October 2007- Resurrected blog entries

By James Carroll | October 22, 2007

ONE NEWS story from Afghanistan last week told of two tragedies. In Paktika Province a young man, whose chest was wrapped with an explosive vest, was en route to the place where he would detonate himself. But then, he saw people at prayer in a mosque, and he changed his mind. He went to the police. He began removing his explosive vest, but it went off. He alone was killed.

In Uruzgan Province, a young man, recently home from Pakistan where he had attended a religious school, announced a similar intention to his family. He was going to kill the enemy by killing himself. The article said that he handed over $3,600, presumably a reward for what he was about to do. In front of his mother, brother, and two sisters, he displayed his explosive vest. The young man’s mother was horrified, and she immediately tried to remove the vest from his body. The bomb detonated. The young man, his mother, and his three siblings were killed instantly.

Reports from Afghanistan and Iraq have been numbingly discouraging, in part because, in the United States, they come as a steady stream of abstraction. We see the faces of American casualties on the evening news, and the fate of wounded GIs draws sympathy, but otherwise the human cost of the war is kept vague.

We know to the single digit how many coalition fighters have died, but estimates of Iraqi deaths span a range from tens to hundreds of thousands. A single death – a tragedy; a million – a mere statistic. Meanwhile, as the suicide bombers treat their bodies as weapons, so do we, as if those faceless killers are indeed the automatons their masters want them to be. Yet this tale of two bombers suggests that every such deed, no matter how prompted by indoctrination or despair, must involve human responses.

During World War I, when the British Parliament was enacting a conscription law, so that draftees could replace the depleted ranks in the trenches, a politician declared, “The necessary supply of heroes must be maintained at all cost.”

A seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers is what makes the American war the horror that it is. Villains to one side, heroes to the other – but who are those bombers? Who are their mothers, brothers, and sisters? The two incidents from Afghanistan offer rare glimpses into the human depth of this otherwise inhuman act. Ambivalence and fear surely accompany each bomber on the way to destruction; anguish and dread must fill the hearts of their family members, if they know ahead of time. After the fact, grief must anchor every feeling.

I think of that mother. What was the meaning of her life if not the well-being of her children? What could be worse than the death of one’s children by one’s child? As the mother saw the suicide vest on her son, and as she then tried to wrestle it off, how could she not have been screaming inside, “Who did this to my child?”

I think of the siblings, witnessing the horror unfolding before them. How helpless they must have felt, with their last glance fixed on a violation of all they had been taught to love and value. I think of that first bomber, who, en route to killing, accidentally caught a glimpse of worship, which is nothing but the wish to affirm life, which is another name for God. I think of the bomb masters, who recruited those boys, manipulated them, tricked them into imagining that death could be an affirmation. And I think of those who created the situation within which all of this unfolds.

What is that situation but an explosive vest? It does no disrespect to these dead people to recognize this image as a metaphor of what we Americans have created. We are the bomb masters who have wrapped the body of Iraq in wires and plastic explosives. How can we remove the vest without blowing it up?

Iraqi civil war, conflict with Iran, Turkish-Kurdish violence, chaos throughout the Middle East – and now President Bush tells us that, if we don’t defuse the regional body vest carefully, World War III will start. There it is. Bush himself acknowledging at last what, under his leadership, the United States has done. We have put an explosive vest on Earth itself.

And now our job is to get it off. The revelation here is that, in the new age, every bomber is a suicide bomber.

By James Carroll | October 8, 2007IF COLUMBUS is the beginning of the story, and, say, Lincoln is the middle, what is the end? Each episode of the American narrative surfaced a problem, which prompted attempts to resolve it, which led in turn to a new problem. This movement from problem to resolution to new problem and ever new efforts to fix things is what makes the American story great.

So Columbus arrived in 1492, but carried the European virus of ideological absolutism – what led Queen Isabella to expel Jews from Spain that same year. Such absolutism sparked Old World religious wars, and Puritan dissenters defied it by coming to America. But they brought their own version of that absolutism. John Winthrop’s City on a Hill was a religiously gated community (no “pagans” or Quakers), with the magistrate empowered to coerce conformity. Therefore Roger Williams proposed the separation of church and state. By Jefferson’s time, though, that distinction justified the separation of private morality from public ethics. Private morality meant he and others could keep the private property called slaves.

Abraham Lincoln presided at the altar on which the bloody sacrifice of civil war was justified by “freedom,” but no sooner had redemptive violence (”. . .as He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”) saved the nation’s soul than it spawned the Indian genocide, and the Jim Crow betrayal of blacks. In the name of freedom, the United States conquered a continent, and claimed a hemisphere – a destiny whose virtue was manifest against corrupt European imperialism. In the American Century, the nation born in rejection of ideological absolutism called itself capital of “the free world,” but redemptive violence went nuclear, and defense of that freedom required absolute readiness to destroy the world. The chill of Cold War “realism” froze the American conscience.

