A Crisis of Republican Faith

PH readers: A great group of guys in this northern New England 'hood, ranging in their politics from Attila to Tinkerbelle, carries on a sporadic, satirical public-policy debate by e-mail. The resident GOP-right-or-wrong booster -- let's call him "Pete" -- takes perverse delight in admitting GWB's a moral idiot and many of his policies disasters, yet crowing that GOP rule is a blessing that's here to stay. His latest missive, urging all us worried types to relax and enjoy "39 more months" of Bush-league government, prompted this farrago from yours truly. Since a number of folks have asked if they could forward it, I figured it belonged on this neglected blog.
Dear Pete,
     As you know, you have long since converted me to Republican wisdom. Nothing in my life has been so liberating, spiritually or financially, as the Christian right's discovery that commie-pinko clerics have deliberately mistranslated Christ's words for the last 2,000 years. Who would have suspected that "Love thy neighbor" actually meant "Fuck thy neighbor"? But it makes so much more sense! I mean, how could anyone live by that elitist riddle? The GOP gospel's so easily accessible, it's no wonder even our charity-C student, drug-addled future Bedwetter-In-Chief got religion!
     But Pete, every time I settle into not worrying and being happy, you come along and rattle my comfortable cage with some inadvertently terrifying factoid. Like, "another 39 months" of Dubya? Thirty-fucking-nine?
     Holy shit, Pete. I mean, I'm trying to be a good Republican, to skip thinking and just believe, but I can't help remembering that in much fewer than 48 months, the Great Unificator and his pals not only managed to ignore the loudest signals of incoming attack since those midget subs appeared in Pearl Harbor, but then turned the 9/11 tragedy into a nonstop economic tailspin, the excuse for two utterly botched, ruinously expensive and unending wars, and the passage of laws more restrictive of citizens' rights than any seen since the Palmer Raids. Now we have more enemies abroad than we could ever have imagined, and our rep as the world's bastion of freedom is about as legit as the writs by which we run a low-intensity, no-legality torture chamber in Guantanamo Bay.
     And heck, then I couldn't help thinking that the Adminstration repeated the same performance by ignoring the Katrina warnings, exhibiting the neocons' usual disdain for learning from experience and for useful planning (as opposed to warmongering, ideological mouthing-off and making sure their campaign contributors have plenty of White House office space in which to write energy legislation). They helped turn a big chunk of the USA into an unnecessarily dangerous and economically dead-in-the-water disaster area--- unless, of course, you work for KBR et al, who are now looting the American treasury on our own soil, where once they had to go all the inconvenient way to Iraq.
     And speaking of money, sometimes I worry about the way liberating the rich from unfair taxation -- and let's face it, all taxation of rich people is unfair; tax the poor, those parasites! -- is dooming any chance of balancing the budget into the imaginable future. This is the same mess Ronnie got into, only we're not outspending the Russkies to win the Cold War. We're just outspending ourselves! I mean, I know this is somehow a good thing, but then I remember that we didn't get a balanced budget until the Clinton years, when taxes were raised to reasonable levels, services were secure and everyone got plenty rich anyway...
     You see my problem? I mean, in way less than four years (including record-breaking vacation time), Dubya and Co. more or less freaking positioned the country to be the world's next great bankrupt oligarchy -- sort of a SuperMexico. And while I know that this is God's will, sometimes I get a little scared.
     I mean, give these guys 39 more months and we could be at war with China or Iran or DisneyWorld or Spanish Harlem or Mars. Screw ANWR: We could be boiling whale blubber for lamp oil. We could be keeping every vegetative accident victim in the world on million-dollar-a-year perpetual life support and forcing every pregnant 14-year-old to carry to term a child who'll never know Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, adequately funded public schools, unemployment benefits, student loans, verifiable voting, separation of church and state, checks and balances in government, or a time when chumps like Harriet Miers never got near the Supreme Court and America was ashamed of the word "empire."
     Not that any of these are necessarily bad things, you know, but gee... I guess I'll have to go study my Revised Conservative Bible a little more. I always get cheered up when Jesus says, "This above all: Screw they neighbor, not thyself." But then I read on and notice that, even in this version, the guys who nail Him up aren't horn-headed, alien Jews. They're regular-guy soldiers of empire, doing what empires always do...
     Awaiting your get-happy guidance,
     Bill

--- HistoryBuff

Concerned Over the I-91 Checkpoint?

