthy, but the resentment upon which al Qaeda feeds springs most certainly from the condition of the dispossessed.

I also encouraged my American friends to turn the anthropological lens upon our own culture, if only to catch a glimpse of how we might appear to people born in other lands. I shared a colleague’s story from her time living among the Bedouin in Tunisia in the 1980s, just as television reached their remote villages. Entranced and shocked by episodes of the soap opera “Dallas,” an astonished farmwoman asked her, “Is everyone in your country as mean as JR?”

When the rest of the world looks to the West, and to America, in particular, they see many wondrous things. But they also see a culture that reveres marriage, yet allows half of its marriages to end in divorce; that admires its elderly yet permits grandparents to live with grandchildren in only 6 percent of its households; that loves its children yet embraces a slogan — 24/7 — that implies total devotion to the workplace at the expense of family. By the age of 18, the average American youth has spent two years watching television. Technological wizardry is balanced by the embrace of an economic model of production and consumption that compromises the life supports of the planet. Extreme would be one word for a culture or civilization that does little to curtail industrial processes that threaten to transform the biochemistry of the atmosphere. Our way of life, brilliant and inspired in so many ways, is nevertheless not the paragon of humanity’s potential.

For much of the Middle East, in particular, the West is synonymous not only with questionable values and a flood of commercial products, but also with failure. Nasser’s notion of a Pan-Arabic state was based on a thoroughly Western and secular model of socialist development, an economic and political dream that collapsed in corruption and despotism. The Shah of Iran provoked the Iranian revolution by thrusting not the Koran but modernity as he saw it down the throats of his people. Combined, the gross domestic product of the 22 Arab economies in 1999 was $531 billion, or about $210 billion less than Texas. Saudi Arabia, culturally conservative but economically fully engaged with the West, has an official unemployment rate of 18 percent and there are two job seekers for every job. Sixty percent of the population is under 18. Per capita income has dropped 75 percent since the early 1980s. It is a nation ready to implode.

The Western model of development has failed in the Middle East and elsewhere in good measure because it has been based on the false promise that people who follow its prescriptive dictates will in time achieve the material prosperity enjoyed by a handful of nations of the West. Even were this possible, it is not at all clear that it would be desirable. To raise consumption of energy and materials throughout the world to Western levels, given current population projections, would require the resources of four planet Earths by the year 2100. To do so with the one world we have would imply so severely compromising the biosphere that the Earth would be unrecognizable. Given the values that drive most decisions in the international community, this is not about to happen. In reality, development for the vast majority of the peoples of the world has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past, propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere.

Consider the key indices of the development paradigm. An increase in life expectancy suggests a drop in infant mortality, but reveals nothing of the quality of the lives led by those who survive childhood. Globalization is celebrated with iconic intensity. But what does it really mean? In Bangladesh, garment workers are paid an average of 1.6 cents to sew a baseball cap that retails in the USA for $17. A shirt sold by Disney for $17.99 earns the person who made it roughly five cents. Eighty percent of the toys and sporting goods sold in America are produced in sweatshops in China, where millions work for wages as low as 12 cents an hour. The Washington Post reports that in Lahore, Pakistan, one Muhammad Saeed earns $88 a month stitching shirts and jeans at a factory that supplies Gap and Eddie Bauer. He and his five family members share a single bed in a one-room home tucked away in a warren of alleys strewn with human waste and refuse. Earning three times the money that he made at his last job, he is the poster child of globalization.

Even as fundamental a skill as literacy does not necessarily realize its promise. In northern Kenya, for example, tribal youths placed by their families into parochial schools acquire a modicum of literacy, but in the process also learn to have contempt for their ancestral way of life. They enter school as nomads; they leave as clerks, only to join an economy with a 50 percent unemployment rate for high school graduates. Unable to find work, incapable of going home, they drift to the slums of Nairobi to scratch a living from the edges of a cash economy.

Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of technological sophistication, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city may seem better than backbreaking labor in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the promise of the new, people throughout the world have in many instances voluntarily and in great earnest turned their backs on the old. The consequences can be profoundly disappointing. The fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties with their traditions will not be to attain the prosperity of the West, but to join the legions of urban poor, trapped in squalor, struggling to survive. As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in the world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire.

If there is one lesson of anthropology it is that culture is not trivial or decorative. It is the blanket of moral and ethical beliefs with which we envelop ourselves to keep at bay the barbaric heart that history reveals to lie just beneath the surface of every human being. It is culture that allows us to make sense out of sensation, to find order in a universe that may have none. It is culture that allows us, as Lincoln beseeched us to do, to seek always the better angels of our nature. Anthropology also suggests more darkly that when peoples and cultures are squeezed, extreme ideologies sometimes emerge, inspired by strange and unexpected beliefs. These revitalization movements may be benign. In Jamaica, 300 years of colonialism followed by the economic doldrums of independence sent scores of young men to the shanties of Trenchtown where, infused with perhaps too much marijuana, the Rastafarians cast Haile Selassi, a minor African despot, as the Lion of Judah. A peculiar notion to be sure, but ultimately harmless. More typically, such movements prove deadly both to their adherents and to those they engage. In China at the turn of the century, the Boxer Rebellion did not seek just the end of the opium trade or the expulsion of the foreign legations. The Boxers rose up in response to the humiliation of an ancient nation, long the center of the known world, reduced within a generation to servitude by unknown barbarians at the gate. It was not enough to murder the missionaries. In a raw, atavistic gesture, their bodies were dismembered, their heads displayed on pikes.

