Those Asiatics, indifferent to human life, as usual

We’re going to hear a lot about the psychological state of Robert Bates, the Ohio boy-cum-butcher of Afghanistan, but it won’t include much analysis of Obama’s failing counter-insurgency strategy and certainly nothing that would suggest an organic error of strategy and judgment, much less motives. Since we’re the good guys by definition, whatever happens is just bad luck or another narrative of ‘rogue’ elements or individuals suddenly ‘snapping’.

Robert Fisk in The Independent takes notes of a curious statement made by the U.S. Army’s top Afghanistan commander, General John Allen, last month after two American officers were gunned down inside the country’s interior minister (assassinations that have not, incidentally, resulted in any arrests). ‘Now is not the time for revenge’, said Allen. ‘There will be moments like this when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back’.

How amazing that a military commander has to tell his troops in the field to ‘resist whatever urge to strike back’. Sounds as though General Allen was worried in advance that a nocturnal slaughter mission might be on the minds of some of his worthy soldiers. What does it say about a strategy of protecting the locals and winning their hearts and minds from the evil Taliban when you have to ask your grunts to please not go out and murder them in vengeance? Which they then proceed to do anyway.

Little by little, the façade is crumbling, and the nasty truth is harder and harder to stuff back in the closet. Despite all our armaments and vast expenditures, the decade-long war in Afghanistan is lost, and the sooner someone dares to recognize that sorry fact, the better. (And the cheaper—it’s now costing us $2 billion a week).

Military defeat is never popular, and within my living memory the utter horror of looking like a loser impelled Nixon and Kissinger to war crimes. They doubled down on the lost cause in Indochina so as not to preside over the inevitable U.S. retreat, probably out of macho pride. (Kissinger has never suffered for this hubris and has done quite well for himself ever since.) Nixon managed to escape the thankless role by being impeached, then Gerald Ford was saddled with it and was promptly ousted at the first opportunity.

Obama also went along with the idea that his generals could win the Afghan war—have military leaders ever argued that they can’t?—and thereby made it his own. His new campaign video doesn’t even mention it, and if the situation further deteriorates, Obama’s re-election chances could well suffer, as they should.

Glenn Greenwald cheers sarcasticallyat the inevitable self-congratulations being heard here at home over the very proper outrage we humanitarian Americans feel over this shameful episode. He cites those two overflowing fonts of conventional wisdom—NPR and the Washington Post—thus (WP writer Rajiv Chandrasekaran on Morning Edition): ‘Obviously, over at home here in the United States I think people’s sense of revulsion at this act, the shooting, has been far greater.’

Get that? Even when slaughtering the locals, it’s we in the United States who are more upset by it, not local people burying their dead children. Just wait until Sergeant Bates goes on trial for this modern My Lai massacre: the blogs and newspapers will be jammed with indignant letters from veterans and military worshippers demanding that the poor guy be sent to a restful mental hospital and be given anti-depressants.

Or as NPR’s Steve Inskeep said to sum it all up: In Afghanistan, ‘human life is already cheap’.

What unfathomable mystery?

Hillary Clinton finds the massacre of Afghan civilians in their beds by a rogue U.S. sniper ‘inexplicable’, but I don’t. After all, didn’t the Republican presidential candidates just excoriate Obama for apologizing over the Quran burnings of a week ago? Didn’t golden-haired Mitt just insist that ‘America doesn’t apologize’, meaning ever about anything? Didn’t half the comments on the YouTube video of GIs pissing on Taliban corpses a month ago include cheers and bravos for the neat genito-urinary statement? Isn’t the mayor of liberal New York City quoted daily saying that NYPD spying on mosques is okay because ‘terrorists’ might be lurking there? Aren’t we continually reminded by the Obama-led Democratic establishment that we must accept a police state because dangerous enemies wish to attack us? Why wouldn’t a half-crazed vet with four combat tours decide to slaughter a few suspects on a midnight crusade? What took him so long? [photo: AP]

