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May 10, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
and Teens: Criminalizing the Victiims
Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Analyst Details
The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United States
Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Institutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
May 6, 2002
Fran Schor
Invasion
of Iraq:
Coming Soon
Dave Marsh
Love Hurts
John Chuckman
The
Paradoxes of Israel
Rep. Ron Paul
End Corporate Welfare, Pull
the Plug on the Ex-Im Bank
Hussein
Ibish
Devastation
Only Feeds Resistance to Israeli Rule
May 5, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
High and Dry in the Mojave
May 4, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Sharon
the Merciless
and Arafat the Corrupt
Sam Bahour
New United States of Israel
Alexander
Cockburn
Extreme
Solutions:
Priests and Palestinians
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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May
12, 2002
Why Is America Behaving This
Way?
A Letter to
European Friends
By Bernard Weiner
Dear Jacqueline and Wolfgang:
You say that as Europeans, you can't
figure out why the U.S. is "rampaging around the globe,
behaving like an arrogant bully." So, while we're waiting
for the attack-on-Iraq shoe to drop, let me try to offer a few
perspectives that put the current U.S. government's actions into
an understandable context.
To begin to discern the global tides,
one must first understand the domestic currents. The key event
in America's recent history is the collapse of the Soviet Union
and its empire. The U.S. no longer had a simple world to navigate:
our enemy, the one who provided a balance-of-power container,
wasn't there any more.
Internally, the American right wing,
which had always organized itself around combatting communism,
desperately needed a new enemy. The fast-changing world was frightening,
scary. The new enemy became that very confusion itself. For the
Right, the political symbol of that chaos and uncertainty --
and, most importantly, moral laxity -- was the liberal Democratic
Party and its supporters. And thus began the move toward the
current nasty Cultural Civil War in America.
As in other societies, in America the
confusions of the modern world had led to the swift growth of
fundamentalist religious organizations, which promise to explain
away the terrors with simplistic enemies: the Devil, '60s ex-hippies,
secular humanists, abortionists, homosexuals, atheists, non-believers
among the faithful, you get the idea.
So there we were with no unifying Communist
enemy, no clear-cut answers to life's confusing complexities,
the social fabric already fraying because of the near-civil-war
we experienced over Vietnam, no clear direction provided us in
this new, open-ended world. Democrats began to resemble Republicans
as everyone more or less hovered for psychological safety around
the middle part of the spectrum, sometimes a little bit Right
(Nixon, even Reagan), sometimes a little bit Left (Carter, Clinton),
but mostly operating from the center out, while the country tried
to figure out where to go.
The HardRight
But there was one group that quickly
was getting its act together: the HardRight. Motivated by economic
greed and a lust for power, they quickly saw the opportunity
ahead for seizing total control. After all, in global terms,
the U.S. was now the world's only superpower; who was there to
stop America? In domestic terms, near-total control is a bit
trickier to bring off, being a democracy and all, but remained
the goal.
The HardRight -- a coalition of religious
fundamentalists, corporate movers and shakers, and political
extremists, many of them politicians -- grew out of the traditional
Conservative movement, But these HardRight types thought, given
that the liberal/centrist approach would take the country to
ruin and continued moral decline, that the normal rules of civil
political debate, and the checks-and-balances system, were too
confining. It would take these zealots far too long to get anything
done if they remained straight-jacketed by the usual rules of
democracy and the politics of civility and compromise. (Of course,
in Europe and elsewhere, similar movements began to develop,
with not a little smell of neo-fascism in many of those parties
and organizations.)
The HardRight leaders were desperate.
Their chance to take over -- and thus move their greed-and-power
agenda through quickly -- was in jeopardy, inevitably getting
smothered in the give-and-take of traditional politics, one party
in power and then the other, etc. Something had to give.
They were all poised for total control
of the three branches of government: the Congress (led by the
likes of such GOP HardRightists Gingrich and Armey and Delay
and Lott), the Courts (more and more packed with HardRightists),
the Executive (Democrat Clinton was looking more and more vulnerable
and irrelevant). And then, surprise of surprises, Clinton got
re-elected, and continued to exercise his veto over the HardRight's
more outrageous proposals. Clinton was anything but a Leftwinger
-- he operated mostly from the center -- but so strong was the
HardRight's ability to set the agenda in the country that they
had effectively moved the parameters of discussion, thus making
the center "the left". Clinton was blocking the way
and had to go.
Thus the HardRight's ferocious assault
on Clinton, the aim being to wreck his presidency, one way or
another. As in the HardRight's other fights, the only object
is to win, to destroy the other side; doesn't matter if you lie,
smear, make 180-degree turns in your own expressed principles.
Only victory will suffice. Clinton, unable to control his own
adolescent impulses, stepped into the trap; true, he wasn't removed
from office, but the never-ceasing attacks and investigations
-- which, of course, ultimately yielded no illegalities, only
consensual sex (we'll ignore for a moment the adulterous hypocrisies
in the GOP) -- basically destroyed his effectiveness as a Chief
Executive, and gave the HardRight an organizing point in ratcheting
up the Cultural Civil War.
(There have been earlier books by journalists
and other uninvolved outsiders detailing the HardRight's campaign
to seize power, and now, finally, there is a book by a very-much-involved
insider, David Brock's "Blinded by the Right," which
names names and dates and places where the HardRight conspiracy
did its dirty work. Brock was the journalist who smeared Anita
Hill in the Clarence Thomas episode, and who got the Paula Jones/Bill
Clinton story started. In this book, he recants his sleazy HardRight
role, and apologizes to those whose reputations he ruined.)
