Iran War: Turning on our ally?

Gareth Porter debunks Bush's attempts to lump together violent Sunni Salafist groups of the Al Qaida type together with with Iranian-inspired Shi'a militant groups like Hizbullah:  Terrorist Network Disconnect TomPaine.com 09/13/06.  He writes:

George Bush’s new argument that Iran and Hezbollah are part of the same terrorist network as al-Qaida turns the recent history of international politics on its head to cover up a truth that makes the Bush administration extremely uncomfortable.

In two speeches on August 31 and September 5, Bush said there is no difference between Iran and Hezbollah, on one hand, and al-Qaida, on the other, as terrorist enemies of the United States. This is fraud so brazen that it makes even the outrageous 2002 Bush administration effort to portray Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden as allies pale by comparison.

Porter's piece gives a good glimpse at the complications that the current Cheney-Bush administration's effort to pressure and threaten Iran are actually causing for the fight against the Sunni Salafist terror groups.  As the history he recounts briefly reminds us, Iran and the United States shared a common interest in opposing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Al Qaida terrorists they were sheltering.

And, in fact, Iran actually did cooperate with the US in combatting Al Qaida and in the Afghanistan War:

When the United States sent its forces into Afghanistan, it was allying with the existing Iranian-supported anti-Taliban coalition forces rather than creating something new. In fact, the United States could not have gotten rid of the Taliban regime without the help of Iran. Not only did Tehran allow the United States to transport food and humanitarian goods across Iran’s territory, but gave the Bush administration advice on the sociopolitical cleavages in Afghanistan and, according to James Risen’s State of War, even what targets to bomb. ...

Contrary to the propaganda pumped out by Rumsfeld from 2002 to 2004, accusing Iran of harboring al-Qaida cadres, within the first few months after the collapse of the Taliban, Iran had arrested 80 percent of the group of cadres who had been associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which had crossed the border to hide in Iran. That account was given by high-ranking al-Qaida member Saif al-Adel, posted on an al-Qaida website in mid-2005. The al-Qaida leader declared, "The steps taken by Iran against us shook us and caused the failure of 75 percent of our plan.”  (my emphasis)

Iran has also backed the Shi'a-majority government in Iraq, where Bush says we're fighting a crucial front in the Global War of Terror by backing that same government.

Indeed it is tempting!

Sometimes it’s tempting to wonder if contemporary Republicanism hasn’t turned into a cult.  - Gene Lyons (White House picked fight with wrong couple Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 09/13/06)

Lyons's column is about the recent book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War.  As he points out, it's looking more and more like Valerie Plame Wilson may have been as much a direct target of the criminal cospiracy to reveal her undercover CIA status as she was "collateral damage" to Dark Lord Cheney's efforts to discredit Joe Wilson:

But here’s the real news in Corn and Isikoff’s book. The biggest mystery in the Plame-Wilson affair has always been why the White House panicked over a newspaper column by a relatively unknown figure like Joe Wilson.  And the answer appears to be that, far from being the low-level munchkin GOP propagandists have depicted, Plame headed the agency’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, or JTFI, which was charged with finding Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Under terrific pressure from the White House, including visits to CIA headquarters by Cheney himself, the task force failed to produce the hard evidence demanded.  “Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed,” Corn writes, “to consider the possibility that [they were ]... coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s WMDs because the weapons did not exist.”  Is that how Cheney knew Plame’s identity, and is that why the White House reacted so rashly to her husband’s exposing just one of the Bush administration’s pre-war propaganda stratagems?  Both sides were playing a game with much higher stakes than anybody outside the intelligence establishment realized.  In a White House eager to blame its own catastrophic bungling on bad intelligence, discrediting Wilson while intimidating Plame’s CIA colleagues into silence may have seemed a clever ploy.  Unfortunately, it picked a fight with the wrong couple.  (my emphasis)

Iraq War: Could this excuse be true?

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

From Shortage of troops in Iraq a `grim warning' by Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers 07/27/06:

Almost no high-ranking, active-duty U.S. officers are willing to discuss their concerns about troop levels publicly, for fear of being reprimanded or having their careers cut short. There's an unwritten understanding, they said, that the Bush administration doesn't want to hear about the need for more troops.

