How incredibly pathetic....from last Saturday's Chicago Tribune www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama_dorningaug04,1,2862205.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout chicagotribune.com Obama remark angers Pakistan Official: Threatened strike 'irresponsible' By Mike Dorning, Washington Bureau Tribune reporter Noreen Ahmed-Ullah contributed from Chicago August 4, 2007 WASHINGTON First Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was attacked by political rivals at home. Now he is under fire from abroad. A senior Pakistani government official Friday criticized as "irresponsible" a threat Obama made this week to launch unilateral American military strikes against Al Qaeda havens in a remote border region of the Muslim nation. Obama's comments also stirred street protests in Pakistan and criticism from Pakistani-Americans living in the Chicago area. "It's a very irresponsible statement, that's all I can say," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khusheed Kasuri told AP Television News. "As the election campaign in America is heating up we would not like American candidates to fight their elections and contest elections at our expense." Obama's threat to attack the territory of a Muslim ally without the consent of its government also could have broader ramifications for his standing in international Islamic public opinion. The worldly mixed-race presidential candidate, who spent part of his early childhood in the Muslim nation of Indonesia, has a life story that has excited interest among a global Muslim population that has been disillusioned by the Bush administration's policies in Iraq. Obama's middle name of Hussein, a negative to Americans familiar only with the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, offers comfort to Muslims who recognize the name as that of a revered ancient imam associated with the cause of the oppressed. Obama has promoted a counterterrorism policy that emphasizes attempts to win over Islamic public opinion in the struggle against fundamentalist extremists, and his advisers say he would be a powerful messenger for the U.S. in the Muslim world. In the same speech in which Obama threatened a military strike in Pakistan, he promised to go to a major Islamic forum within his first 100 days in office to "deliver an address to redefine our struggle" against Islamic extremists. But the threat against Pakistan is likely to damage views of Obama in global Islamic opinion, though perhaps not irrevocably, said Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies political Islam and is author of "The Shia Revival." "There is the Obama promise. There is the Obama message. And now there are the Obama words," Nasr said. "They are not consistent with each other." Sensitive subject Nasr said global Islamic opinion is particularly sensitive to treatment of Pakistan because its tensions with India make it the second major spot in the world in which Muslims are in conflict with a nation of a foreign religion. The other is the Israeli-Arab conflict. "Ultimately, the tenor of Obama's argument is that he is going treat Pakistan as an enemy country," Nasr said. In a counterterrorism speech Wednesday, Obama said that as president he would order a strike against Al Qaeda leaders in tribal areas of Pakistan if President Pervez Musharraf does not eradicate their havens in the mountainous region on the border with Afghanistan. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again," Obama said. "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will." On Thursday, Obama was asked whether there were any circumstances in which he would be willing to use nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan. He said he thought such an action "would be a profound mistake," and then quickly amended that remark, saying, "there's been no discussion of nuclear weapons." The Bush administration has tread carefully in its dealings with Musharraf, an important ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The White House has pressed Musharraf to take more aggressive steps against terrorist sanctuaries in the country, but Bush has been sensitive to Musharraf's precarious hold on power. Street protest Obama's comment added to public anger in Pakistan. And a Republican presidential candidate, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, further inflamed feelings by suggesting that the U.S. deter a nuclear terrorist attack by issuing a threat to retaliate by bombing the two holiest Islamic sites, Mecca and Medina. In Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, about 150 people chanted slogans against the U.S., Obama and Tancredo at a demonstration organized by hard-line religious parties, according to The Associated Press. In Miran Shah, a major town in the lawless region that borders Afghanistan, about 1,000 tribesmen condemned recent Pakistani military operations in the area and vowed to repel any U.S. attack, AP reported. A State Department spokesman issued a rebuke to presidential candidates for complicating efforts to gain international cooperation in counterterrorism efforts. "Those who wish to hold office can speak for themselves, and whoever ... comes into office in 2009 will then be in a position to talk about what they intend or plan to do," said deputy spokesman Tom Casey. In Chicago, several Pakistani-Americans who had donated to Obama said they would no longer support him. Dr. Murtaza Arain, an Oak Brook surgeon who has attended two Obama fundraisers and donated money to the campaign, said he planned to switch his support to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). "I don't want him to be my president if he doesn't understand all the ground realities in Pakistan," said Arain, pointing to Pakistan's efforts to root out terrorists. "To say you'll act if they don't is suspecting an ally and putting that ally down." ----------

See ABC News video covering Running Dog's call for a U.S. invasion of Pakistan without the permission of the Pakistan government http://news.yahoo.com/fc/US/Barack_Obama. 