However unique in numerous and nefarious ways, al Qaeda is nevertheless reminiscent of these revitalization movements. Torn between worlds, Bin Laden and his followers invoke a feudal past that never was in order to rationalize their own humiliation and hatred. They are a cancer within the culture of Islam, neither fully of the faith nor totally apart from it. Like any malignant growth they must be severed from the body and destroyed. At the same time, we must strive to understand the movement’s roots, for the chaotic conditions of disintegration and disenfranchisement that led to al Qaeda are found amongst disaffected populations throughout the world.

In Nepal rural farmers spout rhetoric not heard since the death of Stalin. In Peru the Shining Path turned to Mao. Had they invoked instead Tupac Amaru, the 18th-century indigenous rebel, scion of the Inca, and had they been able to curb their reflexive disdain for the very indigenous people they claimed to represent, they might well have set the nation aflame, as was their intent. Lima, a city of 400,000 in 1940 is today home to 9 million, and for the majority it is a sea of misery in a sun-scorched desert.

We live in an age of disintegration. At the beginning of the 20th century there were 60 nation states. Today there are 190, most of them poor and highly unstable. The real story lies in the cities. Throughout the world urbanization, with all of its fickle and forlorn promises, has drawn people by the millions into squalor. Five cities currently have populations larger than that of Canada in the year of my birth. The populations of Mexico City and Sao Paulo are unknown, probably immeasurable. Twenty-four cities have populations in excess of 10 million, sixty more than 5 million, and 150 more than 2.5 million. In Asia there are cities of 10 million people that most of us in the West cannot name. In the next 20 years the world’s population will grow from six to eight billion and 97% of this increase will occur in nations where the average individual income is less than two dollars a day. By the end of 2006 for the first time in history the majority of human beings will dwell in cities. In another 35 years, demographers predict, there will be a thousand urban concentrations of more than a million people.

The nation state, as Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, has become too small for the big problems of the world and too big for the little problems of the world. Outside of the major industrial nations, globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but rather a firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Of the 6,000 languages spoken today, fully half are today not being taught to children. Effectively, they are already dead. Within a single generation, we are witnessing the loss of half of humanity’s social, spiritual and intellectual legacy. This is the hidden backdrop of our era.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I was asked at a lecture in Los Angeles to name the seminal event of the 20th century. Without hesitation I suggested the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. Two bullets sparked a war that destroyed all faith in progress and optimism, the hallmarks of the Victorian age, and left in its wake the nihilism and alienation of a century that birthed Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and another devastating global conflict that did not fully end until the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989.

The question then turned to 9/11, and it struck me that a hundred years from now that fateful date may well loom as the defining moment of this new century, the day when two worlds, long kept apart by geography and circumstance, came together in violent conflict. If there is one lesson to be learned from 9/11, it is that power does not translate into security. With an investment of $500,000, far less than the price of one of the baggage scanners now deployed in airports across the United States, a small band of fanatics killed some 2,800 innocent people. The economic cost may well be incalculable. The crisis was only exasperated by political leadership that declared war on a technique, thus pledging the nation to fight an open ended conflict against an abstraction, a conflict without end, as naïve as a declaration of war against evil.

Global media has woven the world into a single sphere. Evidence of the disproportionate affluence of the West is beamed into villages and urban slums in every nation, in every province, 24 hours a day. Baywatch is the most popular television show in New Guinea. Tribesmen from the mountainous heartland of an island that embraces 2,000 distinct languages walk for days to catch the latest episode.

The voices of the poor, who deal each moment with the consequences of environmental degradation, political corruption, overpopulation, the gross distortion in the distribution of wealth and the consumption of resources, who share few of the material benefits of modernity, will no longer be silent. Whether it is through the murderous bedlam of Bin Laden, the naïve hope of the rural Nepalese, the complex dreams of the myriad indigenous nations of the Americas, these voices will be heard.

True peace and security for the 21st century will only come about when we find a way to address the underlying issues of disparity, dislocation and dispossession that have provoked the madness of our age. What we desperately need is a global acknowledgement of the fact that no people and no nation can truly prosper unless the bounty of our collective ingenuity and opportunities are available and accessible to all. We must aspire to create a new international spirit of pluralism, a true global democracy in which unique cultures, large and small, are allowed the right to exist, even as we learn and live together, enriched by the deepest reaches of our imaginings. We need a global declaration of interdependence. In the wake of 9/11 this is not idle or naïve rhetoric, but rather a matter of survival.

By James Carroll | December 18, 2006A PARENT’S worst nightmare is the death of a child. Or is it? What if you have two sons, and one murders the other? Wouldn’t that be the worst thing? But what, then, if you and your spouse recognize that you yourselves are the cause of the one son’s heinous act, and of the other’s victimhood? Who could stand such knowledge?

That chain of circumstance, in fact, describes the universal tragedy, and it was given masterpiece expression in the story of Adam and Eve. The terrible consequences of their banishment from Paradise are usually identified as the pains of childbirth and the burden of work, but what are those griefs compared with what that couple surely felt upon learning of the murder of their son Abel by their son Cain? From then on, savage fratricidal war would define the human condition. Imagine the steely glances that Eve and Adam must have exchanged at the news. And imagine with what self-accusation they must have turned from one another. We did this.

Or perhaps not. Was the first act of war followed by the first act of denial? The story of Cain (”a tiller of the ground”) and Abel (”a keeper of sheep”) is a parable of primordial conflict between settled farmers and nomadic herders, and the lessons are timeless. Each warring group claims to have justice on its side, and believes that the way to peace is through conquest. War is always fought in the name of justice-and-peace. But peace achieved through war inevitably leads not to justice, but to conditions that cause the next war. History is the record of that succession. Victory through violence is the way to further violence. From Cain and Abel to the fratricidal wars unfolding today the line is direct. That the territory in which those wars unfold is the Levant crescent from which Genesis springs is enough to make its author weep — again.