The top American military officer in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., has said that such assertions are untrue. When ground commanders ask for more troops, according to Casey, they get them.

Casey "can get any forces anytime he wants to ask for them. General Casey has never been limited by the secretary of defense," said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. "To accomplish the missions that we are attempting to achieve, we do have the force structure that we need."

We know that a number of senior officers thought that more troops were needed.  And it's no secret how that game works: the generals know they should give the civilian officials the cover of not asking formally for more troops than the civilian plan to give.  That's not to say that's the right way to do things.  But that's often how it's done.  And there a lot of reasons to assume that the same thing happened with the Iraq War.

But these repeated claims that the military is getting everything they asked for will be worth remembering once the US has left the Iraq War and the stab-in-the-back crew are frantically claiming that the generals were being forced to fight "with one hand tied behind their backs" and so forth.

Really?  Then why was there such consistent agreement among the Cheney-Bush officials and the senior serving officers that all the troops and equipment that were needed were being provided?

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05

9/11 Five Years After: A blizzard of anniversary articles

There's no shortage of fifth-anniversary articles about the 9/11 attacks.  The San Francisco Chronicle ran a series like many papers have.  All the ones I'm referencing in this post are from the Chronicle of 09/10/06.

The lead editiorial is Five years into a new world. This sentence in the middle at the end of a paragraph jumped out at me:

Many intelligence experts predict that during the next decade, Britain, with its homegrown terrorists, will be a greater source of trouble for the United States than the Middle East.

Maybe that pathetic Tony Blair didn't do us such a great favor by submissively following Bush into the Iraq War.  The editorial also says:

Our goal should be to develop a strategy that allows us to combat terrorism while remaining an effective democracy ourselves.

This, unfortunately, requires us to confront some harsh realities. The first is that no strategy for defeating terrorism has proven as effective as the practice of infiltrating terrorist groups and working, sometimes over the course of decades, to defeat them from the inside. It's fine to have our law enforcement strategy of terrorism - find the bad guys, send out the squad, bust in the door, kill them - but it's even better to have strategies for law enforcement and counterterrorism and diplomacy and public health and nation-building, and yes, propaganda. Otherwise, we're just creating grief for ourselves and losing allies in the very places we need to deter terrorists. ...

The second reality is that we need a better international-relations strategy. We have to stop being so myopic - probably the most valuable thing in Bush's new strategy is the National Security Language Initiative, on the very last page. This initiative strives to expand American foreign language instruction, beginning in early childhood. The fact that the FBI has only a few agents capable of speaking Arabic fluently goes a long way toward explaining that agency's many failures, but it also goes a long way toward explaining why America is failing to grasp the nature of our enemy. One of the reasons we don't understand why they hate us so is because we're not listening. If we're going to be serious about terrorism, we'll have to get serious about our own actions, too - the real costs of our unilateralism, our addiction to oil, our support for repressive governments in the Middle East and our lack of will when it comes to the dirty work of nation-building.   (my emphasis)

But why is our "press corps" so fascinated by the phantom of bipartisanship, which under the Cheney-Bush administration normally just means Democrats supporting what Cheney and Bush want on a particular subject?  They write:  "Many Americans are tiring of the partisan wars and our lack of direction in Iraq."  The problem with the Iraq War in particular was not that there was too much partisanship, but rather that the Democrats failed to function as effectively as they should have as an opposition party.

Vicki Haddock writes that Almost all our assumptions about how 9/11 would alter our lives forever turned out to be wrong.  This article pretty much falls into the category of something written to give people who don't have anything coherent to say a way to talk about this without actually having to know anything.  For instance:

It would be wrong not to give the United States some credit for successfully evading further attacks to date. A Congressional Budget Office analysis noted the federal government would spend nearly $50 billion on homeland security last year, almost triple the amount spent prior to the 2001 attacks. The Bush administration consolidated several agencies into a new Department of Homeland Security. Airport security has been strengthened, cockpit doors bolted, and air marshals patrol the skies.

Sufficient smallpox vaccine has been produced, emergency-response systems revised, bureaucratic barriers between intelligence agencies dismantled.

