"For me, remember, apocalypse means revelation, not catastrophe. ...
I think that era of relativism, where science was just another product of knowledge, is ending. We philosophers should join scientists asking those big metaphysical questions about quantum physics, about reality."
"The starting point of critical elaboration is te consciousness of what one really is, and id "knowing thyself" as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without ever leaving you an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."
- Antonio Gramsci quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism (1978): 25.
The Unmaking of a Company Man:
An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate
"By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high -- whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops -- is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.
...These visits to Jena and Berlin offered glimpses of a reality radically at odds with my most fundamental assumptions. Uninvited and unexpected, subversive forces had begun to infiltrate my consciousness. Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.
That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations.
...
For me, the Cold War had played a crucial role in sustaining that worldview. ... [It] provided a framework that organized and made sense of contemporary history."
"Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis. History -- especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War -- no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles.
...
George W. Bush’s decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended “global war on terror” without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords. During the era of containment, the United States had at least maintained the pretense of a principled strategy; now, the last vestiges of principle gave way to fantasy and opportunism. With that, the worldview to which I had adhered as a young adult and carried into middle age dissolved completely.
Prior to World War II, Americans by and large viewed military power and institutions with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In the wake of World War II, that changed. An affinity for military might emerged as central to the American identity. ... A people who had long seen standing armies as a threat to liberty now came to believe that the preservation of liberty required them to lavish resources on the armed forces."
"Obama's predicament: By declining to speak clearly and often about his larger philosophy - and insisting that his actions are guided not by ideology but a results-oriented "pragmatism" - he has bred confusion and disappointment among his allies, and left his agenda and motives vulnerable to distortion by his enemies.The president's reluctance to be a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan, who spoke without apology about his vaulting ideological ambitions, has produced an odd turn of events: Obama has been the most activist domestic president in decades, but the philosophy behind his legislative achievements remains muddy in the eyes of many supporters and skeptics alike. There is not yet such a thing as "Obamism."
...
By some lights, however, he and his team became so enthralled with the idea of a personality-driven "Obama brand" that they neglected the need to explain - and, in a modern media environment, to explain and explain again - the ideas behind the personality."
By Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175266/tomgram%3A_robert_dreyfuss,_the_president_chooses_the_guru/
"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.
...
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."
"After Vietnam, the United States abandoned its citizen army tradition, oblivious to the consequences. In its place, it opted for what the Founders once called a "standing army" -- a force consisting of long-serving career professionals.
For a time, the creation of this so-called all-volunteer force, only tenuously linked to American society, appeared to be a master stroke. Washington got superbly trained soldiers and Republicans and Democrats took turns putting them to work. The result, once the Cold War ended, was greater willingness to intervene abroad. As Americans followed news reports of U.S. troops going into action everywhere from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, from the Caribbean to the Horn of Africa, they found little to complain about: The costs appeared negligible. Their role was simply to cheer"
...
"We had been told, on leaving our native soil," wrote the centurion Marcus Flavius to a cousin back in Rome, "that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens [and to aid] populations in need of our assistance and our civilization." For such a cause, he and his comrades had willingly offered to "shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes." Yet the news from the homeland was disconcerting: The capital was seemingly rife with factions, treachery and petty politics. "Make haste," Marcus Flavius continued, "and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the empire."
"If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the legions!" "
"One of the most commonplace aspects of our politics today revolves around widely shared respect for the American soldier and, by extension, for the American military. Now, I certainly have no problem with respecting the service and sacrifice of the American soldiers. But those expressions of support create obstacles to examining seriously what our emphasis on military power has wrought and from my point of view - especially in the period since the end of the Cold War when we have, under both Democrats and Republicans, engaged in a large number of military interventions abroad - taken together, all that military activity is not making us safer, is not making us stronger, is not making us richer. Indeed, I would say that, on balance, just the opposite is the case: we are creating instability, we are inciting greater anti-Americanism and we are rapidly depleting our wealth with minimal gain in return."
"Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."
"During the past year, there has been an unprecedented reinvigoration of bilateral defense consultations through nearly continuous high-level discussions and visits. We have re-energized structured dialogues such as the U.S.-Israel Joint Political-Military Group and the Defense Policy Advisory Group, among others. I lead the U.S. government’s discussions within the Joint Political-Military Group (JPMG), which includes representatives from both the State Department and Pentagon on the U.S. side and the Foreign and Defense Ministries on the Israeli side. The JPMG discussions cover a wide range of political-military topics, including first and foremost maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge. Meanwhile, the DoD-led Defense Policy Advisory Group provides a high-level forum dedicated to enhancing defense policy coordination."