Then see Robert Naiman on commondreams.org  (titled "Now Who's 'Bush-Cheney-Lite"? read online at http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/01/2918/) for some political context --- Running Dog's recent dust-up with the Jackbooted Imperialist Hillary Clinton [see http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13215] (with HC calling BO weak on our foreign enemies and BO calling HC "Bush-Cheney Lite") ---  on Barracks Obomba's attempt to look muscular and unilateral by claiming to embrace a remarkably provocative and reckless action (more along the lines of "Bush-Cheney Heavy") that would violate international law and kill lots of innocent civilians and fuel the fires of Islamic extremism.

Obama's recent utterances make my recent "Running Dog" (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13396) article look dead-on.

These "liberal" imperialist jackasses like HC and BO and their power-worshipping advisers (like Samantha Power and Richard Holbrooke) will never grasp the elementary fact that the best way to protect Americans from Islamo terrorism is to stop provoking such terrorism with American world-supremacist petro-imperialism. Like Bush-Cheney, they privilege hegemony over survival and thereby invite future 9/11s and worse. 

It is not clear to me that the hyper-linking function is working under new system - that is why I have included URLs (at this time it not working specifically with ZNet articles either as hyper-links or as straight up URLs - no idea why). 

My mistake. I meant "refrain" as in the repeated lines and verses of a song, as in a chorus. Obama is very smooth at doing this while making it look centrist and different.

At least, one of the principals involved comes close to admitting his criminality in this clip which also shows Dr. K's talking head living out this millenia old dictum of Tacitus: 'Crime once exposed had no refuge but in audacity'.

He also said how much more vibrant democracy is in the second largest country in the hemisphere. Here's a recent example of what Brazilians think of their "Commander in Chief" and also how they perceive their North American neighbors (who by definition are "good neighbors").

SK:

Have now made my way through 100 percent of the 14th Annual Davis Markert Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom, as delivered by Noam Chomsky at the University of Michigan, 2004(?).  Once again, thanks for digging it up.  Lots of great riffs.  As always.  Inside an architecture that is second-to-no-one's.

Listening to that part you called to my attention, just before the very end -- Kissinger's "Anything that flys on anything that moves" -- it reminded me of the day back then when NC asked me whether anybody else had reported this disclosure. 

The New York Times report he mentioned was Elizabeth Becker's "Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse" (May 27, 2004, p. A1).  As best I could tell -- and sticking with establishment media sources -- hardly what the National Security Archives are -- the only other mentions of Kissinger's dutiful relaying of the Commander-in-Chief's order to Alexander Haig were the Washington Post ("Haig Said Nixon Joked Of Nuking Hill," Michael Dobbs, May 27, 2004), the Seattle Times (May 27 -- a reprint of the Post's article), the Daily Telegraph ("Kissinger's tapes put Nixon lies in spotlight," David Rennie, May 28, 2004), and, three months later, the Christian Science Monitor ("Declassified truth is necessary," Daniel Schorr, August 20, 2004). 

In sum: Nobody really cared.

The point that NC also made about the Office of the Prosecutor's exhaustive search for something comparable that could be attributed to Milosevic was therefore all the more appropriate. 

But my favorite riff of all was the one about the intellectuals' service to power reaching as far as the records do. 

 

David Peterson
Chicago, USA 

 

SK:

A very, very, very deep problem indeed.

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

Mkae me wonder how disgusting theorder were when bombing Iraq.. we know of the famous shock and awee..

Yes, that's what NC is talking about. It's in the last 5 minutes of the program in the Q&A session, you don't need to listen to the whole lecture. Here's an edited transcript of his response:

...I mentioned Henry Kissinger and I mentioned that he understands the intellectual community. He knows there's not going to be any objection, when he says we're exempt, we're allowed to use force, but it can't be universalized, meaning only us. No reaction...shortly after that, actually a couple of months ago, the New York Times had one of the most amazing articles I've ever seen. There was an article, I think around last May, in which they discussed some released tapes, some tapes between Nixon and Kissinger were released, and in the course of the article, if you'll look sort of in the middle somewhere, is mentioned the following fact, without any particular notice, at one point Nixon tells Kissinger he wants Cambodia to be bombed, and Kissinger transmits the order with these words, approximately: He says, "A massive bombing campaign against Cambodia, anything that flies, against anything that moves, OK?"...Right now Milosevic is on trial at the Hague, suppose the prosecutors could come up with something like that, I mean a fraction of that about, say, Bosnia or Kosovo. The trial would be over, everybody would be exulting, the great liberal Humanists would be patting themselves on the back because they're so marvelous. He'd be sentenced to successive life sentences, if it was by US standards, he'd be electrocuted. In this case, we have it, on record, in the New York Times. I couldn't find any response, anywhere...this silence reigns even though it's known pretty well what the consequences of that order were...that tells us a lot about how we use our freedom, including our academic freedom and that's a deep problem...

