Month: December 2008

Electing Barack Obama president was the first step in redeeming American democracy.  The second step must be indicting ex-president George W. Bush, giving him a fair trial, finding him guilty of many criminal acts and putting him in prison.  Forget revenge.  Think rule of law and justice.

I want President Obama soon after taking office to go on television and announce the formation of a special group of outstanding jurists and attorneys to make a recommendation whether or not the US Justice Department should bring criminal charges against George W. Bush.  Based on earlier analyses, including work by the American Bar Association, I have no doubt they will recommend indictment.

If moral honesty and courage have any meaning, then the nation must take seriously the concept that no president can ever be allowed to be above the law.  How can President Obama not strongly support this?  Surely no president must be allowed to disrespect and dishonor the US Constitution.  George W. Bush broke his oath of office.  His behavior was treasonous.  Instead of defending the Constitution he disgraced it.  Instead of protecting constitutional rights, including privacy, he sullied them.  He asserted his right to ignore or not enforce laws so he could break them.  Respect for the office of the presidency must never be allowed to trump truth and justice.

Millions and millions of Americans and people worldwide know that George W. Bush made 9/11 the trigger for initiating an illegal war in Iraq that has killed and maimed so many thousands of people.  What Vincent Bugliosi, author of “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder” called “the most serious crime ever committed in American history.”  I say convict Bush of myriad counts of criminally negligent homicide related to both Iraq and the Katrina disaster and put him in prison.  A former president in prison would not disgrace the presidency.  It would restore honor to the office and the Constitution.

Surely millions more people now understand that George W. Bush bears responsibility for creating the conditions that encouraged greed-driven capitalism to rape and murder the middle class and push us into the current global economic meltdown.  By removing government oversight and regulation he committed the greatest acts of fraud in the history of mankind.  After he made American democracy delusional he made prosperity delusional.

We the people are paying the price for George W. Bush’s criminal acts and so must he.  When George W. Bush is sent to prison everyone will see that American democracy has earned the respect of the world.  Everyone will better understand that evil comes in many forms and that even an elected president of the United States of America can and must be recognized as a perpetrator of horrendous criminal acts.

Please President-elect Obama, make it so.  Be the principled person we want you to be.  Make the USA the nation it is supposed to be.  Have the courage to do what Congress refused to do when it did not impeach George W. Bush.  Change history by showing the world that American justice applies as equally to the president as it does to anyone else.  Do not let George W. Bush escape the justice and prison sentence he deserves.  Do not let respect for the presidency trump respect for justice.  If we do not bring George W. Bush to justice that probably only you can make happen, then surely we do not restore respect for the office that you worked so hard to achieve.

To ensure that no future president behaves like George W. Bush we must punish him.  Not merely through the words of historians, but through the physical punishment that he has inflicted on so many millions of people.  In previous eras citizens would have demanded “off with his head.”  Now we must demand “lock him up.”  How poetic for a pro-torture ex-president.  As summed up at www.imprisonbush.com: “Bush must be made accountable to the law, to serve as a lesson to all those who would attempt to destroy the American system of laws and liberty for the sake of their own power.”  This is a test for both President Obama and American democracy.

If there is any kind of God in the universe, then George W. Bush must go to prison.  When he does, then and only then should God bless America.

[Formerly a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, Joel S. Hirschhorn is the author of nonfiction books, including Prosperity Without Pollution, Sprawl Kills and Delusional Democracy.]

I would have selected a different national security team. But I can see what Obama is doing. He has effectively sidelined critics of his foreign policy vision to the kiddie table over there in the corner. You can take a look to see who’s at the kiddie table. There’s Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. There’s Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer. There’s Joe Lieberman and John McCain. There’s even Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney. They will all continue to screech now and then, and the adults will look over condescendingly and tell them to pipe down or there’s no dessert.