But then she contines with, oh, yeah, we're still wetting our pants over terrorist water bottles and terrorist baby-food and terrorist fingernail polish at the airports.  Oh, and some people kind of thing the following shows a gap in emergency preparedness:

But to many Americans, the most startling revelation of our woeful inadequacy to respond to a large terrorist assault came last summer, when Hurricane Katrina walloped the Gulf Coast and turned New Orleans into a living hell.

Gee, how would anyone have thought that?

I hope Mark Sandalow is right about this: Fear's Political Capital Shrinks.  He writes:

When the Pew Foundation asked 1,506 adults in August which single issue they would most want to hear a candidate talk about, only 1 in 50 responded "terror."

Analysts attribute the terror issue's diminished intensity to several factors, including President Bush's struggles in Iraq and with Hurricane Katrina, which have shattered his popularity and raised doubts about his ability to lead the fight on terrorism. Emboldened Democrats believe they have neutralized the GOP's advantage on the issue by overcoming their post-Sept 11 hesitation and aggressively challenging Bush on national security.

And perhaps most important, as the immediacy of the attacks fades, Americans are less scared than they used to be.

Part of what he points out, in a somewhat obscure way, is that the Democrats are now challenging the Republicans' failures, lies and demagoguery about terrorism in a way that they have been afraid to do before.  Sandalow concludes:

Bush's recent series of speeches and the five-year remembrances of Sept. 11 may stir emotions. Yet the evolution of the fight against terrorism from crisis into just one of many issues in the larger political mix is a sign that many Americans have moved on.

If his reading of the public mood is right, I don't think it reflects a feeling that people "have moved on".  But it reflects that fact that people understand a lot more about the issues and see glaring problems like the Iraq War and the Katrina disaster and see that what's happening doesn't square with the Cheney-Bush rhetoric about how effectively they're fighting the GWOT (global war on terrorism).

Bob Egelko writes that Bush Continues to Wield Power.  Not much of a headline, but there's more content to the article:

But the predominant force shaping the law in the past five years has been President Bush's assertion of supreme legal as well as political authority as commander-in-chief in the war on terror.

Bush has ordered the National Security Agency to intercept phone calls between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without the court warrants required by Congress in 1978. He has ordered foreigners and at least two U.S. citizens detained as "enemy combatants'' and argued that courts have no power to review their imprisonment or interrogation.

He has dramatically increased the use of the state-secrets defense against lawsuits challenging his actions, arguing that some government operations, including National Security Agency surveillance, are too sensitive to be judged in court. And in presidential signing statements he has claimed the power to reinterpret or disregard hundreds of laws passed by Congress, frequently saying they would interfere with his constitutional authority over foreign policy.

Somehow, though, he manages to see John Yoo as a credible Constitutional authority instead of the rightwing ideologue and enabler of criminal torture that he is.  And he doesn't seem to think all this stuff about the President claiming the right to ignore the laws and the Constitution on his own discretion with no outside review is any big deal.

Lord forbid that a newspaper columnist would be some "partisan" as to defend the law and the Constitution in print.  Gee, some Republican might get their feelings hurt.

Ruth Ciesinger of Der Tagesspiegel writes in World Views of Attack Varied:

It is very hard not to cry when you read the transcripts of the last words people trapped in the World Trade Center spoke to phone operators while facing their death. Their fate was horrible, the attack monstrous, and five years later sympathy for the victims has not diminished in Germany. But the attitude toward the American government has changed. In the days after 9/11, hundred of thousands of Germans marched silently in the streets, attended church services in memory of the dead and brought flowers to the American embassy.There was an overwhelming sense among Germans that they had been attacked as well, especially when it became clear the assassins had plotted most of the attacks while some of them were living untroubled by police or any other authorities in Hamburg.

Seventeen months later, more than 1 million Germans marched through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin again. This time not in silence but shouting slogans like "U.S. out of Iraq" and "No blood for oil."