Instead of the originating sin of parents, the Cain-and-Abel combatants of today’s Middle East (from the insurgent parties in Iraq, to the warring factions of Lebanon, to the antagonists in Israel and Palestine, now including the fratricidal Palestinians) are burdened by the fatal flaw of the United States of America. The indispensable nation, it turns out, proves indispensable only for the spread of chaos. The grievances of the Middle East are ancient, but so is the capacity for fragile balance, now upset. Iraqis, Lebanese, Israelis, and Palestinians all make violent choices and bear the weight of violent consequences, but the immediate context within which those choices are being made has been overwhelmingly established by violent choices made in Washington.

The Bush administration embraced the cult of war when it did not have to. Bush re-legitimized that cult, and sponsored it anew. In this, he was supported by the American people, its press and its political establishment. In the beginning, the nation itself re affirmed war as the way to justice-and-peace. We did this. The first fallacy lived. By now, even Washington’s one self-proclaimed “victory” has led to further defeat. The “good” war in Afghanistan put in place structures of oppression that promised an inevitable resumption of savagery, which has begun.

After murdering Abel, Cain justified his act, and his parents denied their responsibility for it. Otherwise, the dread pattern of accusation and recrimination would have been checked right there. Humans have been enslaved by this dynamic ever since. Does that vindicate the United States with a “realist” claim to inevitability? No. Because historic moments of ethical recognition regularly present themselves, and one just did. The Baker commission, whatever its faults, defined the folly of any further American pursuit of “victory” in Iraq. Yet, with Bush’s mantra of “prevail,” other “studies” commissioned to dilute Baker’s, and fresh Pentagon talk of brutal escalation, the aim of victory through mass violence is being reaffirmed. The unoriginal sin, by now, but more deadly than ever.

This column began with an eye on the far past. Because of the destructiveness of modern weapons, there will be no distant future unless humans, having seen through the congenital illusion of justice-and-peace through violence, come to the rejection of war. That must begin now. Democrats, take heed: Bush must not be allowed to further the chaos. Having led the world into this moral wilderness, America has a grave responsibility to lead the way out. We have to cease killing other people’s children, which is the way to stop them from killing ours. Stop the war by stopping.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

December 17, 2006It’s all but official: The war in Iraq is lost. Report after leaked report says so. Everybody in Washington knows it except that draft-dodging ferret in the White House. Politicians scurry to avoid the blame. One day soon people will ask aloud: How did we let 3000 GIs die for the weak ego of a pampered liar and his desperate need to prove he’s half the man his father was?

The troops from now on will die for a war that they already know is over. They are dying for politicians. They are dying for nothing. By now they must know it. It happened to us, too, long ago.

The talk among pols now is about finding an “exit strategy.” This means a way of pulling out without risking too many seats in Congress. Screw the troops. We must look to the elections. Do we really want an exit strategy? A friend of mine, with two tours in heavy combat in another war, has devised a splendid exit strategy. It consists of five words: “OK. On the plane. Now.” Bring your toothbrush. Everything else stays. We’re outa here.

It is a workable exit strategy, one with teeth, and comprehensible to all. But we won’t use it. We will continue killing our men, calculatedly, cynically, for the benefit of politicians. The important thing, you see, is the place in history of Bush Puppy. Screw the troops.

Face it. The soldiers are being used. They are being suckered. This isn’t new. It happened to my generation. Long after we knew that the war in Vietnam was lost, Lyndon Johnson kept it going to fertilize his vanity, and then Nixon spoke of the need to “save face”—at two hundred dead GIs a week. But of course Johnson and Nixon weren’t among the dead, or among the GIs.

I saw an interview on television long ago in which the reporter asked an infantryman near Danang, I think, what he thought of Nixon’s plan to save face. “His face, our ass,” was the reply. Just so, then, and just so now. Screw the troops. What the hell, they breed fast in Kansas anyway.

Soldiers are succinct and do not mince words. This makes them dangerous. We must keep them off-camera to the extent possible. A GI telling the truth could set recruiting back by years.

The truth is that the government doesn’t care about its soldiers, and never has. If you think I am being unduly harsh, read the Washington Post. You will find story after story saying that the Democrats don’t want to do anything drastic about the war. They fear seeming “soft on national security.” In other words, they care more about their electoral prospects in 2008 than they do about the lives of GIs. It’s no secret. For them it is a matter of tuning the spin, of covering tracks, of calculating the vector sum of the ardent-patriot vote which may be cooling, deciding which way the liberal wind blows, and staying poised to seem to have supported whoever wins. Screw the troops. Their fathers probably work in factories anyway.

Soldiers do not realize, until too late, the contempt in which they are held by their betters. Here is the psychological foundation of the hobbyist wars of bus-station presidents. If you are, say, a Lance Corporal in some miserable region of Iraq, I have a question for you: Would your commanding general let you date his daughter? I spent my high-school years on a naval base, Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground as it was then called. Dahlgren was heavy with officers, scientists, and engineers. Their daughters, my classmates, were not allowed to associate with sailors. Oh yes, we honor our fighting men. We hold them in endless respect. Yes we do.

For that matter, Lance Corporal, ask how many members of Congress have even served, much less been in combat. Ask how many have children in the armed services. Look around you. Do you see many (any) guys from Harvard? Yale? MIT? Cornell? Exactly. The smart, the well-off, the powerful are not about to risk their irreplaceable sit-parts in combat. Nor are they going to mix with mere high-school graduates, with kids from small towns in Tennessee, with blue-collar riffraff who bowl and drink Bud at places with names like Lenny’s Rib Room. One simply doesn’t. One has standards.

You are being suckered, gang, just as we were.

