Invoke the 14th — and End the Debt Standoff

Invoke the 14th — and End the Debt Standoff

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

On its current course, the United States is four weeks away from defaulting on its debt for the first time in its history. If that happens, businesses will fail. Financial institutions will fail. Home values will decline. Mortgage rates will skyrocket. Spending and investment will all but disappear. Social Security checks will stop being mailed. Everything from military pay to food inspection will be compromised, if not fully cut off. The millions upon millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed will be joined by millions more.

Across the world, America’s second financial collapse in three years will drag down already fragile economies in Europe, Latin America and Asia, potentially creating a “worldwide depression,” as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described it. In short, we would be thrown back deep into economic turmoil — only this time with even fewer tools to crawl our way out.

In theory, this is unthinkable, and it will be remedied by reasonable political parties making reasonable concessions across the negotiating table. But Republicans have been negotiating in bad faith, unwilling to compromise even an inch on their extremist and absolutist positions.Some are no longer willing to come to the table at all.

With that backdrop, President Obama may find that there is only one course left to avoid a global economic calamity: Invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which says that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” This constitutional option is one that the president alone may exercise.

If the Aug. 2 deadline arrives and no deal has been made, Obama could use a plain reading of that text to conclude — statutory debt ceiling or not — that he is constitutionally required to order the Treasury to continue paying America’s bills. In that sense, this is not just a constitutional option, it is a constitutional obligation, one even the Tea Party will have trouble denying.

There are reasons why such a solution is less than ideal. There ought to be some concern about executive overreach; the very idea of the president deciding which laws are and are not constitutional has disturbing ramifications. And to the extent that the goal of the move is to prevent market panic, it remains an open question as to whether it would succeed. But market panic will surely come with the failure to reach a deal altogether. The consequences of default are simply too severe — and too long-lasting — to take this option off the table. It may not be ideal as an elective choice, but as an option of last resort, it is a necessity.

If Obama does choose to move forward, he will be doing so on strong legal footing. In Freytag v. Commissioner (1991), the Supreme Court held that the president has “the power to veto encroaching laws . . . or to disregard them when they are unconstitutional.” The final word still may lie with the Supreme Court, but in the interim, the president need not wait for its opinion. “As a simple matter of constitutional logic, the president can refuse to enforce a statute he believes violates the Constitution,” said Professor Barry Friedman of NYU Law School in a telephone interview with me. “In fact, he is sworn by oath not to enforce it,” added Friedman, author of the book “The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution.”

It is also unlikely that the action would be successfully challenged in court. Only Congress would have standing to sue, but doing so would require a joint resolution, something a Democratic-controlled Senate would almost certainly block.

President Obama should commit to exercising this obligation — as a last resort. And he should commit publicly, as soon as possible.

Doing so will give him the leverage he lacks in the debt-ceiling negotiations. Right now, Republicans’ willingness to let the economy default, consequences be damned, gives them enormous leverage. But presumably, if a deal is not reached by the deadline, and the president is forced to exercise his constitutional obligation, Republicans will get nothing at all. Not the trillion dollars in cuts already agreed to. Not the additional trillion in cuts they are seeking. The threat, alone, of invoking the 14th Amendment defuses the bomb Republicans have strapped to the hostage.

Most would agree that taking such a step would be out of character for a president who has avoided this brand of confrontation. But great leaders adapt to adverse circumstances, and this is no exception. The president doesn’t just have a political and legal obligation here; he has a moral one, too. A default would be wrenching for the poor and middle class, stripping families of their jobs, their homes and programs they depend on for survival. A debt deal, negotiated entirely on Republican terms, would be devastating too — for everyone who isn’t a hedge-fund manager or private jet owner.

That leaves the president with two choices: He can give in to unthinkable Republican demands or he can choose, instead, to exercise his constitutional authority, end the debt-ceiling standoff and craft a new budget deal, defined, finally, by shared sacrifice.