If you're concerned about racial profiling, political scare theater and pork-barrel spending at the Border Patrol checkpoint on I-91 in Hartford, Vermont -- 100 miles from the Canadian border -- you're not alone! I've created a new site, StopTheCheckpoint.Com, as a rallying point for a spring/summer 2005 campaign to make sure this bad idea never gets the $9 million the agency seeks to make it permanent. The site contains links to more information. Here on PreemptiveHindsight, you can read my recent Boston Globe op-ed.
The checkpoint has been cutting back on hours lately, perhaps in repsonse to bad publicity that even included Newt Gingrich calling it a "stupid" idea! But it might just be hoping we'll think it's gone away--- while that $9 million appropriation is still actively under consideration! Let's get together and shut it down. Thanks!

--- HistoryBuff

Annoying, Obstructive, Utterly Essential: Why We Should Cherish The Filibuster

     A lot of people see the filibuster as another antique oddity, like the Electoral College -- or your appendix -- that ought to come out. But there are very important differences between the two. While the Electoral College is a Constitutional glitch that doesn't work as intended and actually discourages democratic participation, the filibuster is a carefully constructed rule that, despite appearances, actually makes the Senate work the Framers' will.
     The filibuster is essentially a braking mechanism. It has been used by the forces of reaction (as opposed to progress) in the past, most notably when Southern senators filibustered Civil Rights legislation. But that case points out that the filibuster is not a veto on change, but only a brake on it; it's a rule that evolved to ensure that the Senate would be the slow-percolating, let's-think-this-over chamber that the Founders intended as a check to the designed-in quick responsiveness of the House.
     During the Civil Rights struggle, the filibuster expressed many Southerners' fear of desegregation, the black vote, etc., but it couldn't stop positive change, because in the end the filibustering delay only made the American people's will toward positive change more evident.
     In the present case, the radical Republicans know that the great majority of Americans are NOT behind them in pushing ultraconservative judges. They know that the delay of filibustering would only expose the narrowness of their political base. In issues without 9/11 scare tactics attached, such as right-wing judges and Social Secuity, these guys are in trouble-- and they know it.
     The filibuster helps make the Senate what it is: a body that moves slowly enough to encourage consideration of minority concerns, and to discourage both the long-term tyranny of majorities and the hasty tactics by which powerfully backed minorites -- such as the GOP's current radical wing -- can exploit national emergencies to effect profound and detrimental changes to our way of life.
     When trying to asses the filibuster's usefulness and legitimacy, it's helpful to compare its history and origins with those of the Electoral College.
     The Electoral College was a fundamental error in the Founders' scheme. It didn't work well from the start, since it was incapable of coping with party politics, and needed almost immediate amendment -- the 12th Amendment, to be exact -- to make it somewhat workable. (It could not be got rid of entirely, as some politicians were in agreement with the essentially elitist, anti-one man/one vote thinking behind its creation.)
     The College has only caused trouble ever since. While some try to explain its potential to overturn the popular vote as the Framers' designed-in check to regionalism or party feeling or what-have-you, history contradicts such postdated rationales. What's more, the Electoral College has only overruled the popular vote in cases of outright election fraud -- or, to describe the Supreme Court's 2000 appointment of George W. Bush more politely, extreme interventions and manipulations. It is indeed an arcane and dangerous institution, one that we need to abolish before it does the country still more damage.
     The filibuster, on the other hand, is (like the 12th Amendment) a patch devised to correct some of the Constitution's weaknesses. The Founders intended the Senate as a go-slow chamber, but it wasn't slow enough, as designed, to represent minority opinion and make all sides feel they'd at least been heard --- which is a crucial function of legislative bodies, if countries are going to stay in one piece.
     It's worth emphasizing that point: If large minorities feel they have no voice in a system, history shows that the results -- political and social polarization, violent dissent, even civil war and revolution -- are far worse than the frustrations of, say, having one's Civil Rights bills or nominees filibustered.
     The filibuster is, in essence, a free society's acknowledgment that free debate on issues of extreme importance should not be suppressed for convenience's sake or at power's pleasure.
     Some tradition or rule of delaying action is found in many legislatures: South Korean politicians, for example, dramatize their opposition by "cow walking" to the podium with infinite slowness.
     The gabby American style was given official form by a rules change in 1806. Further changes limited its use, but few historians see these changes as failed attempts to eradicate the filibuster; rather, they were refinements to an important rule that most politicians in both parties wanted to preserve. The filibuster has survived for almost 200 years, through numerous crises, because -- up until now -- a majority of senators cherished the tradition of free speech even more than they honored party ideology or loyalty.
     In other words, the filibuster is not (like the Electoral College) a mistaken holdover, but a painstakingly evolved solution that makes our often brutally winner-take-all system MORE representative, not less.
     Here's my analogy: The Electoral College is like the Jim Crow (and still more antique) laws that restricted representation in our system to elites; the filibuster is like the Civil Rights laws that ensure that even our minorities have a chance to represent themselves powerfully (if not always successfully).
     Thus, getting rid of the filibuster isn't like doing away with the "arcane" Electoral College: It's like getting rid of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
     I know, I know: That sounds melodramatic. We have strong emotional ties to the Voting Rights Act, and its achievements seem much greater than the annoying, unlovable filibuster's. But it's only an analogy, not an exact comparison, and with that proviso I'll say it again: The filibuster is the Senate's own Voting Rights Act. We mustn't let it go.