It is a science. The government hires slick PR firms and ad agencies in New York. These study what things make a young stud want to be A Soldier: a desire to prove himself, to get laid in foreign places, a craving for adventure, a desire to feel part of something big and powerful and respected, what have you. They know exactly what they are doing. They craft phrases, “Be a Man Among Men,” or “A Few Good Men,” or, since girls don’t like those two, “The Few, The Proud.” Join up and be Superman.

Then comes the calculated psychological conditioning. There is for example the sense of power and unity that comes of running to cadence with a platoon of other guys, thump, thump, thump, all shouting to the heady rhythm of boots, “If I die on the Russian front, bury me with a Russian cunt, Lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-lef….” That was Parris Island, August of ’66, and doubtless they say something else now, but the principle is the same.

And so you come out in splendid physical shape and feeling no end manly and they tell you how noble it is to Fight for Your Country. This might be true if anyone were invading the country. But since Washington always invades somebody else, you are actually fighting for Big Oil, or Israel, or the defense industry, or the sexual ambiguities who staff National Review, or the vanity of that moral dwarf on Pennsylvania Avenue. You will figure this out years later.

Once you are in the war, you can’t get out. We couldn’t either. While your commander in chief eats steak in the White House and talks tough, just like a real president, you kill people you have no reason to kill, about whom you know next to nothing—which one day may weigh on your conscience. It does with a lot of guys, but that comes later.

You are being suckered, and so are the social classes that supply the military. Note that the Pentagon cracks down hard on troops who say the wrong things online, that the White House won’t allow coffins to be photographed, that the networks never give soldiers a chance to talk unedited about what is happening. Oh no. It is crucial to keep morale up among the rubes. You are the rubes. So, once, were we.

LINK Sean Penn will be receiving The 2006 Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award from The Creative Coalition this evening, December 18, 2006, in New York City, where he will deliver the following speech.

The Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award. For the purposes of tonight and my own personal enjoyment, I’m going to yield to the notion that I deserve this.

And in the spirit of that, tell you that I am very honored to receive it. And for this I thank the Creative Coalition and my friend Charlie Rose. It does seem appropriate to take this opportunity to exercise the right that honors us all – freedom of speech.

Note for later:

The original title for the Louis XVI comedy called “Start The Revolution Without Me” was one of my favorites. That original title was “Louis, There’s a Crowd Downstairs.” But I’ll come back to that…

Words may be our most civil weapons of change, when they connect to actions of sacrifice, or good will, but they have no grace or power without bold clarity. So, if you’ll bear with me, borrowing a line from Bob Dylan, “Let us not talk falsely now – the hour is getting late.”

Global warming

Massive pollution

Non-stop U.S. war in Iraq

Attacks on civil liberties under the banner of war on terror

Military spending

You and I, U.S. taxpayers, spend 1 1/2 billion dollars on an Iraq-war-’focused’ military everyday, while social needs cry out.

Health care

Education

Public transit

Environmental protections

Affordable housing

Job training

Public investment

And, levy building.

We depend largely for information on these issues from media industries, driven by the bottom line to such an extent that the public interest becomes uninteresting.

And should we speak truth, we stand against government efforts to intimidate or legislate in the service of censorship. Whether under the guise of a Patriot Act or any other benevolent-sounding rationale for the age-old game of shutting down dissent by discouraging independent thinking and preventing progressive social change.

The most effective forms of de facto censorship are pre-emptive. Systemically, we are encouraged to keep our heads down, out of the line of fire – to avoid the danger, god forbid, that someone in the White House, on Capitol Hill, or a media blow-hard might take a shot at us.

But, as a practical matter, most of the limits on creative expression and other forms of free speech come from self-censorship, where the mechanism of corporate clout offers carrots and brandishes sticks. We avoid a conflict before the conflict materializes. We reach for the carrots and stay out of range of sticks.

Decades ago, Fred Friendly called it a “positive veto” – corporations putting big money behind shows that they want to establish and perpetuate. Whether in journalism or drama, creative efforts that don’t gain a financial “positive veto” are dismissible, then dismissed. We may not call that “censorship.” But whatever we call it, the effects of a “positive veto” system are severe. They impose practical limits on efforts to bring the most important realities to public attention sooner rather than later…

We’re beginning to see more revealing images of this war. But it’s later now, isn’t it? What we have to pay attention to are the results of these “practical limits.” One, is that wars become much easier to launch than to halt.

I’ve got a feeling about how we can begin to change this process and I want to pass it by you. Children grow up in our country — many by the way, under conditions of extreme poverty — and are told from a very early age “You will be accountable!” “With freedom, comes responsibility!” And so the lecture goes…Democratic and Republican alike. Lie-cheat-steal, and there will be consequences! Theft will be punished. Actions that cause the deaths of others will be severely punished. The message, from leaders in Washington, news media, mom, dad, and church is clear. Criminals MUST be held accountable.

Now, there’s been a lot of talk lately on Capitol Hill about how impeachment should be “off the table.” We’re told that it’s time to look ahead – not back…

Can you imagine how far that argument would go for the defense at an arraignment on charges of grand larceny, or large-scale distribution of methamphetamines? How about the arranging of a contract killing on a pregnant mother? “Indictment should be off the table.” Or “Let’s look forward, not backward.” Or “We can’t afford another failed defendant.”

Our country has a legal system, not of men and women, but of laws. Why then are we so willing to put inconvenient provisions of the U.S. constitution and federal law “off the table?” Our greatest concern right now should be what to put ON the table. Unless we’re going to have one set of laws for the powerful and another set for those who can’t afford fancy lawyers, then truth matters to everyone. And accountability is a matter of human and legal principle. If we’re going to continue wagging our fingers at the disadvantaged transgressors, then I suggest we be consistent. If truth and accountability can be stretched into sham concepts, we may as well open the gates of all our jails and prisons, where, by the way, there are more people behind bars than any other country in the world. One in every 32 American adults is behind bars, on probation, or on parole as we stand here tonight.