© 2011 The Washington Post

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Published on Sunday, October 3, 2010 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)

How the Future Will Judge Our Moral Failings

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father’s duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.
Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?
Yet the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones? A look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.
First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counter-arguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)
And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.
With these signs in mind, here are four contenders for future moral condemnation.
Our Prison System
We already know that the massive waste of life in our prisons is morally troubling; those who defend the conditions of incarceration usually do so in non-moral terms (citing costs or the administrative difficulty of reforms); and we’re inclined to avert our eyes from the details. Check, check and check.
Roughly 3 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. What’s more, the majority of our prisoners are nonviolent offenders, many of them detained on drug charges. (Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering.)
Industrial Meat Production
The arguments against the cruelty of factory farming have certainly been around a long time; Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century observed that the key question is not whether animals can reason but whether they can suffer. People who eat factory-farmed bacon or chicken rarely offer a moral justification for what they’re doing. Instead, they try not to think about it too much, shying away from stomach-turning stories about what goes on in our industrial abattoirs.
The Institutionalized and Isolated Elderly
Nearly 2 million of America’s elderly are warehoused in nursing homes. Some 10,000 for-profit facilities have arisen across the country in recent decades to hold them. Other elderly Americans may live independently, but often they are isolated and cut off from their families. (The United States is not alone among advanced democracies in this. Consider the heat wave that hit France in 2003: While many families were enjoying their summer vacations, some 14,000 elderly parents and grandparents were left to perish in the stifling temperatures.) Is this what Western modernity amounts to -- societies that feel no filial obligations to their inconvenient elders?
Sometimes we can learn from societies much poorer than ours. My English mother spent the last 50 years of her life in Ghana, where I grew up. In her final years, it was her good fortune not only to have the resources to stay at home, but also to live in a country where doing so was customary. She had family next door who visited her every day, and she was cared for by doctors and nurses who were willing to come to her when she was too ill to come to them. In short, she had the advantages of a society in which older people are treated with respect and concern.
The Environment
Of course, most transgenerational obligations run the other way -- from parents to children -- and of these the most obvious candidate for opprobrium is our wasteful attitude toward the planet’s natural resources and ecology. Look at a satellite picture of Russia, and you’ll see a vast expanse of parched wasteland where decades earlier was a lush and verdant landscape. That’s the Republic of Kalmykia, home to what was recognized in the 1990s as Europe’s first man-made desert. Desertification, which is primarily the result of destructive land-management practices, threatens a third of the Earth’s surface; tens of thousands of Chinese villages have been overrun by sand drifts in the past few decades.
It’s not as though we’re unaware of what we’re doing to the planet: We know the harm done by deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions -- the whole litany. Our descendants, who will inherit this devastated Earth, are unlikely to have the luxury of such recklessness. Chances are, they won’t be able to avert their eyes, even if they want to.
Let’s not stop with my list. We will all have our own suspicions about which practices will someday prompt people to ask, in dismay: What were they thinking?
Even when we don’t have a good answer, we’ll be better off for anticipating the question.

© 2010 The Capital Times

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, is the author of “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.” This column first appeared in The Washington Post.

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Net Neutrality Vital To Free Speech

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Published on Thursday, September 16, 2010 by TechZone 360.com

Net Neutrality Absolutely Vital to Assuring Progressive Free Speech

by Mark Weisbrot

The mass media remains one of the most powerful forces blocking social and economic progress in the 21st century.

It is because of the mass media that tens of millions of Americans are convinced that budget deficits are more important than the lives ruined by unemployment, or that Social Security won't be there for them when they retire. Or that their government's occupation of Afghanistan and its hundreds of military bases around the world, are protecting the "national security" of U.S. citizens.

All of these destructive myths -- and many more -- could be dispelled within a relatively short time if there were a free marketplace of ideas, instead of the "free press for those who own it" model currently in place.

Of course, other falsehoods would persist for much longer; ideas, once widely accepted, can have great inertia. But during the last two decades the Internet has introduced a degree of competition in the world of mass communications, which although still quantitatively small, is nonetheless unprecedented.

An interactive process has been set in motion with the Internet and the blogosphere acting as a check on the mass media -- sometimes breaking important news that would otherwise go unnoticed or unreported in systems with direct censorship such as China and also in limited democracies like the United States; and sometimes influencing the journalists who produce the mass media.

