The Distant Ocean

The lesson of the drones

Here's former UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto's rendition of a standard narrative of Obama admirers:

The United States is not what people think it is. I don’t think it’s what President Obama thought it was. I thought that being president—I think that he meant, really—I liked him. And I thank God for his coming to that high office in the United States, and I prayed that he would be elected. And I know that he was sincere. And in my waiting room, in my office at the United States, I had a great big picture of him, with—it’s like a poster with "hope" written underneath. And I wrote him a letter saying how much—how glad I was to hear him. But it has remained promises, because I think now he realizes that he is only the president in a country where the industrial-military complex decides what has to be done, and you cannot go beyond the parameters of what they decide. It would be dangerous.

The general version goes like this: Barack Obama is sincerely dedicated to progressive social change and earnestly wants to fulfill our every wish for a better society, but he's been thwarted by the powerful forces of a permanent government/corporate nexus that's beyond his control, and he's powerless to govern outside of their parameters (in some advanced versions of this fantasy he risks unspecified but presumably dire consequences unless he toes the line—"it would be dangerous", as d'Escoto says).

In this worldview, Obama is a pragmatic enemy of the forces of corporatism and militarism rather than a willing co-conspirator.  He's our secret ally in the White House, chipping away from the inside when he can and making difficult compromises when he must.  Much like God—in fact, exactly like God—he's never held responsible for even his worst crimes and betrayals.  To take just one example, when the Obama administration kills hundreds of innocent people with drone strikes in Pakistan (and Afghanistan, and Yemen), it would be unfair to put any of the responsibility for this on Obama himself, because he effectively has no choice in the matter.

There's just one small problem with this worldview: objective reality.  This was Obama in August of 2007, outlining his plans for Pakistan:

[L]et me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will. [...] I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.

Obama repeated this same intention throughout the campaign, as in his first debate with McCain in September 2008:

[W]e've got to deal with Pakistan, because al Qaeda and the Taliban have safe havens in Pakistan, across the border in the northwest regions, and although, you know, under George Bush, with the support of Senator McCain, we've been giving them $10 billion over the last seven years, they have not done what needs to be done to get rid of those safe havens. And until we do, Americans here at home are not going to be safe.

Obama actually outflanked McCain to the right on this, and McCain and other conservatives attacked him on multiple occasions for his irresponsibly hawkish rhetoric.  It didn't make any difference, of course, and Obama easily won the presidency.  And true to his word, one of his first acts as president was to launch drone strikes inside Pakistan—and he only accelerated the attacks from there:

The first drone strikes of the new presidency took place on Obama's third day in office - four Arabs, presumed to be al-Qaeda associates, died in a strike in the border region. But as many as 16 members of the extended family of a respected pro-government tribal elder died when the second drone strike that day went terribly awry.

A study by the New America Foundation last year found that just six of 41 CIA-launched drone attacks in the border region had targeted al-Qaeda members. Eighteen of the targets were Taliban and 16 of them alone were efforts to kill Baitullah Mehsud - which, depending on who did the counting, racked up more than 300 additional civilian deaths.

As that same article observed, "the professorial Obama is the new killer on the block, authorising more drone attacks in the first year of his term in office than Bush did in his entire presidency."  And the new killer kept up the pace through his second year as well:

In the 21 months since his inauguration, President Obama has ordered or approved 120 drone attacks on Pakistan. There were 22 such attacks in September 2010 alone, reportedly killing more than 100 people. In contrast, Obama's predecessor Bush ordered just 60 attacks in eight years.

So to review: 1) in 2007 Obama announced his plan to launch attacks inside Pakistan; 2) he reiterated this intention throughout the campaign, going so far that he drew criticism from the right for his bellicose rhetoric; 3) after taking office he immediately started authorizing the very drone strikes he'd spent the past few years promising to carry out; and 4) his administration proceeded to launch more drone strikes in one year than George Bush had during his entire presidency, and Obama's total now stands at more than double Bush's.