... While German air-force soldiers went into combat in 1999 in Kosovo for the first time since World War II, there was never any notion, not even among conservative politicians, of Germany's joining the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq.   (my emphasis)

The bolded sentence in that last quote shows another place where our Potemkin press corps let down the public badly the last five years.  They cheerfully played the White House spin that the naughty German Social Democrats were opposed and the delustional idea (which the Bush team actually seemed to believe) that the cosnervative Christian Democrats would have been more supportive.  As a consequence of reporting like this, the average newspaper reader wouldn't get a good idea of how strongly many of the Cheney-Bush policies are opposed by the public in European democracies.

James Sterngold writes about Lessons From Libya Strategy:

In December 2003, Libya agreed to abandon a clandestine nuclear weapons program and its sponsorship of global terrorism in return for a package of economic incentives and emergence from pariah status.

The agreement signified more than shutting down a major source of terrorism, most notoriously the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. The deal suggested alternative strategies for confronting terrorism, because it was achieved with far different means from those the Bush administration has generally employed since Sept. 11, 2001.

Libya was persuaded to abandon terrorism through diplomacy and sanctions, not preemptive military force. It was done on a multilateral basis - Britain played the leading role - not with a largely unilateral thrust. It followed the interception of a cargo ship filled with irrefutable evidence, not suspicions, that Libya had a nuclear program.

And, it left a dictator in power, with no provocative talk of regime change or spreading democracy. Experts disagree on how the Libya model might be applied, but at the least it suggests the discussion of strategy should go beyond "stay the course" or "cut and run."

"Libya's about the only success we've had from a strategic perspective that I see out there," said Eugene Habiger, a retired Air Force general and former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, which operates the nation's nuclear forces. "That same model or something like it might have worked in Iraq. At least it's a good starting point for a real debate that we need to have." (my emphasis)

9/11 Five Years After: Living with fear

One key fact about terrorism that has largely been obscured for Americans because of the Republican Party's strategy of relying on fear of terrorism to win elections is that the goal of terrorism is to produce terror. 

It is unfortunate in the extreme for the United States that today's authoritarian Republican Party finds itself with a perceived interest in producing fear among voters that coincides in important ways with the jihadists' goal of producing fear in the Western democratic countries for their own purposes.

So, instead of learning to deal with the fear that terrorists seek to induce, our Republican leaders in the White House and Congress promote fear instead.  Zbigniew Brzezinski recently observed that after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Roosevelt White House didn't seek to promote fear among the public.  On the contrary, that administration sought to promote confidence and - with the glaring exception of the internment of Japanese-Americans - to dampen fear and hysteria.

One of the best description I've seen of the process of how fear can gradually take over a society is one that unfortunately I haven't been able to locate online.  It's "Mit der Angst leben" von Wolfgang Sofsky Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) 03.09.06.

Sofsky begins by talking about how the "will to normality seduces [us] to illusions".  Although since 9/11 Europe has suffered only isolated terrorist attacks, nevertheless they were "nevertheless attacks with many losses".  He writes, "The global conflict is unmistakable.  Jihadists have declared war on unbelievers".

That last statement is true.  But stated in such a general way, it is compatable with the disastrously misleading idea that the jihadists "hate us for our values".  It's very likely than in terms of emotional intensity, the violent Sunni Salafists hate Shi'a Muslims more than they hate Americans or even Jews, and that they hate those they regard as Sunni apostates even more.  The jihadists aren't waging a general war on "unbelievers".  They are focusing on particular targets that are based in significant part on the actions of countries toward Middle Eastern conflicts.

Republican Party fear-mongers have reasons to deny the latter and to prefer that people view the jihadists as nihilistic fanatics.  Fanatics they are.  But their goals are more focused than causing mindless destruction.

Sofsky makes a useful historical point that the jihadist tactic of mass killings represents a different sort of approach to terrorism than the "propaganda of the deed" that has motivated many forms of the sorts of terrorism to which people in Western countries are familiar.  The Red Army Faction (RAF) in Germany targeted individuals or locations to make a particular political point, as did the Weather Underground in the US, though the latter engaged in bombings of buildings rather than assassinations or kidnappings.