This process has the potential for accelerating with the development and spread of Internet technology, for example to Internet television; and of course with advances in literacy and education.

This is rare in the history of technology, and especially in the technology of communications. Almost all prior innovations -- radio, television and motion pictures -- have mostly made it easier for the few to control the many -- like pilotless drone military planes.

This progressive contribution of the Internet is reliant on the principle of "net neutrality": that Internet service providers treat all packets of data the same. An individual blogger's challenge to The Washington Post can be downloaded by anyone at the same speed as the content of the multi-billion dollar corporate newspaper itself. Intelligent readers can decide for themselves who is correct.

The Federal Communications Commission has been considering what its role and rules should be for enforcing net neutrality, and in early August Google and Verizon put forth their own proposal on these issues.

These two big corporations, along with others, are likely to have a considerable influence on the FCC and Congress, and their proposal has elicited a torrent of criticism. It exempts wireless and other "online services" from net neutrality, and has other big loopholes.

There is now a clear and present danger that the road will be paved to a fragmented Internet where service providers can determine what people will see on the Web, and carve out a "non-neutral" sector. As Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., has noted, defending net neutrality is "the First Amendment issue of our time." America's great concentrations of wealth -- more concentrated than at any time since the 1920s -- already dominate the Internet. But not nearly as much as they dominate the vast majority of information that Americans receive from more monopolized info-tainment news outlets such as TV, radio and what remains of the newspaper industry.

A coalition of organizations including MoveOn.org, Color of Change, Free Press and Credo Action is calling on Americans to lend a hand and preserve this one remaining mass medium of free speech and equal rights, before it is remade in accordance with corporate needs. We the people need the Internet as we know it is the essential tool in ongoing battle of ideas.

It is time to fight for it.

© 2010 Tribun Media Services

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC.

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Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Published on Friday, September 10, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Right-Wing Republicans vs. Corporate Democrats vs. Progressive Populists

by Norman Solomon

At this bleak political moment, gaining congressional power for progressives might seem like pie in the sky. More and more desperate efforts are underway to stave off a Republican takeover of Congress. But the necessity of trying to prevent right-wing rule on Capitol Hill should not obscure the need to win more seats for genuine progressives. Ever since early last year, the Obama administration has chipped away at the Democratic Party's base -- undermining its capacity to mobilize for the midterm election -- while sometimes courting Republican leaders to the point of absurdity. Consider this news account from the New York Times a few days ago: "Though liberal and labor groups have been agitating for public works spending, Mr. Obama and his advisers are emphasizing business tax cuts in hopes of drawing Republican support -- or, failing that, to show that Republicans are so determined to thwart Mr. Obama that they will oppose even ideas that they and most business groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, advocate."
Huh?
Or consider the Washington Post report Thursday on "Obama's proposal for $180 billion in fresh infrastructure spending and business tax breaks." The newspaper explained that "his plan would make permanent a corporate tax credit for research and allow companies to deduct from their taxes this year and next the entire cost of whatever they spend in new investments -- ideas pulled directly from GOP playbooks."
Progressives need to fight back -- today, tomorrow and every day. The electoral struggle is just one part of what's needed to build effective social movements, but it's an important part. And that effort should include primary battles to elect real progressives to Congress.
One such election is coming up Tuesday in Rhode Island, where progressive populist David Segal is running against corporate Democratic insiders to fill the seat of retiring Congressman Patrick Kennedy. For many years, Segal has been organizing to challenge banks and other corporate behemoths on behalf of working people and the poor. Although he's been in the state legislature for four years and on the Providence City Council before that, Segal isn't a politician nearly so much as a committed activist whose work has won him wide support from labor unions and many other progressive organizations in the current campaign.
"It's a slap in the face to American workers that our current trade agreements give corporations incentives to lay off U.S. workers and move jobs abroad where they can pay their workers sub-poverty wages and wreak havoc on the environment," David Segal said on Labor Day. "These job losses aren't an accident or the result of a force of nature: they are the direct result of the obscene power that corporations wield over our government. Corporations and the extremely wealthy spend tens of millions of dollars each year to ensure that our trade agreements guarantee their profits, even if it's at the expense of millions of our working families."
Of course Segal is being heavily outspent by the corporate opposition. He's a distinct underdog, but -- whatever the Sept. 14 election results -- the work behind his campaign is an inspiring model for grassroots, volunteer-driven approaches to fighting for electoral power.
More broadly, progressive populism is essential in the quest for economic and social justice -- a vast worldview away from the "populism" flaunted by Tea Bag boosters and the like.
"It's necessary to restate the solid principles of populism and reassert its true spirit, because both are now being severely perverted by corporate manipulators and a careless media establishment," Jim Hightower wrote early this summer. "To these debasers of the language, any politicos or pundits who tap into any level of popular anger (toward Barack Obama, liberals, the IRS, poor people, unions, gays, immigrants, Hollywood, community organizers, environmentalists et al.) get a peel-off ‘populist' label slapped onto their lapels -- even when their populist pose is funded by and operates as a front for one or another corporate interest. That's not populism, it's rank hucksterism -- disguising plutocrats as champions of the people."
Hightower's assessment is true today, and it will be true the morning after Election Day: "Now is the time for progressives to reassert their populist beliefs and bona fides, for we're living in a teachable moment in which it's possible to reach most Americans with an aggressive and positive approach to achieving a higher level of economic and political democracy."
There's a viable -- and essential -- alternative to right-wing Republicans and corporate Democrats. Real progressive populism is grounded in humane values, solidarity, caring and organizing. We can put up a fight. And we can win.

Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is "Made Love, Got War." He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign. In California, he is co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay; www.GreenNewDeal.info.

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War Is The Budget Buster

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Published on Wednesday, June 30, 2010 by TruthDig.com

We Can’t Afford War

by Amy Goodman

“General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts,” began the MoveOn.org attack ad against Gen. David Petraeus back in 2007, after he had delivered a report to Congress on the status of the war in Iraq. George W. Bush was president, and MoveOn was accusing Petraeus of “cooking the books for the White House.” The campaign asked “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” on a full-page ad in The Washington Post. MoveOn took tremendous heat for the campaign, but stood its ground.
Three years later, Barack Obama is president, Petraeus has become his man in Afghanistan, and MoveOn pulls the critical Web content. Why? Because Bush’s first war, Afghanistan, has become Obama’s war, a quagmire. The U.S. will eventually negotiate its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The only difference between now and then will be the number of dead, on all sides, and the amount of (borrowed) money that will be spent.
Petraeus’ confirmation to become the military commander in Afghanistan was never in question. He replaces Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who resigned shortly after his macho criticisms of his civilian leadership became public in a recent Rolling Stone magazine article.
The statistics for Afghanistan, Obama’s Vietnam, are surging. June, with at least 100 U.S. deaths, is the highest number reported since the invasion in 2001. 2010 is on pace to be the year with the highest U.S. fatalities. Similar fates have befallen soldiers from the other, so-called coalition countries. Petraeus is becoming commander not only of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, but of all forces, as the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is run by NATO.
U.S. troops, expected to rise to 98,000 this year, far outnumber those from other nations. Public and political support in many of those countries is waning.
Journalist Michael Hastings, who wrote the Rolling Stone piece, was in Paris with McChrystal to profile him. What didn’t get as much attention was Hastings’ description of why McChrystal was there:
“He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies—to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.”
The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks.org, which received international attention after releasing leaked video from a U.S. attack helicopter showing the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and a Reuters cameraman and his driver in Baghdad, has just posted a confidential CIA memo detailing possible public relations strategies to counter waning public support for the Afghan War. The agency memo reads: “If domestic politics forces the Dutch to depart, politicians elsewhere might cite a precedent for ‘listening to the voters.’ French and German leaders have over the past two years taken steps to preempt an upsurge of opposition but their vulnerability may be higher now.”
I just returned from Toronto, covering the G-20 summit and the protests. The gathered leaders pledged, among other things, to reduce government deficits by 50 percent by 2013. In the U.S., that means cutting $800 billion, or about 20 percent of the budget. Two Nobel Prize-winning economists have weighed in with grave predictions. Joseph Stiglitz said, “There are many cases where these kinds of austerity measures have led to ... recessions into depressions.” And Paul Krugman wrote: “Who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.”
In order to make the cuts promised, Obama would have to raise taxes and cut social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Or he could cut the war budget. I say “war budget” because it is not to be confused with a defense budget. Cities and states across the country are facing devastating budget crises. Pensions are being wiped out. Foreclosures are continuing at record levels. A true defense budget would shore up our schools, our roads, our towns, our social safety net. The U.S. House of Representatives is under pressure to pass a $33 billion Afghan War supplemental this week.
We can’t afford war.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2010 Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of "Breaking the Sound Barrier," recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