--- HistoryBuff

Pat Robertson: "'Activist' Judges More Dangerous Than Osama, Hitler and Tojo"

    OK, I admit it. I've always detested Pat Robertson. After my sister died of AIDS, then-presidential hopeful Pat came to New Hampshire, his campaign rhetoric including the novel ideas that God was using AIDS to punish sinners
and that the disease could be spread through the air. I thought of a lot of things I would have liked to do or say to the reverend, but when I met him in the course of my work as a journalist, I treated him with professional restraint -- and, frankly, with Christian pity for his vicious self-righteousness.
        Well, as you may have noticed by now, the Republican fundamentalist far right has long since stopped excercising any discernible restraint whatsoever. From lying about WMDs to get scores of thousands of Iraqis and more than 1500 Americans killed in a war for strategic control of oil, to "outing" a CIA undercover agent to punish dissent, and from legalizing torture to dancing a political jig with Terry Schiavo's corpse, they've given us plenty of reason to believe there isn't much they wouldn't say or do to achieve their ends.
        And now comes the Rev. Pat to articulate the party line on "activist judges." (That's the current GOP term of art for judges who do not agree with torture; who uphold a spouse's right to make decisions for a terminally ill partner; who support laws restricting corporate rape of the environment; and who aren't impressed with the need to teach fundamentalist "creation science" in our schools.) On Sunday morning, the old Christian Coalition co-founder told TV viewers nationwide that the threat posed by liberal federal judges is "probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."
     Yeah, you read that right.
     And I know it's shocking. But, admit it: You're not really surprised. It was only a matter of time before the far right got around to equating their domestic opposition with Al-Qaeda. Hey, if it worked for the Iraq War, why not try it at home? And by the way, when (on that same show) George Stephanopoulos asked if Robertson really believed that these judges posed "the most serious threat America has faced in nearly 400 years of history, more serious than al Qaeda, more serious than Nazi Germany and Japan, more serious than the Civil War?," the Reverend responded, "George, I really believe that." (Check it out at http://mediamatters.org/items/200505020003.)
     Now, this would be amusing, in a Billy Sunday kind of way, if it weren't a fact that Robertson's Christian Coalition is absolutely in synch with the dark heart of the religious right/megabusiness partnership that is the party of the Bush Administration, the Frist Senate and the DeLay House. What he says is what they want. If the preacher gets away with saying it, the pols will join in. (DeLay has already made statements almost as inflammatory.) It seems a safe bet that the rhetoric of intolerance and incitement may rise to a level we haven't known since the McCarthy Era----- and then get worse.
     And it's all happening, not to suit the people who believe the Earth is flat, but because megabusiness has learned to use the religious right to make its dreams come true. Believe me, Dick Cheney doesn't care whether American kids are taught "creation science," but he and his real, true friends are thrilled at the thought of an end to filibusters, of federal courts packed with judges who abhor environmental protections and workers' rights. The Reverend Pat may or may not sincerely believe this is all about God, but don't be fooled: This "crisis" of the "activist judges" is all about money. It's about laws and rights that get in the way of money being made. It's about ungodly greed.
     So... What are we going to do? Well, obviously, your representatives and the White House need a phone call or an e-mail from you. But I'm pleased to see that moveon.org has a clever strategy that you can aid with just a few clicks. Get on over to http://www.moveonpac.org/robertson/ (paste that address in your browser, or just click on it, if your e-mail program highlights it) and add your name to a petition demanding that Sen Bill Frist and Rep. Tom Delay publicly condem Robertson's comments and stop intimidating judges.
     In other words, force them to act like Americans, like statesmen. Like rational adults.
     As for the Reverend Pat, well, what can you say about a guy who makes Pat Buchanan seem both credible and likable?
     Just pray for him, friends. Thanks for reading. Yours in action and love for this country, Bill