Which is to say that, globally, the United States is number one at demanding accountability and backing up that demand with imprisonment. But, when it comes to our president, vice president, secretary of state, former secretary of defense…this insistence on accountability vanishes. All of a sudden, what’s past is prologue. And we’re just “forward-looking.” But some people can’t just look forward. Men and women stationed in Iraq at this moment, under orders of a Commander-in-Chief so sufficiently practiced in the art of deception, that he got vast numbers of American journalists and the most esteemed media outlets of this country, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and PBS to eagerly serve his agenda-building for war. And the process also induced vast numbers of artists and performers (probably even some in this room tonight) to keep quiet and facilitate the push for an invasion in Iraq.

I’m sure many people who I met in Baghdad, both in my trips prior to and during the occupation, now similarly cannot just look forward. With lives so entirely shattered by a violence of occupation – an ongoing U.S. war effort and the civil war that it has catalyzed. All on the back of a crumbled infrastructure, following eleven years of devastating U.N. sanctions.

And, where is the accountability on behalf of the American dead and wounded, their families, their friends, and the people of the United States who have seen their country become a world pariah. These events have been enabled by people named Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice, as they continue to perpetuate a massive fraud on American democracy and decency.

On January 11, 2003, I made an appearance on Larry King’s show following my first trip to Iraq. I suggested that every American mother and father sit down with a scrap of paper and pencil and scribble the following words: Dear Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so — We regret to inform you that your son or daughter so-and-so, was killed in action in Iraq. I then asked that those mothers and fathers complete that letter in whatever way might comfort them should they receive it. When one considers what a bewildered continuation of those words a parent might attempt to write today, it seems inconceivable that this country could’ve ever bought into this war. Who were those mothers and fathers believing in?! We know it’s not the administration alone, but a culture at large, cloaking itself in self-righteousness, religion, and adolescent hero-dreaming machismo. Would they have believed Rush Limbaugh if they’d known he was high as a kite on OxyContin? Would they have believed the factually impaired Bill O’Reilly if they knew he was massaging his rectum with a loofah while telephonically harassing a staffer? Hannity, had they known he was simply a whore to the cause of his pimps – Murdoch and Ailes? Or the little bow-tie putz, if they knew all he was seeking was a good laugh from Jon Stewart? Maybe our countrymen and women were listening to Ted Haggert while he was whiffing meth and boning a muscle-headed gigolo? Or Mark Foley seeking junior weenis? Joe Lieberman, sitting Shiva? And Toby Keith, singing about how big his boots are?

“Oh, there goes Sean…he had to go and name-call. They say he can’t help himself.” Or, did I name-call? Maybe I just quickly summed up 7 or 8 little truths. Oh, no, you’re right – I name-called. I said, “putz”. I take it back. Or, do I? Did I say “whore?” Pimp? These are questions. But, the real and great questions of conscience and accountability would not loom so ominously — unanswered or evaded at such tremendous cost — without our day-to-day failure to insist on genuine accountability. Of course we’d prefer some easy ways to get there. But no easy ways exist. Not a new Congress. Not Barack Obama. And, not John McCain. His courage in North Vietnamese prison makes him a heroic man. His voting record in Congress makes him a damaging public servant. We have gotta stand the fuck up and show the world how powerful are the people in a democracy. That’s how we regain our position of example, rather than pariah, to the world at large. And that is how we can begin to put up our chins and allow pride and unification to raise our own quality of life and security.

They tell us we lost 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Is that enough? We’re about to match it. We’re within weeks, if not less, of killing 3,000 Americans in Iraq. I ask Speaker Pelosi, can we put impeachment on the table then? Without former FEMA chief Mike Brown being held accountable, post Katrina (scapegoat though he may have been) we’d have had the same chaos and neglect when Rita hit Houston. Think about it. And, the same people who trumpet deterrence as a justification for punishment when we speak of “crime and punishment,” will boast their positive thinking when dismissing the deterrent qualities of an impeachment proceeding.

What is impeachment? It’s not a Democratic versus Republican event. Not if used responsibly. If the House of Representatives votes to impeach this president, is he thrown out of office? No, he is not thrown out of office. That is not what impeachment is. Impeachment is the opportunity to proceed with accountability and give our elected senators, democratic and republican, the power to pursue a thorough investigation. The power to put the truth on the table. Mothers and fathers are losing their kids to horrifying deaths in this war every single day. Horrible deaths. Horrible maimings. Were crimes committed in enlisting the support of our country in this decision to go to war? For the moment we’re living the most spineless of scenarios; where the hawks abused impeachment eight years ago, now, the rest of us politely refuse to use it today. Let’s give the whistle-blowers cover, let’s get the subpoenas out there, and then, one by one, put this administration under oath. And then, if the crimes of “Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” are proven, do as Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution provides, and remove “the President, Vice President and…civil officers of the United States” from office. If the Justice Department then sees fit to bunk them up with Jeff Skilling, so be it.

So…look, if we attempt to impeach for lying about a blowjob, yet accept these almost certain abuses without challenge, we become a cum-stain on the flag we wave. You know, I was listening to Frank Rich this morning, speaking on a book tour. He said he thought impeachment proceedings would amount to a “decadent” sidetrack, while our soldiers were still being killed. I admire Frank Rich. And of course he would be right if impeachment is all we do. But we’re Americans. We can do two things at the same time. Yes, let’s move forward and swiftly get out of this war in Iraq AND impeach these bastards.

