counterpunch

Is the Government Out of Money or is Obama Out of His Mind?

The Problem is Lack of Jobs, Not Lack of Resources

By MARSHALL AUERBACK

The government of the largest economy has run short of money. At least that is what Mr. Obama sought to convey at his “jobs summit” last week. The President said he would entertain “every demonstrably good idea” for creating jobs, but he cautioned that “our resources are limited.”

What a confidence inspiring notion! How can we possibly solve the problem of unemployment in these circumstances? The preposterousness of the statement is only matched by the paucity of economic understanding that it manifests.

For the hundredth time, Mr. President, a government which issues its own sovereign currency cannot go broke. It cannot “run out of dollars”.

Does any other entity in the world issue US dollars? No. The national government does this under monopoly conditions. If you or I tried to do it, we would go to jail for counterfeiting.

So here’s how it really works:

Any US dollar government deficit exactly EQUALS the total net increase in the holdings US dollar financial assets of the rest of us- businesses and households, residents and non residents- what’s called the ‘non government’ sector. In other words, government deficits = increased ‘monetary savings’ for the rest of us. It doesn’t matter if the financial assets are owned by American citizens or by Chinese manufacturers. The government spends money by electronically crediting bank accounts and those funds show up in the bank accounts held by the rest of us – the non-government sector.

This is accounting fact, not theory or philosophy. There is no dispute. It is basic national income accounting.

So, for example, if the government deficit was $1 trillion last year, it means the net increase in savings of financial assets for everyone else combined was exactly $1 trillion. We, as the non-government sector can then take that $1 trillion of financial assets and spend it on REAL assets, whether building a home, developing a business, shopping for a new car or laptop, or deciding to save the money by buying a Treasury bill. The expenditures on real assets create additional wealth in the economy, which in turn helps to reduce unemployment, and enhance incomes.

Think of this like a poker game at a casino. The “casino” (government) issues 100 chips, each representing $1.00. The chips are divided equally four ways. At the end of the evening, the distribution of those chips might well be different. 2 people might have lost everything, the third might have come about ahead by 15 chips and now has 40 and the fourth player might well have done even better, and gained a further 35 chips to give him 60. The aggregate amount of chips has not changed. On a straight accounting basis, there are still 100 chips, but they have been distributed differently

The casino, however, being the government, is never short of chips. The casino can always create additional chips, much like an electronic scoreboard at a football game can “create” additional points at will on a scoreboard. To speak of “a shortage of resources” or an insufficiency of “public dollars to fill the hole of private dollars that was created as a consequence of the crisis” (as the President said), reflects a complete abdication of responsibility on the part of Obama. “The hole in private dollars”, which the President describes, is just the fall in private spending brought about by an increased saving desire. That “hole” means that productive capacity will become unused and the jobs that could have been applied to that capacity are lost. This is why we have an unemployment rate that has almost trebled in the past 2 years.

At a recent symposium, Intel boss Paul Otellini, a contributor to both parties, expressed concern about the “amount of variability in the system” created by the state of policy flux in healthcare, energy and tax policy. “It is very difficult to make a hiring decision,” he said. General Electric chief executive Jeffery Immelt, added he would just like to “know what the rules are.” Fair enough. A business, unlike a government, does face external funding constraints. Get a decision wrong and the business cannot compensate by creating more currency. The problem is that income growth is dependent on aggregate demand (spending) growth. If spending growth falters, then output and income growth falters and the capacity to save by the private sector is compromised.

But the government doesn’t have to wait. As a sovereign issuer of its own currency has all the capacity it needs. The budget deficits (net public spending) can maintain growth in demand to keep income growing and hence support private saving. Budget deficits should aim to fill in that “hole in private savings” (a curious phrase used by the President in his opening speech at the summit), and not allow aggregate demand to “fall through it”, which would lead to income and employment collapses. Government spending has to rise so as to ensure that firms are willing to maximize the use of their productive capacity which in turn generates further employment. You don’t need a job summit to figure that one out, Mr. President.

Caution is only warranted when there is inflation, and inflation will only arise AFTER we’ve come significantly closer to full employment and higher output. And the constraint that a government faces is nothing like the constraint faced by a household. The Federal Government itself neither has nor doesn’t have dollars, any more than a bowling alley ever has a box of points or a football scoreboard has a “hoard” of points that it uses. When the federal government spends, the funds don’t ‘come from’ anywhere any more than the points ‘come from’ somewhere at a football stadium or the bowling alley.

In today’s economy, it is hard to imagine inflation occurring in an environment where almost 20 per cent of our workforce is underemployed. It’s equally hard to imagine how a government which creates its own currency can ever “run out of money”. To go back to our bowling analogy: If you knock down 5 pins at the bowling alley, your score goes from 10 to 15. Do you worry about where the bowling alley got those points? Do you think all bowling alleys should have a ‘reserve of points’ in a ‘lock box’ to make sure you can get the points you have scored? Of course not! But this is exactly the way that government “spends” our money. It provides computer data entry, much as the bowling alley scoreboard “creates” points.

Does this mean the government can spend infinite amounts of money? No. The economist Abba Lerner understood that a government’s spending and borrowing should be conducted “with an eye only to the results of these actions on the economy, and not to any established traditional doctrine about what is sound and what is unsound.” In other words, Lerner believed that the very idea of what good fiscal policy means boils down to what results you can get. If we want jobs, then government spending to create them is ‘sound’. Period.

A government should decide what to spend and tax based on a simple idea: getting everybody employed without causing inflation. This does not mean the government can spend all it wants without consequence. If it spends too much, government can ultimately create a lot of inflation, but we have to stop our economy from going further down a hole before we concern ourselves with building up pressures via price increases.

What it does mean is there is no solvency risk. There is no such thing as our government ‘running out of money to spend’ as President Obama has incorrectly stated repeatedly. The only reason we would want the government to spend less is if the private sector desired to spend more (without overwhelming itself in debt again) and/or our exports were surging. Neither of these occurrences is happening today. Hence, there is a need to restore the government contribution to create growth and jobs along the lines that were evident in the full employment period of the 1960s.

The only “resource deficiency” here is one of political courage. The Obama Administration continues to fantasize that it can get away with creating Potemkin prosperity of levitating asset prices via trillions of dollars of financial guarantees to Wall Street in lieu of deploying fiscal resources needed to lay the groundwork for the real thing.

If the President really believed that the government’s capacity was genuinely limited, then why bother holding a jobs summit at all? Or, at the very least, why not hold it in China, so that our Chinese “bankers”, who allegedly “fund” government expenditures, can vet each program and then decide whether they will continue to “finance” us. What’s next? Declaring wars only in times of national budget surpluses when we can “afford” to go to war?