Does this sound like a man who's acting against his will?

But the irrationality of Obama apologists doesn't end there.  Consider just the last point above—that Obama launched more drone strikes in his first year in office than Bush did in eight years.  To believe that this massive increase in the rate of drone attacks was not a direct result of Obama's policy, you have to believe either that 1) the military and intelligence services had wanted to ramp up the drone strikes for years, but were balked by well-known hippie peaceniks like George Bush and Dick Cheney who refused to go along with them, or 2) the fact that it started right as Obama became president was just a giant coincidence.  Which just goes to show the depths of absurdity you can reach when your overriding goal is to explain away Democratic misdeeds.

The lesson of the drones is that Obama isn't a victim of powerful forces, but a willing ally.  With few exceptions, he does what he does—from drone strikes to corporate tax cuts to whistleblower prosecutions—not because he has no choice, but because it's what he wants to do.  And the lesson of those who refuse to learn the lesson of the drones is that partisanship trumps not just principle but common sense; to paraphrase Orwell, not only don't they disapprove of atrocities committed by their own side, but they have a remarkable capacity for not even seeing them.

Free the Arbetoreum!

San Francisco's Strybing Arbetoreum (or "Arboretum", as some unimaginative pronouncers will insist) was free until a few months ago, when opportunistic local politicians and public functionaries realized that the financial crisis was the perfect cover for making people pay for the use of the commons.  Since these mustachio-twirling bastards instituted the entrance fee, attendance is way down; the turtles are underwatched, the trees are insufficiently sat-under, the squirrels have been woefully underfed, and great blue herons are bluer than ever.

So here's what you can do for me: click on over to this page and tell the mayor and the board of supervisors to support legislative efforts aimed at rescinding the fee.  Don't worry if you're not a resident of San Francisco or the wider Bay Area—just say you visit here twelve times a year and used to donate $100 each time you'd go to the arbetoreum, but you can't bring yourself to return now that they've sullied this once-welcoming landmark.  (The fee is only levied on people from outside of San Francisco, actually, so if you don't live here you're exactly the ones who'll be affected and who have the most reason to protest.)

This is one of those rare cases where spending a minute to write a comment can actually do a lot of good, given the relatively low profile of this issue.  So if you enjoy the little nuggets of kvetching you read here in my corner of the Internet, you can show your appreciation by helping to make my beloved arbetoreum free again (or DERAILING THE CAPITALIST BLOOD TRAIN OF EVIL, as I prefer to think of it).

Synergy

There's now a US Uncut following in the footsteps of UK Uncut, and their first day of action is tomorrow, when they're going to bring Bank of America's business to a SCREECHING HALT.  Of course business at BofA isn't usually hopping on Saturday anyway, but that's when everyone's off work.  What are you going to do?

So if you're up for hounding some tax dodgers, take a look at their event map and see if there's an action near you.  And if there isn't, why not start one?  Oh, right, because I'm mentioning this late on Friday evening.

(San Francisco residents can be forgiven for confusing the "Uncut" movement with the dude who's working to get a circumcision ban on the November ballot in the city.  I can't help but think that one of these two groups could get some free publicity out of the other, y'know?  At the very least they might be able to use the same signs.)

But That Would Be Wrong

News flash:

A 20-year-old Saudi student who was arrested in Lubbock, Tex., late Wednesday was close to constructing a bomb and had researched a range of possible targets including the Dallas home of former president George W. Bush and the residences of three Americans who served in the military at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, authorities said.

Yes.  Well.  I can only say that it is, uh...no doubt very, err...right...that they have stopped this person from doing this thing to former president George W. Bush.

