[Peace] News notes for AWARE meeting 2007-01-28

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I'm down with the flu and won't be at tonight's AWARE meeting, but here 
are some news notes from the past week.  --CGE]

	"... ‘tis a pleasant Scene enough, when Thieves fall out among
	themselves, to see the cutting of one Diamond with another."
	--Sir Roger L’Estrange’s (1616-1704) translation of Aesop’s
	fable, A Wolf and a Fox

[1] IS ANY WORLD POSSIBLE?  The meetings of the World Economic Forum and 
the World Social Forum concluded this week. "In Davos, Switzerland, the 
meeting of the World Economic Forum, a conference where economic 
globalism issues are discussed, opened January 24 with a discussion of 
Bush's planned attack on Iran. The Secretary General of the League of 
Arab States and bankers and businessmen from such US allies as Bahrain 
and the United Arab Emirates all warned of the coming attack and its 
catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and the world ... The Bush 
Regime has made it clear that it is convinced that Bush already has the 
authority to attack Iran. The Regime argues that the authority is part 
of Bush's commander-in-chief powers..."
<http://counterpunch.org/roberts01272007.html>.
	
[2] THE CAUDILLO AND THE GWOT.  Garry Wills writes about American 
militarism in the NYT:
	We hear constantly now about "our commander in chief."  The word has 
become a synonym for "president" ... But the president is not our 
commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army ... 
The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even 
commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are 
federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be 
commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the 
militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of 
the United States.”
	When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he 
gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy 
of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard 
today.  It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of 
the United States.” The citizenry at large is now thought of as under 
military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the 
national leadership more than in peacetime ... But those impositions are 
removed when normal life returns.
	But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline 
imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and “the duration” has become the 
norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than 
ever — more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now 
the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.
	There has never been an executive branch more fetishistic about secrecy 
than the Bush-Cheney one. The secrecy has been used to throw a veil over 
detentions, “renditions,” suspension of the Geneva Conventions and of 
habeas corpus, torture and warrantless wiretaps...
	Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescient last book, “Secrecy,” 
traced the ever-faster-growing secrecy of our government and said that 
it strikes at the very essence of democracy — accountability of 
representatives to the people. How can the people hold their 
representatives to account if they are denied knowledge of what they are 
doing? Wartime and war analogies are embraced because these justify the 
secrecy...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/opinion/27wills.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>

[3] THIEVES FALL OUT.  VP Cheney's creature, Scooter Libby, on trial for 
lying to a grand jury, took the remarkable step this week of claiming 
that he was sacrificed to protect Karl Rove, Bush's creature. Whether 
that's true is less important than the revelation of the split between 
the offices of the president and the vice president (which I claim was 
predicted on News from Neptune).  Cheney has always presented the neocon 
line, which now calls for an attack on Iran, while Bush was put in 
office to maximize returns to a tiny percentage of the very rich in the 
country.  It was not clear that their goals would always coincide.  It 
may be that the war party is in danger of being isolated within the 
administration by others who have the president's ear.
	Cheney encouraged that speculation by giving an hysterical interview 
this week, in which he claimed that "we've had enormous successes" in 
Iraq and insisted that Senate opposition "won't stop us."  Our timid 
senior senator called the VP "delusional" on the floor of the Senate, 
and even a generally mistaken NYT op-ed column said that that was "far 
too mild."
	But the situation is very dangerous.  The war party, backed into a 
corner both on the ground and on the American political scene, seems to 
think that their only way out -- the only way to retain American 
hegemony in the ME -- is to widen the war, in ways that may before long 
lead to the use of American tactical nuclear weapons in Iran.  The VP 
and those like him in the administration seem complacent with that 
possibility.