--- HistoryBuff

Fighting (And Losing) The Last War...In Bunny Slippers, No Less

    It occurred to me --- as I untied my hiking boots in the airport so they could pass through an x-ray machine in order to add yet another layer of spurious safety to the mass illusion known as "Homeland Security" --- that I was fighting the last war.
        You know, as in that old axiom of futility, "Generals are always planning to fight the last war"?
    In the 1930s, the generals of France were preparing to fight the battles of 1914-1918. In the 1910s, they were preparing to refight the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And when American generals squared off for the Civil War, the big shots were hooked on the doctrines of Napoleon and Jomini.
    And so it goes, back to the first hominid who was counting on teeth and claws -- until his opponent picked up a rock.
    America, the battle of the Shoe Bomber is over. Al-Qaeda is as likely to send over another sneaker attack as it is to buy tickets for another five Arabic-looking guys with box cutters. It's not likely to send another tender full of kaboom out to a U.S. Navy vessel in a Yemeni port, either.
    Strangely enough, Japan didn't spend the rest of WWII trying to sneak up on Hawaii, either.
    In fact, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 have something in common besides the obvious: Both were the opening gambits of limited-objective wars.
    Japan didn't imagine it could "conquer" America, any more than Al-Qaeda imagined that 9/11 would "defeat" us. Japan's war planners hoped to sink enough of America's Pacific fleet to buy many months' grace for its occupation and fortification of oil-rich Southeast Asia. They gambled that, by the time we were ready to strike back, their position would be too strong to make war worth our while.
    They gambled wrong.
    Osama and company's 9/11 objective was not to conquer America -- as if! -- but to reap tremendous political profit in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda bet that America's overkill response would galvanize anti-imperialist, anti-Western elements from Algiers to Sarawak.
    They bet right.
    End of war.
    That's right. In a limited war, the player who achieves his war aims and is alive to tell the tale is the winner. Al-Qaeda got what it wanted (i.e., a hell of a lot of publicity and recruiting momentum) and we didn't. (We didn't get Osama, we didn't get all the Taliban, we didn't get a stable Afghanistan --- hell, we didn't even get to keep our allies' sympathy.)
    War is an instrument of policy, and unless you are so cynical as to believe that neocons in the Bush Administration knew of and welcomed a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil (as an answer to the prayers of the Project for a New American Century) you have to concede that the "War of 9/11" --- including the Battle of the Shoe Bomb -- is a done deal. The Bush Administration certainly thought so, as it settled for far less than Osama's head on a pike and started a brand-new war of its own.
    It's worth noting that the essential strategy of terror/guerrilla warfare is to tie up maximal amounts of your enemy's manpower, wealth, resources and strength-of-morale at minimal effort and cost.
    I got dizzy, waiting for my shoes to be screened, when I tried to calculate the extra hours expended by all the Americans who would have to arrive hours early and wait in airport lines that day so they could give up their toenail clippers and penknives (while the smokers among them were permitted to carry on high-tech lighters that would have made Richard Reid a successful martyr). My head swam, imagining the sky-high stack of dollars being spent on airport security measures and forces -- not to mention on Homeland Security pork projects like far-from-the-border Border Patrol stations and infrared goggles for the East Nowheresville Volunteer Fire Department -- that aren't doing a thing to protect us against the next war.
    But individual Americans, I noticed, are often more flexible and foresightful than their leaders. The man in the picture, glimpsed in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, had embraced the Transportation Safety Administration's recommendation that air travelers wear slip-on footgear. Since we're forced to facilitate our own full-body frisking, why stop with shoes? Like Americans everywhere who'd happily surrender a few "rights" to score some "security," he's ready to slip out of something more comfortable...