Democracy Now blows it

I rely on Democracy Now's headlines to save me the pain of trolling through multiple mainstream news outlets for the day's choicest morsels, and in my experience they do a good job of it and inject a sufficient amount of the right kind of bias.  But they blew it royally with this one:

The Obama administration has reportedly launched a review of military aid and potential weapons sales to allied governments facing a wave of popular revolt. U.S. law prohibits aid to military or security units that engage in human rights abuses. According to the Wall Street Journal, the review could force the cutoff of aid to specific military units that have attacked civilian protesters and even delay multi-billion-dollar arms deals to Gulf states.

The notion that the Obama administration is worried that military aid might end up funding "human rights abuses" goes well beyond laughable to Orwellian, given the long and well-documented correlation between US military aid and human rights violations (which has continued right through Obama).  The concern here isn't that US weapons might end up being used by abusive, authoritarian regimes—it's that they might end up being used by anyone other than abusive, authoritarian regimes.  Like, say, democratic governments that actually reflect the will of the populace in some measure.

And in fact the Wall Street Journal article in question made this very point multiple times.  Here's one instance:

"The defense industry's expectations for the future have essentially been reversed," said Loren Thompson, a defense industry expert at Lexington Institute. "Every time there is instability in the Middle East, it tends to slow down the signing of contracts and the delivery of weapons. What Washington doesn't want to do is deliver its latest military technology to regimes that might lose power."

And another:

"We may think that we're arming this regime but it could wind up in four or five years we could have ended up arming someone else," [Democratic Representative Anthony] Weiner said. "Let's take a step back while there's so much volatility in the world."

And as the article also notes, "before the outbreak of unrest, the Obama administration had been aggressively pushing to sell increasingly sophisticated arms to oil-rich Arab allies."  Which makes it crystal clear that this sudden desire to review weapons sales to our formerly-reliable Middle Eastern clients has nothing at all to do with human rights.

It's a sad day when Democracy Now can take a Wall Street Journal article and make it more favorable to the Obama administration.  And while I don't think this necessarily represents a crippling Obamaphilia among the Democracy Now staff, I also don't recall them having any similar problems accurately analyzing and summarizing mainstream news stories about the Bush administration.

HOWEVER: On the other hand, for two days in a row now Democracy Now has played the video of Obama lying through his teeth about CIA agent (sorry, "our diplomat in Pakistan") Raymond Davis.  It's always interesting to watch a human being telling a bald-faced lie (as opposed to the more ambiguous varieties of dissembling), and what's most interesting in Obama's case is that he does it without missing a beat.  Practice makes perfect.

Horrifying realization

Like you, I've checked back here a few times recently to see if there was anything new.  But after a few disappointing visits I came to the realization that nothing new will show up unless I write it myself.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!

This is like one of those dreams where you find yourself in physics class on exam day and you haven't studied for the entire semester.  On the plus side, at least I'm wearing clothes.

Obamaland

I'm still getting over my surprisingly resilient bug, but while I'm recuperatin' you can take a look at this excellent piece by Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford.  An excerpt:

Obama has always told everyone in range of his voice that his main goal in life is to forge a grand consensus with the GOP, a bipartisan understanding between the Right and the Center Right.

The result is an Obama budget that is all sliced up, like the loser in a knife fight – only, Obama and his corporate executives-on-loan at the White House did all the cutting, themselves. Obama is showing such extraordinary talent for obliterating poor and working class programs across the board, he’s making Republicans look redundant and obsolete.

"Making Republicans look redundant and obsolete" could be the motto of the Democratic Party at this point, actually.  And characteristically, Ford fixes the blame where it belongs:

No, the shame is not Obama’s. The people who should be scandalized by the president’s budget are the enablers on the Left who abrogated their political responsibility to the people – and to Truth – by inventing an Obama that did not exist, back in 2007 and 2008. The shame of the proposed 2012 budget rests on the heads of those Blacks and progressives in leadership positions who chose to mis-lead their constituencies in ’07 and ’08, who refused to make even one demand, or even a mild request of Obama, the candidate – and thus rendered Blacks and progressives politically irrelevant.

Ford could just as well have added: and who are planning to do it again in 2012.  It reminds me of an old joke:

Question: What's more pathetic than the U.S. left?