You can see where the President’s incoherence leads. Do we really want to apply a "solvency" paradigm to questions of national security? Of course not! So why do it for unemployment?

The problem is a lack of jobs, not a lack of resources. The solution is more government spending. The only unemployment increase worth applauding would be the sacking of the President’s entire economics team, all of whom persistently regurgitate deficit myths that constrain output and employment and prevent us from recouping genuine prosperity. Unless Obama gets lucky and the fiscal stimulus really begins to catch in early 2010, this is just going to get messier.

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator. He is a brainstruster for the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Intitute. He can be reached at MAuer1959@aol.com

Why Obama Won't Do What's Needed to Deal With the Mortgage Crisis

For OpEdNews: David Fiderer - Writer

Beware of national averages like“One in Four Borrowers Is Underwater.”The problem is heavily concentrated in places like Phoenix, where 54% of homeowners with mortgages have negative equity. That's about half a million underwater mortgages, more than the combined totals in Texas and New York state, where 10 times as many people live.

University of Arizona law professor Brent T. Whitesays anyone with negative home equity should simply walk away. Arizona, like California, is a non-recourse state, where a home lender cannot legally pursue repayment beyond the value of the underlying collateral.

The situation looks much worse in America's Dubai, Las Vegas. Almost three-quarters Las Vegas homeowners with mortgages have negative equity or near negative equity. A lot of them arereallyunderwater. Almost half of Nevada homeowners with mortgages have negative equity in excess of 25%. The total residential mortgage debt in Nevada is 1.14 times the value of the underlying real estate.

The majority of America's underwater mortgages, about 5.5 million, are located in the four sand states: California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, according to a new study by First American CoreLogic. That's where homeowners face each month with a renewed sense of anxiety.Many wonder if the next mortgage payment means throwing away good money after bad. And almost all wonder how the next foreclosure will affect neighborhood property values, and the fabric of their community.

Don't feel smug if you live elsewhere, say Deutsche Bank analystsKaren Weaver and Ying Shen. By 2011, they predict,one halfof all American homeowners will have negative equity, plus another 20% who will have borderline negative equity. They expect the New York market, which so far has held up fairly well, to collapse. By 2011, they estimate, three-quarters of homeowners in the New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ market will be underwater.

Whichever numbers you accept, it's clear that the size of this mortgage crisis dwarfs everything else, including healthcare reform, the war in Iraq and social security. America's $11 trillion in home mortgage debtis 45% larger than public debt owed by the federal government. And half of that $11 trillion was lent or guaranteed by Government Sponsored Enterprises like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. It's not just the solvency of the GSEs that's at stake; it's the health of the overall economy. Federal revenues were down by$400 billionthis year because people have less taxable income.

President Obamawill issue admonishments to the banks.Robert Reichsays we should change the bankruptcy laws to allow for cramdowns. All well and good, but it's unrealistic to hope that banks will fill the vacuum of leadership at the top. We're talking about sorting out the problems of 10 to 15 million individual mortgage loans. The financial incentives are too fragmented and too misaligned and too nontransparent for any private party to sort out the mess. Given the numbers involved, these mortgage problems are too big, and too interconnected, to be resolved on a scattershot basis in a dysfunctional marketplace.

If the government wants the job done right, it must do the heavy lifting itself. Here are the three proposals to untangle the mortgage mess:

1.Perform due diligence on all borrowers at risk.

Step one is to find out what's going on with each distressed borrower. It's a very time consuming and labor intensive job, which is why no one wants to do it. It requires a face-to-face meeting with the borrower, plus independent verification of a borrower's employment and income, his financial assets and obligations. It requires figuring out if the borrower would be motivated to continue servicing the loan if it were reduced to an amount below the property's current market value.

Each delinquent mortgage loan is a multi-layered story. Some borrowers took out mortgages as part of a flipping scheme. Some, who took out loan they could not afford, were deceived by dishonest mortgage brokers. Others took out a fully-documented 80% loan on a house that lost 50% in market value. All the evidence shows that mortgage fraud went viral during the real estate boom.

The root cause of the mortgage meltdown, and most other financial scandals, was that everyone piggybacked off of somebody else's due diligence, which was never performed properly in the first place. As a substitute, investors relied on credit ratings and financial models that were fatally flawed. Now that millions of borrowers are in trouble, everyone acts as if the situation can sort itself out on its own. If we really want to take charge of the problem, the federal government should temporarily hire 50,000 people to perform actual due diligence on these borrowers and loans. The private parties who contributed to the situation don't have the same incentive to do things right. They're conflicted.

2. Nationalize loan servicing for private label mortgage securitizations.

When mortgage loans are sold to securitizations, the loan servicing process is outsourced to a company that has no financial stake in the loans and has all sorts of incentives to play all sorts of tricks on the borrowers. The loan servicer is ostensibly acting on behalf of the security holders, who, because if different levels of subordination, have varied and conflicting claims. The problem is compounded by the fact that none of the private label mortgage securities have standardized loan documentation or workout policies. The incentives are very different when a bank keeps a loan on its own books, or when Fannie Mae guarantees mortgage-backed securities. In those instances, one creditor has a singular financial interest in working out the best possible solution for a problem loan.

By nationalizing this function, the federal government would be able to assure that the workout function would be done with honesty and integrity.

3.Create a transparent national registry for every ownership claim, including every derivative claim, on a mortgage securitization.

Here's a very common scenario in loan workout negotiations. Several creditors agree to some kind of temporary forbearance to keep the borrower out of bankruptcy. But one holdout creditor shows no flexibility. He prefers to push the borrower into bankruptcy, even if it means that the eventual recovery will be far less. The holdout owns a credit default swap, kept secret from everyone else, that will reimburse him immediately. With complex securitizations and credit default swaps, the opportunities for bad faith dealings in debt restructuring grow exponentially.

The only way to achieve an orderly and fair workout process is to clarify who comes to the table with clean hands.

Once the government assembles the data of what's actually happening, it can assert pressure to enforce an orderly and reasonable restructuring of America's financial albatross.

Of course, this approach holds political peril. It's easier to harangue against the banks than it is to take responsibility for the mess created by someone else. Any kind of government intervention is red meat for the tea bagging crowd. Remember how it all started in February 2009?

Do we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage? President Obama, are you listening?" We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing.

CNBC's Rick Santelli, who disclaimed any political affiliation after his famous rant, provided inspiration forLarry Kudlowand countless others. You would think that people would have wised up by now. But consider this, the sand states' economies are all blighted by record multi-year droughts. Yet large blocks of voters are still brainwashed by a cable network that says global warming is not real.