But, he writes, the kinds of terror attacks of which the 9/11 attacks were a part represents terrorism as an act of war.  "Terror war is a war of a new type."  But the accustomed practices and instruments of war are of limited usage against this type of warrior:

Die Angreifer wollten nicht provozieren, sie wollten die Gesellschaft lähmen. Terrorkrieg ist ein Krieg neuen Typs. Den Staatsorganen stehen Kriegsherren, Milizen, Kommandos und konspirative Zellen gegenüber. Das Blutbad kann überall geschehen, vor Botschaften, auf Marktplätzen, in Vorortzügen, Schulen, Diskotheken. Kein Ort ist sicher. Die Trennlinie zwischen Militär und Zivil, Krieg und Verbrechen ist gestrichen. ... Auch die alte Drohpolitik der Abschreckung versagt. ... Terrorkriege sind - wie alle Kriege - nut zur gewinne wenn der Feind kampftunfähig gemacht wird, durch Demoralisierung, Zerstorung sener Organisatipn und Ideologie, Inhaftiertmg, Tod. Wer sein soziales Umfeld bekehren oder ökonomisch neutralisieren will, hat sich viel vorgenommen.

[The attackers don't want to provoke, they want to cripple the society. Terror war is a war of a new type. The state organs are confronted with warlords, militias, commandoes and conspiratorial cells.  The bloodbath can happen anywhere, in front of embassies, in market places, in suburban trains, schools, discoteques.  No place is safe.  The dividing line between military and civilian, war and crime is erased. ... And the old threat policy of deterrence doesn't work. ... Terror wars - like all wars - can only be won if the enemy is rendered unable to fight, through demoralization, destruction his organization and ideology, arrest, death.  He who succeeds in winning over [the enemy's] social environment or economically neutralizes it has achieved a lot.]

But this also means that there can't be any single victory-producing strike, no atom bomb to produce instant victory like the one over Japan (or, at least in the imaginations of air power enthusiasts it did).

Sofsky argues that the potential reservoir for terrorists and the environment in which sympathy for jihadism thrives is a broad one, including significant segments of the Muslim populations in Europe and (obviously) in the Middle East.  So, in other words, the possibility for terrorist attacks is one that isn't going to go away tomorrow.

But, if the public views individual attacks as isolated events rather than as part of a larger reality, that makes the potential of each attack to generate fear and panic even greater.  "If the house of cards based on illusions collapses, naked panic breaks out".  He doesn't make the observation, but that is essentially what has begun to happen in the United States even without new actual attacks on American soil.

He also reminds us that even a deadly attack that claims many victims does not make terrorism an "existential" threat, i.e., it doesn't threaten the existence of a society or nation.  At least not by the individual acts.  But if the targeted publics allow fear to take over, that does give terrorists a potentially much greater achievement:

Dieser Eskalation können nur widerstehen, indem sie sich wirksam rüsten und ihre Angst strikt eingehen.  Statt dessen setzt man auf resolute Prävention.

[Societies can only resist this escalation so far as they are truly prepared and strictly keep their fear under control.  Instead, one aims at resolute prevention.]  (my emphasis)

But the multiplication of controls and checks and oversight over daily life can actually be counterproductive if done incorrectly:

Die Vorsorge sucht die Freiheiten zu beschneiden, welche die Terroristen ausnutzen: die Religions- und Reisefreiheit, das Brief- un Fermeldegeheimnis, das Vorrecht des Individuums ... sein Leben zu führen.

[The preventive measures seek to reduce the freedoms that the terrorists exploit:  the freedom of religion and travel, the privacy of letters and electronic communications, the prerogative of the individual to lead his own life ... ]

But such restrictions of freedom wins popular support.  (He's describing a process, not reporting on opinion polls.)  And, if imagination and fear are allowed to run wild, a vicious circle sets in:

Sprengstoff kann überall versteckt sein, in Einkaufekörben, Fahrradtaschen oder Kinderwagen. Je harmloser ein Behälter, desto gefährlicher. Der Erfindungsgabe der Angreifer waren noch nie Grenzen gesetzt. ... Jeder Zeitgenosse kann ein Täter sein, jeder Nachbar, jeder U-Bahnpassagier. Wer kennt schon alle Masken der Terrorkrieger? Je weniger einer auffällt, desto verdächtiger ist er. Unauffälligkeit war schon immer die beste Tarnung.