--- HistoryBuff

More On Border Patrol's 'Whiteness Checkpoint': NY Public Radio

    Pat Bradley of Albany-based WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, reported today on growing opposition to the proposed permanent Border Patrol presence in Hartford, Vt. (see earlier post, ‘The Whiteness Checkpoint’). Here’s a link to an MP3, which includes a soundbite from yours truly.

--- HistoryBuff

Christo's 'Gates': A Perfect Moment For Content-Free Public Art

    Perhaps it was a bad idea for a history buff to approach "The Gates," Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Feb. 12-28 installation in New York's Central Park, by way of Columbus Circle.
    The roundabout at the park's southwest corner is, after all, a monument to consequentiality: Atop his 40-foot pillar, Christopher Columbus looks around Manhattan like the guy who made all this possible--- which, in some measure, he is. Though he's now dwarfed by the innovative architecture of telecom corporate HQs, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas still demands his props. (So does gilt William Tecumseh Sherman, guardian of the park's southeast entrance: To rate one of these spots, you have to either discover a new world or burn down an old one.)
    And entering the park by the circle's Merchant's Gate is like running a referential gauntlet. The major distraction is the U.S.S. Maine Memorial, a 1913 massif carved with the names of the crew of the battleship that blew up in Havana Harbor in 1898, providing the dubious pretext for the Spanish-American War. (Headlines screamed, "SABOTAGE!"; later investigations whispered, "accident.") But statutes, plaques and commemorations of various kinds are everywhere, especially when you reach the foot of the Mall and step into the arcade of curling elms and bronze penmen known as Literary Walk.
    Of course, by then we'd passed between several hundred of "The Gates"' 7,500 bright orange paired pylons, and under an equal number of flapping, bright-orange clouts of nubbled synthetic fabric. They were pretty, despite the fact that the advertised "saffron" orange wasn't really all that far off from everyday U-Haul orange. The light of a bright winter afternoon sometimes filtered through the drapery to impart an orange glow to park pathways. And how could all that effort at outdoor dress-up not be cheery? Yes, it was a $23-million effort, admirably organized and engineered, but the park would likely have been quite as beautified by so many hanging flags of all nations, or donated quilts, or super-size beach towels printed with poems from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
     But of course, "The Gates" was devoid of all such possibly divisive or limiting or ennobling content, and so was merely, and quite pleasingly, pretty.
    Surrounded by statues of Shakespeare and Byron, Halleck and Burns -- none of them great statues; but then again, I'd venture to predict that "The Gates" won't make anyone's 21st-century Top 100 in 2099 -- it was hard not to question the meaning of meaningless public art. Central Park itself is an artwork, a huge, evolving "installation" of a complexity and profundity that makes "The Gates" seem like a pencil doodle. And its content is a sermon on citizenship and civic virtues. "The Gates" succeeded, I think, because they invited us to celebrate this treasure--- but in that sense, they had no more intrinsic meaning than the gallery light that shines on the "Mona Lisa."
    What does it mean that we're embracing public art that, of itself, says nothing to the public? What does it mean that the most prominent recent proposals for meaningful public art -- e.g., the World Trade Center rebuild and the WWII memorial on the mall in D.C. -- are specimens of bombastic kitsch?
    Well, "art" that isn't about anything is the ultimate escapism. And kitsch is, in the main, the art of egregious self-congratulation. Neither intends to say anything accurate about who and what we are. (By contrast, though Columbus, Sherman, Shakespeare and the other Central Park statues are more or less hagiographic, they do proclaim our intent to embrace their works.) As the first celebration New York has thrown for itself since 9/11 (New Year's Eve doesn't count; it's for the cameras), the content-free "Gates" seems to say... "Let's not think too hard."
    And that DOES ring true. Public art -- once devoted, as was Cleopatra's Needle, the 2,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk set up by the Metroplitan Museum, to the details of history and the ideals of civilization -- may have to play it safe in a society currently devoted to accepting the indefensible. How does one design a monument to preemptive attacks upon weak and distant neighbors? To nonexistent WMDs? To the government's bold assertion of the right to torture and hold without charge foreigners AND U.S. citizens? Columbus symbolizes visionary daring; Sherman, God's "terrible, swift sword" scything slavery and rebellion. Who would care to be cast in bronze as the embodiment of our brave attempt to exercise direct control over the lion's share of Middle Eastern oil reserves?
    And since it's considered disloyal to even mention that last motivation -- despite its prominence in pre-war neoconservative game plans -- and since all the offered excuses for invading Iraq fell apart, this is a remarkably content-free war. Such a conflict can only be prosecuted by a nation with a remarkably content-free collective consciousness.
    And that does seem to be what we're becoming. Francis Fukuyama got "The End of History and the Last Man" wrong. He thought that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy had triumphed over competing ideologies (e.g., Soviet-style communism) and that capitalism and liberal democracy would co-reign over the future. He somehow didn't foresee that --- sure as the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a U.S.-China superpower struggle -- capitalism and liberalism, left all to themselves, would not co-exist but duke it out. And right now, capital is hitting liberal democracy right where it lives: in reason, information, memory and debate.
    It was one thing for the Hearst papers to shout incendiary half-truths in 1898, when any major city had several important newspapers offering in-depth coverage of the truth's other halves. Today, FOX News is the only "news" source for half of a non-reading nation, and informs that half so badly that most still do not realize Saddam Husseim had no WMDs and nothing to do with 9/11. The slice of all network news time devoted to reporting (high overhead) international and national stories of consequence is now much smaller than the whopping helping devoted to (cheaply produced) lifestyle and local crime segments, and it's shrinking to the size of a parsley garnish. Capitalism is unmaking journalism, dismantling the Fourth Estate. The bottom line is that content costs too much -- and that's fine, since a lot of that content would only embarrass and inconvenience the very corporations that own the news media. News-wise, history-wise, we're entering an era of extremely noisy silence, of bright, quick cuts to emptiness.
    Walking back out of the park, out of "The Gates"' blank orange blare, I passed the Maine monument again. This time I noticed that the names of officers and crewmen on its northwest side -- carved just 92 years ago -- were already almost illegible, smoothed away by acid rain.