SK:

Very archival of you: 

Kissinger - Haig Transcript, December 9, 1970 (as posted by the National Security Archive, George Washington University)

I notice that this is the beauty that contains the notorious Kissinger line: "he wants a massive bombing campaign against Cambodia.  He doesn't want to hear anything.  It's an order, it's to be done.  Anything that flys on anything that moves.  You got that?"

Was this what NC highlighted in his lecture?

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

It was Kissinger. Here's the transcript, unearthed after years of legal wrangling, and background on his "private collection" at the Library of Congress.

SK:

Thanks a million for posting this hyperlink:

14th Annual Davis Markert Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom, as delivered by Noam Chomsky, University of Michigan, 2004(?)

I myself won't have the time to listen to it right now.  But was it Henry Kissinger who NC mentioned in the context you've described?  (I only ask because there are literally dozens and dozens of candidates.)

As for your "interesting thought experiment": An important point to remember about the original use of the phrase "banality of evil" was what Arendt herself was getting at by this:

[W]hen I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial.  Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove a villain."  Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.  And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.  He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.  It was precisely his lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted.  In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the "revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government.  He was not stupid.  It was sheer thoughtlessness -- something by no means identical with stupidity -- that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is "banal" and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace.  It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these "lofty words" should completely becloud the reality of his own death.  That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreck more havoc than all of the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man -- that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.  But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.

For the whole of the thought experiment to work, I'm afraid that first the United States would have to be defeated and occupied by overloard from outer space.   

But I catch your drift.

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

 

An interesting thought experiment:  

What would happen if during the trial of an alleged war criminal at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, someone produced a televised quote similar to above as evidence of the "banality of evil" of the perpetrator?

The original mind bending thought experiment proferred by Noam Chomsky, citing a quote from another former American Secretary of State, is here (starting at hour 1:22).

Friends:

For your archives: I remember this well. Excerpted from: "Punishing Saddam: Sanctions against Iraq not hurting leaders of the country, but the children are suffering and dying," Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, CBS News, May 12, 1996.  (Note that at the time this program aired, Madeleine Albright was still serving as the Clinton regime's ambassador to the United Nations.)

………… 

(Footage of Iraqi people; food market; flea market; sick child with the mother)

Lesley Stahl: (Voiceover) If the Iraqi people place any blame on Saddam Hussein, they're afraid to say so. And there is no longer much hope that the sanctions will inspire the people to rise up and topple the government. Now people are just trying to get by because one of the side effects of the sanctions has been inflation, which has jumped as high as 3,000 percent. To make ends meet, Iraqis are selling everything they can. Flea markets have sprung up on the streets, where families sell their furniture, clothes, anything they can to make a few extra dinars. Most Iraqis are suffering.

We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died when--wh--in--in Hiroshima. And--and, you know, is the price worth it?

Ambassador Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it. [####]

No wonder Samantha Power has such a bright future ahead of her in service to the Democratic Party.

David Peterson
Chicago, USA  

 

Jonas, "refrains" can't be right...did you mean "reprises?" I can change it (keeping the link). Yes, the bipartisan doctrine holds among other things that "We are Good, We are Good, We are Always Good...Exceptionally Good." Madeline Albright (a Democratic White House's Secretary of State) said that the U.S is "the indispensable nation" - the chosen world state that "stands taller" and "sees farther" than all the rest. She also asked what the point was of the U.S. maintaining world history's most astonishing capacity for mass destruction if the U.S. had no intention of using it and told CBS that 500,000 dead Iraq children - murdered by U.S.-led "economic sanctions" --- was a "price worth paying" for the inherently noble advance of U.S. foreign policy goals (imperial ambitions).

Same no doubt for an occasional "mistakenly" blown-up Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian, or Afghan wedding party (Samantha Power) --- "a price worth [others] paying."

These liberal true-believer imperialists are every bit as bad as neocon poster boys like Doug Feith, Darth Cheney and the truly pathetic Bill Kristol et al.  

I am told that people sometimes don't agree with me, but I never believe it.

I'm going to repost something I wrote about that piece in Foreign Affairs from my blog, which I wrote on May 31. I'm glad I agree with Paul Street on this one.