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The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die.

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Published on Monday, June 28, 2010 by TomDispatch.com

The Land Where Theories of Warfare Go to Die Obama, Petraeus, and the Cult of COIN in Afghanistan

by Robert Dreyfuss

Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted smartly and pledged his loyal support for President Obama's decision to start withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011. In December, when Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add tens of thousands of additional American forces to the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the military to turn the situation around and begin handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan National Army and police. Speaking to the nation from West Point, Obama said that he'd ordered American forces to start withdrawing from Afghanistan at that time.
Here's the exchange, between Obama, Petraeus, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as reported by Jonathan Alter in his new book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One: OBAMA: "I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?"
PETRAEUS: "Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame."
OBAMA: "If you can't do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"
PETRAEUS: "Yes, sir, in agreement."
MULLEN: "Yes, sir."
That seems unequivocal, doesn't it? Vice President Joe Biden, famously dissed as Joe Bite-Me by one of the now-disgraced aides of General Stanley McChrystal in the Rolling Stone profile that got him fired, seems to think so. Said Biden, again according to Alter: "In July of 2011 you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it."
In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the U.S. military, however, things are rarely what they seem. Petraeus, the Centcom commander "demoted" in order to replace McChrystal as U.S. war commander in Afghanistan, seems to be having second thoughts about what will happen next July -- and those second thoughts are being echoed and amplified by a phalanx of hawks, neoconservatives, and spokesmen for the counterinsurgency (COIN) cult, including Henry Kissinger, the Heritage Foundation, and the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Chiming in, too, are the lock-step members of the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, led by Senator John McCain.
In testimony before Congress just last week, Petraeus chose his words carefully, but clearly wasn't buying the notion that the July deadline means much, nor did he put significant stock in the fact that President Obama has ordered a top-to-bottom review of Afghan policy in December. According to the White House, that review will be a make-or-break assessment of whether the Pentagon is making any progress in the nine-year-long conflict against the Taliban.
In his recent Senate testimony -- before he fainted, and afterwards -- Petraeus minimized the significance of the December review and cavalierly declared that he "would not make too much of it." Pressed by McCain, the general flouted Biden's view by claiming that the deadline is a date "when a process begins [and] not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits."
The Right's Marching Orders for the President
Petraeus's defiant declaration that he wasn't putting much stock in the president's intending to hold the military command accountable for its failure in Afghanistan next December earned him an instant rebuke from the White House. Now, that same Petraeus is in charge.
The dispute over the meaning of July 2011 is, and will remain, at the very heart of the divisions within the Obama administration over Afghan policy.
Last December, in that West Point speech, Obama tried to split the difference, giving the generals what they wanted -- a lot more troops -- but fixing a date for the start of a withdrawal. It was hardly a courageous decision. Under intense pressure from Petraeus, McChrystal, and the GOP, Obama assented to the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops, ignoring the fact that McChrystal's unseemly lobbying for the escalation amounted to a Douglas MacArthur-like defiance of the primacy of civilian control of the military. (Indeed, after a speech McChrystal gave in London insouciantly rejecting Biden's scaled-down approach to the war, Obama summoned the runaway general to a tarmac outside Copenhagen and read him the riot act in Air Force One.)
If Obama's Afghan decision was a cave-in to the brass and a potential generals' revolt, the president also added that kicker of a deadline to the mix, not only placating his political base and minimizing Democratic unhappiness in Congress, but creating a trap of sorts for Petraeus and McChrystal.  The message was clear enough: deliver the goods, and fast, or we're heading out, whether the job is finished or not.
Since then, Petraeus and McChrystal -- backed by their chief enabler, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican holdover appointed to his position by George W. Bush -- took every chance they could to downplay and scoff at the deadline.
By appointing Petraeus last Wednesday, Obama took the easy way out of the crisis created by McChrystal's shocking comments in Rolling Stone. It might not be inappropriate to quote that prescient British expert on Afghan policy, Peter Townsend, who said of the appointment: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
On the other hand, Petraeus is not simply another McChrystal. While McChrystal implemented COIN doctrine, mixing in his obsession with "kinetic operations" by U.S. Special Forces, Petraeus literally wrote the book -- namely, The U.S Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