--- HistoryBuff

Uniting Islamic Resistance -- Just As We Did In 1902

    American troops invaded Moslem territory "`in order to prevent war.'" They "learned too late" that American actions "had unified the Moslem leaders who had traditionally fought among themselves."
    It sounds like a gloss on reluctant admissions by President Bush and Pentagon officials that America's Iraq war has made common cause between "foreign jihadists," Al-Qaeda and diehard Baathists. But the quotes above come from historian Stuart Creighton Miller's book, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903.
    One hundred and four years ago, American troops were sent to occupy the largely Moslem southern islands of the Philippine archipelago. America had "won" the Philippines in the brief, breathtakingly optional Spanish-American War of 1898, a war sold to the American public as a crusade to free Cuba from Saddam-like Spanish strongmen such as Gen. Valeriano "Butcher" Weyler. But America ended up in possession of Spain's entire overseas empire, and many Filipinos -- expecting liberation, not occupation -- were less than grateful for the change of ownership.
    It took our army two years to destroy the Filipino patriot militia that had helped oust the Spanish from Manila, the colonial capital on the island of Luzon. As always happens when foreign troops pursue indigenous guerrillas, civilians suffered the most. An American general estimated that one-sixth of the population of Luzon died before resistance collapsed.
    Not surprisingly, in 1901, when American forces arrived in the Moslem islands to the south, they met with alarm and defiance. Moro tribesmen fought the soldiers however they could -- sometimes with swords against Gatling guns. Though they occasionally savaged unwary U.S. platoons or companies, it was mostly a war that killed a single American soldier today and another tomorrow. Acting on orders, army troops slaughtered Filipinos by the tens, by the scores, by whole villages.
    American policies unified Moslem groups long used to making war on each other. Consequently, organized resistance lasted far longer than any U.S. strategist had anticipated. In fact, despite massacres that depopulated entire districts, and the invention of a prototypical napalm to aid in burning villages, American troops never quite eliminated the Moro "insurgents": Their descendants are members of today's Moro Liberation Front and allegedly Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf.
    Miller's brilliant 1982 study is one of the few exhumations of this catastrophe in print. That's no surprise: Soured by court martials that indicated their "splendid little war" had degenerated into a drawn-out atrocity, most Americans decided to forget the conflict before it was finished. And that's too bad, since a national memory of the Moro war's horrors could have warned us about Vietnam -- and Iraq.
    The analogies are not specious, and they're no stretch. For instance, anti-American feeling in the Middle East today is exacerbated by the perception that Americans are "crusaders" -- a perception supported by Lt. Gen. William Boykin’s “Christian army” rhetoric. In 1902, Maj. Gen. Adna Chaffee drove the reportedly America-friendly Sultan of Bacalod into rebellion when he commanded the ruler to "cease from troubling the progress of Christianity and make up your mind to be good."
    In 1902, Secretary of War Elihu Root observed that American soldiers fought evildoers in "a population among whom it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe." While figures for Iraqi civilian casualties of U.S. “friendly fire” are in dispute, one need only Google up a search such as “+"Iraqis killed" +checkpoints +civilian” to be reminded that U.S. soldiers have once again been put in a place where self-preservation encourages them to shoot civilians first and ask questions later.
    In Iraq, we're referring to resistants by that time-honored misnomer, "insurgents" -- fighters in opposition to lawful authority -- as we did the locals who opposed U.S. occupations and puppet governments in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Vietnam and El Salvador. We’re back to destroying cities and villages in order to "save" them, back to “pacifying” people who have learned to identify us with everything other than peace.
    Perhaps this war will eventually sputter out, like the Moro conflict. But the Moros' island strongholds were far more easily isolated from outside aid and reinforcements. Whether the generals like to admit it or not, Iraq's long borders are a strategic problem with precedents in Vietnam -- and Afghanistan. And the long list of Saddam's former enemies and rivals who now cooperate to imperil U.S. troops is a page out of 1902.