In saying this, I’m not suggesting that Barack Obama’s foreign policy and national security team is going to be right about the policies they pursue, or that they shouldn’t listen to anyone screaming from the sidelines. My greatest concern with the team is that it doesn’t (so far) include any of the strong voices that bravely opposed George and Dick’s excellent adventure in Iraq. My point, though, is that Obama has just carved out a huge swath of territory within which he can safely maneuver.

The Clintons are now inside the tent. The bipartisan Realist School is now inside the tent. The center-left Establishment is now inside the tent. And most of the left is pleased about the selection of Eric Holder to Justice and Susan Rice to a cabinet level ambassadorship to the United Nations (that bypasses Clinton and reports directly to Obama).

Concerns remain, and anti-war progressives are still looking for seats at the table where their superior judgment will not only be rewarded but put to good use going forward. But progressives can take comfort in the fact the field has been cleared politically to such a degree that they can move freely. If they remain marginalized, the neo-conservatives are newly marginalized, and to a far greater degree. Additionally, progressives are now empowered organizationally and have a far greater ability to mobilize public opinion than their opponents on the right. Palinists are truly out in the cold, and will remain there until there is some glaring failure or crack in the new governing coalition.

Obama has successfully disarmed an opposition (at least for the time being) that has dominated the public discourse in this country since (at least) September 11, 2001. No, they won’t go away. McCarthyite/Palinism has been with us since shortly after World War Two. But they are returned to the sidelines of history…even their media outlets now left without a core mission or cohesive message. What will Fox News do now? Is that Bill O’Reilly I see over at the Kiddie Table?

Obama has now presented his security team, a racially-mixed, politically-mixed, gender-mixed team that seems to be very comfortable together.

Obama talked about his strategic view:

To succeed, we must pursue a new strategy that skillfully uses, balances, and integrates all elements of American power: our military and diplomacy; our intelligence and law enforcement; our economy and the power of our moral example. The team that we have assembled here today is uniquely suited to do just that.

In their past service and plans for the future, these men and women represent all of those elements of American power, and the very best of the American example. They have served in uniform and as diplomats; they have worked as legislators, law enforcement officials, and executives. They share my pragmatism about the use of power, and my sense of purpose about America’s role as a leader in the world.

That’s it, he ties them together.

Now, my hope is that quite soon after January 20th, he will gather this same group together and officially revoke the “Bush Doctrine” of attack before we are attacked. I can see why he didn’t do it today…Bush is still in charge. But if we are going to get the world behind us again, the Bush Doctrine has to go.

Hint: it’s not Al Qaeda or terrorism or nuclear proliferation. They are only symptoms of the real problem, the primary underlying cause of conflict in the 21st century. Our biggest national security concern: Global Climate Change.

I know. Broken record time for me again. But the facts and the experts back me up on this. And if there were any doubters still out there, here’s one more sign that global warming is real, that it isn’t some figment of brainj addled lefty tree huggers’ imaginations and we better start doing something about it, sooner rather than later. And I don’t mean baby steps.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a large sheet of floating ice south of South America, is connected to two Antarctic islands by a strip of ice. That ice “bridge” has lost about 2,000 square kilometers (about 772 square miles) this year, the ESA said.

A satellite image captured November 26 shows new rifts on the ice shelf that make it dangerously close to breaking away from the strip of ice — and the islands to which it’s connected, the ESA said. […]

The ice shelf had been stable for most of the past century before it began retreating in the 1990s.

Several ice shelves — Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones — have collapsed in the past three decades, the British Antarctic Survey said.

Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula — the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America — has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years, rising by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade.

Just a coincidence? I don’t think so, my friends:

PARIS (AFP) — Earth’s climate appears to be changing more quickly and deeply than a benchmark UN report for policymakers predicted, top scientists said ahead of international climate talks starting Monday in Poland. […]

the IPCC has warned that current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, if unchecked, would unleash devastating droughts, floods and huge increases in human misery by century’s end.