It’s just amazing to listen to the CBS News on this incident and hear Scott Pelley pause to editorialize that it was just one ‘lone’ nutcase who committed this war crime while 90,000 other good soldiers are out there just being a great bunch of guys. Can anyone imagine a similar posture after William Calley was discovered to have murdered 100 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1969? In the much-maligned ’60s, such behavior caused unmediated revulsion and led to the collapse of support for a pointless war against a civilian population. Why doesn’t that happen today? Instead, we are subjected to a parade of official spokespeople in and out of uniform mouthing their careful talking points, that this ‘incident’ will not deter us from our glorious mission, that it would be a ‘tragedy’ if the crimes caused us to change course—or as Hillary put it at the UN without a hint of irony, to weaken our commitment to ‘protect’ the Afghan people (!).

Meanwhile, our news media slip further into the grip of Pravda-like conformity and obedience. An entire segment on CBS tonight was dedicated to polling the GOP candidates for their views on Afghanistan, not including, of course, the obvious question to the Mitt: Do you think we should apologize NOW? Even more incredible, Ron Paul, the one guy who would have unequivocally urged withdrawal from the whole debacle, was not included in the survey, and everyone pretended not to notice the omission.

We chortle gleefully at the pathetic Republican primary circus, but Obama remains a weak, uninspiring figure whose mystique dissipated in the first year of his term. These incidents reveal that our political culture has mutated into something unrecognizable with no moral compass whatsoever, and the creepy robots and inquisitors of the right are far more natural expressions of it than the smooth-talking law professor from Harvard.

NYC Crime Stats are Bullshit

It’s official, the famously successful New York City crusade against major crime is all made up.

The Village Voice has a piece this week on an internal NYPD report never made public, which confirms what Bloomberg and Kelly have been denying for several years—that the department systematically cooks the books to show that the rates of big crimes like murder, rape, armed robbery, etc., are going down. This is done by throwing up endless obstacles to people trying to report these crimes, downgrading them to lesser offenses and/or simply losing the paperwork.

Simultaneously (and not incidentally), police officers are also pressured and ultimately forced to increase their notorious ‘stop-and-frisk’ temporary arrests, now running at 684,000 per year, overwhelmingly directed against blacks and Hispanics. This is supposed to show that the department is actively engaged in crime prevention via police-state surveillance of non-white males, a strategy which enjoys the unspoken support of the city’s influential white minority. Young black or Latino men in New York now expect to be pulled over and patted down by cops as a routine part of their lives.

And take a moment to read up on the department’s creepy, East German-style campaign against Adrian Schoolcraft, the police officer who tried to report this statistical manipulation to his superiors. He was subjected to harassment at work to shut him up until finally being seized in a nocturnal raid on his home and confined to a locked psychiatric unit. Luckily, he was smart enough to tape record this event along with his precinct captain’s daily orders to meet arrest quotas—which the department continues to deny exist.

The Voice ran a five-part series on this scandal that ever-so-liberal Mayor Bloomberg helps to cover up. Meanwhile, the current mayor and his principal deputy, Christine Quinn, continue to defend the department’s racist campaign against the city’s Muslim population, now the target of permanent, ethnic snooping. Quinn will parade herself as a progressive in next year’s mayoral race, featuring her marriage to a female partner. We will be expected to cheer the fact that she’s a nice lesbian while ignoring her complicity with these criminal activities by the Great Liberal City’s cops.

I also note in passing that my cycling club, Transportation Alternatives, has a depressing article in this month’s Reclaim magazine about the NYPD’s permanent refusal to pursue traffic-related crimes, including those that cripple or kill cyclists and pedestrians. There are four hair-raising tales of fatal bike accidents, all of which the department failed to investigate properly, mishandled or destroyed evidence, lied about and eventually laughed off as unimportant.

And finally, the NY Fire Department was told this week that it would have to pay $128 million to black applicants who have been systematically excluded from the city’s 95 percent white force. FDNY will also have to hire 300 new black firefighters in the ongoing, 40-year saga of resistance to desegregation. There is as yet no word whether the white FD hierarchy will make a final massive-resistance to the court orders by standing in the firehouse doorways.