"The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.
And how could they? In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan."
By CECILIA LUCAS
" "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is bad policy. It encourages deceit and, specifically, staying in the closet, which contributes to internalized as well as public homophobia, thus perpetuating discrimination and violence against LGBT people. Banning gay people from serving in the military, however, is something I support. Not because I’m anti-gay, nope, I’m one of those queer folks myself. I’m also a woman and would support a law against women serving in the military. Not because I think women are less capable. I would support laws against any group of people serving in the military: people of color, tall people, people between the ages of 25 and 53, white men, poor people, people who have children, people who vote for Democrats -- however you draw the boundaries of a group, I would support a law banning them from military service. Because I support outlawing the military. And until that has happened, I support downsizing it by any means necessary, including, in this one particular arena, sacrificing civil rights in the interest of human rights."
"MADDOW: Do you think there‘s really no difference between Democrats and Republicans on the biggest most important issues in national security?
BACEVICH: The differences are far smaller than one would conclude from all of the rhetoric and the hype. I‘ve long believed that if you‘re looking for the big truths about American politics, about the way Washington works, you don‘t look at the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. You look for the continuities. ...
MADDOW: But the difference that I see between theoretical McCain presidency and the actual Obama presidency in Afghanistan is that withdrawal deadline. Now, the administration is taking great pains to make that withdrawal deadline next summer seem very squishy.
And if there is no withdrawal, then, I‘d say you‘re right. But if there is withdrawal, if they really do wind that war down and end it and don‘t let it go on permanently, isn‘t that a potential crack in the consensus? Is it a break in permanent war, sort of an opportunity to question that as a default path? "
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
"The important constituency here is liberals, who duly rise to the challenge of unpleasant disclosures of imperial crimes. In the wake of scandals such as those revealed at Abu Ghraib, or in the Wikileaks files, they are particularly eager to proclaim that they “can take it” – i.e., endure convincing accounts of monstrous tortures, targeted assassinations by US forces, obliteration of wedding parties or entire villages, and emerge with ringing affirmations of the fundamental overall morality of the imperial enterprise. This was very common in the Vietnam war and repeated in subsequent imperial ventures such the sanctions and ensuing attack on Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. Of course in the case of Israel it’s an entire way of life for a handsome slice of America’s liberals.What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the U.S. war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met. The U.S. began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA’s history until that time. Here we are, more than three decades later, half buried under a mountain of horrifying news stories about a destroyed land of desolate savagery and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats often by liberals, about Wikileaks’ “irresponsibility” in releasing the documents; twitchy questions such as that asked by The Nation’s Chris Hayes on the Rachel Maddow Show: “I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable.” "
"Afghanistan has to be stable enough, has to have enough governance, have to--has to create enough jobs, have an economy that's good enough so that the Taliban cannot return to the brutality of the kind of regime that you just showed."
By CONN HALLINAN
"The problem is not Afghanistan, but the entire concept of COIN, and the debate around it is hardly academic. Counterinsurgency has seized the high ground in the Pentagon and the halls of Washington, and there are other places in the world where it is being deployed, from the jungles of Columbia to the dry lands that border the Sahara. If the COIN doctrine is not challenged, Americans may well find themselves debating its merits in places like Somalia, Yemen, or Mauritania.
“Counterinsurgency aims at reshaping a nation and its society over the long haul,” says military historian Frank Chadwick, emphasizing “infrastructure improvements, ground-level security, and building a bond between the local population and the security forces.”
...
COIN is always presented as politically neutral, a series of tactics aimed at winning hearts and minds. But in fact, COIN has always been part of a strategy of domination by a nation(s) and/or socio/economic class.The U.S. has strategic interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, and “terrorism” is a handy excuse to inject military power into these two energy-rich regions of the world. Whoever holds the energy high ground in the coming decades will exert enormous influence on world politics.
No, it is not all about oil and gas, but a lot of it is.
Winning “hearts and minds” is just a tactic aimed at insuring our paramount interests, and/or the interests of the “friendly” governments that we fight for. Be nice to the locals unless the locals decide that they don’t much like long-term occupation, don’t trust their government, and might have some ideas about how they should run their own affairs.