Christopher Reeve promised to get out of that chair. Well, I don’t know about you, but it feels like he’s up now and I wouldn’t be standing here if it weren’t on his shoulders. Let it be for something.

Georgie, there’s a crowd downstairs.

Thank you and good night.

by MAJOR BILL EDMONDS[Note from Larry Johnson: A CIA buddy forwarded this article. It is a must read. It is consistent with what I saw on the ground in Iraq when I was there in June. I discovered that the our focus on counter terrorism–i.e. kicking in doors and killing suspected terrorists–was counterproductive and not diminishing the violence in Iraq. Sometimes we were right but sometimes we were wrong. When we were wrong we ended up creating new enemies. John McCain’s mantra about more troops is off base. We don’t just need more troops, we need more of the right kind of troops. We need more special forces troops like Bill Edmonds. Unfortunately, we call them “Special Forces” for a reason. Not everyone can do the job and it takes years to train these men and women. Without the right kind of forces we are just digging a deeper hole.]

For just a minute or two, step into my life. I am an American soldier in the Army Special Forces. I have just returned from a one-year tour of duty in Iraq, where I lived, shared meals, slept and fought beside my Iraqi counterpart as we battled insurgents in the center of a thousand-year-old city. I am a conflicted man, and I want you to read the story of that experience as I lived it. In the interest of security, I have omitted some identifying details, but every word is true.

Routine and Ritual

I wake in the cold and dark of each morning to the sound of a hundred different muezzins calling Muslim men and women to prayer. These calls reverberate five times per day throughout a city the size of San Francisco. Above this sound I also hear two American helicopters making their steady patrol over the rooftops of the city and the blaring horns of armored vehicles as they swerve through dense city traffic. As a combat adviser and interrogator, I find these contrasts very appropriate for the life that I now lead.

This morning, on the Iraqi base in which I live, I walk 100 feet from my bedroom to work and back again. These are the same 100 feet I will travel month after month for one year. During every trip I smile, put a hand to my heart, sometimes a hand to my head, and say to every passing Iraqi the religious and cultural words that are expected from a fellow human being. In Iraq, one cannot separate Islamic culture from the individual. They are intrinsically woven into the fabric of daily life, but for most Westerners, they seem abnormal. I sit in smoke-filled rooms and drink sugar-laden tea in small crystal glasses. I spray tobacco-scented air freshener, kiss cheeks three times or more, allow the Iraqi on the right to pass through the doorway first. I know never to inquire on the health of a wife or elder daughter. I even hold hands with other men.

I proclaim my submission to God and my relationship to reality by saying “God willing” when referring to any future event. I say “God bless you” every time someone takes a seat. I eat with my hands, standing up, taking food from communal bowls. I attend work meetings where socializing is always the first priority. I hear the expressions “upon my mustache” or “by my eyes” or “over my head”–signifying the most binding and heartfelt of oaths. One day, I ask an Iraqi friend how many relatives he has and he answers, “In the city, maybe a thousand.” I have slowly come to realize that in Islam, and in Iraq, every action is worship. Every single thing that a person does–not just prayer or the time spent in a mosque but every action–is in fact an act of veneration. So yes, many things are different here. Yet we all have become friends–good friends–in part because I am here; I honor them and their religion by going out of my way to show them respect. Not all Americans act this way.

Many Americans assume that if a person does not speak English, it implies a lack of intelligence or some mental simplicity. We usually speak up only when spoken to. We attend meetings to pass information in the most efficient ways possible; our goal is always to decrease time while not losing content. For most Americans, God is intensely personal and religious utterances are not considered appropriate in a group of strangers. Our society is established on the principle of separating religion from state. In America, tobacco is quickly becoming a social taboo, and most men do not hold hands. If we are the first to arrive at a door, we enter first. We go on dates to meet future spouses–this is a cultural activity that I try again and again to explain. Also, Americans are a pragmatic people. We calculate the merit of an action first by its utility. In Islam, such a philosophy is immoral, and this truth is clearly manifest in the current clash between the Muslim and the postmodern worlds. So yes, we are very different. Yet if I look closely, with eyes wide open, I see that we are in some ways very much alike.

I jogged this morning around the small Iraqi base where I live. It was 6:00 a.m. and mildly warm. I wore very revealing blue Nike running shorts with ankle socks while listening to Limp Bizkit on my iPod. I slowly passed a small group of Iraqis and they all just stared, unsmiling. As I came closer, with a huge smile spread across my face, I put my hand to my heart and said, “Peace be upon you all,” (in Arabic of course) while gasping for air. They all, in unison, completely changed and beamed smiles, waved, talked, gave me a thumbs-up and replied, “Peace be upon you.”

Insurgents

On this small plot of land where I live, next to the Tigris River, in the very center of an Islamic metropolis, I help find and then interrogate terrorists alongside the Iraqi officer whom I advise and with whom I also live. We interrogate hundreds of suspected terrorists over many, many months. One of my responsibilities is to insure that prisoners are not abused. This I have done.

But for a year I have also been an observer of an immensely complicated situation. I am a soldier who fights alongside Iraqis, and I interact daily with and hear the words of Iraqi soldiers, civilians and insurgents alike. Through their eyes I see the strengths, foibles and faults of my military and culture. Sometimes I wish for the return of my ignorance. If no one else can understand my distress, I hope other Americans who fought shoulder to shoulder with other cultures–the French, Filipino, the Nungs and Yards and tribesmen of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia–will understand.

