Feelings Of Unease

There's so much happening on the twin fronts of corruption and Alito's confirmation right now that a lot of really weighty news is getting pushed out to the fringes. Some of those stories are of the kind that motivate me to write the most. If you look back to my very first posts it is easy to see that I began blogging because I was worried by the direction the Bush administration was taking the U.S. in its dealings its own citizens and with the rest of the world, all under PR cover of the "Great War On Terror". I have to say that in the last year, a lot of other people have come to feel the same qualms. The items I have for you today all fit into that framework of unease.

Let's begin with the most clear and present danger - those moves towards a secret police state which were initiated by Bush in almost certain knowledge that they were illegal.

Now a whistleblower, 20 year NSA operative Russell Tice, has stepped forward and admitted to being one of the New York Time's sources. Tice wants to testify to Congress about what he knows and witnessed. He seems to know a lot but the defense will be that he's just a nutcase - a defense prepared when the NSA dismissed him last May based on what they called "psychological concerns". One wonders why then he held a security clearance and worked for the Agency for 20 years to suddenly become a concern just as he decided what he was doing was illegal. Tice says that's the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers.

Circumstances would tend to bear out Tice's assessment. The Washington Post today has an article on the conflicts of interest involved in official investigations of the Snoopgate scandal. The NSA Inspector-General has opened a probe into the legality of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, as instituted by Bush. Trouble is, the same Inspector-General has been intimately involved in approving the program. Meanwhile the I-G of the Justice Dept. seems to think his department has no jurisdiction to investigate the legality of the program but plenty of jurisdiction to investigate who leaked details of it. No matter, both I-G's would report their findings to the Attorney General and to the President - which leaves those under investigation for criminal activity in charge of the findings of those investigations.

I've argued before that the current system of checks and balances on possible illegal use of secret programs is a useless moebius strip. In such circumstances, it seems clear that whistleblowers should appeal to those who are, at the end, even the President's superiors - namely the American people - and doing so via the free press of the nation is exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they safeguarded that press's freedom.

Of course, Bush doesn't quite see it that way. The press is an obstacle to be misdirected, spun, overcome or, at the last, bombed into oblivion. It's come to a pretty pass when even ardent supporters of Bush wish that the tale of his intending to bomb the Al Jazeera HQ would simply go away because even they realise that "(a) it happened (not much doubt on that score), and (b) it wasn’t intended as a joke" Now, a rational person would begin to doubt that such a President, one who would bomb civilians in an allied nation, should be handed even more executive power or even allowed to hold his job. However, Mark Coffey of Decision '08 simply ends with "I don’t put this one very high on my list of worries." With such head-in-the-sand denial from his supporters, it becomes very easy for a would-be despot to incrementally increase his personal hold.

Which brings us neatly to what has been the greatest single source of my unease - the needless misdirection of resources from the hunt for dangerous terrorists into a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. Many military experts have been critical of the current administration's methods during the occupation that even their own hand-picked man admits they didn't plan for. The latest to join the chorus is a British general who accuses the US of "cultural ignorance, moralistic self-righteousness, unproductive micromanagement and unwarranted optimism" - a fairly succinct summary of the whole Bush White House effort, let alone the military's efforts.

In an article published this week in the Army magazine Military Review, British Brig. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was deputy commander of a program to train the Iraqi military, said American officers in Iraq displayed such "cultural insensitivity" that it "arguably amounted to institutional racism" and may have spurred the growth of the insurgency. The Army has been slow to adapt its tactics, he argues, and its approach during the early stages of the occupation "exacerbated the task it now faces by alienating significant sections of the population."

Being a Brit with a double-barrelled last name, the general is of course accused of being a "snob" - but he is echoing the opinion of William S. Lind, the conservative American expert who coined the phrase "Fourth Generation Warfare" and wrote, way back in October 2004:

Unfortunately, our leaders do not understand the Fourth Generation, so it appears we are about to throw this opportunity away. We continue to bomb and shell Fallujah, which pushes our enemies toward each other. We seem to be readying an all-out assault on the city, which will have the usual result when Goliath defeats David: a moral defeat for Goliath. Many Iraqis will die, the city will be wrecked (as always, we will promise to rebuild it but not do so), and any losses the insurgents suffer will be made up many times over by a flood of new recruits. Never was it more truly said that, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Nor are Lind and Brigadier Aylwin-Foster the only ones who have spoken out.

And now it seems that the last hopes of avoiding an Iraqi civil war are disappearing fast. The leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shiite faction, has killed any hope Sunni Iraqis had of making crucial changes to that nation's constitution - in particular he has rejected any changes to sections that allowed strong fereralized regions - and Sunnis are certain to feel conned by promises of compromise if they followed a political path rather than that of insurgency.

How will an Iraqi civil war turn out?Lind has a few suggestions:

If the Kurds join the Shiites in a general offensive against the Sunnis, the Sunnis will probably lose. A Sunni defeat means a vast out-migration of Sunnis from Iraq; many will end up in Europe, where they will strengthen the Islamic invasion of Christendom’s historic heartland. If the Kurds stay out, the Sunnis may be able to defeat the Shiites; there are a lot more Shiites, but the Sunnis are better militarily. However, a Sunni victory is likely to be only a defensive victory; it will not enable Sunnis to re-establish their rule over Shiite Iraq. That in turn suggests partition of Iraq, with a Shiite southern Iraq that would become a de facto province of Iran and a Turkish invasion of Kurdistan to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdish state.

On the other hand, a Shiite victory over the Sunnis would reverberate throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. Can the majority Sunnis accept a strategic victory by the despised Shiites, or are other Arab and Islamic forces drawn into what becomes a wider war? One of the great dangers of the war in Iraq has always been potential “spillover effects,” and a Shiite victory might trigger them.

Sounds terrible, doesn't it? Unless of course you are one of those neocons who is more concerned with the "War of Civilisations" or a member of the Religious Right thinking more of "The End Times" than on ensuring peace, stability and a constant flow of oil from the region.

I am seriously beginning to wonder what the Bush administration has in mind in the Middle East. Never mind the PR rhetoric - we already know from other matters that it doesn't need to connect with real policy as long as it gives plausible denial. A destabilized Middle East actually plays to the wishes of the "War of Cultures" neocon hawks as well as the New Jerusalem fantasies of the Armageddon crew. At the same time, a splintered Middle East guarantees high oil prices and thus high profits - just look at the last results from Exxon et. al. - and damn the poor bastards who need heating oil. My feelings of unease extend to wondering if civil war in Iraq and the inevitable spillover is now part of the plan.

The destabilization of the Middle East seems to be moving towards a new phase too. Despite the Iranian government and acknowledged nuclear experts repeatedly pointing out that Iran is entitled by international law to what it has done to date; despite the obvious intellectual dishonesty of Western nations who are aggresively pursuing their own nuclear power and weaponry programs; despite those same nations turning a blind eye to countries that haven't signed and kept to international treaties as Iran has...despite all this, the narrative rolls onwards just as it did before the invasion of Iraq with the blind co-operation of much of the supposedly-liberal media.

Given the Bush administration's record of sociopathic acts, deceptions and outright lies I feel I and many others have a perfect right to a sense of unease and a duty to voice it, no matter what Bush himself says in another attempt to stifle democratic rights.