--- HistoryBuff

'The Whiteness Checkpoint'in The Boston Globe

(Jan. 19 update: This protest has now appeared in regional papers including the Valley News and Keene (N.H.) Sentinel. Thanks, VN, for permission to use Laura DeCapua's photo! Strong e-mail and letter-to-editors reaction gives hope that people may be ready to challenge "terror war" policy...)

    My op-ed on the Border Patrol's checkpoint in Hartford, Vt., appears in The Boston Globe today.

        ARRIVING a few minutes late, I told my students about a delay at the Interstate 91 Border Patrol checkpoint in Hartford, 100 miles from the Canada line.
        "Oh," a twenty-something student asked, "you mean the Whiteness Checkpoint'?"
        His classmates didn't laugh out loud. They just snickered, appreciating an apparently well-worn joke.   ... click to read rest of Globe op-ed!

    It's great to have this piece appear in the region's "hometown" paper. These new "terror war" checkpoints, far inside our borders, won't stop terrorists, but they do institutionalize racial profiling and promote the administration's "stay scared" agenda. Click for links to stories on the checkpoint's intrusive operations and proposed $9-million HQ.
    Global protests couldn't stop the Iraq invasion-- but couldn't national and local protests stop the building of this first of many proposed "inland" roadblocks?

Battle Day in Concord: Shades of Insurgencies Past

This op-ed originally appeared in the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel and other New England newspapers.