From my seat in a dark basement room I understand that many of those who terrorize have always hated the Americans. But being Muslim is definitely not a predisposition for violence; quite the opposite for most Iraqis. Why is it that many have slowly transformed over three years from happily liberated American supporters, to passive supporters of the insurgency, to active fighters of the American “occupation”? “I love Americans but hate your military,” says a college professor turned insurgent. “Americans have come here because you want our oil and because of your support of Israel. You bring democracy, but the Iraqi pays the price.” These were the first words I heard from a man I will call Ibrahim. The Iraqi Army had captured him. He was angry, and for the first time he was sitting face to face with the American soldier whom he hates beyond reason. That was two weeks ago.

Yesterday, I put two red plastic chairs outside in the sun and spoke with him again. This time, I believe I am not the American soldier he has come to hate. This time I am “Mr. Bill,” and it is now hard for him to hate me. I can see and sense his inner turmoil. For Ibrahim and for me, it is hard to hold on to the hate when the once-indistinct face becomes a real person. Later, he admits to having been deceived about the evil that is the American soldier. For two weeks I have spoken Arabic with him, started and ended every interaction with the required cultural and religious sayings, and demonstrated knowledge of his religion. For two weeks I have shown Ibrahim that I respect him as both an Iraqi and as a Muslim.

“It is how you act,” he says, “and how we are treated that makes me fight. For many Iraqis this anger at you is just an excuse to kill for money or greed. But for most others, they truly feel they are doing what is right. But you give them this excuse; the American military gives them the excuse.” So now terrorist leaders pretending to be pious Iraqis target this very common base anger, Iraqis fight and civilians raise their fists to salute the Holy Fighter.

“Two years ago I saw Abu Ghraib and what Americans did to women. I became an insurgent,” whispers a man I call Kareem, another civilian turned insurgent. “You come into our homes without separating the women and children, or asking the men politely if you may enter. Almost every hour of my life I hear some noise or see some sight of the American military. Soldiers talk with Iraqis only from behind a gun, from a position of power and not respect. Last week American soldiers got on a school bus and talked with all of the teenage girls. You had them take off their hijab so you could see their faces. You do not respect our women. This is the biggest of all problems of yours. You do not respect our women. How can we believe that Americans want to help when you do not even respect us or our faith?”

I later tell Kareem that these soldiers thought a person hiding a bomb was on the bus. This was obviously too little and too late. Perceptions are what count and word of American soldiers demanding to see the faces of Muslim women streamed from cellphone to cellphone across an entire city. Perhaps different from other past insurgencies fighting in different societies, within Iraq and over years, negative perceptions are what transform a citizen into an insurgency supporter and then into an insurgent. Now I drive throughout the crowded city alternating between shooting a machine gun and throwing Beanie-Babies to waving children. I think that at least the children are out in the streets and most are still waving. But even this hopeful sight is disappearing.

Last night the Iraqi Army captured Ibrahim’s cell leader and brought the two together in the same small room. For Ibrahim, this was a very traumatic moment, for he saw that the pious Muslim man, whom he followed but had not met, was in fact a 27-year-old tattooed common criminal. Ibrahim began to weep when he realized he had been deceived. A greedy and immoral man who killed for money while pretending to be religious had skillfully manipulated Ibrahim’s anger at Americans. Before Ibrahim was turned over to the Iraqi authorities, I saw him teaching soldiers to use their new office computer. He was helping them to type up his own written confession. But Ibrahim’s transformation is an anomaly. Such a confluence of peaceful events does not often turn an insurgent away from the insurgency. Most insurgents continue to fight the hated American soldier whom they have never met. Their hope is that the American soldier will just go away.

Bursting Bubbles

I have slowly come to understand that if we are to succeed in Iraq, we must either change the way we perceive and treat those we want to help or we must disengage the great percentage of our military from the population. The Iraqi base where I now live was once a small American base. The anxiety and distress of American soldiers in years past are scratched in the ceiling over my bed. “The mind is a terrible thing…,” “keep a sharp look-out during your descent,” “happiness is a temporary state of mind,” “control is just an illusion” and “nothing is as it seems.” Across the room, on another wall, next to another bed, are other words from another soldier. They read, “My score in this War: Arabs=10, cars=10, houses=3.”

American soldiers are angry and frustrated with Iraqis. Iraqis are angry and frustrated with Americans. Many Iraqis just want American soldiers to go away, and I struggle within myself not to agree. Day after day I observe the interactions of Americans with Iraqis and am often ashamed. I see that required classes given to all American soldiers on cultural sensitivity do not work; 100,000 or more American soldiers daily interacting, engaging and fighting Iraqis within their own society for more than three years will inevitably create a wellspring of citizen hostility. In this war, none of us can change who we fundamentally are.

American military culture interacts with Iraqi Islamic culture like a head-on collision. And massive deployments of American soldiers fighting a counterinsurgency now hurts more than it helps. When we focus on the military solution to resolve a social problem, we inevitably create more insurgents than we can capture or kill. As a consequence, real “Islamic terrorists” subverting their own tolerant religion will use this popular anger and sense of resentment to their advantage. As much as they hate and fear us, they also say that we cannot just leave the mess that we have made.

“I know the American military cannot now leave Iraq,” says another captured insurgent whom I will call Muhammad. “If you did, we would all start fighting each other until one person killed enough enemies to come out on top. When I stop seeing your military shooting at civilians on our streets and I stop seeing Iraqi soldiers and policemen as your puppets, then I will stop fighting.”

Muhammad may be naïve and living in a bubble of projected motivations and false perceptions. But his bubble burst when he was captured and plucked from an insular society. My own bubble burst when I was taken out of my society and put into Muhammad’s. Military leaders tell us to “focus on training the Iraqi soldiers and policemen to fight, and do not fight the insurgency yourself.” Yet if the citizen is angry with us, won’t this anger just transfer to the very people we train and fight with? What if we are unintentionally assuring that the Iraqi soldiers and policemen will have someone to fight against if we leave?