Answer: ...

Oh wait—that's not a joke, it's an actual question I starting asking myself years ago, and I still haven't come up with an answer.  I'm open to suggestions.

Speaking of attacking Wikileaks

You might remember Daniel Domscheit-Berg as the angry ex-Wikileakian who felt that the perfect time to announce his competing group (openleaks.org)—and coincidentally, publicize his upcoming book—would be right when Wikileaks was releasing the first of the State Department cables, since obviously his own activities were far more important than anything in those documents.  Now we have more information on what Domscheit-Berg was up to before and since then, and it's very interesting to compare it to the reported tactics of the corporate plot to smear Wikileaks. Here's one of the smear campaign tactics:

• Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization.

And here's Domscheit-Berg recounting how he and others sabotaged Wikileaks and stole unpublished documents on their way out the door:

WikiLeaks’ most prominent defector confirmed that he and other disaffected volunteers had taken the site’s software-based secure-submission platform when they left the project, leaving the site technically unable to receive new material. [...] In the process, the group also took with them a backlog of previously submitted, leaked material — an action that has now prompted legal threats by WikiLeaks' Berlin lawyer.

Here's another of the reported smear campaign tactics:

• Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed to not be secure they are done.

And what do we hear from Domscheit-Berg?

"Children shouldn’t play with guns," Domscheit-Berg writes. "That was our argument for removing the submission platform from Julian’s control ... We will only return the material to Julian if and when he can prove that he can store the material securely and handle it carefully and responsibly." [...] Domscheit-Berg warns that anyone who visits the site to read submission instructions could be monitored. "The current system has become a security risk for everyone involved," he writes.

None of which proves that Domscheit-Berg is actually receiving checks from the companies that are trying to discredit and destroy Wikileaks, of course—but if he isn't, he should be, since he certainly is doing their dirty work for them in just the way they'd outlined.

Domscheit-Berg does at least make one of his motivations clear when he admits that "sometimes I hate [Julian Assange] so much that I’m afraid I’d resort to physical violence if our paths ever cross again."  Reports that the chip on his shoulder reached such startling proportions only after he'd been called "Daniel Damn Shitbag" one too many times, while extremely amusing, could not be confirmed.

My belief that I couldn't possibly trust this self-serving nimrod and his openleaks.org site any less than I already did turns out to have been a serious failure of imagination.

Without fear or favor

In an article about a recently-uncovered plot to undermine Wikileaks (which is worth reading for the procedural details of the plotters' plans, among other things), Glenn Greenwald makes a point I was going to write about at the time:

After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks.  But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline.  Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous.  Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest.  Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it's impossible to imagine that ever happening.

And then follows it up with the critical explanation:

Why?  Because crimes carried out that serve the Government's agenda and target its opponents are permitted and even encouraged; cyber-attacks are "crimes" only when undertaken by those whom the Government dislikes, but are perfectly permissible when the Government itself or those with a sympathetic agenda unleash them.  Whoever launched those cyber attacks at WikiLeaks (whether government or private actors) had no more legal right to do so than Anonymous, but only the latter will be prosecuted. 

That's the same dynamic that causes the Obama administration to be obsessed with prosecuting WikiLeaks but not The New York Times or Bob Woodward, even though the latter have published far more sensitive government secrets; WikiLeaks is adverse to the government while the NYT and Woodward aren't, and thus "law" applies to punish only the former.  The same mindset drives the Government to shield high-level political officials who commit the most serious crimes, while relentlessly pursuing whistle-blowers who expose their wrongdoing.  Those with proximity to government power and who serve and/or control it are free from the constraints of law; those who threaten or subvert it have the full weight of law come crashing down upon them.