    We stood by the hundreds on the river's east bank, boosting our kids so they could see the redcoats march down to the old North Bridge.
    April 21, 2004 was as fair a Patriots Day as I can remember in Concord, Mass., where they re-enact the skirmish Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the shot heard round the world" – the 1775 affray that started our Revolutionary War. A late but vehement thaw raised the Concord River high up the pilings of "the rude bridge that arched the flood," and a surge of tourism all but overfilled the battlefield park.
    The King's men -- marching in cadence, festooned with the latest in military hardware -- certainly looked like world-beaters, the Old World's greatest army. How could they be defeated by the homespun amateurs marching down the opposite bank?
    It's worth remembering just what the British were trying to accomplish that day: Troops had been sent to rescue the sensible majority of colonists – at least a third of whom were Tories, and another third neutral – from terrorist groups such as the Sons of Liberty.
    Of course, even local Tories understood that England – for all its crusading rhetoric – was serving its own strategic interests. The prime minister's hard line had less to do with colonists' welfare than with British re-election politics. But British generals believed the insurgents could be pacified if top rebels were jailed. The primary aim of the march on Lexington and Concord was to capture radical leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
    In other words, the British raid had much in common with American soldiers' 1993 attempt to capture a warlord in Mogadishu – and present American attempts to arrest or kill rebel leaders in Najaf, Fallujah and other Iraqi cities.
    "What North Bridge showed," the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, "was that sheer technical superiority isn't everything in warfare. Historians have been telling us lately that the fabled Minutemen weren't such hotshots after all. ... But then, neither were those Somali fighters, who made up for it with ferocity and sheer numbers."
    By the time they reached Concord, the British knew they'd failed to catch Hancock and Adams. They burned rebel supplies – but nearby Minutemen thought the British were torching the village. Enraged, they marched on the North Bridge, receiving a volley that, among other losses, killed their drummer boy.
    That was the moment when the British expected victory. Astonishingly, though, Emerson’s "embattled farmers" stood their ground – and fired back. Outnumbered and – more important – outmotivated by men who believed they were fighting for family and freedom, the British turned and ran.
    For all the good the next few years' fighting did them, the imperial troops might just as well have marched straight onto their ships in Boston harbor and sailed home.
    The essential lessons of the long debacle had already been learned: Overwhelming military might is a clumsy instrument to use on a popular rebellion. Insurgents in faraway countries don't have to beat you to win; they just have to keep fighting. If rebels can't be cut off from supplies and reinforcements, their will to fight will outlast yours. Troop masses can't move as nimbly as individual targets, and troops moving in rebel territory almost never achieve surprise.
    But learning lessons and learning from them are very different things.
    On Patriots Day 2004, as always, the Minutemen stormed across the bridge and the British – dragging their wounded – scurried away, with our children firing plastic muskets at their backs. We cheered the occupying army's defeat, the insurgents' victory.
    But it felt more than a little strange.

--- HistoryBuff

America Needs to Talk About The “O” Word: Oil

  Alright, America. It’s time to talk about the “o” word.
  No, not that one. I mean the one we really avoid talking about. The one we’ll do shocking things to get. Our most wanton, shameful secret.
  Oil.
  We need to talk, because all our excuses for invading Iraq have come apart like philanderers’ alibis for motel afternoons. Now it’s time to come clean.
  Americans and oil: We’ve got a thing going on.
  Of course, we never meant to hurt anybody. But admit it: Sometime before the invasion, you thought something like, “Even if there’re no WMDs, it’s a good thing to sack Saddam – and it wouldn’t hurt to pay less at the pump.”
  So we went along. Maybe we had misgivings, but we didn’t join those few protesters in the park. We answered “No War For Oil” with rationalizations ranging from “It’s not that simple” to “One 9/11's not enough for you people?”
  We more or less fell for the administration’s lines: Osama links, yellowcake, anthrax-laden drones, intercontinental missiles.
  They never mentioned petroleum.
  And if we brought it up, it was like discussing honeymoon intimacies at a church supper. One shock-and-awe day, I confessed to a friend – a Vietnam-protesting lefty liberal – my worry that the whole thing boiled down to oil.
  “I can’t believe you just said that,” he huffed. “It’s so simplistic.”
  “But,” I asked meekly, “what’s the one thing you can take out of this huge mess – terrorism, Iraq, Israel, the Middle East, America – that changes everything?”
  “9/11!” he hissed. “9/11 changed everything!”
  “Well, no. It’s not new, people hating us because we support rotten governments for oil’s sa –”
  “Go wash your mouth out!”
  OK, he didn’t say that, but he meant it. Talking about post-9/11 policies in terms of oil was like reducing romantic relationships to sex.
  How crude.
  But what’s the one element you could take out of the mating game that would change everything?
  We like to focus on mating’s romantic elaborations, rather than its imperative essence. And we’re free to do that: Assuming we’re single and childless, we’re only playing with our own lives.
  Similarly, Americans would like to focus on romantic, heroic reasons for invading Iraq – on avenging 9/11, promoting democracy, fighting terror – rather than on the real one.
  But we can’t.
  We can’t, credibly, because all the lies have been exposed.
  We can’t, morally, because we’re playing with many millions of lives.
  So it’s time to talk about the “o” word. About all the “former” oil company operatives directing this war. About the only Iraqi facilities we protected from looting (hint: not hospitals, not banks, not alleged WMD sites). About the only reason America pays more attention to Iraq than it does to, say, sub-Saharan Africa. About America’s 20-plus million barrel-a-day habit, and who’s paying for it.
  About the only word that can explain all this administration’s decisions.
  Alright, not the only one. We also need to talk about that “r” word we just ran into: re-election.

--- HistoryBuff