An unexpected thaw (warming Gorbachev and Reagan) ended the Cold War bloodlessly, and America had a chance to redefine national redemption, removing violence from its center. That brings us to today. If this nation followed the pattern of its own historic reckoning with the ever unfinished work of public morality, political discourse would be defined by the dual-project of eliminating nuclear weapons and building international structures of peace. Instead, we are paralyzed by a war that no one wants, unable to change what matters most.

Last week, this story reached a climax of sorts, with developments like these:

War Cost. With new budget requests, the Iraq war price tag jumped over the $600 billion mark – enough, extrapolating from figures of the National Priorities Project, to add 9 million teachers to public schools for a year. Where would American education be if that happened instead? And where Iraq?

Mercenaries. We learned that the United States government has surrendered to “private contractor” hit squads the primal function of protecting its own diplomats in Iraq. Such unaccountable and profit-driven forces betray the foundational American military ethic. Hessians at last.

Abolition. Barack Obama made a major speech calling for a return to the long-abandoned goal of nuclear elimination. “We need to change our nuclear policy and our posture, which is still focused on deterring the Soviet Union – a country that doesn’t exist.” The major news media ignored this important declaration, obsessing instead with horse-race polls and fund-raising totals. Nuclear reform (antidote to proliferation and terrorism both) is not a campaign issue.

Torture. The Bush administration was revealed to have again secretly approved “enhanced” interrogation methods at restored CIA “black sites,” where prisoners are once more held without treaty protections – measures that Congress and the Supreme Court have already rejected. Despite scandals, US torture continues.

These developments would be disturbing enough, but what they point to is an interruption in this nation’s most important public tradition – the movement from recognition of a problem to its attempted resolution. From ill treatment of native peoples, to enslavement of Africans, to temptations to empire, to a religious embrace of violence, to Red Scare paranoia, to an insane arms race – we Americans have had our failings. But we have faced them. The capacity for self-criticism and change has defined our history. But that is not happening today. We are in an arms race with ourselves, and will not stop. Our unjust war is just unending. Our politics and media, meanwhile, form a feedback loop of banality. “Freedom” has become our prison.

Does all of this reveal a deeper flaw in our moral narrative itself? After all, we say today that our story began with Columbus. But what about the ones who welcomed him?

By James Carroll | October 1, 2007

IF YOU Google “war Iran,” you will come up with more than 90 million results. The blogosphere is full of alarms about US intentions toward Iran. Newsweek said last week that Vice President Cheney has been looking to provoke an Israeli assault against Iranian nuclear facilities that would draw Iranian reactions, sparking a “justifiable” American attack. At the United Nations, meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France seemed to second his foreign minister’s recent warning that an unchecked Iranian nuclear program will lead to war.

But this “constant drumbeat of conflict” concerning Iran, said Admiral William Fallon, head of the US Central Command, is “not helpful and not useful.” Fallon wants to head off such talk. “There will be no war,” he told Al-Jazeera, a denial that keeps the specter looming.

It is hard to imagine that President Bush would actually order an attack against Iran, despite the drumbeat, since the assault would instantly turn 160,000 US troops in Iraq into Shi’ite hostages. But it also seems clear that Bush, even content to leave Iraq a shambles, does not want to depart Washington with Tehran’s nuclear provocations unresolved.

The surprisingly hawkish Sarkozy, warning of Iran, told the United Nations last week that “weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace. They lead to war.” That was a dangerous conflation of two distinct ideas, since renunciation can be more a signal of strength than weakness.

Indeed, the lesson of the last half of the 20th century is that nations define their greatness as much by what they refrain from doing as by what they do. The United States long ago confronted the dilemma posed by a nuclear-determined Iran – in the far deadlier contest with the Soviet Union. The lesson of that experience seems forgotten, yet renunciation was at its core.

In 1945, General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, bluntly declared, “If we were truly realistic instead of idealistic, as we appear to be, we would not permit any foreign power with which we are not firmly allied, and in which we do not have substantial confidence, to make or possess atomic weapons. If such a country started to make atomic weapons, we would destroy its capacity to make them before it has progressed far enough to threaten us.”

Even when, in subsequent years, more dovish figures like Bertrand Russell and J. Robert Oppenheimer supported the idea of a preemptive strike against nascent Soviet nuclear facilities, President Harry Truman renounced the idea.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower succeeded Truman, that renunciation defined his “massive retaliation” doctrine, an official commitment to refrain from first strikes on Soviet nuclear targets. In 1954, Ike approved a National Security Policy paper that made it formal; “The United States and its allies must reject the concept of preventive war or acts intended to provoke war.”