Finally, here are the numbers, simplified:

Source:First American CoreLogic

Sources:Federal Reserve,Congressional Budget Office

For over 20 years, David has been a banker covering the energy industry for several global banks in New York. Currently, he is working on several journalism projects dealing with corporate and political corruption that, so far, have escaped serious (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Obama's War Rests on Dubious Assumptions

By Paul Karsh

A quick analysis of President Obama's speech on Afghanistan suggests that it relies on several dubious propositions. He is backing up an Afghan government that, to the extent that it exists at all is largely a hub of corruption. He is relying on eventually turning the war over to Afghan security forces that seem to be a fictional extension to the basically nonexistent Afghan government. He is sending troops to Afghanistan to root out al-Qaida bases that for the most part are in Pakistan. Furthermore, he began his speech on a note that should arouse skepticism among critical thinkers. In invoking the memory of the 3000 people who perished on September 11, 2001 to justify his actions he is resorting to the innuendo that the Bush administration has used to justify a war on the Muslim world.

Recounting a brief history of events since then, Obama reiterates a theme that he has used repeatedly of blaming our current situation on his predecessor. In this case, he does so with much more subtlety. While that may have some truth to it, he understates the lack of legitimacy of the Kharzai government. He does not mention that this government at best only controls parts of the capital city of Kabul.

While admitting that the recent elections in Afghanistan were "marred by fraud", he says that the government is consistent with Afghanistan's laws and constitution. The critical thinker may question the legitimacy of these laws and constitution. Are they for real or are they a device for fooling ourselves into believing that we can remake this remote, tribal nation in our own image? Do they have any meaning to the average Afghan?

Obama asserts that Al-Qaida retains safe havens along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. To the extent that these safe havens really exist, are they present in Afghanistan at all? To the extent that they exist at all, isn't the important point that they are located in areas that are not readily accessible to military forces, be they American, Pakistani, other NATO, or Afghani? Will a surge of our military into Afghanistan destroy safe havens not in Afghanistan?

Later on in his speech Obama asserts that this area is the "epicenter" of al-Qaida extremism. He says that we have "apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror." Early on in his Presidency he had strongly implied that he bought into the story of the mountains of Afghanistan as a nesting ground for terrorist plots to be carried out by individuals who crossed many borders into advanced nations. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that the 9/11 attacks were carried out as we were told, does that mean that other attacks, such as the bombings in Bali, London, and Amman, would require the centralized planning and control that we are told characterized the 9/11 attacks? If the alleged safe havens in Pakistan and Afghanistan were destroyed, does that mean that al-Qaida's operational capabilities would be destroyed with them? Is it not possible that the keys to al-Qaida's capabilities lie in its use of international financial and communications networks and networks of alienated Muslims residing in urban areas? If al-Qaida actually strikes in these areas, are they not best foiled by law enforcement? Al Gore said in his book The Assault On Reason that many of the 9/11 terrorists were already on terrorist watch lists. Had there been better coordination among our authorities, the 9/11 attacks might have been foiled at far less cost in lives and resources. FBI agents in the field had reported suspicious activities at flight schools but were ignored at the highest levels of the Bush administration. A highly-publicized plot based in London was foiled because decent Muslims living in Britain informed on the plotters. It should be troubling that stories of plots originating in far-off bases are put forth without any supporting evidence or details. Obama invokes innuendo in place of fact to justify war.

Another aspect of Obama's presentation that seems dubious is the notion of Afghan security forces. Are these for real? Absent an actual central government, to whom are these supposed security forces responsible? The people of Afghanistan defeated the Soviet Union. Why then do they need our training? Obama asserts that "it will be clear to the Afghan government - and more importantly, to the Afghan people they will ultimately be responsible for their own country." I propose that the people of Afghanistan were running their own country long before the great powers violated their borders. He further asserts that previously, Afghanistan was terrorized by the al-Qaida forces within its borders. Was it al-Qaida or the Taliban who were terrorizing the people of Afghanistan? Moreover, will the people of Afghanistan accept the notion that alien forces from a faraway land combined with the armed forces of a terribly corrupt government will protect them from the Taliban? This looks an awful lot like Vietnam, even though Obama tells us that this is different. The differences he cites are more illusory than real. There were forces from other nations such as South Korea and Australia involved in Vietnam, to no avail. While our enemies in Afghanistan may not be exactly the same as the enemy in Vietnam, the similarity of a people set upon by a foreign army with awesome firepower but no organic connection to the people whose land they are occupying outweighs the differences.

President Obama rightly understands that al-Qaida must be denied fertile ground from which to base its operations. He specifically mentions Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Our presence in Afghanistan, however, may actually legitimize al-Qaida in the eyes of millions of Muslims as a force fighting the infidels invading the Muslim world. He says that the Pakistani people have turned against the outside extremists who have infiltrated their country and that the Pakistani army is now waging offensives against the Taliban within their borders. To the extent that this is true, they are doing so without the help of American forces.

President Obama concludes by asserting that our country is different because we do not seek world domination. The majority of the American people want to believe this assertion. Unfortunately, the picture that is emerging of our role in the world does not particularly fit the image of the benign protector that we imagined ourselves in the years following World War II. Rather, the metaphor that comes to my mind is that described by George Orwell in his prophetic work, 1984. The world of its protagonist Winston Smith is one where his country is perpetually waging war in some frontier area of the world against an unspecified enemy. The people are constantly told that their country is on the verge of victory. One can easily imagine Obama's war becoming a realization of Orwell's prophetic vision.

I am a sometime software quality assurance engineer who lives in Martinez, California. These days I amuse myself by playing harmonica. The harmonica is a wonderful musical instrument. It is easy to play, expressive, cheap, and portable. I always (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
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Published on Friday, December 4, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Obama's Broken Promises to Family Farmers: Disappointing and Dangerous

by Jim Goodman

"And it means ensuring that the policies being shaped at the Departments of Agriculture and Interior are designed to serve not big agribusiness or Washington influence peddlers, but the family farmers and the American People."

--President-elect Barack Obama, December 17 2008, Chicago, Illinois.

The message was one of hope, the words of a newly elected President echoing the Populism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the promise of John F. Kennedy. It stopped there, the delivery of the promise fell short.

We have gotten a New Deal, albeit one that is more protective of those who caused the economic and agricultural crises than of those who suffer from them. We have also gotten a new version of "The Best and the Brightest" in the Obama Administration and their faulty counsel extends beyond war into food and trade policy.

The campaign promises were not worth the notepads they are written on. The promises were broken and business at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will carry on much as it did during the Bush Administration.

Instead of going outside the agribusiness and agrochemical industries, Obama has kept the revolving door spinning and appointed the very lobbyists and special interests he said would find no home in his administration.

