Bush of the Flies

Can you imagine - Human Rights Watch has had the temerity to criticize poor imperial george's performance. The advocacy organization thinks that our government should be promoting democracy or something I guess, instead of bolstering and making whoopee with dictators and totalitarian governments. What a concept, especially if you as a leader or pompous ass were to be so vainglorious as to carry on about how committed you are to promoting democracy whenever microphone proximity happens to trigger yet another of your classic public narcissism/glossolalia seizures.

On a practical level, of course, it is doubtless a lot easier to cut a deal with those sleazy dictators and authoritarian governments, and to hell with whatever swill you have offered up to the audience in your own Jerry Lewis-on-a-bad-day fashion. Almost no dialogue or negotiations are probably needed. In contrast, actually promoting democracy, much like taking any serious steps to actually reduce the risk of terrorist impacts on the US of A, is Hard Work. As anyone actually paying attention has come to learn, the bush administration's program for the latter has basically involved kicking and cans.

In the meantime, not surprisingly, prissy little george et al have undoubtedly actually fostered a full-on boom in terrorism. So the scorecard for george must read at best something like Promoting Democracy - D; Fighting Terrorism - D-. Of course those grades blend in well with the rest of his record. The part we have been to allowed to see, of course.

Talk about a child left behind.

But that gets me thinking about Lord of the Flies, not exactly something you want your federal leaders to be emblematic of.

It's fascinating how routinely these even-vaguely counter-authoritarian articles are offered in carefully buffed terms, rarely if ever in anything even vaguely resembling the standard snarling parlance of the would-be tough guys in the WH. I don't know whether to take that for a maturity and decorum that few if any in the current administration are familiar with, or the usual corporate media obeisance to those same empowered paranoid ones. But the fact that this article by contrast uses the words "harsh critique of the Bush Administration" did get my attention.

From the Washington Post yesterday, Feb. 1, 2008:

A leading human rights group said Thursday that the United States has lost its moral authority by supporting autocratic governments in strategic countries despite their continuing violations of civil liberties.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, has used its past 17 annual surveys to highlight the most egregious humanitarian crises in the world and to note improvements when warranted. The latest report marks a break with that tradition by focusing on democracy and the ways in which U.S. influence have affected other countries' pursuit of it.

The group delivers a harsh critique of the Bush administration, suggesting that by accommodating autocratic allies in the fight against terrorism, it has failed to meet its declared goal of promoting democratic values.

In an introductory essay titled "Despots Masquerading as Democrats," Kenneth Roth, the organization's executive director, blasts such leaders as Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Vladimir Putin of Russia. Roth accuses them of finding "utility in holding electoral charades to legitimize" their reigns.

"Such divorcing of democracy from the international standards that give it meaning helps to convince autocrats that mere elections, regardless of the circumstances, are sufficient to warrant the democrat label," the essay notes. "Rarely has democracy been so acclaimed yet so breached, so promoted yet so disrespected, so important yet so disappointing."

Roth also writes that the Bush administration's ability to speak out effectively for human rights has suffered since disclosures about its clandestine network of CIA-run jails, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the use of secret military tribunals, harsh interrogation methods and "rendition," or the covert transfer of terrorism suspects. The report describes those practices as "a troubling parallel to abusive governments around the world."

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US Terrorism From the Air

I can't be the only one victimized as a child by older, tougher, more wiley, or simply less scrupulous playmates when it came to competition. There's a certain haze over this now of course, but there was a period of several years when the ritual of unearthing our marbles and scratching out a few little shallow targets was almost as much a sign of spring as a personal favorite, Skunk Cabbage.

But my limited memory of this time has the happy association ending with the vague general concept of this marble-playing, always under the direction of others. What little I recall of the actual action involves slippery always-changing "rules," never by some odd circumstance seeming to favor me or my latest shot.

Sound familiar? Besides all the efforts to co-opt the intelligence agencies, set up separate parallel anti-intelligence agencies when step one would only get as far as dubious waffling on pretty solid stuff rather than actual certifications of falsehoods, we can no longer deny that we are faced with an executive office (commonly enabled, yes, by a shamefully sheep-like Congress) that cannot even pretend to competence without routinely and unilaterally moving the goalposts.

