“The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” (1)<\/p>\n
Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/em> editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich has won his second Pulitzer Prize. He won his first in 1995, a year his humour targeted<\/a> the O.J. Simpson trial and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, Republican-driven assaults on affirmative action, gun control, and the environment. In 2005<\/a>, his squares were filled with images of war and caricatures of fledgeling Gingriches and their financial conspirators awash in scandals, the majority that gained absolute power and lost its patent on morality, a hurricane’s devastation and a rare reflection on the nation’s ailing psyche. The .pdf version of his 26 October 2005 statement on the 2,000th soldier to die in Iraq is available on NPR<\/em><\/a>. Working at his kitchen table, he used the names of each soldier to form the word, Why<\/em>, then copy editors spell-checked each one.<\/p>\n 6 months after Luckovich asked the question, Americans have not reached a consensus, and there is no sense of urgency for doing so. Iraq is such a mess that even people familiar with the land and its people can’t report with certainty the who and why of the daily carnage. The same government that lied the country into Iraq retains the power to keep it there or wage yet another illegal, unnecessary war if it so decides, as if these war criminals were opening a new restaurant, not planning mass murder. No indignant ethicists in the main dining room, just the usual cadre of hustlers feeding the fears of anxious customers.<\/p>\n Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, regular contributor to LewRockwell.com<\/a>, authoured The New Pentagon Papers<\/a> to call the American public to attention on matters she’d been speaking<\/a> and writing about<\/a> for some time<\/a>, that whilst serving in the Near East-South Asia policy department at the Pentagon she’d observed the ushering in of civilian intelligence fixers whose sole purpose was to create propaganda that would generate support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. She resigned her commission and ended a 20-year career she’d enjoyed due her outrage over the behaviour that she’d witnessed.<\/p>\n “Today, we don’t have a broad based American feeling about why we’re fighting in Iraq. People’s confidence in the United States is not what it was 50 years ago. It’s not what it was during World War II.”<\/p>\n Karen Kwiatkowski Kwiatkowski’s appearance in a film that attempts to answer Mike Luckovich’s question, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, “Why We Fight”, was a subject of discussion on two C-Span Q&A shows this month. On April 2<\/a>, Brian Lamb interviewed Kwiatkowski and showed the clip in which she said, “Today, if you went downtown to my local town and you asked five people why we’re fighting in Iraq, you’d get five different answers”, after which several people were asked the question, “Why do we fight?” The answers were variations of “we fight because they hate our freedom” and “we’re fighting for oil”.<\/p>\n A few said they don’t know. I think they understand that both positions are the opposite sides of the same coin. The question left untouched on everyone’s plate like last week’s bean soup – is the pursuit of empire morally or objectively justified – is tackled by people like Kwiatkowski, Chalmers Johnson, and Gore Vidal in “Why We Fight”. It would have been a more interesting film if the question had been posed to average citizens.<\/p>\n William Kristol, who discussed Kwiatkowski with Brian Lamb during his interview for Q&A a week later on April 9<\/a>, has a lot to be smug about. Rupert Murdoch has been bankrolling his projects, such as Project for the Republican Future<\/a> and its affiliate, New Citizenship Project<\/a>, since 1994. And due what Kristol describes as their happy marriage, Murdoch’s News Corp will keep the presses rolling for his magazine, The Weekly Standard<\/em>, despite its failure to turn a profit in even one of its ten years in existence.<\/p>\n But more importantly, he’s confident that no matter which party is in the majority, his adviser status will remain intact. His recipes for furthering American empire are savoured by the gung-ho neoliberals who are promising to turn up the heat in the Middle East and elsewhere, if they assume the controls. There will always be a place at the grown-ups’ table for Bill, if not, he knows how to cook-up one.<\/p>\n He set the dogs on Clinton then offered to call them off if he bombed Iraq in ’98.\u00a0 His barely guarded gloating and coquettish reminiscing dissipated into abject remorse as he recalled Clinton’s unwillingness to finish the job. Democrats have been duly warned, not that they need to be.<\/p>\n What is the job and will it ever be finished<\/a>?<\/p>\n Kristol didn’t say. He was on Q&A to heap an unhealthy dollop of “crackpot” into any brewing consensus that even suggests the military industrial complex drives America to war. He stuffed “industry” into a box that has room only for close, personal friends of legislators and the executive. Harper’s Magazine<\/em> published remarks from a forum attended by Andrew J. Bacevich, Brig. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., Richard H. Kohn, and Edward N. Luttwak, in its April 2006 edition. The purpose of the gathering was to “discuss the unthinkable”, hence the article’s title, American Coup D’etat<\/a>.<\/p>\n Kristol told Brian Lamb:<\/p>\n It’s – I think in Eisenhower’s day military spending was what eight-nine percent, 10 percent perhaps of gross domestic product. It was three percent when Bush took over and now it’s about four percent. It’s – I mean look at the defense companies they’ve all merged and are much smaller compared to their, you know, civilian counterparts than they used to be.<\/p>\n So the idea that there’s this, you know – that this was done for this money as didn’t someone say in the trailer, “follow the money,” that really is ridiculous. And the idea that a president of the United States and Senators and Congressmen would vote – would go to war for the sake of what enriching some friends of theirs who are contractors that’s really both childish and kind of obscene I think.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n An exchange from the Harper’s<\/em> forum:<\/p>\n KOHN: Consider this glaring example of political manipulation by the military. After every other American war before the Cold War, the country demobilised its wartime military establishment. Even during the Cold War, when we kept a large standing military, we expanded and contracted it for shooting wars. But in 1990 and 1991, the military – through General Colin Powell, who was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time – intervened and effectively prevented a demobilisation.<\/p>\n RACEVICH: More accurately, I’d say that he prevented any discussion of a demobilisation.