A Review of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People

We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People
by Peter Van Buren, 288 Pages, Henry Holt and Company, $25.00.

My excuse for just now reviewing a book that came out last fall is that it took the U.S. State Department even longer than that to get around to reading this book – and their review was a lot more important than mine. “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People” is the story of State Department career employee Peter Van Buren’s year in the field “rebuilding” Iraq after our invasion destroyed it. Although this was still a dangerous proposition (one base he lived at was mortared or rocketed over seventy times during his six months there), the level of killing was well past its peak by the time he arrived in 2009. The story he tells, then, is skewed more to the farcical than to the tragic end of the historical cycle.

With no night life and few other diversions available to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams that he served on, there was little to divert a dedicated note-taker like Van Buren, so by the fall of 2010 he already had a manuscript ready to submit for the departmental review required before publication of any work-related material. As he tells it, after hearing nothing within the allotted 30 day period, he went forward with publication plans, only to have the State Department contact his publisher a year later objecting to three passages it claimed contained classified information. Reading the book, however, it’s hard not to suspect that the Department’s decision to fire him in March of this year (currently under appeal) derived more from statements like “we acted like buffoons” than any supposed security breaches.

Van Buren’s previous work, he tells us, “was removed from the high level WikiLeaky things … We worked with Americans who were victims of crime abroad … the benign side of empire.” But for the first time since the Vietnam War, he says, the State Department pressured Foreign Service Officers into assignments they didn’t want by adding financial incentives and making tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan a virtual requirement for advancement.

So, imagining that he knew what was good for him – career-wise, anyhow – off he went to spend a year watching power point presentations, eating sludge and living in shipping containers in order to apply that good old American know-how to another benighted land. And after the “ninety minutes of handy phrases and greetings,” which would be the only Arabic language training he got, he was good to go. After all, when money talks it needs no translation and Van Buren and his peers were there to spend money – in staggering amounts. By his reckoning, the Iraq reconstruction project ran over $170 billion and to put that in perspective he notes that “the reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost, in 2010 dollars, only $32 billion and $17 billion respectively.”

The whole operation seems to have operated on the Dubai model. Although there were 150,000 American subcontractors making six figure salaries, with free trips home, they were not expected to do “anything dirty, dark, or dangerous, such as cleaning latrines, digging holes, unloading things, guarding places, or serving food.” For that there were “young male workers imported from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and other Third World garden spots.” Van Buren found himself “watching news from home about foreclosures, and … reading e-mails from my sister about school cutbacks,” while signing off on expenditures left and right. One program involved handing out $5000 in cash grants to Iraqis who would promise to “open a business” – any business, no strings attached.

Competition for biggest waste was stiff. There was the $2.58 million chicken processing plant that could not match the price of chicken imported from Brazil. And the new medical gases factory south of Baghdad whose product could not pass army checkpoints “because terrorists used such cylinders as bomb casings.” And the $171 million hospital whose opening Laura Bush had flown in for in 2004, yet was still not operating. Then there was the first Baghdad yellow pages, of which Van Buren writes, “[W]e could come up with only 250 businesses to include out of a city of several million. We could not safely go door-to-door and so hired a local contractor at seven bucks a copy to give away the books for us.”

And there the beekeeping for widows program – programs aimed at Iraqi women were actually quite popular among those charged to spend. Van Buren notes that “[S]ome of us expected the Republicans to like the fact that women could not work outside the house or drive,” so there was always a great of speculation as to why colonels found themselves always having to try “to come up with what they described as ‘some kind of goddamn chick event.’” Many suspected that “the real reason the Bush people liked it [the emphasis on women’s issues] was that it pissed off Muslim men.”

All of this was run out of the world’s biggest embassy, a place larger than Vatican City. As the American Ambassador said, “[A]long with the Great Wall of China, it’s one of the things you can see with the naked eye from outer space.” Van Buren attended an economics conference there that included a tourism briefing where it was reported that “in 2009 sixty five Western tourists visited Iraq” including “eighteen Taiwanese” and “seventeen Americans.” The briefing did not explain when Taiwanese had become Westerners. The US Army polled the tourists, though – they said hated the hotels in Iraq. (A sign in the Embassy advertised swing dance lessons on Tuesdays.)

Van Buren certainly had this reader snickering out loud regularly, but there was one point where he elicited a gasp that was in no way mirthful – when he described an aspect of lifesaving training the soldiers had undergone back in the states.

“The guys at Falcon who had been selected for the training all started with a big 180-pound, man-sized hog,” he writes. “The trainers blew half the pig’s face away, slit open its belly, and cut the femoral artery. The idea was to get the soldiers to ignore the horrific facial wound and the slit belly and focus on the femoral. If you couldn’t stop it from pushing blood out, your pig/soldier/friend bled to death in minutes. The soldiers topped one another with ghastly descriptions of how messed up their pigs had been. The trainers were never done. As soon as you controlled one thing, they shot, cut, or tore the pig in another way. At one point they threw the bleeding pig into the back of a pickup truck and you had to continue to work to save its life as the truck bounced down a rutted back road in North Carolina. … Soldiers who had undergone the experience were careful when and how they talked about it. No one enjoyed seeing an animal suffer, and most left the sessions with questions in their heads about right and wrong. What was a pig’s life worth?”

The phenomenon of the suffering of animals sometimes carrying greater impact than that of fellow humans is well known – orphaned pets and starving zoo animals have often touched people inured to endless stories about man’s inhumanity to his own species. And since Van Buren later recounts an episode in which a sergeant who had received this training saves a lieutenant’s life, perhaps we are to consider this ghastly procedure as something ultimately benefiting human life, even if extremely unpleasant to think about or perform.

But isn’t there is a larger question here? What was the justification for putting the lieutenant in harm’s way in the first place? Or, in specific terms, was George Bush’s war in Iraq worth even the life of a single pig? Or, for that matter, are the next twelve years of war in Afghanistan that Obama has committed us to worth it?

David Cameron’s No Poodle – He’s a New Breed

It was just like old times when British Prime Minister David Cameron came calling at the White House this month. Yes, the “Special Relationship” felt really special again just like back in the days when Tony Blair lined the U.K. up behind the Iraq War – when those French and Germans were having none of it – and made his reputation as “George Bush’s poodle.” For a couple of years in between, that sour old Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and obviously didn’t enjoy the sound of his master’s voice in Washington nearly so much. But now it seems that Barack Obama has his own pet at 10 Downing Street. Of course, Cameron’s Conservative, not Labour, so he’s an entirely different breed than Blair. But the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank seemed a bit off in characterizing Cameron as “serving as Obama’s guard dog.” Perhaps something more along the lines of a Yorkshire Terrier – Obama’s Yorkie.

It’s been a rough stretch for the president’s Afghanistan War policy: the Koran burnings; Afghan government soldiers and police killing NATO soldiers; American soldiers urinating on corpses; one soldier murdering sixteen civilians, Afghan President Karzai calling for the Americans to be confined to major bases. So when Cameron arrived and said of the war, “If you compare where we are today with where we’ve been two, three years ago, the situation is considerably improved,” it did suggest that the prime minister may have told his people not to brief him on the subject these past years. But oblivious support is better than no support at all and the White House loved it.

The prime minister also said “it would be hard to say that the al Qaida network is not effectively dismantled today.” Oh, wait a minute – wrong prime minister. That was Tony Blair talking – on February 6, 2003. But whatever the rationale of this war is supposed to be these days, David Cameron was here to say that he’s for it and that he and the president are “absolutely in lock-step” over the withdrawal process.

