SolidarityEconomy.net

How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America

by Zbigniew Brzezinski

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us. (more…)

By Slavoj Zizek, London

Since the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he really did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop the water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”?

If there was one surprising aspect to this situation it has less to do with the confessions themselves than with the fact that for the first time in a great many years, torture was normalized — presented as something acceptable. The ethical consequences of it should worry us all.

While the scope of Mr. Mohammed’s crimes is clear and horrifying, it is worth noting that the United States seems (more…)

by Mitchel Cohen, Brooklyn Greens/Green Party, and co-founder, Red Balloon Collective

FORTY YEARS IT’S BEEN. In October 1967, I was an 18-year-old junior at SUNY Stony Brook, organizing students to participate in the first militant demonstration on the East Coast against the Vietnam war. At the Pentagon.

Phil Ochs — my hero — was scheduled to perform at Stony Brook that night. Many students were saying they weren’t going on the march because they wanted to go to Phil’s concert instead. SDS wrote letter after letter trying to get him to change the date. No answer. Finally — oh, how it cut my heart out — we organized a boycott of his records. (more…)

by Glen Ford

“Barack Obama is our son and he deserves our support,” declared Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr., speaking to a gathering of Black Democrats at the party’s winter meeting, in Washington, earlier this month. By Jones’ logic, Condoleezza Rice deserves automatic African American support as “our daughter,” and Colin Powell, her predecessor as George Bush’s Secretary of State, was due fealty as “our brother.”

Jones’ embrace of the entire African American family tree must also, therefore, extend to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the most reactionary, anti-Black member of the High Court; and to “our brother” J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State whose consuming mission in 2004 was to deny the franchise to as many fellow Blacks as possible. (more…)

Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad have lost face at home; now others must forge peaceful settlements in the Middle East

by Henry Porter, Observer

There is a striking likeness in the expressions of George W Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran as they confront each other over the issues of uranium enrichment and dominance in the Middle East. It falls somewhere between the chastened and defiant playground bully. (more…)

by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh

“The military-industrial-complex [would] cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

“There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.”

- General Smedley D. Butler (more…)

by John McMillian

Recently I finished teaching a freshman seminar at Harvard called “From Reform to Revolution: Youth Culture in the 1960s.” When I built the syllabus, I asked students to ponder a single, overarching question: “How did the youth rebellion of the 1960s happen?” That is, what caused millions of young people to pierce the bland and platitudinous din that characterized the early Cold War years? Why did so many youths — many of them affluent and college-educated — suddenly decide that American society needed to be radically overhauled? (more…)

by Chris Floyde

January 12, 2007

I. The Twin Engines of Bush’s War

The reason that George W. Bush insists that “victory” is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. (more…)

Financial Times

George W. Bush’s new direction in Iraq is certainly not a strategy for victory, whatever that word, which is used ever more desperately by the US president, now means. It may be one last heave. It may be a cover for
US withdrawal. But two things are quite clear.

Right now, Mr Bush has the support of no more than one in four Americans for this so-called surge of an extra 20,000 or so troops. Very soon, as the already indecipherable ethnic and sectarian patchwork of Iraq is pulled further and even more bloodily to pieces, he will have none. (more…)

by John Nichols

In a sober address to the nation Wednesday night, President Bush confirmed his determination to surge the United States military deeper into the Iraq quagmire by sending roughly 21,500 more troops to that troubled land.

The president went even further than his critics feared he might, outlining a dangerous program of integrating U.S. and Iraqi military units – with U.S. trainers and strategists embedded in Iraqi units and U.S. brigades partnered with Iraqi brigades. And he signaled that he will implement his new approach before Congress has a chance to consider it. Indeed, the first new U.S. brigade is scheduled to hit the ground in Iraq Monday. (more…)

by Chris Hedges

The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America’s open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy. (more…)

by Tom Hayden

In my first report, concerning troop withdrawals, I found the Iraq Study Group proposals for troop reductions too vague and equivocal. In my second report, I found their proposals for opening Iraq’s oil reserves to multinationals repugnant and even self-serving. Now let’s turn to the internal political solution offered by the Baker-Hamilton Group.

It deserves close attention, for it mirrors and endorses peace talks with the Iraqi insurgents that are already underway in secret, as first reported in the Huffington Post last week. (more…)

by Marc CooperFor the first time since Vietnam, an organized, robust movement of active-duty US military personnel has publicly surfaced to oppose a war in which they are serving. Those involved plan to petition Congress to withdraw American troops from Iraq. (Note: A complete version of this report will appear next week in the print and online editions of The Nation.)

After appearing only seven weeks ago on the Internet, the Appeal for Redress, brainchild of 29-year-old Navy seaman Jonathan Hutto, has already been signed by nearly 1,000 US soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, including dozens of officers–most of whom are on active duty. Not since 1969, when some 1,300 active-duty military personnel signed an open letter in the New York Times opposing the war in Vietnam, has there been such a dramatic barometer of rising military dissent. (more…)

Remembering the Iraq War’s Pollyanna Pundits

Weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Fox News Channel host Brit Hume delivered a scathing speech critiquing the media’s supposedly pessimistic assessment of the Iraq War.

“The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong,” Hume complained in the April 2003 speech (Richmond Times Dispatch, 4/25/04). “They didn’t get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong.”

Hume was perhaps correct–but almost entirely in the opposite sense. Days or weeks into the war, commentators and reporters made premature declarations of victory, offered predictions about lasting political effects and called on the critics of the war to apologize. Three years later, the Iraq War grinds on at the cost of at least tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. (more…)

by Karen Dolan

Red state, blue state? That is SO last week.

As Democrats have swept into power, shamelessly ignoring the once-sacred red state–blue state divide, one more aspect of this blurring of the nation’s political divide remains underreported. This story more fully illustrates the passionate energy of anti-war sentiment in America and it’s a lesson former red-staters would do well to heed.

This election, 162 communities in Wisconsin, Illinois and Massachusetts voted on ballot measures calling for the U.S. to end the Iraq War. In every one of those communities, the measures swept to victory.

(more…)