The quality of mercy

The dust-up over the Kony/Uganda child soldiers video is a great opportunity to review our culture’s increasingly weird attitudes toward charitable giving. Are the videographers heroic crusaders cleverly tapping social media for a good cause, or are they self-indulgent, neo-colonial exploiters engaging in an updated version of White Man’s Burden? Something in between or a little bit of both?

The grandmother in Isabel Allende’s wonderful early book The House of the Spirits says, ‘We don’t give alms to help the poor but to make ourselves feel better. The poor don’t want charity; they want justice’. Or words to that effect, but in any case a bracing corrective to facile do-gooderism.

Which is not to say that worthy ‘charities’, broadly defined, should shrivel up and die or that we should stop making donations to them. It does point us in the right direction when doing so, however, i.e., towards making a difference in people’s lives rather than satisfying our own temporary discomfort in the face of human misery. I say ‘in the face’ because the cheapest, most cynical nonprofit hustlers inevitably push unpleasant images there precisely to make us feel bad and cough up the cash, as in my latest favorite, Foreign Child with Harelip. They are the institutional equivalents of beggars who display their scaly stumps on street corners so that you’ll give them a dollar.

How a society organizes and promotes charitable giving is never ideologically neutral. For starters, we have to ask why a given activity should be handled by private parties rather than the state. In my Chile days one would constantly be invited to benefits for a poor family whose child had an expensive disease and needed some unimaginable amount of money to pay for treatment. Of course, under Pinochet poor people couldn’t get decent medical care for anything other than a nosebleed, so the whole block had to sell brownies and hot dogs for a month if a kid got leukemia. But this state of affairs resulted from political decisions by the country’s rulers, who openly served the well-to-do. One donated but knew that in a sane world such campaigns would not need to exist.

Sudden emergencies were a different matter, but even in those cases the lack of perspective was notorious. I recall the fund-raising activities that enjoyed official backing after the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s when the TV news was full of heart-rending pictures of African babies on the verge of starvation. Chileans dutifully attended and put in their coins, but when interviewed had no clue about Hutus, Tutsis, or what country it was all happening in. ‘I don’t know anything about all that, but I just feel terrible when I see those poor children’, said one lady typical of those forking over their donations.

I recall her comments to this day because she didn’t realize she was giving money to the perpetrators of the genocide who ran the Hutu refugee camps that were the beneficiaries of that collection. I only knew because the Hutu priests in charge openly blamed the Tutsi victims for what had happened in later interviews.

Meanwhile, Chilean supermarkets had initiated the practice—now common here among the big chain stores—of asking people at the cash register to donate their change to the company’s favorite charity. In Chile this was often Catholic anti-abortion groups or other dubious entities. You were made to feel cheap and heartless if you refused to let them take your pennies for forwarding to these outfits, and not incidentally the whole exchange made you forget that you had just paid your hard-earned money to the company, which came off as the good guys, oh-so-concerned about human welfare and not, perish the thought, crude material gain.

This is now S.O.P. at Duane Reade, Staples and probably a ton of other stores that I do not patronize. I’ll bet the tobacco companies are furious they didn’t think of it first: ‘Five cents off the price of every pack of Camels goes to help orphan children in Zimbabwe!’

The Susan G. Komen breast cancer scandal of a couple weeks ago is another good example of the politics of philanthropy. Who not directly involved in that world would have suspected that this eminently inoffensive-sounding operation housed a crew of ambitious businesswomen eager to please their corporate backers by stiffing Planned Parenthood? By their historic goof, they ripped the lid off their own hidden agenda.

Unfortunately, finding a place to send our charitable dollars that will use them as we intend is not an easy task. But if we just want to feel good for a couple of minutes, anywhere will do.

Ron Paul's welcome reminders

Ron Paul may be the only presidential candidate still in his right mind. Listening to Paul’s address to a crowd in Idaho Falls last night was startling for the iconoclastic daring it displayed in these oddly conformist times. Paul objected to the legalization of murder by the government (explained at length by Eric Holder on the same day). In his mild and avuncular way, Paul said the government is so huge and out of control that its agents can now spy on us and kill us with impunity.