The real story here is, or ought to be, two leaders persisting in the pursuit of a ten year old war “increasingly unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic,” as the International Herald Tribune characterized the situation. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted earlier this month found Americans now consider the war “not worth fighting” by a 60-35 percent margin and 55 percent think “most Afghans oppose what the United States is trying to do in Afghanistan,” while only 30 percent believe they support it. Following the deaths of the 16 villagers, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found 61 percent of Americans supporting bringing the remaining U.S. troops home immediately, with only 17 percent against.

The war enjoys even less support in the United Kingdom, where an ITV1 News at Ten poll found 46 percent of respondents professing to have no idea why British troops were in Afghanistan, 55 percent thinking the threat of terrorism on British soil was increased by British forces remaining there, 57 percent not believing that the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan are justified by the cause they are fighting for and 73 percent considering the war “unwinnable.” 55 percent supported immediate withdrawal.

So, no surprise, Obama was thrilled with the Prime Minister’s visit, declaring that “in good times and in bad, [Cameron] is just the kind of partner that you want at your side. I trust him. He says what he does, and he does what he says. And I’ve seen his character.” Precisely the type of qualities you look for in man’s best friend.

To say that the two were joined at the hip during Cameron’s visit would be to employ too slight a metaphor. Joined at the brain is more like it: They went so far as to co-author an op ed for the Washington Post. So when Obama wrote about “imposing tough sanctions on the Iranian regime for failing to meet its international obligations” and warned that otherwise Iran would “face the consequences,” well, that was Cameron too. And when Obama failed to mention the corresponding U.S. obligations to reduce its nuclear arsenal – as U.S. presidents always do, it was also Cameron failing to mention U.K. obligations to reduce its own – as U.K. prime ministers always do.

Cameron separately told his American audience that “we take nothing off the table” when it comes to Iran, just the same as the president had said. So if any American were doubting the sanity of reserving the right to use nuclear weapons to ensure that Iran doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons, now you know that the Brits think just the same – at least the ones in power do. And, oh yeah, Cameron told us he thought Obama’s bombing of Libya was cool, too – and he said that on his own.

As a reward for being such a good political lap dog, Cameron not only got a hot dog and a basketball game from the president, but a state dinner at the White House – only the sixth of the Obama Administration. They even created a new dish in his honor – Bison Wellington, which, according to the menu, is “a perfect pairing of U.S. and U.K. cultures … a classic English dish given an American twist with the use of buffalo tenderloin.” News reports did not specify whether the prime minister ate from a bowl or at the table.

The Ron Paul Flap

The current controversy on the left about Ron Paul suggests a need to recall that old political maxim: “No permanent friends; no permanent enemies.”  Overall philosophical agreement is great, but the fact is that when it comes down to specifics, yesterday’s ally may just be tomorrow’s foe – whether we’re comfortable with that or not.  In the case at hand, for all of the issues on which Ron Paul is anything but our friend, when it comes to Afghanistan, or American foreign policy in general, he certainly is.  And if you have any doubt about that, you need only look at his antiwar ad, Chinese Army in Texas.

Does Paul’s antiwar stand matter?  Well, probably anyone concerned about America’s role in the world ought to at least watch his ad – it’s that good, particularly at a time when hardly anyone else is being heard on the topic.  And we just might want to ask ourselves how it has come to pass that a Republican presidential candidate is putting something like that out there and we’re not.  At the very least we shouldn’t pretend that the Ron Paul antiwar phenomenon isn’t happening simply because we don’t like the man’s stand on other things.

Really, this whole thing shouldn’t be that confusing to us in the first place.  Since we don’t have the tightly disciplined parties found in some other countries, this short of crossover phenomenon is a somewhat regular feature of American politics.  During the Vietnam War, for instance, liberal California Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey famously challenged his party’s sitting president, Richard Nixon, on the war issue in the 1972 primaries.  Of course, what’s set current antiwar activists in a tizzy about Paul is that he ain’t no liberal.

Still, the intensity of the debate over whether he is ultimately, on balance, a good guy or a bad guy seems somewhat misplaced, given how little it has to do with any likely set of events.   For one thing, few, if any, of those engaged in the argument are going to ever find themselves standing in a voting booth holding a primary ballot that includes Ron Paul’s name.  And so far as November goes, let’s face it – the Republican Party isn’t going to nominate him.

Better, perhaps, to direct this passion to analyzing how we might conceivably steal his thunder on the war issue.  For again, like it or not, the man has demonstrated an ability to attract political support among independents and young voters.  He drew 48 percent of the entire under-thirty vote in the Iowa Republican caucuses and 47 percent in the New Hampshire primary; and led with 44 percent of independents in New Hampshire and 32 percent in Iowa.  He also held a 34 percent plurality of first time participants in Iowa and was the top vote getter among those making less than $50,000, with 31 percent in both states.  He actually polled better among self described “moderates” than among those calling themselves “very conservative” – in Iowa by a factor of two to one.

We don’t want to make too much out of numbers from Republican voters, certainly, yet it’s hard to ignore those demographics.   And there seems little doubt that Paul’s anti-imperialist stance constitutes a very significant aspect of his appeal.  Unquestionably, Paul’s Republicanism has given him greater leeway on foreign policy than a Democrat or an independent from the Left might have.  It’s the Nixon-goes-to-China, Clinton-ends-welfare-as-we-know-it syndrome.  Even the Republicans who hate him don’t call him an “un-American” or a “terrorist sympathizer” – not yet, anyhow.

It’s also not the case that he’s saying things that we haven’t said.  What’s important though, is that he’s delivering that message to people and places that haven’t heard it before. What is ultimately so impressive about Paul’s Chinese in Texas ad is the empathy at its core.  Americans would resist foreign invaders, it argues, just as others do when it’s the Americans who are the foreign invaders.  Why, one might even conclude that the lives of people in strange countries are just as valuable as those of Americans!

(A Guardian article denouncing “Ron Paul’s useful idiots on the left” provides a useful contrast, as author Megan Carpentier berates said “idiots” for thinking that “people whose lives, safety, livelihoods and health depend on them [policies and programs opposed by Paul] should accept that they are trading their concerns for, say, the lives of Muslim children killed by bombs in Afghanistan” – the idea that the latter could approach the former in importance being so obviously ridiculous as to require no further comment.)

Who could have imagined that the best mass market educational material on American foreign policy would seen mostly by Republicans?  Perhaps if some of the vehemence currently displayed in rendering an overall judgement on Paul were redirected toward figuring out what we could do to change that situation, we just might have an antiwar movement worthy of the name.

Obama-Paul: What Would You Do?

With Barack Obama running just four points ahead of Ron Paul (51-47% according to last month’s CNN poll), it might be useful to ask ourselves where we would come down in such a race. Not that there’s any realistic possibility of this contest actually taking place, mind you. The libertarian Texas Congressman probably has about as much chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination as that pizza guy from Atlanta. But in politics there’s always something to be said for figuring out all the options, isn’t there? (And by the way, the “we” I have in mind here isn’t Republicans who think Obama coddles labor, but Democrats, independents or “third party” voters who may think he coddles capital.)

Certainly, so far as domestic economic policy goes, Paul holds about zero appeal – he doesn’t just favor cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare, but complete abolition of the programs. Basically a utopian capitalist, Paul presumably doesn’t even hold an “enlightened capitalist” position that might acknowledge that New Deal and Great Society programs may have forestalled a return to Great Depression-era conditions by directing resources to the lower rungs on the economic ladder. So, no matter how critical we might be of the shortcomings of Obama’s health insurance plan or his defense of Social Security, there’s no question that his policies are far superior to Paul’s in all of this.