HardRight Agenda
Gets Blocked
Just as the GOP did itself in by nominating
the bland Bob Dole, because it was "his turn," the
Democrats four years later nominated the bland (and, by association
with Clinton, somewhat tainted) Gore. His campaign was a see-sawing
disaster, but, even so, Gore managed to win the popular vote,
by about a half-million ballots. The other side, which nominated
a none-too-bright and inexperienced front man, George W. Bush,
played political hardball all the way, and the traditional liberals
and centrists surrounding Gore never knew what hit them. In the
end, ideological HardRightists on the U.S. Supreme Court, totally
reversing their principles on states' rights, simply pulled the
plug on counting all the votes and installed Bush as President.
Now the HardRight could move quickly
to establish total dominance over the three branches of government,
and ram through their agenda: everything for the wealthy and
big corporations, the moral/cultural issues for the fundamentalist
base of the party, the dismantling of the New Deal/Great Society
programs and policies, the destruction of environmental regulations,
etc. etc.
All was looking good until Republican
Senator Jeffords, out of principle, deserted the conservative
party and chose to vote with the Democrats, thus taking control
of the U.S. Senate away from the HardRight Republicans. This
meant that the entire HardRight agenda was now in jeopardy, as
the centrist Democrats could block any meaningful Bush&Co.
legislation. Something had to be done.
The 9/11 Attacks
Now please don't get me wrong. I am NOT
saying that the Bush Administration ordered or supported the
September 11th attacks on the U.S.; there simply is no proof
that they knew the targets and date of the attack, only that
"something big" was coming. What I am saying is that
those attacks were used mightily by Bush&Co. -- perhaps with
plans drawn up earlier -- to accomplish what could not be accomplished
by other means: the seizing of fuller power, the movement of
America closer to a martial-law society, the evisceration of
key civil liberties, the cowing of the Democratic opposition
in the name of support-the-war "patriotism," the speedy
passage of legislation designed to roll back the social programs
of the past 40 years because money to pay for them was taken
away (either locked up for a decade in huge tax cuts to the wealthiest
Americans and corporations, or spent in war-related adventures),
the weakening of oversight agencies that normally would be protecting
consumers and the environment, etc. etc.
Again, don't misunderstand what I'm saying.
Once the U.S. was attacked, it had to respond vigorously in defense,
and even go on the offense in some way. These are vicious religious
extremists, who must be stopped. The point I'm making here is
that, right or wrong in methodology, the Bush Administration
has been highly manipulative in using the 9/11 tragedy to its
ideological advantage and to the advantage of its corporate sector,
especially in the energy/oil arena. Those who disagree are treated
as unpatriotic.
On the global front, the hawks in the
Administration saw that, as the remaining superpower on the planet,
they could do more or less what they wanted in military terms,
setting up and supporting friendly regimes (Afghanistan, Israel,
et al.) and engineering the demise of those deemed unfriendly
(Iraq, Venezuela, et al.). In all cases, the grays of complexity
were overlooked and simplistic black-and-white, you're-with-us-or-against-us
diplomacy ruled the day.
Europe, the United Nations, global treaties
-- nothing and nobody was permitted to stop the U.S. unilaterist
approach to foreign relations. What the U.S. elephant wanted,
the U.S. elephant moved to take or control, always for the benefit
of its corporate-class sponsors. European and other complaints
were heard and brushed aside as irrelevant to the task at hand:
the establishment of a Pax Americana across the globe.
Hopeful Signs
Normally, the U.S. population and Congress
would debate such sweeping moves toward the establishment of
what amounts to an empire abroad. But Bush&Co. could breathe
easy. Everything was couched in the name of "national security"
and the "war on terrorism," so they didn't have to
worry much about being questioned or attacked by the Democrats,
or by the media (mostly owned by huge corporate conglomerates,
in any case). Even now, as the U.S. prepares to invade Iraq,
there has been no debate in Congress -- the branch of government
under the Constitution given the sole power to declare war --
about the wisdom and consequences of such a military adventure.
Bush&Co. constantly heighten the
fright level, and have told the citizenry to get used to a "permanent
war." The public is beginning to lose its enchantment with
Bush's policies, especially in the domestic area, but there still
isn't a broad groundswell of opposition to his foreign policies,
even when they aren't working or are thoroughly confused and
inconsistent.
So you, and your other European friends,
ask why America is behaving the way it is. Bush&Co are doing
so because they can get away with it. They cleverly have folded
their permanent "war on terrorism" into the HardRight
agenda, and not enough citizens have noticed or cared.
On the other hand, arrogant bullies always
go too far, and invariably get caught out and implode, often
as a result of their overweening greed and power-seeking. The
lurking Bush&Co. influence-peddling and other scandals, when
allied with obvious foreign-policy and military mistakes, are
starting to eat away at Bush's support. If the Democrats do well
in the November elections, perhaps even inflicting an embarrassing
defeat to the GOP in the Congress, the Bush house of cards will
begin to wobble and may even collapse. More Congressional investigations
will be launched. Resignation or impeachment is not outside the
realm of possibility.
To aid in this process, not only does
the liberal/progressive Left in America need to increase the
pressure on Bush&Co. but our friends in Europe and elsewhere
must maintain their questioning posture and pressure from the
outside. A better day will come, the shadow forces will recede,
we will move back to a saner, more centrist balance. Keep the
faith, and keep on keepin' on.
Bernard Weiner,
Ph.D., has taught American government and international relations
at Western Washington University and San Diego State University;
he was with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly 20 years and
has published in The Nation, Village Voice, The Progressive,
and widely on the internet.
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