In “Renewing American Leadership,” Obama effectively refrains much of the so-called Bush Doctrine: dismissal of “outdated thinking” in service to “visionary leadership,” the United States' divine “promise and purpose,” etc. It is not simply rhetorical. Toward “the broader Middle East,” we must use “tough-minded diplomacy” in which, for example, “we must not rule out using military force” against irritants like Iran. More worrisome is that he declares that he “will not hesitate” to “unilaterally” use force (“if necessary”), to protect undefined “vital interests” under the specter of being “imminently threatened,” whatever that may be. Our role is to fight the “evils” of the world, in the name of the “ultimate good.”

Paul:

Also, to appreciate just how Bush-like and morally deranged the prescriptions in Samantha Power's "Our War on Terror" (July 29) really are, imagine the revised Counterinsurgency Field Manual that she and her fellow lieutenants in the Humanitarian Brigades at Harvard admire so much applied, not by U.S. forces to countries such as Afghanistan or Iraq, but by some other, vastly greater military power to the United States -- beginning, of course, with Washington D.C., New York City, and Cambridge, MA. 

"An operation that kills five insurgents[*] is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 new insurgents."

And we are supposed to entrust the indoctrination of the next generation with these depraved souls? 

It's time for Americans to do the planet a favor, and voluntarily to skip at least one generation.

David Peterson
Chicago, USA 

 [*] Where the term 'insurgents' needs first and above all to be taken as resistance to foreign military occupation, whatever the motives of the people involved. 

 

"Uninentionally and accidentally"...like Hell.

Noted imperial humanitarian Samantha Power is acknowledged as Running Dog's foreign policy guru in his ponderous and nauseating  book The Audacity of Corporate Imperialist Hope. Perhaps they met at ruling class university (Harvard); she might have a foreign policy position of some sort in the White House of an ObamaNation. 

As Gravel said at one of the debates, "these people scare me."

 

 

Friends:

A quick question: In between the edges of these two finely crafted and tightly fitted stones in the grand pyramid of American Power, do you think it would be possible to squeeze anything wider than a playing card?  If even that?

"Renewing American Leadership," Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 86: No. 4), July/August, 2007
"Our War on Terror," Samantha Power, New York Times Book Review, July 29, 2007

Boy. It must be nice to serve American Power.  And never have to give one's commitments a second thought.

Two beautiful examples of Samantha Power's morality (see para. 30-31):

[I]f you continue to believe (as I do) that there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective, you will indeed find [Talal Asad's book ] On Suicide Bombing disturbing, if not always in the way he intends.

Nonetheless, Asad's book is valuable because the legal distinctions he is challenging are especially vulnerable now.  They are vulnerable sociologically, in that millions -- if not billions -- of people around the world do not see the difference between a suicide bomber's attack on a pizzeria and an American attack on what turns out to be a wedding party.  Asad's challenge is one politicians must answer if they stand any chance of recapturing hearts and minds. At the same time, when a war is fought on false grounds, like that in Iraq, the notion of ''collateral damage'' breaks down, since one must ask what civilian harm could possibly be justified in a war that was itself unnecessary.

A whole seminar could be devoted to these 170-odd words.

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

There is a perverse power elite enthusiasm over the prospect of being able to perhaps put a technically black face at the head of U.S. imperial violence.

Confused, ignorant, myopic and/or guilty white left liberals can insist all they want that the Barockstar is some kind of a progressive peace and justice candidate. They can drive around Hyde Park, Iowa City, and Madison all they wish in Hondas and Volvos combining “Obama'08” bumper stickers with stickers saying “Arms Are For Hugging” and “It Will Be a Good Day When the Pentagon Has to Hold a Bake Sale to Pay for a B-52 Bomber.”

Their chests can swell with pride as they declare their readiness to vote an African-American into the White House. But the ugly truth is that the former South Side Chicago community organizer and potential first black U.S. president is what Maoists used to (maybe they still do) call a “running dog lackey of imperialism.”

Confused white left liberals, step away from the Barockstar. It's alright – it doesn't make you a racist; really. Worry not: you'll find some genuinely progressive and anti-military black candidates to vote for in the future. And Obama's election could actually be a negative for the struggle against racism, as I explained in a previous article. For now, Dennis Kucinich is the closest thing to a truly anti-imperial candidate in the race. But even John Edwards is a far better choice than Obama, for reasons I have also previously written about at some length.

---

Admit it, you are a commie racist. You like Kucinich and Edwards because they are white and you hate Obama because he's black.