And that would be that, except for one thing – the rest of the world. Rejecting equally the welfare and the warfare state, Paul categorizes current American foreign policy as “delusional” and, in that regard, he is far superior to a President who appears to have embraced war as a permanent condition of American life, to be conducted on a worldwide basis, with targets that may now even include American citizens.

What are we make of a split like this? If we were we speaking in electoral terms, the answer might be simple: “It’s the economy, stupid;” you don’t win elections on foreign policy – at least not when there’s no military draft. But for the purposes of our political thought experiment, let’s not confuse what we think would work with what we think is right. The question here is whether one of these two deeply flawed political profiles is somehow better, or at least not as bad as the other. This could be a much more difficult calculation.

Let’s consider the Afghanistan War – something not likely to be much of an issue in the campaign that will actually transpire next year. Twice as many American troops have now died there under Obama’s watch as during the Bush years (1153 of the 1728 total.) And with talk of keeping 25,000 soldiers there until 2024, can any but the hardest core Obama zealot really believe that he’s working on any kind of plan other than not being the president who “lost Afghanistan”? For a point of reference, we had “only” 25,000 troops there in 2007. So under the Obama Plan, America’s Ten Years War will become its Twenty Years War. Clear point to Ron Paul on this one.

And let’s look at some much larger numbers – like the cost of this war. In its recommendations to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the Congressional Progressive Caucus estimates the savings from “a responsible end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” at $1.6 trillion. Where will the money come from to continue this military adventure from one decade to the next as Obama apparently hopes to do? Probably not Wall Street.

We’re still just talking about the tip of the iceberg, though. Obama appears to have drunk the military establishment’s Kool Aid in a single gulp. With nary a murmur about the absurdity of continuing to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union, twenty years after that country has ceased to exist, the President has accepted the necessity for seven hundred or so foreign military bases. As for the idea of his administration being in some way “transformational,” as some once hoped, so far as foreign policy goes, the only transformation he’ll be remembered for is the transition to drone warfare.

Which is worse, then – Paul’s domestic policy or Obama’s foreign policy? So far as their effect on Americans goes, there are arguments to be made either way. But, again, there’s the rest of the world. Estimates of civilian deaths caused by U.S. led operations in Afghanistan run from 10-30,000. These numbers, of course, carry little weight in any domestic American political calculation since the friends and relatives of these unfortunates – collateral damage, as we call civilian casualties when they’re not Americans – cannot vote or even be heard in this country. But one might argue that they hold greater moral weight for that very reason. For all that we may suffer under our government’s misguided domestic policies, the fact is that we have some say in them. Limitations and imperfections in our democratic system notwithstanding, we could vote the people responsible for them out of office, but, for a variety of reasons, we have not done so. Those who suffer under our misguided foreign policy, however, do not have that power – not even in theory.

For better or worse, any electoral match-up that we are actually likely to see next year will pose no such dilemma. The Republican candidate will almost certainly be calling for both more war and more domestic cutbacks than Obama, so the considerations raised by an Obama-Paul match up will remain just abstract questions. We’ll be “lucky” that way.

Nevertheless, if there is ever to be a paradigm shift in American politics of the sort that the Occupy movement hints at; if we are ever to be able to make common cause with the wider range of people necessary to effect real change, then it will probably require that we think all of this through and see our supposed friends with as clear eyes as we see our supposed enemies.

Honey, We’re Bombing a New Country

“Did you see this here, dear?  It says the U.S. bombed another country last week.”

“No, I didn’t.  Which one?”

“Somalia.”

“And why did we do that, honey?”

“It looks like there are some people there who don’t like us, dear.”

“And with all we do for those people in the war against terrorism! Now which one is Somalia, again?”

“It’s in Africa and it’s not the Sudan, the other one we usually confuse it with.”

“But didn’t we used to bomb those people?”

“Yes, but it’s been a couple of years.”

“And who are the people we’re bombing?”

“It’s some group called the Shabab.  Dear, while you’re on the computer, could you Google them?”

“Okay, here it is – you can also spell it Shabaab and they call them al Shabaab, too.  Hmm, you wonder how we’re ever going to find these people if we don’t even know their name – anyhow, it says they remind a lot of people of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and they talk to al Queda in Yemen, and they’re trying overthrow the government of Somalia.  That sounds very bad, doesn’t it.”

“Yes, it does.  I think I’ll write them down on our Scrabble word list – the name seems likely to come up again.”

“Did the Shabab say this happened, honey?

“No, I don’t know if we know where their office is, actually.  It just says that unnamed ‘American officials’ told the Washington Post about it.  It was the first time we’ve used a drone aircraft to fire a missile in Somalia ”

“And they don’t even give the names of the people they talked to ?  Now, that’s some sloppy reporting, isn’t it?”

“No, dear, this is secret.”

“What do you mean secret?  You’re reading it in the newspaper, aren’t you?  Is this one of those Wiki Leak things?”

“No, these unnamed people are authorized to be telling us military secrets.  It’s just that we can’t bomb Somalia.”

“What you mean we can’t bomb Somalia?  Didn’t you just tell me we just did bomb Somalia?”

“Well, dear, we’re not at war with Somalia, so we can’t bomb them.  It’s like Canada – Canada’s not at war with us, so they can’t bomb us.”

“Well, thank God for that, anyway.”

“So even though we did bomb Somalia we don’t say we bombed Somalia – except to the Washington Post.  It’s a secret.”

“Well, for Pete’s sake, what kind of secret can it be when you bomb someone.  All the neighbors would be bound to know.  You’d probably break all their windows.  And did you say it was a drone aircraft.  “Drone” always sounds like one of those Star Wars characters to me, but it must be one of those religions over there I don’t understand, right?”

“No.  The drones are airplanes where the pilot sits in an office in Texas and bombs Somalia or Yemen.  Or Afghanistan or Pakistan.  Or Iraq or Libya  The Administration calls them America’s “unique assets.”

“The pilot sits in Texas and can bomb someone from there?”

“Or it could be Nevada or Virginia or somewhere else.  We don’t know for sure.  Remember, it’s a secret.  I think they try to put them in red states, though.”

“Well, all of this is pretty strange, isn’t it?”

“Why, yes it is.  And I see that someone named Philip Alston is worried that drone warfare might foster some kind of ‘PlayStation’ mentality, where war seemed just like a video game.  But he’s from the United Nations, originally from Australia, I see – I think that’s where that Julian Assange came from.  Apparently he’s the UN’s special representative on extrajudicial executions – as if they didn’t have more important things to be spending our money on in that organization!”

“Now tell me again just why we’re bombing these Shabab?”

“Well, they’re terrorists.  Our officials say they’re calling for ‘strikes against the United States’ and they’re ‘planning operations outside of Somalia.’”

“You mean like we’re doing to them?”

“Dear, have you taken your medication today?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  This is all so confusing.  I’m going to bed.  But remind me, honey, are we still bombing Kosovo?”

Presidential Primaries: A Perspective on an American Electoral Left

The final installment in this three part series makes the case that the presidential primaries are/should be/could be a national political discussion – happening only every four years, at best – that a permanent American electoral left should participate in eagerly. The  first article in this series, “An Obama Primary Challenge?” argued the importance of challenging the President from his left.  The second, “Know Thy Rules: The Effectiveness of a Third Party Challenge” addressed the ways in which the structure of the American political system hampers the “third party” route taken in numerous other nations.

Part III

Why is it so hard to understand the need for a primary challenge to Barack Obama?  When Jesse Jackson ran in the 1988 presidential primaries, pretty much everybody understood the point.  No, he wasn’t going to get elected president – or even win the nomination, but the reasons for a primary campaign don’t end there.  What Jackson would do was say what needed to be said.  He would get ideas shared by a lot of people onto the front page for the first time in a long time, maybe ever.  He would point out the nation’s shortcomings on the domestic front as well as our excesses on our many foreign fronts.  People would talk to each other about them; some would organize.  Other candidates might even have to address some of this for once.  As he used to put it, he would “keep hope alive.”