But the new studies, they say, indicate that human activity may be triggering powerful natural forces that would be nearly impossible to reverse and that could push temperatures up even further. […]

“In the last couple of years, Arctic Sea ice is at an all-time low in summer, which has got a lot of people very, very concerned,” commented Robert Watson, Chief Scientific Advisor for Britain’s department for environmental affairs and chairman of the IPCC’s previous assessment in 2001. […]

“The most recent IPCC report was prior to … the measurements of increasing mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica, which are disintegrating much faster than IPCC estimates,” said climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. […]

Runaway sea level rises, Hansen said, would put huge coastal cities and agricultural deltas in Bangladesh, Egypt and southern China under water, and create hundreds of millions of refugees.

“The present concentration is the highest during the last 650,000 years and probably during the last 20 million years,” said the Global Carbon Project’s Pep Canadell, a researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

And in 2008, he said, there has been an “exponential growth” in the atmospheric concentration of methane, another greenhouse gas that is an even more potent driver of global warming than CO2.

One potential source of both gases is frozen tundra in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, where temperatures have risen faster than anywhere else on Earth.

“The amount of carbon that is locked up in permafrost that could be released into the atmosphere is just about on a par with the atmospheric load the world has right now,” said Serreze.

These higher concentrations of greenhouse gases come at a time when Earth’s two major “carbon sinks” — forests and especially oceans — are showing signs of saturation.

I know today is Obama’s National Security Day, but what could be more essential to the future national security of our country, and of every other country in the world, than global climate change? Droughts, severe storms, rising sea levels, more disease, more refugees, and likely more wars over diminishing resources like water and food. Those are not insignificant issues in my view.

So I hope Obama appoints a Global Warming Czar or some comparable official with a cabinet level portfolio pronto, because whatever happens in Iraq or Afghanistan over the next decade isn’t going to matter half as much to our children and grandchildren as the consequences of continuing to ignore runaway global warming. I’ll be dead before the worst consequences hit, but they won’t.

And yes, when resources, like water and food, are scarce in places like the Middle East and Southwest Asia, nuclear war and nuclear terrorism becomes a greater probability. Not possibility, probability.

Think on that you Grand Poohbahs of foreign policy. Our greatest national security threat won’t be Islamofascism or Russia or China or a failed state in Pakistan. It will be Mother Nature. Count on it. And all the guns and planes and ships and missiles won’t save us from the coming collapse of our society which that climate change will bring about if we don’t start acting now to deal with the problem.

Nicole Belle points us to a transcript of this week’s Chris Matthews Show, where he, Ceci Connelly, Katty Kay, Mark Whitaker, and David Ignatius discuss the impact of the ‘Angry Left’ relative to the Republican Party.

MATTHEWS: If we try to put up the trade walls, are we going to have a fight on labor issues like this card check thing, about being able to organize individual decision making rather than a big voting election kind of thing. Those kind of issues can really, as you say, could divide the Democrats, right?

CONNOLLY: Absolutely but here’s the key to this: Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff. What did he do when he was in the House Democratic Caucus? He often was the person who had to break it to the liberals in that caucuses that things were not going to go their way.

MATTHEWS: Who’s going to break it to the blogosphere? They don’t like anything that looks like a give to the right. Where are they doing to be on this thing? Are they going to give him a break if he doesn’t go hard left and doesn’t do what they want?

WHITAKER: I think that Obama has to worry as much about the far left as he does about the far right. But look, you know I think that it could be a plus for him in some ways because I think they are going to give him what you might call a “Sista Soulja moment” when he can stand up to them.

MATTHEWS: Right.

WHITAKER: And talking to some veterans in those early Clinton wars who think that particularly this issue of the card check push by the labor unions to change the rules on organizing could be a moment for him either by delaying that, standing up to the unions, of positioning himself more in the middle and making it harder for the far right to position him the way they tried to during the campaign.

MATTHEWS: You see that, David?

IGNATIUS: This is where the economic crisis, you know, ends up being crucial because people are angry. The country’s furious and a lot of these really divisive issues I think will come from the left, not from the right and they’ll come from unions, from working people who are enraged at bailouts for big banks and wealthy executives and the pressure on Obama to check some what he’d like to do on the economy I think is going to be very strong from angry people.

