[Peace] News notes 2006-07-09: War is the health of the state

[Carl Estabrook]

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	My notes on last week's "global war on terrorism"
	(regularly prepared for the Sunday meeting of AWARE,
	the "Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort" of Champaign-Urbana)
	this week are in the form of the script for a radio show
	broadcast on Monday 10 July 2006 on community radio station
	WEFT-FM, Champaign.  Sources and citations will be provided
	on request; paragraphs preceded by a bracketed source
	abbreviation are substantially verbatim. --CGE
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	10 JULY 2006 // "TELLING TIME" // SCRIPT

GOOD EVENING. It's just after 6pm on Monday, July 10, 2006.  On this day
in 1894, 14,000 federal & state troops finally succeed in putting down the
labor strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had been
peaceful until July 5, when federal troops intervened in Chicago, against
the repeated protests of the Governor & Chicago mayor. During the Pullman
Strike federal troops killed 34 American Railway Union members in the
Chicago area while attempting to break the strike, led by Eugene Debs,
against the Pullman Company. Debs & several others were imprisoned for
violating injunctions and the union was destroyed.
	It's also the anniversary, in 1925, of the destruction by the
government of the files of correspondence, documents & books belonging to
the I.W.W. which were used as exhibits in their trial against "Big Bill"
(William D.) Haywood in 1918.  With this auto-da-fe the State reveals its
fear & contempt for labor generally & its particular desire to destroy the
revolutionary trade unionism of the I.W.W.
	And it's also the anniversary, in 1962, of the Kennedy
administration's rejection of a Soviet proposal for complete & general
disarmament -- only one of many similar attempts by Russia to defuse the
armaments race to be rejected by the US in the 1950s & 60s.

IT'S "TELLING TIME: ADDITIONS TO THE CORPORATE NEWS" at WEFT.
I'm Carl Estabrook, and our program takes its inspiration from a line in a
1934 play, "The Front Page" -- "Trying to determine what is going on in
the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by
watching the second hand of a clock."

ELECTRONIC MEDIA -- and the one real American innovation of the 20th
century, Public Relations -- have made the matter much worse than it was
when Ben Hecht wrote that line, 70 years ago.  Corporate news controls
much of what we know -- not so much by suppressing stories (altho' they
sometimes do that, too) -- but by providing emphasis, directing our
attention, telling us what's important, and indicating *how* we should
think about the stories that that they do report .

AGAINST THAT, on "Telling Time" we want to take the time to tell you
stories from the foreign press, blogs, and other alternative media, as
well as stories that have been overlooked or downplayed in the media owned
by big business.

FOR EXAMPLE, did you hear that Hillary "Clinton seeks to woo Wall Street"?
That's the headline on the Financial Times today. The British business
paper explains that

	"Hillary Clinton has been cosying up to Wall Street in recent weeks with a
series of meetings with top executives that could help her follow the path
blazed by her husband ahead of his first presidential run ... Bill
Clinton's early forays to Wall Street helped advance his bid for the
Democratic nomination in 1992.
	"Some events, such as a recent gathering at Morgan Stanley that
included chief executive John Mack, a big Republican donor, have been
fundraisers for the Senate campaign.
	"Others, including a chat with executives at Lehman Brothers, are
more policy-oriented.
	"Mrs Clinton is said to be planning meetings at Merrill Lynch and
Credit Suisse, among others...
	"The Wall Street meetings could pay dividends in 2008 by helping
reassure bankers that Mrs Clinton is a free market centrist [sic]...
	"'She wants to reassure them that she is really OK,' said Maurice
Carroll, a pollster and political analyst...
	"Executives across Wall Street, while historically more supportive
of Republicans, are dismayed at the degradation of the nation's image and
say the decline makes it harder for them to do business abroad...
	"Many on Wall Street are already familiar with Mrs Clinton through
her work in the Senate. She often visits big New York employers such as JP
Morgan Chase for public and private events. She has raised $4.7m (3.6m,
2.5m)  from individuals in the financial services, real estate and
insurance sectors this year..."

And what is the US press doing about the probably Democratic nominee for
President in 2008?  Well, the NYT ran a long front-page article on the
state of the Clinton's marriage...

"WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE," wrote American Randolph Bourne during
WWI, meaning that governments gather power to themselves in wartime -- and
when war is seen as a lowering possibility.  How much the American and
Israeli governments want war -- or perhaps even more the rumors of war --
how little they have ever pursued peace in fact, because it is manifestly
not in their interest, was on display this week.  Israel staged punitive
raids into its vast prison-camp of Gaza that killed dozens, while the only
Israeli soldier to die was killed by his own troops.  Meanwhile the
Americans conjured war threats from east and west Asia, from Korea and
Iran.

[2] What war and the threat of war does for governments like ours can be
understood from trying to imagine what the Bush administration would be
like -- or even if there now would be a Bush administration -- had there
been no 9/11 attacks.  Lacking the excuse of the GWOT, the Bush people
would have been pilloried by the public for failing in their
responsibilities as a government, from health care to Katrina, as it
became ever clearer that they were striving to serve their real
constituency, the wealthy and powerful.  But given the war, they're able
to cover their service to their masters by lies and distraction.  No
wonder Karl Rove told Republicans to run on the war in 2002; no wonder
that the Democrats, working for the same constituency, failed to attack
the war in 2004; and no wonder that even now, when the polls show 2/3 of
Americans support withdrawal from Iraq and 1/3 think it should begin
immediately, the Republicans still think that they can win the 2006
elections by once again running on the war -- and they're probably right.

[3] The hostility of the USG to peace -- i.e, their desire for a permanent
war emergency -- is on view in the Korean and Iranian "crises."  Neither
is a crisis, except insofar as US policy requires them to be so, and both
are miserably reported by the US media, notably by ignoring all but the
most recent events.  The US media always seem to have been born yesterday.

[4] First, concerning Korea, the firing of rockets from that country on
July 4 was construed as an attack on Hawaii (and not a celebration of our
independence day) in the wilder parts of the US media.  It was not
described as competing symbolism, although the NKG was very much aware of
the large Pacific war games staged by the US beginning on June 25, the
anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War -- which were not in the
news stories.

[5] More importantly, the recent history of the US/NK relations was never
mentioned in the US media: When the first Bush administration came in, the
US negotiators were on the way

	"...to a deal that would have eliminated the North's development,
production and testing of ballistic missiles. The Bush administration
stopped negotiating and started threatening the North, mostly with words,
not many deeds, because our allies weren't going to go along with the
deeds. The ultimate bankruptcy of the policy drove us to the negotiating
table, because the allies were about to part company with us. They also
led to a very important joint statement out of the six-party talks last
September, in which the North agreed that it would abandon all nuclear
weapons and all existing weapons programs, which means both the plutonium
program that they have and the uranium enrichment program.  And no sooner
did that happen than the hardliners in the administration, led by Vice
President Cheney, got the US. negotiator, Chris Hill, to back away from
all the obligations we undertook in that statement." [DN]

[6] "So what led the North Koreans to remind the West of its missiles?
Perhaps it was President Bush's announcement in May that the
administration would negotiate directly with Iran over its nuclear program
a move that led the North Koreans to call for talks of their own with the
United States. In this light, North Korea's missile brinkmanship is not
intended to scare us. Rather, in the ham-handed way that is Pyongyang's
specialty, it is meant to invite Washington to make a deal." [Cumings/Woo]

[7] Bush's flack, Tony Snow, actually played down the Korean missile
threat, because of course the USG wants the crisis but not the all-out
war, in part because the NK deterrent works: they apparently do have a
half dozen plutonium weapons,and they can do unacceptable damage to Seoul
even by conventional artillery, as the SKG, which generally opposes US
policy, quite realizes.

[8] Meanwhile, in regard to Iran, the media do the USG's work and present
Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il as a matched set of nuclear madman.  (A
cartoon in our local newspaper show them as children at either end of a
see-saw, as the US watches with concern.)  Again, even the most recent
history of US/Iran relations isn't mentioned, including Iran's offers to
negotiate on every point, and even more importantly, the agreement Iran
reached with the EU three years ago to control nuclear production.