Spot on.  And this is not only the governing principle in the context Greenwald's describing but in U.S. policy generally, both domestically and internationally.  That's how Mubarak could spend 30 years torturing and killing people and winning "elections" with over 90% of the vote and still not be a dictator, and that's why U.N. Security Council resolutions are sacrosanct when it comes to Iraq but meaningless when it comes to Israel.  It's amazing how much simpler it becomes to understand what the U.S. does in the world once you accept this underlying principle.*

* (And let go of this one.)

Not the love bug

I've come down with hantavirus or possibly ebola or—I'm reaching here—maybe the common cold, so this space will be intentionally left blank for a while.  In the meantime, why not take a stroll?  It's nice out and a little exercise never hurt anyone.  I'm just saying.

Crystal ball

Johann Hari recounts the inspiring story of UK Uncut, a group dedicated to getting corporations and the rich in the UK to pay their taxes.  Here's the seemingly-hypothetical-but-SURPRISE-actually-true story:

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

As people see their fellow citizens acting in self-defense, these tax-the-rich protests spread to even the most conservative parts of the country. It becomes the most-discussed subject on Twitter. Even right-wing media outlets, sensing a startling effect on the public mood, begin to praise the uprising, and dig up damning facts on the tax dodgers.

Hari goes on to ask:

Can this model be transferred to the United States?

To which I reply:

No.

Prove me wrong, America!

Footballism

[ Part I of the Super Bowl non-series is here. ]

Robert Lipsyte, still bitter all these years later over the "high school jocks" who "shouldered him in the halls", decides to take a ride on the reliable left hobby horse of football bashing.  It's a by-the-numbers bit of doctrinaire liberal cultural analysis that hits all the points you'd expect to see: vicarious proxy war, sexism, testosterone, soccer rejectionism (which he somehow fails to link explicitly to homophobia, though the subtext is certainly there), and even dog fighting to give the whole exercise some currency.  I won't bother excerpting it since I'm sure you can predict what it's going to say as easily as I did before I read it, but I did want to highlight this response by commenter lhhj, which is dead on:

I do not particularly identify with pro football fans and, yes, we all understand the bread-and-circus-excessive-violence-late-empire aspect of the spectacle. The problem with this essay, however, is not so much its thesis, but rather its tone of self-congratulatory disdain for all those presumably insecure, threatened, and really rather stupid, macho American men out there who channel their insecurity into football. One paintbrush. Maybe many of these guys can still find some beauty and grace in the game. If so, then fine. But I also believe that the air of smirking cultural contempt expressed in parts of this essay is a real problem for the left and has been for quite a while.

That's perfect.  In fact it's so perfect that I have nothing more to add along those lines; if you want to know what I think in this case specifically and related cases more generally, you can just go back and read it again and again and again.

Lipsyte offers multiple reasons to watch the "Empire Bowl" (clever!)—reliable lefty chestnuts like "a vain search for a crucible of manhood that no longer exists" or "pursuit of a ticket out of a dead-end life"—but predictably misses the single most important one: that football is an interesting game to watch, in many ways and on many levels.

I won't go through all of those, but I do want to point out one that I haven't often seen mentioned: despite its reputation among people who don't know any better, football is a thinking person's game.  It's deep and strategically complex, on offense and defense.  I've always described it as the chess of mainstream sports (compared to the checkers of baseball or the tic-tac-toe of basketball).  It takes years to fully appreciate everything that's going on during any given play of a game, and even after you've spent years watching it you can't really take in every aspect of every play.  At any given time I might be paying attention to the line, or the secondary, or the backs, or the receivers (and even that just scratches the surface, since within those divisions I might be watching the safeties or the defensive backs, the running backs or the tight ends, etc).  Or I might follow something else entirely, or take it in as a whole instead of focusing on any of the parts.

And I'm always impressed by the casual genius of the design of so many elements of football.  Take the scoring: you get 3 points for a field goal and 7 for a touchdown—both prime numbers, so the least common multiple is their product of 21, which makes ties less likely and adds major strategic implications to any given score.  Two field goals are just one point short of a touchdown, which makes touchdowns much more desirable, but a touchdown isn't an automatic 7 points—you have to essentially kick a short field goal to earn the extra point, and if you miss it you've effectively scored two field goals.  See what I mean?