Monsanto stalwarts Michael Taylor, special assistant to the FDA Commissioner for food safety and Roger Beachy, head of National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

Rajiv Shah, head of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) where his pro-biotech leanings will continue to be pushed on the developing world. Perhaps it is a good fit, as President Obama noted "/The mission of USAID is to advance America's interests by strengthening our relationships abroad". /However, advancing America's/ /interests and giving real aid to those in need are not the same thing. Advancing interests implies control and empire building.

Islam Siddiqui, Chief Agriculture Negotiator, office of U.S. Trade Representative, is a particularly troubling nomination. He is no friend of consumers, considering his most recent employment at CropLife America (CLA), the pesticide industries main trade association. As a registered lobbyist and vice president of regulatory affairs, Siddiqui was responsible for setting and selling CLA's international and domestic agenda which, simply put, was to weaken regulations on pesticides and agricultural chemicals worldwide.

He is no friend of farmers either, and not just organic farmers, even though he has a long history of distaste for organic agriculture. He promotes agribusiness, chemical companies, processors and grain marketers who make their profits by buying low, processing and selling high. In his world, a farmers job is to maintain corporate profits.

As an unabashed 'free trader" he is a strong supporter of the World Trade Organization and its ability to strong-arm countries into accepting unwanted U.S. imports. He openly derided the European Union's rejection of hormone-treated beef, Japan's desire to mandate labeling of Genetically Modified (GM) food and he pushed to permit pesticide testing on children. In his world consumers should be forced to accept whatever food products are thrown at them.

Forced trade, telling countries they must accept our products whether they want them or not is not trade, it is nothing short of blackmail.

His "public service" career has been dedicated to selling more pesticides and GM seed to farmers world-wide and easing restrictions on their use. The beneficiaries of these policies were not farmers or consumers but the agribusiness corporations that Siddiqui worked for. That is not public service, that is promoting private interest.

Siddiqui has not worked in the best interests of farmers or consumers, rather he has consistently promoted the interests of multi-national corporations, grain companies, meat processors and chemical companies over those of the farmer or consumer. If appointed, why should we believe that that the leopard will suddenly be changing its spots ?

President Obama noted as a candidate:

"We'll tell ConAgra that it's [USDA] not the Department of Agribusiness. We're going to put the peoples interests ahead of the special interests."

Just another empty promise.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer from Wonewoc WI and an IATP Food and Society Policy Fellow.

Obama Rejected His Own Surge Rationale

Published on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 by Inter Press Service

Obama Had Rejected His Own Speech's Surge Rationale

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama presented a case Tuesday for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for U.S. national security.

Obama said the escalation was for a "vital national interest" and invoked the threat of attacks from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, asserting that such attacks "are now being planned as I speak".

Despite Obama's embrace of these new national security arguments, however, he has rejected within the past few weeks the critical link in the national security argument for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops - the allegedly indissoluble link between the Taliban insurgency and al Qaeda.

Proponents of escalation have insisted that the Taliban would inevitably provide new sanctuaries for al Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan unless the U.S. counterinsurgency mission was successful.

But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al Qaeda.

In fact, intense political maneuvering between Obama and the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, over the latter's troop increase request revolved primarily around the issue of whether the defeat of the Taliban was necessary to U.S. anti-al Qaeda strategy.

The first round of the effort was triggered by the leak of McChrystal's "initial assessment", with its warning of "mission failure" if his troop deployment request was rejected. The White House fought back with anonymous comments quoted in the Washington Post Sept. 21 that the military was trying to push Obama into a corner on the troop deployment issue.

One of the anonymous senior officials criticized a statement by Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the war in Afghanistan would "probably need more forces".

To avoid being outmaneuvered by the military, Obama suggested in a press conference that the legitimacy of the Afghan government might now be so damaged by the blatantly fraudulent Aug. 20 election as to put into question a counterinsurgency strategy such as the one advanced in McChrystal's assessment.

Obama also raised a red flag about the conventional argument from national security, saying he wasn't going to "think that by sending more troops, we're automatically going to make Americans safe".

Within a week, his national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, began to raise that issue explicitly.

In an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Jones suggested the question of why al Qaeda would want to move out of its present sanctuary in Pakistan to the uncertainties of Afghanistan would be one that the White House would be raising in response to McChrystal's troop request.

McChrystal's rejoinder came in a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London Oct. 1, in which he went further than any previous official rationale for the war. "[W]hen the Taliban has success," said McChrystal, "that provides sanctuary from which al Qaeda can operate transnationally."

He was apparently arguing the Taliban wouldn't even have to seize power nationally to provide a sanctuary for al Qaeda.

Only three days later, however, the New York Times reported that "senior administration officials" were saying privately that Obama's national security team was now "arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States".

That "shift in thinking", as the Times reported, was an obvious indication that the White House was preparing to pursue a strategy that would not require the additional troops McChrystal was requesting because the Taliban need not be defeated.

One of the senior officials interviewed by Times said the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that "does not express ambitions of attacking the United States". The Taliban were aligned with al Qaeda "mainly on the tactical front", said the official.

A second theme introduced by the official was that the Taliban could not be eliminated because it was too deeply entrenched in the country – quite a different goal from that of the counterinsurgency war proposed by McChrystal.

That was an expression of resistance to what was soon reported to be a McChrystal request for a "low risk" option of 80,000 troops, combined with a suggestion that 20,000 troops would be the "high risk" option.

But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was determined to turn the White House around on the issue of McChrystal's request. He was well aware of Obama's political sensitivity about not being seen as on the wrong side of his national security team, and he effectively used that to force the issue.

Gates worked with McChrystal, Mullen, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a plan that would be presented to the White House as their consensus position on Afghanistan strategy.

The plan, as the New York Times reported Oct. 27, was presented by an administration official as a compromise between the plan put forth by Vice President Joseph Biden for concentrating essentially on al Qaeda, and McChrystal's counterinsurgency plan. It would be ostensibly aimed at protecting about 10 population centers, leaving the rest of the country to be handled by Special Operations Forces with the assistance of drones and air power.

But the catch was that McChrystal was demanding an expansive definition of "population centers", which would include most of the Taliban heartland of the country.

McChrystal was still going to get his counterinsurgency war under the Gates plan.

Notably absent from the Times report was any suggestion that Obama had given even tentative approval to the proposal. Only Obama's advisers were said to be "coalescing around" the proposal. But "administration officials" confidently asserted that the only issue remaining was how many more troops would be required to "guard the vital parts of the country".

That confidence was evidently based on the fact that Obama's national security team had already agreed on the options that would be presented to the president for decision. Two weeks after that report, Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs said he would consider four different options at a meeting with his national security team Nov. 11.

The four options, as the Times reported the day of the meeting, ranged from a low-end option of 20,000 to roughly 40,000 troops. And Gates, Mullen and Clinton had "coalesced around" the middle option of about 30,000 troops.