By the time John F. Kennedy became president, all-out nuclear war seemed imminent. But when, in summer 1961, the new technology of satellite surveillance showed that the Soviet nuclear force was far smaller and more vulnerable than ever imagined, the Pentagon brass saw a God-given opportunity to head off Armageddon simply by blowing up Moscow’s nuclear weapons on the ground. Defying the generals, and their civilian acolytes, Kennedy said no.

Because of Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, such renunciation became a pillar of American political morality, but history unfolded to show that, despite Groves’s contrast between realism and idealism, this consistent refusal to launch antinuclear attacks was profoundly practical, too.

A further succession of US presidents went on to demonstrate the wisdom of this off-limits threshold. The nonviolent resolution of the American-Soviet nuclear high noon offers transcendent instruction, the past’s most important message to the present. The trigger-happy gunslingers turned out to be wrong – “crackpot realists,” as C. Wright Mills dubbed them. “In the name of realism,” he wrote in 1956, “they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.” Is it happening again?

Pentagon “global dominance” doctrine now prohibits the emergence of any military rival to the United States, which means preemptive attack must replace stabilizing deterrence as the ready exercise of American power. Fortunately, though, the Bush administration’s generic embrace of “preventive war” is discredited by Iraq, which is the main reason to hope no preemptive attack on Iran is coming. But that hope must be reinforced by a sense of history. America has already answered this question, and the answer remains no.

The president’s warmongering remarks on the Iranian threat suggest he is psychotic. Really.

by Rosa Brooks

Forget impeachment.

Liberals, put it behind you. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney shouldn’t be treated like criminals who deserve punishment. They should be treated like psychotics who need treatment.

Because they’ve clearly gone mad. Exhibit A: We’re in the middle of a disastrous war in Iraq, the military and political situation in Afghanistan is steadily worsening, and the administration’s interrogation and detention tactics have inflamed anti-Americanism and fueled extremist movements around the globe. Sane people, confronting such a situation, do their best to tamp down tensions, rebuild shattered alliances, find common ground with hostile parties and give our military a little breathing space. But crazy people? They look around and decide it’s a great time to start another war.

That would be with Iran, and you’d have to be deaf not to hear the war drums. Last week, Bush remarked that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III . . . you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” On Sunday, Cheney warned of “the Iranian regime’s efforts to destabilize the Middle East and to gain hegemonic power . . . [we] cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions.” On Tuesday, Bush insisted on the need “to defend Europe against the emerging Iranian threat.”

Huh? Iran is now a major threat to Europe? The Iranians are going to launch a nuclear missile (that they don’t yet possess) against Europe (for reasons unknown because, as far as we know, they’re not mad at anyone in Europe)? This is lunacy in action.

Writing in Newsweek on Oct. 20, Fareed Zakaria, a solid centrist and former editor of Foreign Affairs, put it best. Citing Bush’s invocation of “the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon,” Zakaria concluded that “the American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. . . . Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s. . . . It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are . . . allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?”

Planet Cheney.

Zakaria may be misinterpreting the president’s remark about World War III though. He saw it as a dangerously loopy Bush prediction about the future behavior of a nuclear Iran — the idea being, presumably, that possessing “the knowledge” to make a nuclear weapon would so empower Iran’s repressive leaders that they’ll giddily rush out and start World War III.

But you could read Bush’s remark as a madman’s threat rather than a madman’s prediction — as a warning to recalcitrant states, from Germany to Russia, that don’t seem to share his crazed obsession with Iran. The message: Fall into line with administration policy toward Iran or you can count on the U.S.A. to try to start World War III on its own. And when it comes to sparking global conflagration, a U.S. attack on Iran might be just the thing. Yee haw!

You’d better believe these guys would do it too. Why not? They have nothing to lose — they’re out of office in 15 months anyway. Après Bush-Cheney, le déluge! (Have fun, Hillary.)

But all this creates a conundrum. What’s a constitutional democracy to do when the president and vice president lose their marbles?

The U.S. is full of ordinary people with serious forms of mental illness — delusional people with violent fantasies who think they’re the president, or who think they get instructions from the CIA through their dental fillings.

The problem with Bush is that he is the president — and he gives instructions to the CIA and military, without having to go through his dental fillings.

Impeachment’s not the solution to psychosis, no matter how flagrant. But despite their impressive foresight in other areas, the framers unaccountably neglected to include an involuntary civil commitment procedure in the Constitution.

Still, don’t lose hope. By enlisting the aid of mental health professionals and the court system, Congress can act to remedy that constitutional oversight. The goal: Get Bush and Cheney committed to an appropriate inpatient facility, where they can get the treatment they so desperately need. In Washington, the appropriate statutory law is already in place: If a “court or jury finds that [a] person is mentally ill and . . . is likely to injure himself or other persons if allowed to remain at liberty, the court may order his hospitalization.”

I’ll even serve on the jury. When it comes to averting World War III, it’s really the least I can do.