The Obama “Hope” posters notwithstanding, it seems obvious that Jackson’s “hope” is very much in need of life support these days.  Even those convinced that the President has fought the good fight, that in his heart he remains a man of peace, and that our problems are all due to Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, must certainly recognize the still growing gap between rich and poor, as well as the fact that we currently bomb more countries than in the Bush years.  Whatever else may be the case, by now it seems clear that just being the change we wish to see doesn’t cut it as political strategy.  We need government committed to making the change we wish to see.  And for that to happen, at the least, we need someone spelling out the nature of that  change – on the national level, much as Jesse Jackson once did.

The surface arguments against challenging Obama are the fears that it would somehow weaken him and might alienate Black America, the group that formed the base of Jackson’s campaign.  The reluctance to promote an alternative vision seems to run even deeper, though, for the fact is that the Jackson candidacy was an anomaly.  A look back at the last two presidential campaigns – when there was no Democratic incumbent – may provide a more typical example of the American Left’s unwillingness to support candidates aspiring to promote its ideas.

When the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, the most widely cited cause was the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq.  So when the Democratic takeover produced virtually no impact on that war, it seemed inevitable that Iraq become the defining issue of the 2008 presidential race.  And yet primary voters did not back the serious antiwar candidates who were available, with the result that by Super Tuesday, the only remaining Democratic presidential aspirant pledged to complete troop withdrawal was Mike Gravel, the former Alaska Senator and prominent Vietnam War opponent, whose exceedingly modest campaign never netted so much as a half of one percent of the vote in any primary or caucus.Before the race was over, Gravel would actually bolt the Democratic Party entirely and join the Libertarians.

Meanwhile, the small “l” libertarian Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul mounted the most unlikely, and most successful antiwar candidacy of the entire presidential season, although by Super Tuesday it too had become quite marginal.  The later stages of the race were then dominated by Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – who were not committed to removing all American troops from Iraq during the four-year term that they sought – and Republican John McCain – who did not appear committed to removing them during the twenty-first century.  If anti-Iraq War sentiment had once been a defining electoral force, it was not any longer.  And along with the antiwar movement went any notion that a significant electoral left existed in America in 2008.  We might say it committed suicide.

Some thought any sense of urgency about the Iraq War left the Democratic race with the departure of John Edwards.  As a U.S. Senator, Edwards had voted to authorize the war, just as Clinton had; and also voted to fund it, as both Clinton and Obama had.  As a presidential candidate, however, he had tried to carve out some kind of acceptable antiwar campaign position, that is to say, to the left of the other well funded candidates, but not too far to their left.  Media critic Norman Solomon’s generous interpretation was that Edwards’ position on the war was “evolving,” once calling him “the most improved presidential candidate of 2007.”  And, in fact, by the time Edwards withdrew, he was calling for the removal of all combat troops within a year.  In many respects he was the 2008 version of Howard Dean, the former Vermont Governor deemed the “electable” antiwar candidate four years earlier.  Neither proved either as antiwar or as electable as most supporters wished, however.

The antiwar candidate from whom many Dean and Edwards backers averted their vision was Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. In 2004, his supporters used to say that Kucinich actually was the candidate many people thought Dean to be.  Both had opposed the Iraq War at the start, but where Kucinich continued to call for complete U.S. troop withdrawal in ninety days, Dean grew vague on the question.  Similarly, up until the day he withdrew from the 2008 race, Edwards still envisioned 5,000 troops guarding the U.S. Embassy in Iraq at the end of his projected first White House term, a possibility that only made sense in the context of an ongoing military occupation.

Edwards’ candidacy met pretty much the same fate as Dean’s: premised upon their supposed electability, both quickly melted away once that premise proved chimerical – unlike the issues-based Kucinich campaign which chugged on through the entire 2004 primary season.  In 2008, however, Kucinich found himself shut out of network television debates before the first votes were even cast in the Iowa caucuses.  (The networks were likely only too happy to do this, of course, but were able to justify his exclusion with polls showing antiwar voters not supporting antiwar candidates.)  2008 proved less a reprise of his prior campaign than of the 1992 effort of Larry Agran, the once and future mayor of Irvine, California, who ran on a platform similar to the then-recent Jesse Jackson candidacies, but was deemed too obscure to participate in the presidential debates.

Kucinich’s withdrawal from the race ended what slim chance remained for any presidential primary discussion, not only of immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but of a Canadian-style single payer health care plan, a serious critique of free trade policies, and a range of other issues.  Gravel remained, true, but while his positions (quite close to Kucinich’s, with the exception of a flat tax plan) were quite serious, his fundraising was not.  Where the less than $4 million Kucinich had raised by the end of 2007 was quite insubstantial compared to Clinton’s $115 million and Obama’s $102 million, it was nonetheless an order of magnitude larger than Gravel’s $379,795.  Raising less than Jim Gilmore (you’ll have to look that one up) had in pursuit of the Republican nomination, Gravel’s campaign was quite simply unknown to the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

Much of Kucinich’s 2008 difficulty undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that while his wire-to-wire 2004 campaign had arguably been the most significant left wing Democratic presidential candidacy since Jesse Jackson’s 1988 run, that wasn’t saying all that much.  Kucinich had netted but 67 delegates compared to the nearly 400 Jackson won in his first try in 1984.  So where Jackson’s supporters felt they had something to build on and went on to win over 1,200 delegates the second time out, many of Kucinich’s no doubt began looking elsewhere after the first race.
The disparagement Kucinich’s candidacy encountered from the right and center was only to be expected – and no doubt would have been far more vociferous had they thought there was any need to take him more seriously.

The criticism from the left probably deserves greater scrutiny, though.  A widely cited article on the Edwards campaign by Bill Fletcher, Executive Editor of The Black Commentator, argued that both Edwards and Kucinich “fell prey to the historic ‘white populist error.’ What is this error, you ask?” he wrote, “Simply put, it is the idea that unity will magically appear by building a campaign that attacks poverty and corporate abuse, supports unions and focuses on the challenges facing the working class, BUT IGNORES RACE AND GENDER.” (Capitals in original).  Given that Kucinich actually supported reparations for slavery, this seems less a seriously considered critique than a rote add-on to an article about Edwards, particularly in light of Fletcher’s later role as a leader of “Progressives for Obama,” despite obvious Obama’s failure to live up to the standards Fletcher previously enunciated. (Fletcher currently opposes a primary challenge to Obama on the grounds that it would alienate black voters – and the argument for a black challenger to Obama is certainly worth considering.)

This was not the typical left wing critique of Kucinich, though, and one wonders whether its wide circulation might have had something to do with its offering white leftists an out from having to do anything for better candidates with lesser prospects.  Many actually seemed to feel that Kucinich was too good on the issues.  Supporters of more “mainstream” candidates routinely acknowledged that he was better on Iraq or health care than the candidate they actually backed, but felt the country somehow wasn’t ready for that.  Certainly the Pentagon and the insurance industry weren’t, anyhow.  So why even try?

It’s true that when Jackson ran not everyone immediately got the point – mainstream political commentators continually asked, “What does Jesse want?” The real question, though, was what Jackson’s voters wanted.  Why did they break with the conventional wisdom that you “threw away” your vote when you backed someone you didn’t think had much chance of becoming the eventual nominee?  For some, of course, the main reason was that he was a black candidate who brought that community’s concerns to the attention of a wider audience.  For others, though, it was his platform that included creating a Works Progress Administration-style program to rebuild America’s infrastructure; a fifteen percent Department of Defense budget cut; reparations to descendants of slaves; a single-payer system of universal health care; increased federal funding for public education; free community college for all; and reversing tax cuts for the richest Americans and earmarking the revenue for social welfare programs.  In other words, it was a platform of the left, a platform very much like that of Dennis Kucinich.