Gates and his allies had thus defined the options and stacked the deck in favor of the one they were going to support. And the fact that Obama's national security was lined up in support of that option was already on the public record.

It was a textbook demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House.

Although Obama bowed to pressure from his major national security advisers to agree to the 30,000 troops, his conviction that the Taliban is not necessarily a mortal enemy of the United States could influence future White House policy decisions on Afghanistan.

Obama's speech even included the suggestion that the defeat of the Taliban was not necessary to U.S. security. That point could be used by Obama to justify future military or diplomatic moves to extract the United States from the quagmire he appeared to fear only a few weeks ago.

© 2009 IPS North America

Published on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 by The Nation

Obama Has Spoken; Now, Let's Have a Debate

by John Nichols

President Obama delivered a carefully-constructed and nuanced call Tuesday night for the extension of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Obama came to the wrong conclusion about a military adventure that should be coming to a conclusion, rather than ramping up. But Obama's attempt to find a middle ground between anti-war forces and supporters of a Iraq-style occupation at least recognized that the debate over Afghanistan has many sides and many players.

At times, Obama seemed so tortured in his attempt to placate both those who want to send more troops (he's dispatching an additional 30,000) and those who want a bring-the-troops-home exit strategy (he says they will start coming home in 2011) that his speech had the ring of Greek tragedy - or, perhaps, "fall of the Roman Empire" history.

Unfortunately, there has been nothing artful about the media coverage of Obama's speech.

Most of the coverage has followed the predictable patterns of the post-September 11 "war on terror" era.

Compromise, even bad compromise that keeps the U.S. involved in a quagmire, is portrayed as rational, and probably necessary, while blunt calls for rapid withdrawal or all-out war are dismissed as outside the realm of reason.

So it is that we are left with in murky-middle moment where prominent Democrats rally, for the most part, to back the president even when he embarks on what House Appropriations Committee chair David Obey, D-Wisconsin, refers to as a "fool's errand," while prominent Republicans such as House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, whine that the president is not doing enough.

In fact, the picture has more shades of grey than the pundits would have us believe.

There remains substantial Democratic discomfort with Obama's plan to surge tens of thousands ofd additional troops into what - despite all that talk of an exit strategy - is sounding more and more like an endless war of whim. One hundred members of the House, the vast majority of them Democrats, have now sponsored Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern's call for the development of a formal plan to bring the troops home. In the Senate, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold and Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders make no secret of the fact that they believe the president is making a mistake, as does House Appropriations Committee chair David Obey, D-Wisconsin, the author of the "fool's errand" characterization.

Perhaps even more significant, however, is the fact that there is a good deal of division within the ranks of the Republican caucus, particularly in the U.S. House. Not every member of the Grand Old Party is banging on Obama for taking too long to do too little in Afghanistan. In fact, some key congressional conservatives are echoing the call of liberals for a "Bring the Troops Home" plan.

The first cosponsor of Jim McGovern's resolution was North Carolina Republican Walter Jones Jr., who says of the Afghanistan occupation: "We're trying to police the world. Every great nation prior to America that tried to police the world has failed economically. That's why I tell people that I'm a Pat Buchanan American. I want to stop trying to take care of the world and fix this country. Our problems are so deep that there is no easy way to fix them."

Jones has repeatedly gone to the floor of the House to deliver calls for an exit strategy, as has his fellow "old-right" conservative, Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

Among the other stalwart conservatives who do not merely reject a surge but who are outspoken in their advocacy for the development of a plan to withdraw U.S. forces in Afghanistan are California's Dana Rohrbacher and Tennessee's John Duncan Jr.

They were joined on the eve of Obama's speech at West Point by an unexpected Republican dissenter, Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who used a speech Monday at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah.to declare: "Mr. President, it is time to bring our troops home."

Chaffetz, a pristine conservative by just about any standard, says Obama's surge strategy makes no sense.

"We're talking about having nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. If the mission is to root out al-Qaida, we do not need to risk the lives of tens of thousands of troops to fulfill it," the congressman, who has traveled to Afghanistan and met with the top generals on the ground there, argues that: "If our mission in Afghanistan is simply to protect the populace and build the nation, then I believe the time has come to bring our troops home. ... I am opposed to nationbuilding. I do not believe it is the role and responsibility of the United States of America to be involved in every aspect of the globe."

Chaffetz announced his stance prior to Obama's speech because he did not want to be seen as just another Republican critic of the president. And he did so with a seriousness that merits attention, issuing a detailed assessment of the conflict and of his views regarding more serious threats facing the United States.

The Utah Republican is not an anti-war firebrand - he wants out of Afghanistan; but if the U.S. is going to maintain a military presence there, the congressman suggests that it might as well go all out militarily.

Chaffetz is trying to push the envelope, maybe even to open the debate up - within his own party and beyond its boundaries.

That's something Obey is trying to do with his talk of a "war surtax."

One is a conservative. One is a progressive.

One is a Republican. One is a Democrat.

But these two members of the House, and a good many of their colleagues in both parties, are offering every indication that they are ready for a real debate.

And that debate is what is needed. Indeed, hte best news from Tuesday was the signal, sent before the president's speech by progressive Democrats (including Senator Feingold and Congressman McGovern), and a few conservative Republicans, that efforts might be made to block funding for at least some aspects of the troop surge.

No matter how Congress might eventually decide the issue, that's a discourse and a vote that Congress should embrace.

The executive branch is not supposed to define the discussion about war.

Presidents, according to the Constitution, are supposed to engage in a dialogue with Congress -- the legislative branch that was empowered to check and balance the executive precisely because the founders wanted to "chain the dogs of war."

Obama laid out an agenda Tuesday night. Now, the Congress should start debating whether it wants to go along with that agenda. And the media should cover that debate - not just as Democrats versus Republicans, or liberals versus conservatives. It should pay attention to all the scope and character that is on display.

This is the essential discourse of the republic - the discourse that James Madison, the father of our Constitution imagined, and demanded, when he warned more than 200 years ago:

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals, engendered in both.

No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created; and it is the executive will, which is to direct it.

In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.

In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.

The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

Democrats and Republicans both like to claim Madison as their founding father.

So be it.

Let's be Madisonian.

Now that the president has spoken, let's have a real debate about whether he is right -- and about whether this nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Published on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 by Consortiumnews.com

Obama with Blood on His Hands

President Barack Obama carefully avoided describing his decision to dispatch 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan as an "escalation," but that is what he announced.

by Nicolas J S Davies

So what will his decision to pour more troops, weapons and tons of ammunition into this already war-ravaged country really mean, for Americans and for the people of Afghanistan?

On Sept. 4, German forces in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan called in a U.S. air strike on two fuel tankers that had been captured by "anti-coalition forces" (ACF).

