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Liberal
Consensus Hardens for More Troops to Iraq; Meet Senator Slither;
Farewell, Jeane Kirkpatrick
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Here's comes Rep Silvestre Reyes of
Texas, handpicked by Nancy Pelosi to head the House Intelligence
Committee and he's calling for 20,000 more U.S. troops to be
sent to Iraq. Reyes says they're needed to crush the Shi'a and
Sunni militias. Didn't I tell to you right here, after the Nov
7 "peace moment" the polls, that the Democrats would
fall into line behind Senator John McCain? The minute Jack Murtha
made his run for House Majority leader the liberal establishment
began to take a stand against all seditious talk of "immediate
redeployment". You can scarcely open up the New York Times
without tripping over a piece by Michael Gordon reporting yet
another thoughtful military man--he put up General Zinni in this
capacity last week--saying that the prudent short-term course
would be to send more troops to Iraq.
Contrast this with the angry
floor speech Republican Senator
Gordon Smith of Oregon, the potato kind of Pendleton, who
said straighforwardly on Thursday night that he'd had it with
the president that the US should "cut and run, cut and walk
or whatever ... "
You want more evidence of Democratic
spinelessness? How about the confirmation of Robert Gates as
Secretary of Defense by the U.S. Senate, 95 to 2. Not a single
Democrat voted against this slippery survivor of the Iran-contra
scandal, who spent the early part of his intelligence career
at the CIA and NSC, inflating the Soviet threat and leaking fictions
about the KGB plot to kill the pope to neocon fantasists like
Clare Sterling. The two No votes came from Santorum of Pennsylvania
and Bunning of Kentucky. Some of the Democrats voting Aye this
time voted No on Gates when he was up for confirmation as Bush
Sr's CIA chief back in 1991.
In our national public life
these days, if you want to make any realistic recommendation
on policy options, you have to be over 75, plenty of money in
the bank and with nothing left to lose. Take Jimmy Carter and
James Baker. Carter denounces Israel's "imprisonment wall"
and Baker slips Palestinians' right of return into his Study
Group's road map to peace.
Another 80-year old, Jeane
Kirkpatrick, apparently saw reason in her fading years. Her friend
Jack Kemp says that she would meet him on the way to church and
lament the folly of the US attack on Iraq. This ur-neo-con would,
so Kemp said, denounce the younger neocons like William Kristol.
I had to endure a servile interview with Kristol by NPR's Deborah
Ames, in which he held forth on her fine distinctions between
authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
Since the point of Kirkpatrick's
distinctions was to give intellectual buttress to crude imperial
functions like cheering on Guatemalan mass murderers practicing
genocide on Mayan Indians, Kristol at least reminded me of what
a disgusting creature Kirkpatrick was, at least in the decades
when she had measurable influence on U.S. foreign policy, in
the Reagan years. As with all the Commentary crowd in the late
1970s the only intellectual challenge they ever offered was the
matter of deciding whether they actually believed all the drivel
they were writing. Kirkpatrick was one of the irksome, because
she tricked out her absurdities with pretentious references to
Hobbes and Kant, thus tipping off the rubes that here was a Great
Mind at work.
I remember her at the Republican
convention in New Orleans in 1980. Conservative queen bees like
Kirkpatrick and Schafly had, in their proximate physical aspect,
an undercurrent of erotic violence - Jeane was surely a
closet case -- that didn't really come through on camera. Rooted
under the rostrum in the Superdome, peering up into Kirkpatrick's
flaring nostrils I could see planes of her face that were normally
flattened out in the bland imagery of videotape.
Of course she was talking about
"national security" with her lips puckered into a moue
of cruel delight as she foretold how Dukakis and the Democrats
would leave America bound helpless beneath the Russian jackboot.
The only jackboot I could keep in mind was hers: Jeane lashing
savagely at the cuffed and whimpering body of effete liberalism.
Meet Senator
Slither
The slithery junior senator
from Illinois, Barack Obama is ensuring himself a steady political
diet of publicity by refusing to take his name out of consideration
as a possible candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination
in 2008. We're entering the time frame when all such aspirants
have to make up their minds whether they can find the requisite
money and political base. Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin,
the obvious peace and justice candidate, has already decided
that he can't, which gives us a pretty revealing insight into
the weakness of the left these days.
It's a no-brainer for Obama
to excite the political commentators by waving a "maybe"
flag. It keeps the spotlight on him, and piles up political capital,
whatever he decides to do in the end.
It's depressing to think that
we'll have to endure Obamaspeak for months, if not years to come:
a pulp of boosterism about the American dream, interspersed with
homilies about "putting factionalism and party divisions
behind us and moving on". I used to think Senator Joe Lieberman
was the man whose words I'd least like to be force fed top volume
if I was chained next to a loudspeaker in Camp Gitmo, but I think
Obama, who picked Lieberman as his mentor when he first entered
the US Senate, is worse. I've never heard a politician so desperate
not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to
be fearless and forthright.
When Democrats fled Murtha's
call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq a year ago, few with
more transparent calculation than Obama who voyaged to the Council
on Foreign Relations on November 22, 2005, to soothe the assembled
elites with such balderdash as "The President could take
the politics out of Iraq once and for all if he would simply
go on television and say to the American people 'Yes, we made
mistakes" or "we need to focus our attention on how
to reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq. Notice that I
say 'reduce,' and not 'fully withdraw' or "2006 should be
the year that the various Iraqi factions must arrive at a fair
political accommodation to defeat the insurgency; and three,
the Administration must make available to Congress critical information
on reality-based benchmarks that will help us succeed in Iraq."