Some of Jackson’s ideas – like the Canadian-style health care system – had never received front page treatment before.  Among other things, keeping hope alive meant keeping those ideas in the political debate.  But this was not to be.  When Jackson opted against a third try in 1992, those ideas were no longer to be found in the presidential discussion, Larry Agron’s efforts notwithstanding.  Four years later, despite widespread discontent over his tack to the right, no significant Democrat challenged Bill Clinton’s re-election.  And by 2000, the presidential primaries showed no trace at all of the ideas that had motivated Jackson’s base twelve years earlier – even with no incumbent in the race.
There have now been five Democratic presidential nominating conventions since Jesse Jackson’s last run.  In those gatherings, the sum total of delegates elected to represent a candidate with a platform similar to Jackson’s is the 67 Kucinich delegates elected in 2004.  Did those ideas disappear?  Obviously not.  Some, like a single payer health care system have steadily gained support, to the point where one state, Vermont, has started on the path of implementation.  What has disappeared, however, is the American Left’s will to take itself seriously – and with it any need for the rest of the nation to do so either.

Right now, pollsters for Rasmussen Reports tell us that 70% of Democrats support immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, a position that, as of the moment, will be represented only in the Republican Primaries (by not one, but two candidates – Ron Paul and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.)  Rasmussen (whose polls are generally considered skewed to the right) also reports 39% of all voters (compared to 32% in 2009 Rasmussen poll) supporting a single-payer health care system along the lines of the bill recently re-filed by Senator Bernie Sanders.   Right now, that position would have no supporters in either set of primaries.

The Obama candidacy was supposed to be all about energizing and activating America’s youth.  Well, many of those once energized and activated are now alienated.  And what are they told today?  Be quiet.  Don’t go jeopardizing what we’ve got.  Not the wisest course, even for the Obama supporters, me thinks.

It may well be true that those who heard what Obama actually said during the 2008 campaign – as opposed to what they wanted to hear him say – don’t have all that much reason to be disillusioned with his performance.  But for a very large number of his voters it was not like that.  They thought that a community organizer would try to bring about real change.  They didn’t expect him to give the insurance industry half the loaf before the health care fight even began.  They thought he only said that he would expand the Afghanistan War and bring it to Pakistan because he had to say things like that to defuse the right.  They shouldn’t have thought these things, but they did.  Hey, if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee could fool itself, why shouldn’t the average American voter?  If anything, Obama’s backers might welcome a primary challenge as a way for him to try to restate his case and revitalize his base.  If he’s got something to say for his actions – and inactions – by all means, let him say it.  If nothing else, the man does give a good speech.

To some, a primary challenge is a diversion from what we really need to be doing – some type of “organizing” to provide a base for the change that we wish Obama really wanted to effect.  We need to become better, more active citizens – the argument goes – committed to “making” him do the right thing – as in that story about FDR once telling someone or other to “make me do it.”  Certainly we could actually benefit from more activism on all levels, but to argue that community or labor organizing can substitute for electoral activity is, well, a-political – in the real-world sense of politics.

The sad fact is that, since the Jackson campaigns, the American Left has largely opted out of the biggest political game in the land – the race for the White House, the national discussion that comes only every fourth year.  Right now, Obama faces a reelection campaign in which he will have to answer to no one to his left.  Oh, there will no doubt be some third party challenge or other, but few of even Obama’s harshest critics will want to run the risk of inadvertently facilitating a Republican take over of the White House.  One might even consider Obama guilty of an impeachable offense – the continued bombing Libya in violation of the War Powers Act – or an indictable offense (were the International Criminal Court to hold the U.S. to the same standards as militarily weaker nations) – the drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen – and still recognize that worse is possible.   After all, we had it for the previous eight years.

But the need for careful action is not an excuse for inaction.  Do we really mean to tell every new young voter disillusioned with our never-ending state of war that the only place to go is to Ron Paul and the libertarians?  Do we mean to tell all the budding activists outraged at seeing the poor stay poor and the rich get richer, that there’s no room for that discussion in the presidential election process?

To commit to a primary race against Obama requires a vision.  A vision, first, of a 2012 nominating convention with a bloc of delegates committed to ending the corporate warfare state, and saying so.  And a vision of future conventions with blocs of delegates of the left large enough to make a difference in the policies of the eventual nominee.  All of this may seem like quite a stretch, given how lifeless the presidential nomination process has become.  It requires hope – not the passive kind where we keep our mouths shut, cross our fingers and hope that Obama will bend our way, but active hope.

Jesse Jackson was on to something.  Let’s find a candidate.  Let’s talk to people.  Let’s send some delegates to Charlotte, North Carolina next year.  Let’s make the president answer to us.  We may not be able to “make him do” the things we want, but I think we’d at least be heading in the right direction.

Know Thy Rules: The Effectiveness of a Third Party Challenge

When you play a game you want to know the rules. You don’t, for instance, play American football by the rules of European football – otherwise known here as “soccer” – just because “Football’s football.” You could get hurt playing without a helmet, after all. And it’s pretty much the same in politics – you don’t just say “Politics is politics” or “A party’s a party” and then go out and play American politics by European rules either. You – or your cause – could get hurt doing that too.

As the 2012 presidential campaign warms up, increased calls for another shot at a “third party” presidential candidacy are inevitable. After all, the party holding the White House has switched and yet America’s disparity of wealth and income appears to grow unchecked; military spending continues on a pace nearly matching that of the entire rest of the planet put together; and the pointless, and increasingly obviously unwinnable war in Afghanistan that started with George Bush will pass the ten year mark bigger than ever – with Barack Obama at the helm.

Why not then just start afresh with a new party, like people in other countries do when they don’t like the parties they’ve got? Well, the simple answer is because parties can function quite differently in various situations. And we can’t consider an approach toward the current situation truly political – as opposed to philosophical – unless it measures the system in which it operates. So, while a third party may intuitively seem to be the “really radical” way to go, if it doesn’t work well in our system, it’s not. Outrage, however justified, is never a substitute for strategy.

Were we in Germany, for example, we’d be dealing with political parties with very different characteristics, operating under very different rules. So, when some on the German left found the politics of the Social Democratic Party disappointing, inadequate, or maybe not even left wing at all, they started a new party; first the Green Party and more recently the Left Party. These moves were quite logical within a system that allows parties to combine their respective parliamentary delegations to form a coalition government when no one of them has a majority – as is usually the case. A new party might realistically hope, then, to first become a junior coalition partner – and have some of its program adopted – and later even become the larger party. All of this can be done without great worry that a vote for the new party might inadvertently facilitate the worst possible outcome, namely a Prime Minister from the party whose policies the new party’s voters favor the least (in this case, probably the Christian Democrats.)

An American presidential election unfortunately offers no such assurance. There are no provisions for coalition governments. The White House goes to the winner of the vote of the Electoral College, the makeup of which is determined by pluralities of popular votes in the various states. Come in first in the state and get all of its electoral votes, even if you don’t have a majority. (Maine and Nebraska distribute their Electoral Votes on a Congressional District rather than statewide basis.) All of which means that in the U.S. a “third party” vote can unintenionally facilitate the election of a President from the least-liked party – probably the Republicans in the case of a “third party” of the left. Where German (or French or Italian) “third party” voters have reasonable assurance that their vote will actually increase the prospect of blocking the least desired electoral outcome, American “third party” voters do not. Ignore that fact and you might as well be playing American football without a helmet.