German officials knew that there was a crowd of civilians around the tankers helping themselves to a windfall of free fuel, but they called in the air strike anyway. This was a clear violation of the laws of war, which prohibit attacking civilians even when there are believed to be combatants amongst them.

In the aftermath of the attack, it was found that 142 people had been killed, and that the great majority of them were civilians.

General Wolfgang Schneiderhan, the Chief of Staff of the German Army, and Franz Josef Jung, who was the Defense Minister at the time, were both forced to resign, and Peter Wichert, the junior civilian official who approved the air strike, was suspended.

An obvious question must occur to Americans reading this tragic story. We know that thousands of U.S. air strikes have killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why has no U.S. general or defense secretary resigned over any of those incidents?

In other ways, the stories in the press have followed the same pattern. They begin with denials and assertions that only combatants were targeted and killed. Then there are investigations, and eventually U.S. officials admit that they killed large numbers of civilians, although the figure acknowledged is always less than that cited in reports by U.N. or local officials.

But nobody is court martialed, and nobody resigns. We've all seen this story repeated dozens of times since 2001.

Air Strikes

In reality, U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have operated under standing orders to "call for fire" (an air-strike) whenever resistance fighters take cover in a house or apartment building, even when large numbers of civilians may also be inside the building.

The overriding priorities have always been to avoid risking American lives in dangerous house searches and to kill "insurgents."

Human rights reports by the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) have documented many such incidents in which civilians have been killed, as well as extensive discussions between U.N. and U.S. officials about them.

For instance, in its human rights report for the 2nd quarter of 2007, UNAMI insisted that American air strikes in densely populated civilian areas were violations of international law.

The section of the report headed "MNF (multi-national force) military operations and the killing of civilians" included this footnote:

"Customary international humanitarian law demands that, as much as possible, military objectives must not be located within areas densely populated by civilians. The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian character of an area."

The report demanded, "that all credible allegations of unlawful killings by MNF forces be thoroughly, promptly and impartially investigated, and appropriate action taken against military personnel found to have used excessive or indiscriminate force... The initiation of investigation into such incidents, as well as their findings, should be made public."

On further examination, the contrast between American and international responses to the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan has roots that extend well beyond these immediate incidents and the officials involved.

American attitudes to protecting civilians in wartime and other requirements of international humanitarian law differ sharply from those of people in other countries.

This dichotomy raises questions of collective responsibility for war crimes that implicate American civil society as a whole, from our media and educational systems to our fundamental view of ourselves as a civilized people.

And it has made occupation by American forces especially dangerous and deadly for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Public Attitudes

The People on War report by the International Commission of the Red Cross (ICRC) illustrates the dichotomy very well.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions in 1999, the ICRC conducted a survey of 17,000 people in 17 countries to see how well people understood the restrictions that the Geneva Conventions place on military forces in order to protect civilians, combatants and prisoners in wartime.

The 17 countries surveyed included 12 that had recently experienced war on their own soil, four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Switzerland, where the ICRC is based.

The report noted that war has changed over the past century. Whereas about 86 percent of the people killed in the First World War were actual combatants, 90 percent of those killed in contemporary wars are civilians.

The report concluded that, in the modern world, "war is war on civilians." It went on:

"The more these conflicts have degenerated into wars on civilians, the more people have reacted by reaffirming the norms, traditions, conventions and rules that seek to create a barrier between those who carry arms into battle and the civilian population.

"In the face of unending violence, these populations have not abandoned their principles nor forsaken their traditions. Large majorities in every war-torn country reject attacks on civilians in general and a wide range of actions that by design or default could harm the innocent.

"The experience has heightened consciousness of what is right and wrong in war. People in battle zones across the globe are looking to forces in civil society, their own state institutions, and international organizations to assert themselves and impose limits that will protect civilians."

Protecting Civilians

People in the United States, Great Britain, Russia, France and Switzerland were asked about the importance of protecting civilians in time of war.

They were asked to choose between a firm statement that combatants "must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone" and a weaker one that "combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible."

In Great Britain (72 percent), Russia (77 percent), France (76 percent) and Switzerland (77 percent), about three quarters of those surveyed chose the absolute prohibition on attacking civilians, which in fact accords with international law under the Fourth Geneva Convention, while 17 percent in Russia and France, 16 percent in Switzerland and 26 percent in Britain chose the weaker one.

In the United States, however, a different pattern emerged. Only 52 percent agreed that combatants "must leave civilians alone," while 42 percent chose the weaker option, roughly twice as many as in the other countries.

The report said, "Across a wide range of questions, in fact, American attitudes towards attacks on civilians were much more lax."

A similar discrepancy emerged in response to questions about torture and the treatment of prisoners of war. More than one in three Americans thought that torture could be justified, compared with 19 percent in Britain and 10 percent in France.

The survey also asked questions about the Geneva Conventions themselves. Respondents were asked whether they believed that the Conventions can help prevent wars from getting worse or whether they "make no real difference."

Only a minority (28 percent) of people in the 12 countries that had experienced war thought the conventions "make no real difference," along with 33 percent of Russians and 45 percent in France.

But a majority of British (55 percent) and Americans (57 percent) agreed with the statement that the Conventions "make no real difference."

Why are "American attitudes towards attacks on civilians more lax" than the attitudes of people in other countries?

This is a form of American exceptionalism, but Americans have generally believed that they are exceptional in their commitment to justice and human rights, not in their disregard for them.

Breakdown of Norms When the victims of war in the People on War survey were asked to explain the breakdown in civilized norms that led to combatants killing civilians, they chose the will to win at any cost and disrespect for the laws of war as the two principal factors.

Another reasonable explanation they offered placed greater responsibility with political and military leaders, and seems relevant to the case of the United States:

"Many people think the limits are breached because ordinary people have been ordered to harass, dislodge or even attack civilian populations, sometimes uncomfortably at odds with their own beliefs and prevailing norms.

"Political and military leaders, it is believed, have chosen to pursue the battle in ways that endanger civilians, but people are prepared to believe that the leaders have a plan or a good reason for their course of action. At the very least, they are ready to follow their orders, because as ordinary people they have little choice."

But these general explanations don't account for the discrepancy in the case of the United States. There must be specific factors in the U.S. educational and doctrinal system that result in either a lower regard for the lives of people in other countries or a disrespect for the laws of war or both.

Without further research, it is hard to be specific, but several factors that make the United States exceptional spring to mind.

One factor could be that Americans have not experienced war on their own soil since the American Civil War. Americans may therefore find it harder to empathize with the predicament of civilians in war-zones.

Or perhaps Americans have been gradually conditioned over time by deferential political and media responses to the killing of civilians by U.S. forces to regard it as regrettable but acceptable.