I offer it up as the hallmark of this administration that there is not a single large-scale goal or target they have publicly pursued that would be deemed a true success when judged by a determined fact-checker under the terms of the original compact required to get the program going. The limited "successes" they trumpet about repeatedly are almost always the result of playing out-of-bounds, committing fouls and overruling the referees, or, as with recent claim of supposed thwarting of attacks on planes headed to the US, attempting to usurp the accomplishments of others.

Which brings me around to the whole concept that there is always something that can be claimed (parodied?) as "progress" or an achievement in Iraq. We should know by now that this game could be played in any catastrophe. The spin hypothetically goes like this: Fewer people happened to die horrific deaths this week than last! (More died this week than last as a result of lack of clean water and hygiene in general as a result of the invasion.) Fewer American soldiers died this month than a year ago at this time! (Civilian casualties rose again this week.) Deaths in Baghdad are down! (Fatalities in all of Iraq continue at an appalling level.)

We obviously cannot trust this Administration to tell the truth about anything.

The Pentagon has only a marginally better record, historically. The military will always protect their own and defend their turf, regardless of the constantly-escalating human rights abuses the warmaking they endemically agitate for entails.

The weaponry of war never seems to move in the direction of reducing the death of innocent civilians - or for that matter death or human suffering in general - those are constantly on the "upsurge." But especially given the frequency with which the Pentagon leadership in the last few years has been subjected to (and seemingly tolerated) figurative wedgies and other humiliation by this Executive Branch, their current cowed state is perhaps unsurprising.

It has never been the case that one could turn to "Pentagon spokesmen" to help us with verisimilitude when it comes to warmaking and defense matters. It has only gotten worse now that whistle-blowers lose their jobs and are punished rather than being only hazed and badly beaten as the ones recognizing and speaking up about how glaringly the little monkey's tiny parts have been exposed by those new chaps he's so enamored of.

It puts a major onus on those of us less inclined to faith-based hoohah and more in the reality school to be grappling with what is really happening, if only we had a way to know.

One war-component we (the reality-we) probably have been cognizant of but might tend to forget is the whole air-war business. That dropping of 100,000 pounds of bombs in a comparatively small area recently ought to be enough to re-energize this topic. As a result of reading "Picasso's War" last year I bonded again as I had in the '60's with the artist's "Guernica," perhaps the most emblematic anti-war icon of our time, inspired by one of the first of these heinous air-war barbarities. Back then it made US citizens sick. Now we scarcely want to notice.

Tom Englehardt has been doing yeoman service on the sorry topic of this whole business of basically targeting and assassinating civilians en masse from a safe/polite distance that preserves the sensitivities (i.e., Terrorism from the Air) without any accountability at all:

A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. (”Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.”) Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:

“The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.“In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad.”

And here’s paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:

“The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.’s.”

Farrell led his piece with news that an American soldier had died in Arab Jabour from an IED that blew up “an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq.”

Note that both pieces started with bombing news — in one case a suicide bombing that killed several Iraqis; in another a roadside bombing that killed an American soldier and wounded others. But the major bombing story of these last days — those 100,000 pounds of explosives that U.S. planes dropped in a small area south of Baghdad — simply dangled unexplained off the far end of the Los Angeles Times piece; while, in the New York Times, it was buried inside a single sentence.

Neither paper has (as far as I know) returned to the subject, though this is undoubtedly the most extensive use of air power in Iraq since the Bush administration’s invasion of 2003 and probably represents a genuine shifting of American military strategy in that country. Despite, a few humdrum wire service pieces, no place else in the mainstream has bothered to cover the story adequately either.

For those who know something about the history of air power, which, since World War II, has been lodged at the heart of the American Way of War, that 100,000 figure might have rung a small bell.

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), the planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000 people, including refugees, in the town which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 50 tons or 100,000 pounds of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 100,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 10 miles south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 100,000-pound barrage has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as “al Qaeda,” so in situations like this it’s hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down. In the Spanish situation, however, four reporters in the nearby city of Bilbao, including George Steer of the Times of London, promptly rushed to the scene of destruction. Steer’s first piece for the Times (also printed in the New York Times) was headlined “The Tragedy of Guernica” and called the assault “unparalleled in military history.” (Obviously, no such claims could be made for Arab Jabour today.) Steer made clear in his report that this had been an attack on a civilian population, essentially a terror bombing.

The self-evident barbarism of the event — the first massively publicized bombing of a civilian population — caused international horror. It was news across the planet. From it came perhaps the most famous painting of the last century, Picasso’s Guernica, as well as innumerable novels, plays, poems, and other works of art.

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