Then there's the ball itself.  A football is oblong so it can be thrown through the air farther and faster, of course, but that shape also means that when a football hits the ground you have no idea what it will do.  Unlike the pickup games my friends and I played after school, most of professional football is planned to the last detail, but no planning can overcome that little piece of chaos at the center of the game.  In one second this carefully planned and scripted game can turn into a Three Stooges free-for-all, and often does.

I don't begrudge a person hating football for any number of reasons, even as I feel sorry for anyone who can't appreciate the unique beauty of a perfectly-thrown spiral perfectly caught.  I watch much less of it than I did as a kid, actually, and I agree with a lot of the criticism I've read of football in particular and professional sports in general (and I've got plenty of my own gripes).  But the notion that disliking football is some badge of ideological purity, and the particular brand of condescending dimestore psychologizing you see in the annual spate of Super Bowl-bashing exercises like Lipsyte's, are just the kinds of things that push people away from the left.

ADDING: Go Packers.

AND: I must admit that I do now feel that I've found the crucible of my manhood which I thought no longer existed, all thanks to the Green Bays beating the Pittsburghs.

Severance package

It's a sad day when the most clear-sighted mainstream commentary on the U.S. and Egypt comes from The Onion—and is fully encapsulated in the headline, no less—but here we are: U.S. Negotiating Mubarak's Severance Package.

(If you'd like to compare that acutely perceptive bit of satire with some of the most infantile displays of historical ignorance and yay-Democrats headupassery I've seen in a while, take a look at this and this.)

Obama just keeps earning that Nobel Peace Prize

Can Barack Obama turn Afghanistan into more of a charnel house than George Bush ever did?

Yes he can:

Armed violence in Afghanistan exceeded record levels in 2010 leaving catastrophic impacts on civilian Afghan communities, read an Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) annual report on civilian casualties of war in 2010 released today.

From 1 January to 31 December 2010, at least 2,421 civilian Afghans were killed and over 3,270 were injured in conflict-related security incidents across Afghanistan. This means everyday 6-7 noncombatants were killed and 8-9 were wounded in the war.

Armed Opposition Groups (AOGs) were blamed for 63 percent of the total reported civilian deaths); US/NATO forces were accused of 21 percent of the civilian deaths; pro-government Afghan forces (police, army and militias) were accused of 12 percent of the reported deaths; and about 4 percent of the civilian deaths could not be attributed to an identifiable armed group and thus referred to "unknown" in the report. [...]

ARM criticizes the AOGs for their deliberate killing and harassing of civilian communities and the US/NATO for their labeling of almost every war casualty as being "suspected insurgent".

At least this clarifies what Obama meant when he described his Nobel Peace Prize as "a call to action".

PREEMPTIVE STRIKE: The apologist response to this would no doubt be to point out that the "armed opposition groups" are responsible for the bulk of the civilian deaths—which is true, but ignores the rather important question of just who it is they're opposing.  And keep this (PDF) in mind as well:

Although IED attacks [by armed opposition groups] killed  and injured  large numbers  of  pro-government Afghan and foreign  forces, disparity in the numbers of civilian and military victims was  overwhelming.  Too often IEDs  intended for foreign military convoys killed civilian people travelling on the same roads.  In  some cases, even when an IED attack hit  its target, civilians still suffered disproportionally as US/NATO soldiers were shielded by their armored vehicles, vests and other protective covers.

As the Nuremberg Tribunal said, "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"—a point that's taken as too obvious to bother mentioning when talking about another country's wars, and too absurd to merit consideration when it's applied to your own.

Worth a thousand words

Just in case you haven't seen this extraordinary photo from Egypt:

UPDATE: Mubarak says he "will die on the soil of Egypt."  I'm sure I'm not the only one hoping his wish will soon come true.