If the COIN cult has a guru (whom all obey unquestioningly), it's Petraeus. The aura that surrounds him, especially among the chattering classes of the Washington punditocracy, is palpable, and he has a vast well of support among Republicans and assorted right-wingers on Capitol Hill, including the Holy Trinity: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman. Not surprisingly, there have been frequent mentions of Petraeus as a candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2012, although Obama's deft selection of Petraeus seems, once and for all, to have ruled out that option, since the general will be very busy on the other side of the globe for quite a while.
Even before the announcement that Petraeus had the job, the right's mighty Wurlitzer had begun to blast out its critique of the supposedly pernicious effects of the July deadline. The Heritage Foundation, in an official statement, proclaimed: "The artificial Afghanistan withdrawal deadline has obviously caused some of our military leaders to question our strategy in Afghanistan... We don't need an artificial timeline for withdrawal. We need a strategy for victory."
Writing in the Washington Post on June 24, Henry Kissinger cleared his throat and harrumphed: "The central premise [of Obama's strategy] is that, at some early point, the United States will be able to turn over security responsibilities to an Afghan government and national army whose writ is running across the entire country. This turnover is to begin next summer. Neither the premise nor the deadline is realistic... Artificial deadlines should be abandoned."
And the Post itself, in the latest of a long-running series of post-9/11 hawkish editorials, gave Obama his marching orders: "He... should clarify what his July 2011 deadline means. Is it the moment when ‘you are going to see a whole lot of people moving out,' as Vice President Biden has said, or ‘the point at which a process begins... at a rate to be determined by conditions at the time,' as General Petraeus testified? We hope that the appointment of General Petraeus means the president's acceptance of the general's standard."
Is the COIN Cult Ascendant?
It's too early to say whether Obama's decision to name Petraeus to replace his protégé McChrystal carries any real significance when it comes to the evolution of his Afghan war policy. The McChrystal crisis erupted so quickly that Obama had no time to carefully consider who might replace him and Petraeus undoubtedly seemed like the obvious choice, if the point was to minimize the domestic political risks involved.
Still, it's worrying. Petraeus's COIN policy logically demands a decade-long war, involving labor-intensive (and military-centric) nation-building, waged village by village and valley by valley, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless U.S., NATO, and Afghan casualties, including civilians. That idea doesn't in the least square with the idea that significant numbers of troops will start leaving Afghanistan next summer. Indeed, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer with long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, who headed Obama's first Afghan policy review in February 2009, told me (for an article in Rolling Stone last month) that it's not inconceivable the military will ask for even more troops, not agree to fewer, next year.
The Post is right, however, that Obama needs to grapple seriously with the deep divisions in his administration. Having ousted one rebellious general, the president now has little choice but to confront -- or cave in to -- the entire COIN cult, including its guru.
If Obama decides to take them on, he'll have the support of many traditionalists in the U.S. armed forces who reject the cult's preaching. Above all, his key ally is bound to be those pesky facts on the ground.
Afghanistan is the place where theories of warfare go to die, and if the COIN theory isn't dead yet, it's utterly failed so far to prove itself. The vaunted February offensive into the dusty hamlet of Marja in Helmand province has unraveled. The offensive into Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and a seething tangle of tribal and religious factions, once touted as the potential turning point of the entire war, has been postponed indefinitely. After nine years, the Pentagon has little to show for its efforts, except ever-rising casualties and money spent.
Perhaps Obama is still counting on U.S. soldiers to reverse the Taliban's momentum and win the war, even though administration officials have repeatedly rejected the notion that Afghanistan can be won militarily. David Petraeus or no, the reality is that the war will end with a political settlement involving President Karzai's government, various Afghan warlords and power brokers, the remnants of the old Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and the Taliban's sponsors in Pakistan.
Making all that work and winning the support of Afghanistan's neighbors -- including India, Iran, and Russia -- will be exceedingly hard.  If Obama's diplomats managed to pull it off, the Afghanistan that America left behind might be modestly stable. On the other hand, it won't be pretty to look at it. It will be a decentralized mess, an uneasy balance between enlightened Afghans and benighted, Islamic fundamentalist ones, and no doubt many future political disagreements will be settled not in conference rooms but in gun battles. Three things it won't be: It won't be Switzerland. It won't be a base for Al Qaeda. And it won't be host to tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops.
The only silver lining in the Petraeus cloud is that the general has close ties to the military in Pakistan who slyly accept U.S. aid while funneling support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. If Obama decides to pursue a political and diplomatic solution between now and next July, Petraeus's Pakistan connection would be useful indeed. Time, however, is running out.