Allgegenwärtige Prävention erzeugt ein Klima stetiger Alarmierung. Wird überall kontrolliert, muß die Gefahr überall lauern, Der Maßnahmen ist kein Ende. Denn je mehr man weiß, desto sicherer weiß man, daß man noch nicht alles weiß.

[Explosives can be hidden anywhere, in shopping baskets, bicycle bags or strollers.  The more harmless a container, the more dangerous.  The creative ability of the attackers have never yet had limits placed on them. ... Any contemporary can be a pertetrator, any neighbor, and subway passenger.  Who knows all the masks of the terror warriors?  The less someone stands out, the more suspicious he is.  Inconspicuousness has always been the best disguise.

Ever-present prevention creates a climate of rising alarm.  If everywhere is controlled, the danger must lurk everywhere.  There is no end of the [security] measures.  The more one knows, the more certain one is that he doesn't yet know everything.]

That description of Sofsky's of how the spiral of fear can work is an impressive one.  And one that we in the United States are in danger of falling into deeper and deeper, and not only in the US.  Just yesterday I returned from vacation on a flight from Heathrow Airport in London direct to San Francisco.  Several seats over in the same row was a crying baby, something all air travellers experience sooner or later.

The six-month-old was disturbed by the take-off and landing, probably because of the unfamiliar and unpleasant sensations they can cause in the ears.  But the baby also became very fussy during the flight.  It turns out that the parents weren't allowed to bring the child's baby food on board.  They had been told by airport security that baby food would be available on the flight.  But, oops!  It wasn't.

Fortunately for the child and the peace of the nearby passengers, the service staff were able to find suitable food that could be mashed up and fed to the baby.

But this is where we are right now.  A group of Muslim fanatics in Britain with a plot that was far from actual implementation gets busted.  And suddenly officials are pissing their pants over the threat of terrorist baby food!

Is this what our "global war on terrorism" has come to?  Perpetual pants-soiling over imaginary threats of terrorist baby food, terrorist toothpaste and terrorist lipstick?  Is this how free peoples should confront the threat of religious fanatics who attack us? Is this what all the macho posturing by the Cheney-Bush administration and their supporters over the last five years has reduced us to?

Sopfsky doesn't offer any cure-all policy prescriptions.  He does make what should be fairly obvious observations that just denying the dangers isn't sensible or realistic, but, "Hysterical prevention sends us into a dead-end, though."  He continues:

Der Traum von der vollständigen Sichtbarkeit entspringt nicht den Erfordernissen des Schattenkrieges ... Weit wirksamer sind Methoden der klandestinen Kriegführung: Infiltration des Milieus, gezielte Anfklärung, Koordination des Wissens und der Destruktivkräfte, plötzlicher Überfall, energische Verfolgung.

Das sicherste zuvile Mittel ist die Einhegung der Angst. Bleifat die Panik aus, stößt der Terror ins Leere. Menschen überwinden ihre Furcht, indem sie die Gefahr wahrnehmen, Illusionen verabschieden, blindes Staatsvertrauen reduzieren. Im Ernstfall sind Freiheitsbeschränkungen aufs Nötigste zu begrenzen, strikt zu befristen und öffenlich zu kontrollieren.

[The dream of complete security does not rise to the challenge of the shadow war... Much more effective are methods of clandestine conduct of war:  infiltrating the milieus, targeted explanations [i.e., education/propaganda], coordination of knowledge and the destructive powers [police and military], sudden raids, energetic suppression.

The most sure civilian means is the overcoming of fear.  If panic doesn't occur, terrorism goes nowhere.  People overcome their fear bytaking the danger seriously, geting rid of illusions, reducing blind trust in the state.  When genuinely necessary, the reduction of freedoms should be limited to the necessary, stricly limited in time and publicly controlled.]

The famous Rooseveltian line, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," may not have lost all its relevance for today's problems.