The Iraqi civilian I speak with says that is so. In the eyes of many, there is now no difference between the American on patrol and the Iraqi policeman or soldier who is with the American on patrol. If the citizen believes that the American military is an “occupying power,” won’t he now perceive the Iraqi policeman or soldier as this occupier’s puppet?

American soldiers do live within self-imposed bubbles of isolation. These are called American bases and are where the greatest percentage of soldiers live and never leave. These bubbles are far different from the universe of Muhammad and his colleagues. We know that Muhammad’s beliefs about who we are and what motivates us are mostly false. His first perceptions are defined by culture and religion, careful words of terrorist leaders, and a thousand channels of satellite television beamed into the homes of almost every Iraqi. It is then our behavior that contributes to these negative perceptions. Our self-imposed isolation and the citizens’ perceptions may be all that the insurgency needs to continue and be successful.

I have come to realize that we isolate our soldiers from the societies in which we operate. We airlift and sealift vacuum-sealed replicas of America to remote corners of the world; once there, we isolate ourselves from the very people we are trying to protect or win over. An Iraqi once told me, “How you treat us must be like how African-Americans felt.” If you’re an American soldier in Iraq working as an adviser, ask yourself this: Is the Iraqi I live and fight with not allowed to enter any American facility? If you are a military adviser or training to be an adviser, look around where you eat: Are the Americans on one side of the room and the Iraqis on the other? Do you even eat with Iraqis? Do you go out of your way to avoid eye contact and thus not greet the Iraqis you walk by? Do you try to learn their language or follow their customs? Do you habitually expect Iraqis to share intelligence and then not respond in kind? Do you distrust them?

Last week I read an article in an American newspaper that described a very common scene. Getting ready to go on a mission with an Iraqi policeman, a young American soldier snaps at an Iraqi officer and says, “Get off the cellphone.” Then this same soldier turns to another American soldier and says, “He is probably warning a terrorist that we are coming.” It may not be racism, only ignorance combined with frustration and paranoia, but to the Iraqi, it sure does feel like racism.

To play the role of a combat adviser–something American military personnel are increasingly asked to do–is to live within a foreign culture and to train and fight with a foreign military. Many American soldiers are not capable of such an important role or mission. The job is long, very difficult, and set within a very austere, hostile and unfamiliar environment. The adviser becomes culturally isolated and so requires a unique personality combined with extensive training; but most lack this expertise and inclination. It’s a sink-or-swim job, and most candidates sink after only a few months. They then retreat inside the shells of themselves and soon become combat advisers who do not interact or even advise. They thus form adviser teams that are dysfunctional and counterproductive. They exist until the day arrives when they can return home to a place that is familiar, where they are not hated.

The Tightrope

American soldiers now patrol the streets with extreme caution and quick reflexes. They have come to think that every Iraqi who runs a red light or does not yield is a terrorist. They shoot at or accidentally kill civilians, which then creates one more insurgent and three more insurgency supporters. I know this cause-and-effect explanation is simplistic for an immensely complicated situation, but you get the picture. I will never fault American soldiers for their actions and reactions; it really is dangerous out there, and no other nation could ever ask for such service and sacrifice from its citizens. Yet I also try not to fault Iraqi civilians, for their truth is just as valid to them as is mine to me.

I have seen firsthand why I cannot create stability by force within an Islamic society and why many say democracy cannot be brought by force but must evolve.

To be a moral person in a protracted counterinsurgency is my daily struggle, one in which I am asked to instill social morality on a culture that is not my own.

So what is the balance between taking charge in Iraq and/or abandoning the country? Our best response is to pull the American soldiers back and push the Iraqi soldiers/policemen forward as quickly as possible. I feel the urgency of this mandate as I type these very words on this small Iraqi base among Iraqi soldiers. As I told Ibrahim, the captured insurgent, “I want to leave your country. The only reason I stay here is because Iraqis are dying and you insist on fighting. All we want to do is to help.”

I naturally assumed he understood this. Well, he had not, and most do not. This message is one that is lacking and one that Iraqis surely need. So I find myself balanced on a tightrope bridging a deathly height. As Iraqi intelligence officers once explained to me over hot tea, “It is a race to see which of many possibilities comes first; the competency of an Iraqi Security Force with a stable and competent government, or the formation of a monolithic and deadly insurgency or civil war, both of which would prevent the latter.”

In Iraq, I wish to survive and to succeed. Yet as the days pass, my hopes increasingly become mutually exclusive: The insurgency gets more effective; the citizen anger at us and the Iraqi Security Force becomes greater; the fractions in the society grow deeper and more violent; the American public becomes more impatient as the war is perceived as less legitimate and the conditions to form a stable Iraqi government become more elusive. So I run along this rope as if in a race to get away. I run knowing full well that my speed comes only at the sacrifice of my balance. I long for the tranquility of normalcy, the comfortable, the understandable, and so I want to run from Iraq. So what then can I do besides serve admirably and hope for the best while fearing the worst?

The Iraqi officer I advise once said after months of frantically working to capture terrorists, “You need to just relax. You are here, so there will always be another terrorist to capture. Sit and drink some tea with me.”

I doubt he was intentionally being prophetic. As a soldier who lives with an Iraqi, I do hope to one day just sit and drink some tea with him. To sit and talk of family without a worry in the world. But to do so, I must do more than just train, advise and fight with my Iraqi friend. I must go out of my way every single day to disprove the “Ugly American” label that is attached to me. I must approach every personal interaction as a singular opportunity to battle the insurgency and then realize that my interactions with each and every Iraqi do have very lasting and very strategic consequences.