Copyright 2010 Robert Dreyfuss

Robert Dreyfuss is an independent journalist in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone and Mother Jones. His blog, The Dreyfuss Report, appears at the Nation's website. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, was published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in 2005.  Listen to Dreyfuss in the latest TomCast audio interview discussing Obama's war with the military by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, here.

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The Myth of Free Enterprise

Image by gorgeoux via Flickr

Published on Saturday, May 29, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
'Business Good. Government Bad.'

by Bruce Luske
I just read Arthur C. Brooks' precious recent Washington Post polemic, "America's new culture war: Free enterprise vs. government control," and I want to comment on his one-size-fits all libertarian prescription for every conceivable social ill. As political scientist David Michael Green observed, it can be expressed in a bumper sticker:

"Business good. Government bad."

Please join me in repeating this line aloud twice, making sure to punctuate each rendition with a parrot's whistle.

You've got it! Simple, isn't it?

This ubiquitous "master narrative" has prevailed for over 30 years as the exact cause of our current economic meltdown and overall societal disintegration; namely, a run-amock thoroughly deregulated so-called "free market."

I want to go on record here by saying that I and virtually all Americans love Brooks' grand IDEA of huge numbers of small businesses imaginatively innovating and competing in every area of American life.

But the problem with this exceedingly attractive proposition (in the abstract) is that as an empirical matter the "Biggest Fish" (transnational corporations) have long since eaten most of the "little fish" (small and medium businesses).

The alluring libertarian dream of the "free market" no longer exists--indeed, never has existed--since the matter of which businesses thrive and expand and which do not has always been a product of governmental policy. A good historic case in point are the railroads in the 19th century.

Today's "free market" is in reality an oxymoron as a wholly owned and controlled creature (Frankenstein?) of the largest international corporations served by the federal government as the "corporate state."

A simple metaphor: The corporations are the "dog" and the federal government is the "tail." The right, Tea Partiers, their assorted allies, and a largely misled populace refuse to acknowledge and/or to understand this dominant truth of contemporary American society.

I can't think of a more poignantly compelling example than the federal government's utter dependency on the BP corporation that caused the Gulf catastrophe to control attempts to plug the gusher as well as the accompanying narrative fed to the corporate media in the attempt to "spin" the disaster in the least damaging way for BP as possible.

But it ain't gonna work this time. Now even the Gulf state Bubbas who used to fish and swim in the Gulf are starting to get it.
Bruce Luske has been the resident sociologist at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York since 1993, and welcomes all responses to this piece - bluske@frontiernet.net.