9/11 Five Years After: "For me, a world collapsed"

The most sobering and chilling comment I've seen on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks came from Udo van Kampen, who on 9/11 was the New York correspondent for the German TV network ZDF, in "Für mich ist eine Welt eingestürzt" Kleine Zeitung 03.09.06 (print edition):

Von meinem Bürofenster aus sah ich die Türme niederkrachen. Es war grauenvoll. Was ich allerdings auch nach diesem Horrortag nicht fur möglich gehalten hatte: Amerika ist danach so unfrei wie nie zuvor geworden. Der 11. September wurde von der Regienmg des George W. Bush missbraucht, um die bürgerlichen Freiheitsrechte einzuschränken. In New York ist das Gefühl der Freiheit damit vollig verloren gegangen. Ich kam 1997 voller Enthusiasmus und voller Freiheitsgedanken nach New York. 2003 kehrte ich tief enttäuscht wieder nach Europa zurück.

[From my office window I saw the towers break apart.  It was gruesome.  Something I in any case held to be impossible even after this day of horror:  America afterwards has become so unfree as never before. September 11 was misused by the government of George W. Bush to restrict civil and democratic rights.  In New York, the feeling of freedom has thereby been completely lost.  I came to New York in 1997 full of enthusiasm and full of thoughts of freedom.  In 2003, I returned to Europe deeply disappointed.]

Now I know that many New Yorkers would deny that the feeling of freedom there has been completely lost.  Still, Van Kampen's description of his own feelings as a result of that experience and the aftermath is a moving and disturbing comment on where the Cheney-Bush policies have taken us since then.

It's important for Americans to recognize that these are not our enemies saying things like this, but our friends.  The people who actually in the very recent past looked at the United States as a real bulwark of freedom and democracy in this world.

The torture and kidnapping policies implemented and defended by the Cheney-Bush administration are particular sources of disgust to European democratic publics and governments.  Der Spiegel Online reports in Bundesregierung ruft Präsident Bush zur Kurskorrektur auf 09.09.06:

Die Bundesregierung stellte derweil klar, dass sie die von der US-Administration in Europa eingerichteten Geheimgefängnisse ablehnt. "Der Einsatz solcher Gefängnisse ist nicht vereinbar mit meinem Verständnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit", sagte Angela Merkel. "Hier müssen wir angemessene Antworten finden, wie wir den Terroristen begegnen, ohne unsere fundamentalen Prinzipien und Grundwerte infrage zu stellen", sagte die Kanzlerin.

[The [German] federal government has made it clear meanwhile that it rejects the secret prisons that the US administration has set up in Europe.  "The establishment of such prison in not compatable with my understanding of the rule of law," said [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel.  "Here we must find appropriate answers as we combat the terrorists without bringing into question our fundamental principals and basic values," said the Chancellor.]

I don't usually like to make these kinds of comparisons.  But Germany's Chancellor is fully justified in trying to distance her government from the kidnapping and torture practices of the Cheney-Bush administration.  Those Americans who still see Germany and Europe throught the lenses of movies about the Second World War and superficial analogies to the Munich Agreement need to wake up and look at what's happening.  Most of the democratic nations of the world are not only not looking to American practices as a model.  On the contrary, most of them are trying to make sure they are contaminated with the most odious practices of the Cheney-Bush regime.

For Americans, it's not a matter of being embarassed or ashamed about the kidnapping and torture policies.  If the public and especially the Republican Congress were capable of the appropriate amount of embarassment or shame over those things, Dick Cheney and George Bush and Rummy would have been impeached and removed from office long ago.

It's a matter first of all of preserving democracy and the rule of law in America.  I don't care how much people may be ashamed of that stuff as long as it gets permanently stopped.

I hate to be melodramatic.  But we Americans in our nationalistic self-love like to hear high-minded quotes from our past praising our own greatness.  Like Abraham Lincoln's famous statement that America is the last, best hope of freedom in the world.

In the day of the Cheney-Bush administration, that statement is no longer true.  Maybe it stopped being true long before the Scalia Five handed the 2000 election to Dick Cheney and George Bush.  But if we want to move back in that direction, it will mean among other things putting an end to the torture policy and to the Unilateral Executive doctrine that says the President can disregard the laws and the Constitution at his own discretion and with no review from anyone else.

Regular posting to resume in a few days