Or American leaders may have made a more or less conscious choice not to educate people about the laws of war for fear that that might weaken the United States' ability to commit military forces to combat or limit the ways in which they could be used.

But in that case we would still have to explain the difference between American leaders and their counterparts in other countries.

Crossing Lines

The history of U.S. wars, covert operations and proxy wars that have killed millions of people all over the world, must also be relevant. Covert forms of violence in particular, by their very nature, violate both laws and moral codes.

When the United States has already crossed legal and moral lines on such a scale since it signed the conventions in 1949, perhaps it is unrealistic to expect the public to respect rules that its government so flagrantly disrespects.

Some combination of these factors (isolation from the reality of war; the more deferential attitude of U.S. media; a deliberate lack of education in this area; and the corrosive effect of the government's own actions) may account for the unique results in the American portion of the People on War survey.

Whatever accounts for our country's disrespect for the laws of war, we cannot deny our collective responsibility for its consequences. While international law holds individuals responsible for war crimes, it also holds countries that commit war crimes collectively responsible for compensating their victims.

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) is a group of Americans who are uniquely qualified to assess the collective responsibility of the United States for the death and destruction inflicted on the people of Iraq.

IVAW has three principal demands. In addition to calling for the immediate withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, and for adequate medical treatment and benefits for veterans, IVAW insists that the United States should pay reparations to Iraq.

Reparations are the traditional means of assessing collective responsibility for aggression and other war crimes committed by one country against another.

Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, a U.N. Compensation Commission ordered Iraq to pay $52.5 billion in reparations to the government of Kuwait and its people.

A just imposition of U.S. reparations to Iraq would help to compensate some of the victims and rebuild some of Iraq's devastated infrastructure. And it could have an important added benefit. It might just teach us to take international law more seriously in the future.

Soldiers and the Rules

People on War also surveyed members of the armed forces in each country, and found little difference between the attitudes of military personnel and civilians.

This seems to confirm the premise of the study that it is the general attitudes of civilian populations that countries send to war with their soldiers.

The general lack of education in the United States could be overcome by intensive emphasis and education on the laws of war within its armed forces.

So it is unfortunate that the United States armed forces do not have such a program. Each soldier receives only a one-hour lecture on the laws of war during basic training and a refresher prior to deployment to a theater of war.

An officer I spoke to in the Centcom press office and other soldiers I've talked to remembered their JAG lecture covering the treatment of prisoners but couldn't remember what was said about the 4th Geneva Convention, which defines the responsibilities of occupying forces toward civilians.

This of course stands in stark contrast with the provisions of the Convention itself. Article 144 of the Convention requires that, "Any civilian, military, police or other authorities, who in time of war assume responsibilities in respect of protected persons, must possess the text of the Convention and be specially instructed as to its provisions".

Once in theater, military training and discipline is designed to produce unquestioning obedience to orders, but even the basic accountability of a military chain of command has been subverted throughout U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The National Guard unit from my neighborhood in Miami found themselves guarding Iraqi prisoners at Al-Assad air-base, preparing them for interrogation with techniques of sleep deprivation and death threats.

But the only orders their officers gave them were to do whatever they were told by "spooks," known by code-names like "Scooter" and "Bear." They had no idea who was really issuing their orders or from what military or civilian agency they originated.

Accountability for the crimes they were committing was not just absent - it was carefully and deliberately forestalled.

Killing Civilians

But the most far-reaching breakdown of the laws of war is the failure to make the fundamental distinction between civilians and combatants. This is especially difficult for soldiers in hostile occupied territory where any civilian can become a resistance fighter.

But the laws of war are clear that the distinction must be made on an individual basis and that collective punishment of groups or communities of people because of the actions of a few of them is prohibited.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, without proper training or strict discipline, U.S. forces have often come to treat all adult males and teenage boys as "insurgents."

At a court martial for murder at Camp Pendleton in California on July 14, 2007, a Marine Corporal testified for the defense that he did not see the cold-blooded killing of an innocent civilian as a summary execution.

"I see it as killing the enemy", he told the court, adding that, "Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency."

When this attitude extends to senior officers, it inevitably permeates the forces under their command.

Following the cold-blooded murders of three civilians on an island in Lake Tharthar in northern Iraq, a court martial heard that the colonel in command of the brigade had given the order at the outset of the operation to "kill all military-age males."

When the troops did not immediately kill two of the men, a sergeant at company headquarters asked over the radio why they had not killed them as they'd been ordered to do. They then told the men to run away and shot them in the back.

The colonel was allowed to testify in secret at the court martial of his troops and he was not charged with a crime.

Iraqi towns besieged by U.S. forces were sealed off with barbed wire and earthen berms and denied food, water, electricity and medicine, a classic case of collective punishment.

Any resistance to these medieval siege techniques became a pretext for air strikes and artillery fire into the besieged towns. The Assault on Fallujah

In the case of Fallujah, an all-out aerial and ground assault was launched on a city where U.N. officials estimated that 50,000 civilians remained trapped.

U.S. forces had set up checkpoints around the city to prevent men and boys between the ages of 15 and 55 from fleeing the kill-zone before the assault began.

But, unlike the civilians, the Iraqi Resistance was able to evade the U.S. cordon, and it redeployed about half of its forces to Mosul and elsewhere before the attack.

This forced U.S. commanders to withdraw the two Stryker battalions manning the cordon around Fallujah four days into the battle as resistance erupted in Mosul. That maneuver, in turn, permitted most of the estimated 1,000 Resistance fighters remaining in Fallujah to escape.

U.S. Marines and air forces killed an estimated 4,000 civilians in Fallujah.

In a flagrant violation of the 1st Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, U.S. Marines are trained to "dead-check" wounded resistance fighters.

"They teach us to do dead-checking when we're clearing rooms," a marine told Evan Wright of the Village Voice. "You put two bullets into the guy's chest and one in the brain. But when you enter a room where guys are wounded you might not know if they're alive or dead. So they teach you to dead-check them by pressing them in the eye with your boot, because generally a person, even if he's faking being dead, will flinch if you poke him there. If he moves, you put a bullet in the brain."

‘Amoral' Behavior

Many present-day Americans have accepted the pseudo-realist proposition that foreign policy is "amoral" and that our country's war crimes are just part of a long and inevitable history of murderous and extra-legal behavior.

This indoctrination may partially explain the results of the People on War survey. But it is not historically accurate.

The United States emerged onto the world scene at the end of the 19th century with a genuinely new vision of international affairs. American diplomats and international lawyers led the "legalist" movement to construct a legal framework for international politics.

With American leadership, diplomats and international lawyers from the major powers negotiated mechanisms to peacefully resolve disputes; to establish international courts; to codify customary international law into explicit international treaties; and to regulate the conduct of war so as to limit some of its most horrific consequences.