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Justice For Just Us?

Image via Wikipedia

Published on Thursday, May 27, 2010 by Salon.com
US Demands Civilian Trials -- Except in the US

by Glenn Greenwald

The Washington Post, [yesterday] (h/t Arkinsaw):

A judge granted parole Tuesday to Lori Berenson, the 40-year-old New York activist who has spent 15 years in Peruvian prisons on a conviction of aiding leftist rebels. . . . Berenson had for many years denied any wrongdoing, maintaining she was a political prisoner and not a terrorist. But her defense team said in papers submitted to the judge that she "recognized she committed errors in involving herself in activities of the MRTA" . . . .

Berenson was arrested in 1995 and initially accused of being a leader of the MRTA, which bombed banks and kidnapped and killed civilians but was nowhere near as violent as the better-known Shining Path insurgency. It is blamed for, at most, 200 killings. . . .

She was convicted of treason by a military court in 1996. But after an intense campaign by her parents. . ., she was retried in a civilian court in 2000. It convicted Berenson of the lesser crime and reduced her sentence to 20 years. . . . The U.S. State Department had pushed hard for the civilian trial, saying Berenson was denied due process by the military tribunal.

Washington Post, May 9, 2009 -- CNN, November 9, 2009 -- Washington Independent, April 27, 2010:

The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . . [Attorney General] Holder also announced that five other detainees held at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be sent to military commissions for trial. . . . Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has finally signed and issued a Manual for the Military Commissions Act of 2009. It's 7:30 p.m. as I write this. Approximately 13 and a half hours from now, Col. Pat Parrish, the military judge presiding over Omar Khadr's pre-trial hearing, will gavel the first full-fledged military commission proceeding of the Obama administration into order.

It's true that the Berenson military tribunal in Peru was filled with due process deficiencies. That's what happens when governments deny accused Terrorists a trial in a real court, and instead concoct ad hoc military tribunals: it's inevitable that grave injustices will occur, such as refusing even to provide the rules governing the proceedings until 13 hours before the tribunal begins, as just happened with the child soldier, Omar Khadr, at Guantanamo. As the Berenson conviction highlights, the U.S. previously protested military tribunals and demanded civilian trials even when it involved a foreign national credibly accused of involvement in a designated Terrorist group (as was true of Berenson in Peru). Now, we're the ones who deny civilian trials. We've gone from protesting the "justice system" of the Peruvian authoritarian Alberto Fujimori to (at best) following it.

In other related news, "the White House has been working with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to craft legislation that would restructure the amount of time interrogators can hold suspected terrorists domestically without reading them their Miranda rights." And the President's top Terrorism advisor, John Brennan, said today that it was both necessary and just that the U.S. hold detainees indefinitely without any charges of any kind -- not even before military commissions, a re-iteration of the Obama administration's previously expressed commitment to indefinite detention. But that's because, Brennan explained, we're now facing a "new phase" of Terrorism. Whatever that means, it evidently requires brand new rules of "justice" (Brennan said all that after he beat his chest and bellowed: "We will destroy Al Qaeda"). Somehow, it was a grave violation of due process for Peru to try accused foreign Terrorists before military tribunals, but not for us to hold them for as long as we want with no charges of any kind.

UPDATE: For more on what a complete mockery of justice these military commissions have become in general, and the Khadr tribunal specifically is, see Harper's Scott Horton:

The Gates Pentagon prepared the manual for the military commissions completely behind closed doors. It disregarded established procedures under which proposed procedural rules are disclosed for public comment and the views of the military bar itself are explicitly solicited. We now see that it turned to secrecy because it had something to hide: the rules were recognized as flawed and weak even within the Obama Administration, where they were subjected to appropriately sharp criticism. Had they been publicly aired, the Pentagon would have been forced to work out the contradictions in them. But it opted to keep the country and the bar in the dark.

Horton's whole analysis is worth reading. And remember: Peru denied due process to Lori Berenson by putting her before a military tribunal rather than a civilian court, just as the U.S. State Department -- in a prior incarnation -- long complained.
© 2010 Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

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