MATTHEWS: And you say the left is going to fight anything that looks too conciliatory?

IGNATIUS: You can, it’s been obvious now for the past few weeks that the anger in the country is working its way through Congress and it’s, the bailouts might make sense in a macro-economic sense but they’re increasingly tough politics.

MATTHEWS: Bottom line, we asked the Matthews Meter, twelve of our regulars given the mountain of problems he faces will the right give Obama a longer than usual honeymoon. Our panel is always filled with cockeyed optimists. Eight say yes he gets a longer honeymoon from the right. Four say no, Katy you’re with the optimists.

KAY: I am. I’m not sure I’m cockeyed but I am probably an optimist. I think for all the reasons that we’ve been saying about the mood in the country and the desire to get things done I just don’t think that the right at this particular juncture can be seen to stymie an economic agenda in particular. I think that they have to give him the benefit of the doubt for a period of time.

MATTHEWS: Okay big time. Will the Republicans get out of his way and not use any obstructions to stop from getting through a big economic package once he gets in office.

KAY: I think they’ll give him…

MATTHEWS: No procedural tricks.

KAY: I think they’ll give him three months.

MATTHEWS: Three months.

WHITAKER: Six months.

CONNOLLY : I don’t think they’ve figured out that kind of procedural trick.

MATTHEWS: [laughs] You know what I mean. Filibuster, all kinds of ways to slow the…will they use those tools to slow him down?

CONNOLLY: Doubt it.

IGNATIUS: No, the Republicans will help him out on the package. His problem is going to be with the left, not the Republicans.

I believe there is some degree of truth in this discussion, in that the Republicans acknowledge that they were resoundingly defeated (even if they make occasional weak protests that they were not) but the liberals are convinced that they won a big victory and they want their spoils. What is more of a concern is the consensus Beltway view that legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act is ‘Angry Left’ legislation, and that the strengthening of labor unions is a ‘divisive cultural issue’. I mean, please. And Ignatius is basically telling us that Obama is going to catch hell from the left for leafleting Wall Street with cash (as he allegedly wants and needs to do) and will not catch hell for this from the right.

The right still controls roughly 40% of the seats in both Houses of Congress, and they have quite a bit more power and influence than the angry left bloggers and union leaders. If there is a qualitative difference between the angry right and angry left, it is that the left has been so traumatized over the last decade that they suffer from an unhealthy level of mistrust and cynicism. Of course, this is not without cause, but it has gone too far.

Having said that, the left is more self-aware than they were in the 1990’s. They are more organized, they are more disciplined, they are aware of the enemies in their own midst, and they better understand how Washington works. The left’s wish list goes well beyond a return to the Clinton era. The Beltway’s wish list consists of nothing more or less than a return to the Clinton era. There is a conflict here, and it will be played out during the next four years.

If Chris Matthews runs for Senate in Pennsylvania, the labor unions will remember how he sees them.

by Jeff Huber

Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen appears to be the most powerful man in the world.  Americans elected a president who pledged to get U.S. troops out of Iraq in 16 months.  Iraq’s parliament, by a substantial majority, has ratified a security agreement that requires all American troops to be out of the country by the end of 2011, a deadline specifically “not governed by circumstances on the ground.”  

One might think the book is closed on the matter of U.S. occupation of Iraq, but no.  Admiral Mullen says it’s “theoretically possible” to change the agreement.  “Three years is a long time,” he says, and we will “continue to have discussions with them [the Iraqis] over time as conditions continue to evolve.” In July, Mullen said that a deadline for a U.S. withdrawal would be “dangerous.”  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has been asked to hang around for a year or so into the Obama regime, objected to the 16 month plan during the presidential campaign, and incoming National Security Adviser James L. Jones, a retired Marine four-star, said in 2007 that a deadline for our withdrawal from Iraq would be “against our national interest.”

