Just Disconnect

And if, perchance, you wanted to read an investigative report on -- ho-hum, another Vietnam-ish topic -- the way we may be setting up a mini-version of the CIA's infamous and murderous Vietnam-era Phoenix Program in Iraq, you would naturally turn to a publication with investigative clout and resources, something major with a lot of well-funded reporters on hand -- let's say that monster of the media, American Prospect magazine. There, Robert Dreyfus informs us about the latest plans of frustrated neocons to win the counterinsurgency war in Iraq now by using a $3 billion "black budget" hidden in Congress's Iraq appropriation bill. I mean this should be headline news, but will it make it out of that modest magazine or off the web? ("Phoenix Rising," Jan. 2004):

 

"With the 2004 electoral clock ticking amid growing public concern about U.S. casualties and chaos in Iraq, the Bush administration's hawks are upping the ante militarily. To those familiar with the CIA's Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, Latin America's death squads or Israel's official policy of targeted murders of Palestinian activists, the results are likely to look chillingly familiar.

 

"The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds-tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November-will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups. Experts say it could lead to a wave of extrajudicial killings, not only of armed rebels but of nationalists, other opponents of the U.S. occupation and thousands of civilian Baathists-up to 120,000 of the estimated 2.5 million former Baath Party members in Iraq.

 

"'They're clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam,' says Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrorism. Ironically, he says, the U.S. forces in Iraq are working with key members of Saddam Hussein's now-defunct intelligence agency to set the program in motion."

 

The point is, if you read American Prospect or visit www.Antiwar.com or regularly stop at the Guardian or Asia Times on-line, there's plenty to learn about what's actually happening in our world. There you can find journalists and analysts ready to put things together for you. Here, aside from the odd op-ed page columnist like Paul Krugman or James Carroll, the mainstream is an interpretive desert. The main activity in the mainstream media, in a sense, is the disconnect, the breaking of the large into its component parts and then the staring at each one as if it were a unique event or an anomaly.

 

Faced with the coherent, repetitive kingdom of lies which is the Bush administration, lies that are utterly familiar and yet endlessly and effectively reiterated, our media has proved hopeless and helpless -- alternately cowed, complicit, confused, and largely incapable of making connections. Though enough stories have appeared to add up to a list of scandals, lies, and corrupt practices that make the Clinton impeachment proceedings look like the most minor of minor league events, they are never actually added up. Remember those investigative series on Whitewater, Travelgate, and other potential Clinton scandals that graced the front pages of our newspapers in the Clinton years? Where, oh where, is such reporting today?

 

We've probably never had an administration which is so much a matter of linkages and connections -- government, corporate, military, think-tank, lobbyist. And this is the moment our media has chosen to demobilize itself. They are in full disconnect mode.

 

Yes, there are scandals that have individually been well covered in recent months, particularly in the Washington Post. Yes, the New York Times front-paged its coverage of the Halliburton fuel-overcharging scandal and recently the Boston Globe's Stephen J. Glain had a good business piece, "Pentagon freezes Iraq funds amid corruption probes" (12/30), on "allegations of corruption and cronyism" associated with Iraq's reconstruction that have caused the Pentagon to postpone the handing out of much of that $18.6 billion appropriated by Congress. But these are almost invariably dealt with as isolated matters.

 

If you want to find a listing of the scattered lies and scandals, of the mis- and disinformation campaigns of this administration in one place, you have to turn to dissident websites like the always interesting Democrats.com where Bob Fertik and Ted Kahl in Top Bush Scandals of 2003, Part I: Iraq list twenty of them ranging from lying to Congress and war profiteering to "the hiring of murderers and training of assassins" -- including (#7) the administration's massive disinformation campaign itself that accompanied the drive to war, the war, and the postwar months without cessation.

 

"…[T]he White House and the Pentagon used a massive disinformation campaign to 'sell' the war to the American people before the invasion, and that disinformation campaign is still ongoing. This disinformation campaign has been conducted through 'leaks' to both the mainstream media (including front page NY Times propaganda by Judith Miller about Iraq's aluminum tubes) and to the right-wing media. This disinformation campaign successfully convinced a majority of Americans that Saddam was involved with September 11, a lie that Bush himself actually refuted. Still, this campaign continues, most recently with the alleged memo from the head of Iraqi intelligence claiming Mohamed Atta spent 3 days being trained in Iraq before the September 11 attack; this memo was revealed as yet another hoax, since FBI records show Atta was in the U.S. at the time. There has been no Congressional investigation of this disinformation campaign, and it will most likely continue through election day and beyond."

 

A rare list of administration lies in the mainstream can be found in a recent piece by Ruth Rosen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle ("To Tell the Truth," 1/1/04). She picks seven of the most "egregious" lies, of which I offer, more or less at random, four:

 

"Our economy (actually, corporate profits) is rapidly recovering -- despite the fact that homelessness, hunger, outsourcing of jobs overseas and lagging job growth have widened the gap between people who can buy luxury goods and those who can't make ends meet.