NO DIFFERENCE?

Are there circumstances that might outweigh these considerations? Well, there could be. The most common argument for not worrying too much about whether “third party” efforts might result in a Republican president is that there’s no essential difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. Let’s look.

So far as domestic politics go, the stark profile that Republicans are currently presenting in the U.S. House of Representatives and various state capitals, most famously Madison, Wisconsin, would seem to make this argument a fairly difficult one to press at the moment. When it comes to labor rights, for instance, Democrats may disappoint, but Republicans destroy – not a trivial distinction. While Democrats may fail to press forward aggressively on women’s rights, Republicans defund Planned Parenthood. And so on.

Since my goal is analysis rather than rhetoric, I don’t want to ignore the fact that Massachusetts’ Democratic controlled House of Representatives has since attempted to match the anti-union efforts of their Republican in Wisconsin.  There’s no question but that the Democrats can make it very hard to defend them.  But no matter how many times we’re moved to say, “They’re almost as bad as the Republicans,” the “almost” does matter.

And then there is the matter of day-to-day the consequences of appointments to bodies such as the Supreme Court and the National Labor Relations Board, an area where there may be the broadest agreement that there is a real difference between the effects of electing one of the “major” parties or the other.

On the foreign policy side, the argument for the rough equivalence of the parties can be a lot stronger though. For instance, the recent U.S. veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution that declared Israeli West Bank settlement illegal came as no big surprise since Democratic and Republican administrations have both done such things for decades. And not only is Obama’s pursuit of the Afghanistan War more aggressive than Bush’s – as promised – but he has also authorized American bombing in Pakistan, Yemen and Libya, the latter serving as a reminder of the Democrats’ embrace of the “humanitarian” military intervention during the Clinton Administration.

And yet, there has been a difference – certainly on the congressional level, anyhow. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, which stands out as the premier atrocity even in a decade of unceasing American military action, was initiated by a Republican president and opposed by most Democrats in the House of Representatives. And even when it’s been Obama initiating military action in Libya, it’s been Democrats who have been the most vigorous in calling him on his failure to consult Congress.

It also seems hard to argue that any Republican likely to replace Obama wouldn’t be even worse on foreign policy. For instance, while the Obama Administration’s pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and its treatment of alleged leaker Bradley Manning certainly give us nothing to cheer about, consider the stance of presumed Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee: “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.”

Candidate Newt Gingrich, who was for the Libya bombing before he was against it, believes “We certainly have to be prepared to use military force” to oust the government of Iran and in years past has called for legislation “that recognizes that we are entering World War III and serves notice that the United States will use all its resources to defeat our enemies – not accommodate, understand, or negotiate with them, but defeat them.”

Speaking of the possible development of a nuclear program in Iran, whose government he calls an “unalloyed evil,” former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney laments that “Unfortunately, for reasons that are unfathomable to me, our government has signaled that the military option is effectively off the table.”

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty tells the President to “Stop apologizing for our country,” as “we undermine Israel, the U.K., Poland, the Czech Republic and Colombia, among other friends. Meanwhile, we appease Iran, Russia and adversaries in the Middle East, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman believes that if “we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play.”

And, of course, Sarah Palin’s views are well known.

In short, so far as foreign policy goes, while it might not be such an open and shut case as domestic policy, if you think it’s bad now … (There is one Republican presidential candidate who does differ from all of the above, however – Texas Representative Ron Paul. But Paul will not receive the nomination, in no small part because his sane views on foreign policy are so far out of tune with the bulk of his party. It will also constitute a tremendous failing on the part of antiwar forces within the Democratic Party if Paul and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson should be the only candidates in either major party calling for an immediate end to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and occupations.)

BUT STILL,

Still, some may argue that even if the Republicans are worse than the Democrats, the Democratic Party is nevertheless a corporate dominated entity that is an unworthy and/or unworkable vehicle for social change. While not wishing to discourage anyone from hurling righteous brickbats at the party’s current leadership in Congress and the White House, I think arguing that the “essence” of the Democratic Party somehow precludes our useful participation in also fails to take into account the actual structure of American political parties.

Where parties in many other countries are “disciplined,” in the sense that their elected representatives are expected to vote that party’s position, American parties famously are not. (The best source on this may well be the humourist Will Rogers, whose remarks on the topic included, “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!”) Apart from voting for the party’s candidate for Speaker or Majority Leader, it’s largely understood that American legislators will not be bound by any party strictures. Representatives like Dennis Kucinich or Barbara Lee may vote “off” from the majority of their party colleagues time and time again, yet they are in no way prevented from doing so. In a sense, the members of the House and Senate, dependent on their own fundraising devices as they largely are, could be seen as constituting 535 independent parties.

Likewise, presidents routinely govern without consulting the wishes of their party. Does anyone really think there is a Democratic Party structure telling Obama what to do? Or that Republican Party bosses directed Bush?

THINGS NEED TO GET WORSE?

And then you may also hear the argument that things need to get worse before they get better. So even if a third party candidacy did facilitate the election of a Republican who was the greater of two evils, it might have the effect of waking people up to what’s really going on. For instance, didn’t Wisconsin and the American labor movement come to life after Scott Walker was elected governor? Unfortunately, the most infamous formulation of this notion comes from Weimar-era Germany: “Nach Hitler uns” (After Hitler, us) – in other words, some on the German left thought once people saw how bad the right wing really was, they’d turn to them. You know how that worked out. And while nothing so dramatic may happen here, it seems that if there were anything much to that theory, you’d figure people would be pretty wide awake by now after their eight years of George Bush.

I’m no doubt short shifting a range of other arguments here, but the one additional that does come to mind is from people who say they just can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat because they would feel tainted by the very act. And ultimately you can’t argue with an individual’s feeling on that score – but that’s a personal statement and not a political act.

INSANITY?

Of course, there are those who simply find the notion of making big change within the Democratic Party a dreary prospect – a high school classmate responded to my argument for challenging Obama in the primaries by citing Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and thinking you’re going to get a different result. A fair enough assessment of recent left wing Democratic Party primary efforts, I’ll concede. Unfortunately, it’s a spot-on critique of recent left wing third party campaigns as well.

This is not the place to rehash all of the elements that led up to the Supreme Court decision declaring George Bush the winner of the 2000 election, but it seems undeniable that the perceived effect of Ralph Nader’s candidacy upon the outcome caused many potential supporters to simply apply the Einstein dictum and pay little attention to his subsequent efforts – or those of any third party candidate.

The context of Nader’s 2000 candidacy may be worth recalling, though. The Democratic primaries that year produced the most soporific race to occur in a year absent a sitting Democratic president in a very long time: Al Gore against Bill Bradley. Anyone out there remember what they disagreed on? As a result, Nader’s effort produced enough buzz to prompt a bit of serious consideration of how one might utilize the Electoral College system for a kind of “tactical voting,” a concept unfamiliar here, but fairly well known in the United Kingdom.

Although quite dissimilar overall, the British and American electoral systems do share the feature of not directly electing the head of state, but instead choosing those who do elect that person – Members of Parliament in the U.K. and Presidential Electors in the U.S. – and doing so by a simple plurality in each district. In the latter years of the last Conservative government, the fact that their votes had no impact outside of their own district led some U.K. voters to act very differently than they would if their votes were totaled nationally. Aided by the availability of reliable polling information, Labourites and Liberal Democrats frequently voted for whichever of the two parties appeared to have the better chance of defeating the Tory in their particular district. (The recent Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has shelved such tactics for the time being, of course.)