What do they call it again, when a country is run by its military?  

Great White Junta

Obama won’t be the first U.S. president to have his initiative to end a war opposed by an intransigent military establishment.  Historian and journalist Gareth Porter reminds us that the warmongery of a previous American Century gave John F. Kennedy migraines over ending the Vietnam conflict.  Unlike Obama, Kennedy had his top brass on board with his plan.  In 1962, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and JCS chairman Maxwell Taylor both favored a timeline to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam by the end of 1965, but the commanders in Vietnam and the Pacific dug in their heels, and the rest, as they say, is blood down the gutter.  

The most persistent symptom of insanity in the New American Century has been military leadership’s relentless pursuit of military solutions when it knows good and well that none exist.  In his September 2006 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Jones said, “I am convinced that the solution in Afghanistan is not a military one.”  In 2007, conversely, Jones said, “If we don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you’re sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the U.N. and the 37 countries with troops on the ground can be defeated.”

Jones illustrates the crux of the Pavlov’s Dogs of War Syndrome.  An old warfare adage says that no conflict is over until the loser stops fighting.  While Jones and Mullen and Gates and the like understand that they can’t win military victories, they can’t stand the thought of being called losers, and as long as they keep fighting, they aren’t losers.  If these guys had their way, we’d still be winning in Vietnam.  

Under the Influence

Dwight Eisenhower, the president who first entangled us in the Vietnam goat rope, also gave us the military industrial complex.  He at least had the good grace, before he crawled off to the tar pit, to warn of us the “unwarranted influence” his monster would wield, saying in his 1962 presidential farewell speech that its “total influence–economic, political, even spiritual–is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.”  

More than 40 years later, the military industrial complex has expanded into an all engulfing confluence of Big War, Big Business, Big Message, Big Energy, Big Jesus, Big Money and Big Brother.  Political careers and regional economies are wholly dependent on war, the costliest and least productive sector of the U.S. and world economies.  

We spend more on arms than the rest of the world combined.  Our nearest conceivable military competitors, Russia and China, spend a tenth or less as much on defense as we do.  Our “no greater challenge” nation, Iran, has a defense budget less than one percent the size of ours.  The terrorists have a defense budget you could hide under the dirt in a brain surgeon’s fingernail.  

The universally respected Rand Corporation says the best approach to defeating terrorism involves “a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.”  Nobody has a big enough fleet or air force to transport enough evildoers to invade and occupy us.  Moreover, unnamed senior officials assure me that no one will be able to produce flying carpets in strategically significant numbers before the end of the next century, and that the Vulcans have decided against ever trusting us with their transporter technology.  The evil ones can’t get from there to here, so there’s no need to fight them in either place.  

Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons or a program to develop any, or a ballistic missile that can reach the United States, and even if they ever have both the nuclear weapon and the missile to deliver it with, the missile defense system we’re developing to counter them will never work.  If Iran or any other third world tin pan were to ever use a nuclear armed ballistic missile, the retaliation would amount to the end of that tin pan’s existence, and the terrorists will develop suitcase nukes about the time they get their mitts on flying carpets and Vulcan transporters.  

Political and military leaders throughout the world agree there are no military solutions to Iraq, or the Bananastans, or terrorism, or Sri Lanka, or the Congo, or Darfur, or Somalia, or South America, or the South Pole for that matter.  In fact, there hasn’t really been a military solution to the world’s challenges since President Eisenhower was General Eisenhower.  

And yet, the American warmongery continues to pursue counterproductive wars and newer and costlier means of blowing the smithereens out of Muslim weddings.  

Obama says the “vision for change” comes from him.  Given the makeup of his national security team, though, I fear there’s a good chance he’ll be gazing through a distorted lens, and it’s a dead certainty that a fistful of neocons are meeting in the basement of some think tank these days cooking up 10,000 ways to pull the wool over the colored guy with an Arab name.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.  Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

A little pretty for Monday…