 

"We are safer now, even though commercial airplanes and ships anchored in our ports still carry cargo that is not inspected for lethal weapons. Our invasion of Iraq, moreover, has inflamed much of the Islamic and Arab world and alienated our traditional allies.

 

"The military action in Afghanistan was an immense success. Nevertheless, the Taliban have regrouped, Osama bin Laden remains at large, warlords run the provinces surrounding Kabul and the new constitution appears to do little to improve the legal rights of women.

 

"We are so committed to democratic principles that we must export them to Iraq. At the same time, the Patriot Act has challenged some of our most cherished civil rights and liberties at home."

 

Otherwise, the scattered lies and scandals still await their collective moment, while (like the Nixon administration) the Busheviks do their canny best to push them off to a distant, post-election future as, for instance, they have done with the outing of Valerie Plame, CIA agent and former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife. This was an egregious act of retribution for Wilson's outing of the administration on the President's State of the Union Niger uranium claim. The administration's Plame Dance has been particularly skillful, given that the leaker(s) can hardly be a secret to those running things in Washington (who may, in fact, have done the leaking). First, the Justice Department pursued the case with a slowness that ensured the shredding machines plenty of work time; then Ashcroft oversaw the case, only recently recusing himself, to give the charming impression of doing "the right thing."

 

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has written a fine assessment of what the belated appointment of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as "special counsel" in the Plame case actually means (Don't Be Fooled):

 

"Even the Times, in its 'Right Thing' editorial, notes that 'there are still serious questions about the investigation,' namely, will Fitzgerald have 'true operational independence.' The odds are strongly against it.

 

"Let not yesterday's maneuver obscure the fact that in naming Fitzgerald, who remains under the authority of Ashcroft's deputy, the Bush administration has rejected the only appropriate course-naming a complete outsider to be special counsel, as Justice Department regulations allow. Why has that path been rejected? One need not be paranoid to see these latest moves as evidence the White House has something very sensitive to hide. Has one of their senior officials committed a felony, endangered lives, and vitiated the ability of a senior intelligence official to use her net of agents to acquire critical information on weapons of mass destruction (Valerie Plame's portfolio)?…

 

"The Bottom line? As Shakespeare put it, the truth will out-eventually. But at this point it seems a safe bet that (as with the phantom "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq) the full truth about White House v. Wilson/Plame will remain hidden until after the November election. It will be interesting to see if our embedded mainstream press aids and abets that kind of delay."

 

The "intelligence community" is still seething on this subject -- and many others; the military is roiled; and Washington is at the edge of war with itself (even without the Democrats going into serious opposition). Anything could burst out, despite the Bush administration, at any time.

 

Just connect -- the global dots

 

To finish off this dispatch, I thought I might offer some global-level, end-of-the-year connections made by others -- the sorts of connections you simply can't find in our press (no less -- don't even think about it -- on television, a few Frontline documentaries aside). For any attempted large snapshots of how our imperial globe fits together today, you have no choice but to look to the margins, or abroad.

 

Here, then, are three large snapshots/interpretations with a few interpolations from elsewhere -- not one from a mainstream source in this country. The fact is (in case nobody's noticed), even at year's end, when summing-up is usually the order of the day, there remains something of a taboo in the American press against linking three or four countries in the same article or op-ed or column, even, it seems, a taboo against wide-ranging reports or analysis of any kind. So the three pieces included below come from the Moscow Times, New Labor Forum, and the blog of a well-known scholar of imperial decline, Immanuel Wallerstein.

 

Let's start with "'Bleeding strategy' comes home," contributed to the Moscow Times of Dec. 23 by Nicholas Berry, director of ForeignPolicyForum.com. He makes a fascinating suggestion for which a little background is in order. During the Age of Reagan, as the Pentagon budget was being hiked into the heavens -- quite literally with all the r&d for "Star Wars" weaponry -- it was often suggested by conservatives that we were pursuing a policy meant to "bleed" our superpower opponent to death economically via an escalating arms race in which the Soviets couldn't afford to compete without bankrupting themselves. The idea was that the Soviet economy simply wouldn't be able to take it. And when the Soviet Union collapsed during the first Bush administration, it was often argued by Cold War triumphalists that this was exactly what had happened. (This is in dispute. The best argument I've seen against the Soviet-collapse-from-bleeding argument can be found in Frances Fitzgerald's book on the Reagan administration as a cross between a Byzantine Court and the Keystone Cops, Way Out There in the Blue.)

 

Now, Berry argues, there's reverse "bleeding" thinking out there in the world. Various other power centers are reconciled to the Bush administration's narrow focus on the war on terrorism and Iraq, and are happy not to offer much help on the economics of that war. They are content to sit back and "let the United States bleed itself," knowing that with ballooning deficits Bush's unipolar world won't last long. Berry writes:

 

"Bush then is free to pursue his narrow agenda. And that leaves the rest of the world free to pursue their agendas without much U.S. interference. Russia moves to reestablish its sphere of influence and rejoin Europe. China advances its economy and regional influence in its pursuit of great power status. The EU concentrates on expansion, unity and even military cooperation."