Then “hearts and minds” turns nasty. U.S. Special Operations Forces carry out as many as five “kill and capture” raids a day in Afghanistan and have assassinated or jailed more than 500 Afghans in the past few months Thousands of others languish in prisons.
The core of COIN is coercion, whether it is carried out with a gun or truckloads of money. If the majority of people accept coercion—and the COIN supported government doesn’t highjack the trucks—then it may work.
And then maybe not. Tufts University recently researched the impact of COIN aid and found little evidence that such projects win locals over. According to Tufts professor, Andrew Wilder, “Many of the Afghans interviewed for our study identified their corrupt and predatory government as the most important cause of insecurity, and perceived international aid security contracts as enriching a kleptocratic elite.”
...
So COIN is back. And it is working no better than it did in the 1960s. Take the counterterrorism portion of the doctrine.
Over the past several years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been carrying out a sort of long-distance Phoenix program, using armed drones to assassinate insurgent leaders in Pakistan. The program has purportedly snuffed out about 150 such “leaders.” But it has also killed more than 1,000 civilians and inflamed not only the relatives of those killed or wounded in the attacks, but Pakistanis in general. According to an International Republican Institute poll, 80 percent of Pakistanis are now anti-American, and the killer drones are a major reason.
“Hearts and minds” soldiers like Petraeus don’t much like the drone attacks because they alienate Pakistan and dry up intelligence sources in that country.
But McChrystal’s Phoenix program of killing Taliban “leaders” in Afghanistan is no better. As author and reporter Anne Jones notes, “Assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers—those we call the ‘bad Taliban’—actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns who are more interested in living off the population we’re supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty.”
The “hearts and minds” crew have their own problems. McChrystal and Petraeus have long stressed the counterproductive effect of using airpower and artillery against insurgents, because it inevitably produces civilian casualties. But this means that the war is now between two groups of infantry, one of which knows the terrain, speaks the local language, and can turn from a fighter to a farmer in a few minutes."
"The United States is currently the world biggest weapons supplier - holding 30 per cent of the market - but the Obama administration has begun modifying export control regulations in hopes of enlarging the U.S. market share, according to U.S. officials."
"PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: More than any other nation, the United States of America has underwritten global security for over six decades, a time that, for all its problems, has seen walls come down and markets open and billions lifted from poverty, unparalleled scientific progress, and advancing frontiers of human liberty. For, unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours. What we have fought for, what we continue to fight for, is a better future for our children and grandchildren. And we believe that their lives will be better if other people’s children and grandchildren can live in freedom and access opportunity.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama justifying the escalation of war. Professor Bacevich, your response?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, it’s a very sanitized version of American history that I imagine many Americans find agreeable, but it does tremendous violence to the actual facts of our post-World War II history. I mean, we are not an imperial nation in the sense that Great Britain or France, nations like that, were once imperial nations, but we are imperial. We wish to dominate. We wish to ensure that norms that work to the advantage, or perceive to work to the advantage, of the United States prevail across the world. And we are, I think, uniquely, in this moment, determined to rely on military power to enforce those norms.
...
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is Andrew Bacevich. This is his first interview on his book that’s coming out tomorrow, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. I wanted to read a quote from a piece you just recently wrote, where you’re saying, "The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"
ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, I’m referring to President Obama here. I voted for President Obama. I admire President Obama. And I want to see him make good on his promise to us to change the way Washington works. In particular, I want to see him address the Washington rules, this pattern of behavior in the realm of national security policy that I think is so wrongheaded. And I’m deeply disappointed that he has chosen not to do that.
You showed the clip from the West Point speech in December 2009, when he made the decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan and to make it Obama’s war. I think that was a tragic error. The Afghanistan decision was his opportunity to begin to chart a new course on national security policy, to begin to break away from this pattern of behavior that we’ve adhered to for the past sixty or so years. And he blew it. I can’t pretend to look into his heart and understand what factors caused him to make the decision he did. I suspect that a political calculation may have weighed more heavily than a strategic calculation or a moral calculation. And I find that deeply upsetting, because I, and I think many of us, felt that here, finally, was a public figure who—whose decisions would not be influenced primarily by political calculations.
...
When I was a serving officer for twenty-three years, I think trying to do my best as a serving officer, I was not particularly—I did not engage in serious critical thinking. To some degree, serious critical thinking is inconsistent, perhaps, with being a professional officer."