<\/p>\n KOHN: That’s right.<\/p>\n DUNLAP: We did have a reduction in the size of the military. There were cuts of around 9 percent, in both dollars and manpower.<\/p>\n KOHN: But it was nothing compared to the end of the great American wars prior to that.<\/p>\n BACEVICH: Powell is explicit on this in his memoirs. “I was determined to have the Joint Chiefs drive the military strategy train,” he wrote. He was not going to have “military reorganisation schemes shoved down our throat.”<\/p>\n KOHN: This was not a coup, but it was very clearly a circumvention of civilian political authourity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But was Powell circumventing civilian authority or merely following orders from people like Kristol who was facing eviction from his public seat of power at the time? The forum affords a thorough review of why the military is now a powerful political tool of the Republican party.<\/p>\n This exchange puts partisan battling for the military vote into context:<\/p>\n BACEVICH: The recruiters go for the rich turf, which is where the evangelicals are. You have to work a hell of a lot harder to recruit people from Newton and Wellesley, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n KOHN: Or anywhere in the well-to-do or even middle-class suburbs.<\/p>\n BACEVICH: In an economic sense, the services are behaving quite rationally. But in doing so they perpetuate the fact that we have a military that in no way “looks like” American society.<\/p>\n DUNLAP: The other part of the problem is the behaviour of the politicians. They realise the affection that American people have for people in uniform.<\/p>\n BACEVICH: And so they land on aircraft carriers to prance around in the flight suit of a fighter jock. Both parties now see the military vote as being part of politics, as a constituency. It’s a constituency that the Republicans think they own and intend to continue to own. It’s a constituency that the Democrats want to pry away.<\/p>\n KOHN: And partisanship in the military overall, i.e., the percentage of the military that identifies with a party as opposed to being “independent” or non-affiliated, is much greater overall. Not only are military officers more partisan than the general population; they’re more partisan than, say, business leaders and other elite groups. I’ve tracked the numbers of four-star generals and admirals endorsing a candidate in presidential campaigns, and it’s vastly up in the last two elections.<\/p>\n BACEVICH: Remember at the Democratic National Convention, where General Claudia Kennedy introduced General John Shalikashvili to address the delegates? Why were they up there? There was only one reason: to try to match the parade of retired senior officers that the Republicans have long been trotting out on political occasions.<\/p>\n KOHN: But is that to get military votes? Or just to connect with the American people on national security and patriotism?<\/p>\n BACEVICH: It’s both. In 2000, the Republican National Committee put ads in the Army Times<\/em> and other service magazines attacking the Clinton\/Gore record. To me that was, quite frankly, contemptible.<\/p>\n WASIK: It seems as if the two are related: if it’s reported that you have the support of the military – as was the case before the 2004 election, when newspapers noted that Kerry had less than 20 percent support within the military – then you get a halo effect among the rest of the voters. Does the partisanship of our military present a danger to the nation?<\/p>\n KOHN: One of the great pillars in our history that has prevented military intervention in politics has been the military’s nonpartisan attitude. That’s why General George Marshall’s generation of officers essentially declined to vote at all, as did generations before them. In fact, for the first time in over a century we now have an officer corps that does identify overwhelmingly with one political party. And that is corrosive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n “Why We Fight” never suggested that foreign policy decisions are made by the military. But I doubt that Kristol could construct a strawman for the argument it’s a constituency that he and his fellow ideologues exploit to advance their agendas, and in the early 90s, was an integral part of their strategy to restore their preferred party to power.<\/p>\n Poor Peter Beinart. The book he was hired by The Brookings Institution to write was shot down unmercifully by Christopher Hitchens<\/a>. It was meant to be a call-to-arms for liberals to shrug off commie tendencies and to embrace a war for capitalism. Of course, it’s not acceptable to frame it that way. It<\/em>‘s a campaign of freedom and democracy that the U.S. is executing, not a raping of people and nations that refuse to bend to the master’s will. Hitchens refuses to frame it that way as well, just like Kristol, who in his innermost sanctum may actually believe that the unwashed masses will be enlightened by this self-serving pogrom executed in the name of Christian-Judeo fundamentalism and “free markets,” enforced by economic and pre-emptive militancy; that the reigning power (for now<\/a>) will eventually become dear to their hearts rather than scorned like a parasite, after the shame and misery of being thoroughly throttled into submission fades and the graveyard bones turn to dust.<\/p>\n The Spirit of Disobedience<\/em> by Curtis White [ April 2006<\/a> Harper’s Magazine<\/em> ] reflects upon Reason and Revelation and their most beloved offspring, capitalism, which he argues most defines America’s national character.<\/p>\n As Hegel famously suggested, speaking of phrenologists in particular and empiricism in general, some people are capable of regarding a bone as reality. In the absence of the Imagination, our sense of the real has ossified. It’s like a great thighbone on the ends of which are our inevitable bulbous realities-in-opposition, the Christian and scientific worldviews. What the Imagination seeks is an opportunity. It seeks a moment when the dry bone of the real is just for the moment “out of joint,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it, so that it can assert its difference. In the fraudulent Manichaeanism of Reason and Revelation, each the light to the other’s dark, each more like the other than it knows, the Imagination seeks to be a decisive rupture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Imagination’s “Why” awaits a response.<\/p>\n (1) In 1897, Theodor Herzl sent two Austrian rabbis to Palestine to explore the possibility of locating a Jewish state there. They cabled him, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” – Star of Goliath, Dave Lippman<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” (1) Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich has won his second Pulitzer Prize. He won his first in 1995, a year his humour targeted the O.J. Simpson trial and … Continue reading
\n“Why We Fight<\/a>“<\/p>\n