 

This is certainly an interesting suggestion and I urge you to consider the whole article. Behind this lie two developments -- both involving old Cold War opponents. China has long been seen by a core of hawkish thinkers in and out of this administration as the great future opponent of the United States. A number of them were ready to pursue an aggressive policy of "containment" against China, but their policies have largely been thwarted by the developing catastrophe in the Middle East. Iraq is threatening to swallow up -- à la Vietnam -- all other global policies.

 

In the meantime, China, while offering various kinds of mollifying support to the Bush administration, has indeed begun to emerge as a rival -- economic, not military -- in Asia. As Martin Jacques wrote recently in the Guardian ("A Year of Thwarted Ambition," 12/27):

 

"Opposition [to the Bush administration], moreover, was not confined to the European powers. Russia was of similar mind, notwithstanding the fact that ever since the days of Boris Yeltsin, a man of ignominious and tainted memory, it had chosen to side with the US on issues of major import. China trod the same course, wearing Hush Puppies, desperate not to be noticed, because while there could be no doubt where China's true sentiments lay, the world's next superpower is playing a very long game, one of the longest history has ever known, subordinating temptation and instinct to its strategic desire not to alienate the US in the course of its breathless economic transformation."

 

Martin Walker, senior correspondent for UPI and a most knowledgeable observer, wrote similarly in a year-end piece ("U.S. distracted -- and the world changed," 12/26):

 

"China has been on a charm offensive, wooing India -- its only serious strategic challenger on the Asian mainland -- and the ASEAN group of Southeast Asian nations with trade pacts and treaties of friendship. China has played the role of a responsible great power in helping the United States manage North Korea's nuclear threat. And China is fast becoming Japan's major trading partner, while also helping the U.S. finance its trade deficit by buying almost $100 billion of U.S. Treasury bonds in the last year…Only a decade ago… China was close to being a rogue nation. Today, with an economy almost three times larger than it was back in 1989, China looks less menacing, but potentially far stronger… The EU now invests more in Latin America than the United States, and China is now Argentina's largest market -- signs of erosion in Washington's role.

 

"America's focus on the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq has shrouded the degree to which other countries are making their own arrangements… Historians may yet look back to define the Bush presidency as the era when America's moment of undisputed power began to give way to a new balance among a series of regional powers, each able to challenge American dominance in its own sphere of influence."

 

Meanwhile in the borderlands of Russia and Central Asia, a new "cold war" is slowly heating up as Russia threatens to reassert itself as a modest regional imperial power in areas where, since the Clinton administration, the U.S. has made military and economic inroads as a global imperial power. The Guardian's Jonathan Steele lays out the bruising American side of that new cold war as it's being played out in Georgia, the small state on Russia's border, where a "velvet revolution" recently took place ("The new cold war," 1/3/04):

 

"Bush's people supported Clinton's strategy of diminishing Russia. In power, they sharpened it. They exploited the terrorism scare of 9/11, plus Putin's desire for US acquiescence to his failed war in Chechnya, as a way to get Moscow's consent to the establishment of US bases in central Asia. Geared as a temporary measure against the Taliban, they are determined to keep them for possible use against Russia, China and the Middle East. They accelerated the 'pipeline wars' in the Caucasus by pressing western companies to cut Russia out of the search for oil in the Caspian and make sure that none was transported through Russia."

 

Conservative columnist Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun in his end-of-the-year roundup offers these brief comments on Russia's leader ("The good, the bad and the lucky," 12/28):

 

"Barely noticed by the outside world, this hard man has gathered all the reins of power in Mother Russia and put his former KGB colleagues in charge of just about everything important. The unsmiling, incorruptible Putin is laying the foundation for the re-emergence of Russia as a great world power and the reincarnation of the old Soviet Union. Czar Vlad I bears much watching."

 

Walden Bello, the Philippine economist who always has a strong eye for the ways in which things don't mix-and-match at a global level, suggests in a year-ending piece for New Labor Forum that "developing countries, some once hopeful that the WTO [World Trade Organization] would in fact bring more equity to global trade, unanimously agree that most of what they have reaped from WTO membership are costs, not benefits. What happened? In a word, Empire. It turns out that globalization and U.S. unilteralism don't mix."

 

Finally, Immanuel Wallerstein of Binghamton University considers the underlying problems of the U.S. dollar -- it's that "bleeding" problem again -- saying in part:

 

"The U.S. deficit is no longer being covered by dollar inflow, which poses dilemmas for the U.S. Treasury. And the situation is kept from total immediate disaster only by the decision of East Asian governments (and particularly China) to continue to buy U.S. Treasury notes. China (and Japan and South Korea) do this out of self-interest of course. But their investment in dollars puts them at risk as well, and they may soon decide that the advantages are outweighed by the dangers to their own resources. In any case, the United States is now dependent on them for its continuing economic health, not vice versa, which is hardly a position of economic strength. And meanwhile, the U.S. is up for sale to outside investors, the inverse of what the U.S. would like the situation to be."

 

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]