[4] NIGHTMARE SCENARIO. "General Leonid Ivashov ... former Joint Chief 
of Staff of the Russian Armies, forecasts an American nuclear attack on 
Iran by the end of April ... There will be shock and indignation, 
General Ivashov concludes, but the US will get away with it. He writes: 
'The probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high. It 
does remain unclear, though, whether the US Congress is going to 
authorize the war. It may take a provocation to eliminate this obstacle 
(an attack on Israel or US targets including military bases). The scale 
of the provocation may be comparable to the 9-11 attack in NY. Then the 
Congress will certainly say "Yes" to the US President.'" (Roberts, loc. 
cit.)
	Paradoxically, the Libby trial may offer some slight hope.  Prosecutor 
Fitzgerald has made it clear that he sees Cheney as the source of the of 
the original leak of a CIA agent's name as a counter to her husband's 
revelation of an administration lie about the invasion of Iraq. 
Remember that Richard Nixon's VP was allowed to resign when it was 
discovered that he was taking cash bribes.  Could Cheney be forced to 
resign over "Plamegate" by the administration opponents of an attack on 
Iran?  And would that deter such plans?
	We might even see here why Speaker Pelosi ruled absolutely that 
"impeachment is off the table": she may have thought that not to do so 
would be seen as self-serving, given that Bush's impeachment and 
conviction with a vacant vice-presidency would mean that she would 
become president...

[5] WHADIDDY SAY?  Bush's State of the Union speech on Tuesday was 
eminently forgettable.  It may have lacked the explicitly criminal 
assertions of earlier SOTU speeches -- such as his speech four years 
ago, when the decision to invade Iraq had already been taken, which 
included Bush's conscious lie that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger 
(SOS Rice attempted to minimize it as "sixteen words"), and his smirking 
admission that the USG is murdering unnamed enemies around the world 
("Let's put it this way: they won't be a problem anymore").  But this 
year's speech did include hare-brained proposals on medical insurance, 
solely to appear to be doing something about health care, and rather 
little about what the American populace thinks is by far the greatest 
problem facing the country, the war in the ME. That relative silence 
bothers me.  Can it be that like four years ago the administration is 
obfuscating decisions for war already taken -- in this case, an attack 
on Iran?

[6] TANGLED WEBB. The official response to the SOTU by a Democrat, Sen. 
Jim Webb of Virginia, was widely praised, but it seemed to me what some 
Brits might call "a damp squib" -- a disappointment.  Webb began by 
agreeing with Bush for the need for "freeing us from our dependence on 
foreign oil," an entirely misleading account of the basis for US 
activities in the ME.
	His objection to the war was that it was "mismanaged" and 
"unnecessary," not that it was a crime, because "it would take our 
energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism."  He 
accepts indeed the fraudulent account of the "global war on terrorism." 
  But "The president took us into this war recklessly," and "The war's 
costs to our nation [sic -- no other nation's costs are mentioned] have 
been staggering."  And he says one of the principal costs is "The lost 
opportunities to defeat the forces of international terrorism"!
	After dwelling on his family's military traditions, Webb claims that 
Americans' objections are to "the way this war is being fought" and 
repeats the vague and tired Democrat invocation of "a new direction." 
There is of course an obvious direction for the American invaders of 
Iraq -- out.  Most Iraqis and Americans want that, but that's not what 
Webb means.  "Not one step back from the war against international 
terrorism.  Not a precipitous withdrawal..." (Note the false equation.)
	Webb's goals are the perennial goals of US foreign policy in the ME -- 
control of the region's resources by "strong regionally-based 
diplomacy." But he wants "a policy that takes our soldiers off the 
streets of Iraq's cities" -- to secure them in the vast bases the US has 
built in Iraq? -- "and a formula that will in short order allow our 
combat forces to leave Iraq"  -- and that formula includes a biddable 
Iraqi government that will not be "one step back from the war against 
international terrorism"?
	He concludes by invoking two Republican presidents (I suppose that's to 
avoid that nasty uncivil partisanship) Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight 
Eisenhower, the former to deplore class divisions (including "mob rule") 
and the latter to recommend an end to "a bloody stalemate" of a war.  On 
both domestic and foreign policy, the official Democrat seems ambiguous 
at best.

[7] THE NEWS GAZETTE. Don't miss today's edition of our only local daily 
paper, for an article on a local activist and AWARE member, prominently 
featured on page 2.  That's the good part: the editorial page features 
characteristic maunderings by the publisher on the theme "The Bush plan 
[regarding Iraq] is the only plan that offers a chance."  Unfortunately, 
(some) people in town do read his nonsense, and it should be answered 
this week by AWARE letter-writers (and you can praise the piece on Ricky).

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