This sort of discourse and mindset has been around for a while in Idaho, a favorite haunt of paranoid, neonazi militias that consider Social Security to be a Stalinist plot. But Obama has just fulfilled their crackpot fantasies by saying the president can authorize assassinations of anyone, anywhere, including American citizens.

Some, though not all, of the lines in Paul’s speech that brought cheers and shouts of outrage from the creepily reactionary crowd could have been painted on signs at Occupy Wall Street. When the Democratic-liberal establishment and blogosphere are folded into the tent and eagerly place party loyalty above principle, it’s weirdly unsurprising that this intersection should occur.

Alone among our “leadership,” an anti-government, right-winger is the only voice in the campaign warning of the dangers of encroaching authoritarianism. Liberals, blinded by the presence of an unthreatening figure at the top, willingly sign off on the consolidation of arbitrary state power. When someone nasty later uses these powers, they will be the first to shout, “Unfair!”

War is not about splitting the difference

In the one-sided war campaign masquerading as a debate over Iran's behavior, the issue of Israel's behavior has disappeared completely. Land-grabs, the Wall, all the many forms of race-based harassment directed at the Palestinian and Israeli Arab populations–issues that Obama once dared to raise, albeit obliquely—are now gone from public discussion.

This convenient refocus offers an answer to Juan Cole's baffled wonderment today as to why our major media have ignored the recent elections in Iran that strengthened the anti-nuclear conservatives and weakened the figurehead Ahmadinejad, who has trumpeted the nuclear advances. The scholarly Cole points out that the results are highly relevant to the alleged nuclear proliferation worries of the U.S. and European establishments. If they want Iran to put aside any nuclear ambitions, asks Cole somewhat plaintively, why not pay this some attention?

In my view Cole accidentally answers his own question. Iran's nuclear capability is not the underlying concern, but rather regime change. The centrifuges and uranium enrichment play exactly the same role as Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction: an excuse for the Tel Aviv-Washington alliance to do exactly what it wants. If Iran completely capitulates, new demands undoubtedly wll follow to justify deeper and more permanent sanctions and the rattling of bigger and better sabers.

The accelerating march toward open hostilities, in addition to being extremely dangerous for the well-being of actual persons, also threatens to illustrate in tragic form the shortcomings of Obama's approach to policy negotiations, i.e., start at the mid-point, then begin ceding ground. When haggling over the fine points of Medicaid funding or the like, this deal-at-any-cost mentality delivers far too much to the intransigent disloyal opposition. But the damage theoretically could be reversed.

Not so with war. Obama's failure to stake out a principled starting position in defense of long-term U.S.--not Israeli—interests has allowed Netanyahu to browbeat and bully him just as Boehner, Cantor, Grassley and McConnell did over health insurance reform and the Bush tax giveaways.

Obama seems to view his office and himself in Clintonian terms, as the chief conciliator among the mighty. This is uninspired non-leadership in the best of times; at critical moments over war and peace, it means we are cast adrift, unable to guide events and forced to react to them. The times call for an Eisenhower, a leader with the credibility and determination to protect our interests vigorously, which requires acting tough not just toward the easy targets among the enemies and adversaries but toward unruly and opportunistic allies. Obama has never shown himself capable of that, with the exception of dissing people like you and me as whiners.

Breitbart's purified exit

NPR reported on the surprising death of hatchet man Andrew Brietbart at the age of 43 in such reverent tones you'd think he were known for dedicating his life to rescuing feral kittens. How could a Very Serious news entity like NPR fail to mention that Breitbart achieved real fame via the sleaziest racist scam of recent memory -- the distorted video that ruined the career of Shirley Sherrod, a civil servant and, not accidentally, a black female who dedicated her life to aiding poor farmers. But Breitbart's career as a scumbag was hardly knicked by NPR and other broadcast outfits, which speaks volumes about the corruption of our political and media cultures.

I'm all for charity towards the dead, even public figures, but not for whitewashing their shortcomings to please certain still-alive sympathizers. Breitbart was not just a "controversial" or "polemical" figure. He was an immoral dirty trickster whose tactics should have been universally condemned long before his death. In a sane world, he would have been a desk clerk snarling at customers at a Quality Inn.