Likewise, in the U.S., some proposed that if you liked Nader and you lived in New York where Gore was sure to win, or Idaho where Bush was sure to win, you should just go ahead and vote for Nader. But if you lived in a state where the outcome was not so clear like, say, Florida, you should vote for Gore because he would be better than Bush, even if he was far less than ideal. Websites for negotiating interstate Gore–Nader vote swapping even sprung up before the government shut them down – on grounds that would later fail to pass muster in federal court. But talk of utilizing the Electoral College system for progressive ends pretty much came to a halt when the 2000 Nader vote exceeded Bush’s margin of victory in Florida and New Hampshire and it hasn’t been revived since.

All of this is not fundamentally an argument against either Ralph Nader or “third parties” in general. So far as Nader goes, the only thing that really bothered me about his most recent candidacy is that his announcement provided an opportunity for people who I don’t think could carry his briefcase to denounce him for ruining their lives’ work.

So far as “third parties” go, there have been some obvious notable successes on the local level, particularly in non-partisan elections. In San Francisco, for instance, over the past decade, two Greens have won seats on the city’s Board of Supervisors, two on the School Board and one on the Community College Board, while Green Party member Matt Gonzalez came within five points of defeating Democrat Gavin Newsom for mayor. (Two of the city’s chartered Democratic Clubs even endorsed Gonzalez, prompting an unsuccessful drive to de-charter them that ultimately established the right of the Clubs to endorse freely in nonpartisan elections. Four of the five successful Greens, by the way, have since left the Party; three to become Democrats.)

And then there is the wholly remarkable case of Bernie Sanders, who has won election to the United States Senate as an independent, in the process achieving sufficient stature that it would be a Democratic opponent rather than Sanders who would be deemed the spoiler should a three way race result in the seat going to a Republican.

Significantly, however, since the time Sanders reached Congress he has never embraced a “third party” presidential campaign, standing back from the Nader candidacy even in 2000, when in the early stages it looked to have the potential to exceed ten percent of the popular vote and really put the Greens on the map.

In the end, the 2000 Nader campaign actually played out quite similarly to Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party candidacy. Former Vice President Wallace, who would have become president following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had the 1944 convention not pushed him off the Democratic ticket in favor of Harry Truman, was likewise early on expected to garner at least ten percent of the vote in a four way race with the now-incumbent Truman, New York Republican Governor Tom Dewey and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. The same dynamic as would develop fifty-two years later came into play, though, and fear of electing Dewey overrode lack of enthusiasm for Truman. Wallace’s vote sank to under three percent, just as Nader’s would.

In retrospect, if the 2000 election were considered a test for the American people on the use of the Electoral College, you’d have to say we flunked it. Hence, the growing popularity of the probably ultimately more desirable strategy of ditching the eighteenth century “College” entirely (which would, though, only intensify the danger of “third party” votes producing undesirable outcomes.)

Obviously nothing lasts forever and the current structure of the American political system won’t either. Still,  it took a civil war to effect the last major alteration in the political landscape – the rise of the Republican Party. Likewise, we probably won’t see the next realignment until a significant portion of one party’s members – elected officials included – are ready to jump ship en masse – a possibility that does not seem to be on the immediate horizon.

However, a serious backlash among President Obama’s true believers does seem unavoidable, particularly among those who voted for him because of who they wanted him to be rather than who he was. “Third parties” can be particularly appealing to the relatively newly radicalized, who often want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what they have just rejected. For one thing, a bold new party venture sure can seem a lot more glamourous than slogging though Democratic Party primaries.

In the end though, all of us, old or new, have to ask ourselves the same questions about the effectiveness of our political choices. And knowing the rules of the political system is ultimately a lot more important than knowing the rules of a game because so much more is at stake.

San Francisco: Reaganomics is Back!

San Francisco might have seemed one of the least likely cities to rip a page from the economic play book of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  Yet in approving a tax holiday for Twitter, Inc., the giant of micro blogging, the city’s Board of Supervisors has done just that.  Walker has become infamous for gutting his state’s collective bargaining law.  Less well known, though, is the package of tax cuts he had previously signed into law – including a two year income tax moratorium for companies moving into Wisconsin – that increased the very budget deficit he argued justified his drive against his state’s public employees.  San Francisco officials presumably won’t take up the cudgel against public employees or government services the way Walker did, but proposing new tax breaks while the city is running a serious deficit certainly smooths the path for those who will.

There’s nothing really new about this approach.  Call it “supply side economics,”“trickle-down economics” or “Reaganomics,” the idea’s the same: Cut business taxes, America thrives, and the tax cuts pay for themselves in increased revenue.  When the theory proved to be poppycock as those revenues failed to materialize, fiscal conservatives like Ronald Reagan found themselves born-again as deficit spenders.

Walker’s cuts were only a drop in the bucket compared to Wisconsin’s anticipated two-year shortfall of nearly $3 billion, amounting to $117 million over two years, with just a million or two for the relocating companies.  But his backers hope they’re just the start – eight of the cuts Walker campaigned on (there were more) would cost an estimated $3.8 billion over the two year budget cycle.

Likewise, the estimated $22-57 million payroll tax exemption that Twitter has apparently successfully demanded as its price for staying in San Francisco for the next six years falls far short the city’s projected $380 million deficit.  And since the deal only applies to new hires, Twitter won’t actually pay less than it does today.  But here too, that won’t be the end of it.

Online game creator Zynga has already announced it wants the same deal; others, likely including online review company Yelp, will certainly follow.  And since it’s not allowed to fashion a tax break for the benefit of a single company, this one is crafted for an entire “community revitalization” zone.  Business owners in other parts of the city will obviously ask their Supervisors why they can’t get them one too.

And there is a darker side to this.  Ronald Reagan was accused of being many things, but original thinker was not one of them.  He may actually have believed in what his future running mate, George H. Bush, once called his “voodoo economics,” but not everyone is so naive.  Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, proclaims his desire to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”  And a major tax break for a wealthy corporation in an industry that’s currently thriving is just how you start the shrinkage.

It’s not that there are no legitimate policy issues here.  The city is currently one of the few with a payroll tax and some would prefer to switch to taxing a company’s gross receipts.  (The city had a hybrid system in which a company was taxed either on its profits or gross receipts until the latter was eliminated in 2001 by a lawsuit filed by the city’s businesses, an outcome that cost the city $25 million annually.)  And Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who voted against the Twitter deal proposed a two-year moratorium on taxing stock options.  Instead, for the moment the city has opted to stick with the current system and give Twitter what it wants.

And let’s be clear here – this tax break is not focused on an industry or individuals struggling to make ends meet.  The New York Times recently pegged the hi tech industry’s average salary for computer science majors just out of college at $80,000, (with Google going as high as $90,000 to $105,000.)  Twitter itself is currently valued at $7 billion and hi tech employment in San Francisco is almost at its peak level.

The bill needs to go through one more reading, but with the Supervisors having voted 8-3 in its favor and Mayor Ed Lee leading the cheers, it seems certain to become law next week.  The question of whether the Board still had a “progressive” majority had been a open one until it firmly embraced a corporate tax agenda with this vote.  Still, as the city elects a mayor later this year and Lee has pledged to serve only the remainder of now-Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s term, the Twitter vote may emerge as a litmus issue in that race.

Those behind the Twitter deal no doubt think it will be cool to keep such a hip company in the city.  Perhaps they’re too young to remember Reaganomics; perhaps they’ve forgotten.  And no doubt, they’ll continue to denounce politicians in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. for cutting taxes on the rich and services for the rest of us.  But when it comes time to balance the budget in San Francisco, hip and cool won’t pay the bills.  Let’s not the rest of us forget that.  And for now, the city’s Board of Supervisors has been tried and found wanting.