They achieved limited but real progress, leading to the Hague peace conferences (1899 & 1907), the League of Nations, the Permanent Court of International Justice (1922), the Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) to "renounce war as an instrument of national policy," and eventually to the United Nations Charter (1945) and the Geneva Conventions (1949).

The U.N. Charter brought together many elements of the earlier treaties and institutions in a comprehensive system dedicated to peace as the predominant value and goal in international affairs. The civilized norms established through this process did not originally extend to U.S. or European colonies, and the United States historically regarded the sovereignty of small countries in Central America and the Caribbean as subservient to its own interests.

However, with the end of the colonial era, the legal framework of international law was extended to apply to people everywhere on the basis of universally recognized rights.

The U.N. Charter, which originally offered protection from foreign aggression to the people of only 51 member countries, now extends to 192 countries.

America's commitment to the framework of international law that its former leaders and diplomats worked so hard to construct has gradually been eroded by a dangerous belief that its own military power can replace the rules and institutions of international law as the ultimate arbiter of international affairs.

Since the Cold War

This erosion has accelerated since the end of the Cold War. In 1997, the Quadrennial Defense Review published by the U.S. Department of Defense violated the United Nations Charter by explicitly threatening unilateral military action to gain access to economic and strategic resources in other countries:

"When the interests at stake are vital...we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power. U.S. vital national interests include, but are not limited to... preventing the emergence of a hostile regional coalition ... (and) ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources."

Different countries' "vital national interests" frequently come into conflict with each other, so that justifying military action based on "defending vital interests" simply resurrects the central historical problem of international relations.

This is the very problem that the legalist approach to international relations was designed to resolve.

As the senior British legal adviser told his government during the Suez crisis, "The plea of vital interest, which has been one of the main justifications for wars in the past, is indeed the very one which the U.N. Charter was intended to exclude." But it is only in this decade that the desire of American leaders to replace the rule of international law with the rule of U.S. military power has been seriously tested in the real world, and the results have been catastrophic.

Instead of responding to terrorism by applying and strengthening the rule of international law, the United States trapped itself in a downward spiral in which its weakening economic position, its opportunistic and illegal applications of military force and the growing confidence of all who seek to break free of its control are reinforcing each other to exacerbate the underlying crisis in its political economy.

The opportunities that the Obama administration has missed to break this downward spiral during its first year in office may come to haunt the United States for the remainder of its history.

The decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan stands as a critical mistake, and reveals that U.S. leaders remain largely oblivious to their own folly. Despite all the evidence of recent history, they remain incapable of judging how other people and countries will react to American violence.

If we doubt that the corporate-backed U.S. regime is ultimately susceptible to overwhelming public pressure, we only have to look at other countries. It was public pressure on U.S. allies that stranded the United States as a lonely occupier in Iraq.

The Netherlands is withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan in 2010, followed by Canada in 2011. With enough public and international pressure, President Obama and his corporate backers will abandon a war that they can never win and that, like Iraq, is progressively undermining Brand U.S.A.

If President Obama finds it politically impossible to withdraw, his successor will do so, but how many people must die for his doomed ambitions and the dictates of our plutocratic political system?

© 2009 Consortiumnews.com

Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood on our hands: the American invasion and destruction of Iraq, due out in March. He is a writer and activist in Miami, where he coordinates the Miami chapter of Progressive Democrats of America (www.pdamerica.org).

Published on Wednesday, December 2, 2009 by Creators Syndicate

Obama's War

by Jim Hightower

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to war we go! Pound the drums loudly, stand with your country proudly!

Wait, wait, wait — hold it right there. Cut the music, slow the rush, and let's all ponder what Barack Obama, Roberts Gates, Stanley McChrystal and Co. are getting us into ... and whether we really want to go there. After all, just because the White House and the Pentagon brass are waving the flag and insisting that a major escalation of America's military mission in Afghanistan is a "necessity" doesn't mean it is ... or that We the People must accept it.

Remember the wisdom of Mark Twain about war-whooping generals and politicians: "Loyalty to the country, always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it."

How many more dead and mangled American soldiers does the government's "new" Afghan policy deserve? How many more tens of billions of dollars should we let them siphon from our public treasury to fuel their war policy? How much more of our country's good name will they squander on what is essentially a civil war?

We've been lied to for nearly a decade about "success" in Iraq and Afghanistan — why do the hawks deserve our trust that this time will be different?

Their rationales for escalation are hardly confidence boosters. The goal, we're told, is to defeat the al-Qaida terrorist network that threatens our national security. Yes, but al-Qaida is not in Afghanistan! Nor is it one network. It has metastasized, with strongholds now in Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, Yemen and Somalia, plus even having enclaves in England and France.

Well, claims Obama himself, we must protect the democratic process in Afghanistan. Does he think we have suckerwrappers around our heads? America's chosen leader over there is President Hamid Karzai — a preening incompetent who was "elected" this year only through flagrant fraud and whose government is controlled by warlords, rife with corruption and opposed by the great majority of Afghans.

During the election campaign from July through October, 195 Americans were killed and more than 1,000 wounded to protect this guy's "democratic process." Why should even one more American die for Karzai?

Finally, Washington's war establishment asserts that adding some 30,000 more troops will let us greatly expand and train the Afghan army and police force during the next couple of years so they can secure their own country and we can leave.

Mission accomplished!

Nearly every independent military analyst, however, says this assertion is not just fantasy, it's delusional — it'll take at least 10 years to raise Afghanistan's largely illiterate and corrupt security forces to a level of barely adequate, costing us taxpayers more than $4 billion a year to train and support them.

Obama has been taken over by the military industrial hawks and national security theorists who play war games with other people's lives and money. I had hoped Obama might be a more forceful leader who would reject the same old interventionist mindset of those who profit from permanent war. But his newly announced Afghan policy shows he is not that leader.

So, we must look elsewhere, starting with ourselves. The first job of a citizen is to keep your mouth open. Obama is wrong on his policy — deadly wrong — and those of you who see this have both a moral and patriotic duty to reach out to others to inform, organize and mobilize our grassroots objections, taking common sense to high places.

Also, look to leaders in Congress who are standing up against Obama's war and finally beginning to reassert the legislative branch's constitutional responsibility to oversee and direct military policy. For example, Rep. Jim McGovern is pushing for a specific, congressionally mandated exit strategy; Rep. Barbara Lee wants to use Congress' control of the public purse strings to stop Obama's escalation; and Rep. David Obey is calling for a war tax on the richest Americans to put any escalation on-budget, rather than on a credit card for China to finance and future generations to pay.

This is no time to be deferential to executive authority. Stand up. Speak out. It's our country, not theirs. We are America — ultimately, we have the power and the responsibility.

Copyright 2009 Creators.com

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.