Some Democrats working for
Ned Lamont in the recent senate race in Connecticut eventually
taken by Lieberman, running as an independent, are exceptionally
bitter about the role played by Obama who made the calculation
that Lieberman would win, and that he would not forfeit political
capital by doing anything for his fellow Democrat, Lamont. (By
contrast, Hillary Clinton gets good reviews from such Lamont
workers as a politician who did what she could for their man.)
These hard feelings go back
as far as the notorious political dinner in Connecticut in Marcdh
of 2005, when Obama traveled to Connecticut to hail the pro-war
Lieberman to the state's Democrats.Obama, who runs a huge political
fund-raising operation in Washington, knows where the money is,
in the the right-center segment of the political landscape inhabited
by the Democratic Leadership Council.
It's why he picked Lieberman,
a DLC icon, as his mentor. The new arrival in Washington wanted
to send out a swift signal to the corporate powers and Party
donors that here was no boat-rocker from Chicago, but a safe
pair of hands and an obedient pair of heels.
There ere was another, more
substantive signal, keenly savored by the corporate world, where
Obama voted for "tort reform", thus making it far harder
for people to get redress or compensation.
As I wrote about Obama last
year, Sometimes people comfort themselves with variants on what's
called the intentional fallacy: in other words, as only the fifth
black senator in US history, Obama has to bob and weave, placate
the Man, while positioning himself at the high table as the people's
champion. But in his advance to the high table Obama is diligently
divesting himself of all legitimate claims to be any sort of
popular champion, as opposed to another safe black, like Condoleezza
Rice (whom Obama voted to confirm. The Empire relishes such servants.
And so, Obama, the constitutional
law professor, voted to close off any filibuster of Alito, and
fled Senator Russell Feingold's motion to censure the P:resident,
declaring "my and Senator Feingold's view is not unanimous.
Some constitutional scholars and lower court opinions support
the president's argument that he has inherent authority to go
outside the bounds of the law in monitoring the activities
of suspected terrorists. The question is whether the president
understood the law and knowingly flaunted it." That's not
the question at all. The question is whether the Constitution
permits its violation by the President, and the answer is no.
Obama, a self proclaimed educator
in constitutional law, voted Yes on March 2 to final passage
of the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act, unlike
ten of his Democratic colleagues.
A couple of weeks ago Obama
unleashed another cloud of statesmanlike mush about Iraq to an
upscale foreign policy crowd in Chicago. Trimming to new realities
he's now talking about a four-to-six month time frame for beginning
withdrawal from Iraq. Don't mistake this for any real agenda.
It's a schedule that can be pulled in any direction, like a rubber
mask from a Christmas stocking.
This week many Americans have
stared aghast at the photos of Jose Padilla, manacled hand and
foot, blinded by special goggles, being escorted by his US military
jailers from his isolation cell to the dentist. His lawyers say
that his horrible treatment , four years of total isolation and
sensory deprivation, have rendered him incapable of defending
himself.
The treatment of Padilla--classed
as "an enemy combatant" until US government prosecutors
were forced to reclassify him as a criminal defendant earlier
this year--was obviously a diligent exercise in torture, akin
to what has been meted out to "enemy combatants" held
in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo. Last year Illinois'
senior US senator, Dick Durbin, bravely got into trouble for
likening conditions at Guantanamo to those in a Nazi or Stalin-era
camp. This was one of Durbin's finer moments, as he read an FBI
man's eyewitness describing how he had entered interview rooms
"to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position
to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated
or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24
hours or more."
"If I read this to you
and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what
Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most
certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets
in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that
had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case.
This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope
we will change course."
The right-wing mad-dog crowd
jumped on Durbin, and eventually he paid the penalty of having
to eat crow on the Senate floor. His fellow senator from Illinois,
Obama, did not support him in any way. He said, "we have
a tendency to demonize and jump on and make mockery of each other
across the aisle and that is particularly pronounced when we
make mistakes. Each and every one of us is going to make a mistake
once in a while...and what we hope is that our track record of
service, the scope of how we've operated and interacted with
people, will override whatever particular mistake we make."
That's three uses of the word
"mistake". Obama had his fingers stuck in the wind
as always. He bends to every breeze, as soon as he identifies
it as coming from a career threatening quarter. This man is no
leader.
"Happy
Feet": Calvinism Takes A Hit
On a final note of uplift:
Alya and I found ourselves at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle
Friday night, watching Happy Feet, at the Imax. Cartoon movies
about penguins are about my speed these days. Happy Feet
is fine stuff, particularly for one who, in distant days, put
his hands in front of his face as soon as the Ice Queen came
on screen. It's a paean to antinomianism, to informalism in culture,
to diversity, to sharing the earth's resources, to Hispanic homies,
to... to ... Not a single beheaded, impaled or flayed Mayan (penguin)
anywhere to be seen. The imagery is basically out of Caspar Friedrich
and early nineteenth century German kitsch romanticism, which--in
its later expressionist form -- had a big input into Disney's
artists back in the 1930s and early 1940s. Penguins brood atop
soaring ice crags, or gaze in vertiginous forced perspective
down immense abysses of snow and ice. The ideological contest
is between despairing Calvinism, enacted by a Scottish Elder
Penguin, and the Promethean defiance of our hero, Mambo the penguin
mutant. There are fine cameo roles from killer whales, raptors
and leopard seals. The message: we can have our fish and eat
them too. Braced with Happy Feet and the late Gold's persuasive
views on the abiotic origins of oil I can face 2007 with a light
heart.
Maybe the Bond movie next week,
though my favorites in that canon came long ago, as I described
in an essay you can find here on this site,
relentlessly plundered by other writers about Bond down the years.
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