[9] "The nuclear negotiations between Iran and the European Union were
based on a bargain that the EU, held back by the US, has failed to honor.
The bargain was that Iran would suspend uranium enrichment, and the EU
would undertake security guarantees. The language of the joint declaration
was unambiguous. 'A mutually acceptable agreement,' it said, would not
only provide 'objective guarantees' that Iran's nuclear program is
'exclusively for peaceful purposes' but would 'equally provide firm
commitments on security issues.'"  The phrase "security issues" is a
thinly veiled reference to the threats by the United States and Israel to
bomb Iran, and preparations to do so. The model regularly adduced is
Israel's bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, which appears to have
initiated Saddam's nuclear weapons programs, another demonstration that
violence tends to elicit violence." [FT]

[10] Again,the US wants the crisis and not the all-out war.  In the New
Yorker this week, Seymour Hersh "reports that the Defense Department has
been drawing up plans, at President Bush's direction, for a major bombing
campaign inside Iran. Hersh says that generals and admirals have told the
Bush Administration the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in
destroying Iran's nuclear program and that war planners are not even sure
what to target." [DN]

[11] Of course the USG would probably not be able to inflate its vast
propaganda bubble of the GWOT is the were no real threat of terrorist
attacks in the US.  The 9/11 attacks did occur (and they probably weren't
organized by Dick Cheney).  And as the CIA correctly pointed out before
the invasion of Iraq, that invasion has made terrorist attacks more
likely.  (In Britain, on the anniversary of the London attacks that killed
52 and wounded hundreds, a video tape of one of the suicide bombers
confirmed what had been vigorously denied by the Labour government and
even some of the left in Britain, that the motive was indeed the
British-American attack on Iraq.)

[12] But the USG needs the threat of terrorism and therefore avoids
working effectively against it.  The Congress (with its liberal members
voting aye) recently removed funds for the inspection of cargo containers
coming into US ports, even as they voted vast new sums to kill people in
Iraq -- and thus make more people willing to consider such things as
smuggling weapons into American harbors.  (The girl who was raped by
several US soldiers after watching them kill her little sister and parents
had two brothers who escaped American liberation: in their position, what
would one do?)

[13] Unwilling actually to deter terrorism for policy reasons, the US
secret police must nevertheless appear to the public to be doing so, so
they concoct plots by the use of agents provocateur, entrapment and the
manipulation of crazy or deluded individuals -- as seems to be the case in
Florida last month (where the FBI suggested the plot and offered to supply
the explosives) -- and again in this week's plot against the NY tunnels,
which even CBS news dismissed "mere jihadist bravado" on the part of the
supposed conspirators, lurid accounts of whom had been planted by the FBI
in the New York Daily News.

[14] But obediently enough, the NYDN blares in its Sunday edition, "World
War III has begun." The News isn't sure when it started, but it becomes
clear that it means the general war scare that the US is promoting.  It
suggests WWIII might have begun "after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold
War ended" -- i.e., when the last bete noir went away and terrorism took
its place. "The war on terror, or the war of terror, has tentacles that
reach much of the globe. It is a world war ... a threat against modern
society." And it argues this time nuclear deterrence as with the USSR
won't work, because "Such rational thinking is quaint next to the ravings
of North Korean nut Kim Jong Il and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
They both seem to be dying to die - and set the world on fire, [so] we
still must prevail [in Iraq], but Iraq could mean nothing if Iran or Bin
Laden get the bomb or North Korea uses one."

	WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE.

[The program concluded with Jeremy Scahill's talk, "The Myth of
Humanitarian Intervention," delivered at the Traprock Peace Center,
Deerfield MA, 24 June 2006.  An mp3 version can be found at
<http://www.traprockpeace.org/socialism_2006.html>.  While good-hearted
American liberals clamor for "humanitarian intervention" in Africa
(Darfur, though -- not the Congo), they forget how cynically the notion
was used by the USG the former Yugoslavia.]

"America will see, over the years to come, thousands of traumatized
soldiers trying to reenter civil society and resume their peace time
lives. Many will never shake off the traumas instilled by months of
service in Iraq, and thousands of families, and communities, not to
mention the soldiers themselves will be paying the price while the supreme
commanders who launched this war will be making money from lectures and
memoirs." --Alexander Cockburn

*** "YOU'VE BEEN LISTENING to TELLING TIME: ADDITIONS TO THE CORPORATE
NEWS on WEFT.  I'm Carl Estabrook, and we're telling stories from the
foreign press, blogs, and other alternative media, as well as stories that
have been overlooked or downplayed in the media owned by big business. I'm
happy to fill requests for sources and references.  Email me at
<cge at shout.net>."***

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	C. G. Estabrook, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
	109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
	### <www.carlforcongress.org> <www.newsfromneptune.com> ###
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