Interventions Past: Getting the Record Straight

The jumbled accounting of the 1999 events in Kosovo that respected Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery musters in support of the current Libya bombing campaign illustrates just how far the fog of war may extend.  In reviewing the recent history of what he considers humanitarian interventions, including NATO’s in Kosovo, Avnery writes:

Slobodan Milosevic was committing an act of genocide – driving out a whole people, committing barbarities along the way.

Leaving aside the question of the appropriateness of the word “genocide,” Avnery describes things accurately enough.  In his book, Kosovo: War and Revenge, journalist Tim Judah wrote:

In the end almost 850,000 were either deported or fled Kosovo and hundreds of thousands were displaced inside.

The problem is that Judah here describes events that actually happened after the start of the NATO bombing campaign that Avnery thinks was aimed at stopping them.

I know from personal experience that Avnery is not the only one with an inverted time line of the period.  A couple of years ago, a friend of mine described an article he was planning to write accusing Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein of dogmatism.  While I was in no way sympathetic to his point of view and ultimately thought that it was his article rather than its targets that was dogmatic, I nonetheless thought I’d save him from a bit of embarrassment by pointing out that the Kosovo bombing campaign he considered the “right thing” to do (while Chomsky hadn’t) had preceded the displacement campaign his memory told him had come first.

It’s not the case that these folks are recovering these memories out of thin air, though. There were Kosovars displaced before that. Judah again:

By the 3 August (1998) the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was estimating that 200,000 Kosovars had been displaced by the fighting.

But the chronology is not the only aspect of the Kosovo War that has been distorted – there were two sides to it and neither covered itself with glory. Slobodan Milosevic, leader of what was then still officially Yugoslavia, is accurately remembered as a war criminal.  But less well remembered is the fact that earlier that year, the U.S. State Department had branded the principle force fighting Milosevic’s government, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a “terrorist organization.” (While I personally do not place great stock in State Department “terrorist lists,” I had thought that the State Department did.)  At one point the organization threatened death to any ethnic-Albanian Kosovar leaders who might sign onto a pact for autonomy within Yugoslavia. The late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke thought the KLA was “taking very provocative steps in order to draw the west into the crisis.”

None of this is meant to whitewash either Milosevic, the disproportionate force employed by his government, or the fear at the time that something like the massacre of 8,000-10,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces four years before could be repeated in Kosovo.  But neither should we forget that Yugoslavia had allowed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to station 2,000 monitors in the province in the midst of the fighting.  The monitors were removed when NATO began its bombing – against the wishes of Yugoslavia.

Only after the start of that 78-day campaign (which included the use both of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions and the bombing of a Belgrade television station that killed eighteen) did Yugoslav forces drive Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population out.

(BBC’s official timeline of the conflict: 1999 March – Internationally-brokered peace talks fail. Nato launches air strikes against Yugoslavia lasting 78 days before Belgrade yields. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees pour into neighbouring countries, telling of massacres and forced expulsions which followed the start of the Nato campaign.)

But in his column on the Gush Shalom website Avnery writes:

When there was a worldwide outcry, President Bill Clinton decided to bomb installations in Serbia in order to induce Milosevic to desist. Nominally, it was a NATO action. It achieved its goal, the Kosovars returned to their homeland, and today we have the independent republic of Kosovo.

Judah, in fact, considered Yugoslavia’s responding to the bombing by driving the Albanian Kosovars out to be what ultimately undid it.  Absent that, the story the outside world saw was all about the bombing of Serbia.  “If this situation had continued for much longer,” he thought, “there is little doubt that uproar would have ensued.  The question would have been asked, ‘How can we bomb a small country – whatever we think of its government – because it refuses to sign an agreement about the future of part of its own territory?’”

In retrospect, one of the more significant aspects of NATO’s Yugoslavia bombing campaign has proved to be that it was the point at which many liberals “got over” Vietnam and came to like war again.  Avnery continues:

At the time, I applauded publicly, to the dismay of many of my leftist friends at home and all over the world. They insisted that the bombing campaign was a crime, particularly since it was conducted by NATO, which for them is an instrument of the devil.  My answer was that in order to prevent genocide, I am ready to make a pact even with the devil.

Or at least to lose his memory, apparently.

Some who do remember the chronology correctly still maintain that an effect of the bombing campaign was somehow actually its cause. As Noam Chomsky commented:

The logic, widely accepted, is intriguing. Uncontroversially, the vast crimes took place after the bombing began: they were not a cause but a consequence. It requires considerable audacity, therefore, to take the crimes to provide retrospective justification for the actions that contributed to inciting them.

We will surely not all agree on the future military interventions the U.S. will undoubtedly enter into, but if we could at least agree on the facts of the interventions of the past, we might have a firmer basis for discussing them.

The Arrogance of Power

“These people weren’t gathering for a bake sale … They were terrorists.”

So went the American response to Pakistan’s complaint that our drone-launched missiles killed mostly “peaceful citizens, including elders of the area” in an attack last week. Now, a decade of explanations that civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan were a regrettable (but inevitable) part of our War on Terror have pretty well inured me to government mendacity. But somehow, this one – well you know, it took the cake. “A bake sale” – No, they probably weren’t there for a bake sale. Bake sales are what they hold here in America to run the schools we don’t have enough money for. Making new enemies for this country is pretty expensive you know.

The story this time is that the missiles apparently killed 26 of 32 participants in a “jirga” called to settle a local dispute between two tribes in North Waziristan over the operation of the chromium mine. Their target was the local Taliban officials expected there to mediate in their role as the de facto local government. Pakistan’s Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani called the attack “carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life,” reporting that there were, in fact, 13 Taliban present, but 15 of those killed were not Taliban. Some locals claimed a death toll as high as 40. And the U.S. response was anonymous because officially we have never launched a missile into Pakistan. We’re not at war there, so that would be illegal. And the CIA would never do anything illegal.

If the military hasn’t yet created a decoration for arrogance, they should. Otherwise, a lot of lot of spectacular efforts – such as this one – will go unrewarded. Could we ever imagine another country killing American civilians because they were in proximity to government or military figures, and then telling the world, “Those people were criminals. That was no cattle show, you know”? Of course not – no country is capable of such an action, so why bother even imagining such a thing?

There may be no better measure of just how far this country has gone down the road of trying to bomb its way to peace and friendship in the Muslim and Arab worlds than our current decision to bomb another Muslim and Arab country. The proposition that Libya could do better than Muammar Gaddafi will get no argument here, nor will I try to predict the future. But consider the arrogance that it takes for us to decide that this latest attack constitutes a sensible American response to the situation.

The U.S. still maintains an occupying force of 50,000 troops in Iraq as a result of a war launched on grounds now generally conceded to have been fraudulent. A military force of over 100,000 is currently deployed in Afghanistan, even as the Secretary of Defense says that anyone who’d recommend an operation like that should “have his head examined.” As mentioned above, we are also waging undeclared war in Pakistan – and in Yemen, too, in similar fashion.

In the current political upheavals in the Middle East, American allies in the governments of Yemen and Bahrain have killed unarmed civilians – in the case of Bahrain with the aid of another ally – Saudi Arabia – none of which has moved our government to action. But when France and the United Kingdom, the former colonial powers in the oil-rich area, declare the need to aid a military uprising in Libya – obviously not an ally – why, the U.S. is right there.

Unfortunately, one of the most accurate reactions to recent events was probably that of the unnamed Pakistani resident who said of the missile attack on his region:

It will create resentment among the locals and everyone might turn into suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, they might want to get to minting those Presidential Medals of Arrogance.

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