I Refuse To Read 9/11 Memorial Coverage

If you're reading this right now you are doing something that I have refused to do: read any coverage or analysis of 9/11. I am boycotting the wall to wall coverage - the pull-out specials in the newspapers, the live coverage of ceremonies at ground zero (I assume there are ceremonies but I haven't been reading the coverage so I can't be sure). I'm even ignoring the critical coverage that is buried underneath all of the jingoism, mourning, and replaying of buildings billowing smoke. After all, what else can be said about 9/11? We know there has been several wars since then - putatively because of 9/11 but, in fact, argued for, threatened and planned for prior to the event. Way back when, everybody was quoting the founding documents of the Project for a New American Century, which advocated war against Iraq (a secular government with no ties - and significant animosity - towards radical Islamism). When we memorialize 9/11 as the reason for those wars we're participating in that lie.

Ah, but there I go, trying to analyze it. The truth is, it's pointless because the event has been drained of any rationality. It has become an endlessly repeated image of those burning towers and the necessary repetition of appropriate regret for the loss of life. There is literally nothing to say that won't be banal and commonplace to those who accept your particular viewpoint of the significance of the day - and which won't be utter blasphemy to those who don't.

Not many would say that I try to avoid thinking about world events and politics. Something happens somewhere in the world and I try to dig up the historical roots and uncover the social forces at play. It's a bit of an obsession at times. But this one event I will let pass - not because it's so special that I need to look away from the horror. 35,000 children die every day from preventable causes. Preventable causes. 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1.2 million died in Iraq as a result of the war - not counting the US enforced sanctions for a decade prior to the war. Nor do I want to ignore 9/11 because it isn't important. Certainly to the 3,000 people killed, their friends and family, 9/11 was a calamitous event. But, just as obviously, it was calamitous to the people who have been killed in wars, the societies destroyed, by wars supposedly in retribution for 9/11 [re: supposedly - see Project for a New American Century above].

No, the reason I won't read about 9/11 - not a word: I caught myself reading Chomsky on the al Jazeera website and forced myself to stop - is because we have lived it for ten years. We have seen it all - and if we happen to live in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine (yes, they got blamed too - we rarely miss a chance to kick the Palestinians around), Pakistan we felt the self-righteous fury of its manufactured response. We have seen this extended to our civil liberties - eroded significantly, almost without protest. We have seen it in a more bellicose form of rhetoric from politicians and media figures and a greater ease of military response to every crisis - we now slip on our fatigues to go and bomb "evil-doers" as easily as we put on our Wellingtons when the rain comes. We all know what 9/11 means and I don't need a special edition of the New York Times or, God help me, Glenn Beck to explain it.

We don't need more memorials. They're building a "Freedom Tower" in New York with 104 floors of skyline-dominating memorial. All you have to do is say "9/11" and every person in the western world, and probably most of the eastern, southern and northern world, can't help but have the iconic image pop into their mind - even if they try to think of the CIA coup against Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Even in countries that have suffered much greater tragedies, which is most countries, it was probably on the front page at some point in the last week. Making this event the obsession of the entire planet is somehow deeply pathological, like a monomania as we try to find the right emotional response to an event we're expected to have an emotional response towards. Meanwhile the house is burning down. I hate that I even remembered "where I was when I heard about it" several times today; once at a film festival bbq where we were expected to stop noshing and shmoozing to pay our respects for the dead. No: no more memorials. Talk to me about 9/11 when, instead of verbiage and symbols - and guns and bombs and F-35 fighter jets that cost a ba-zillion dollars - the memorial that is being offered is a plan to eliminate poverty at home and abroad, to stop supporting dictatorships that are convenient and bombing ones that aren't (especially the democratic ones that we call dictatorships because we don't like how people voted). In the meantime, stop trying to prove how profoundly on top of the meaning of the event you are in order to sell newspapers (how much extra has the New York Times made selling it's coverage - like to the T.O. Star?) or get people to tune in. It's like Christmas Day when no matter which channel you turn to you get people singing Christmas carols or delivering sermons. Just. Stop. Already.

How Bin Laden's Death Proves America's Masculinity Is Safe

What are we supposed to do with a White House press briefing that tells us Osama bin Laden tried to hide behind women before the death squad that came for him finished him off? I guess this has meant to tell us that he wasn't a "real man", like a "red-blooded American", because American men, faced with heavily armed assassins would stand out in the open, chest out, like Rambo or Chuck Norris or Arnie and shout "Come and get me, you bastards!" Personally, hat kind of behaviour just seems stupid to me but then, I'm a cowardly pinko who wants to live.
But in the end, that's what this ten year war on terror is all about: America's manhood was hurt by the destruction of the WTC. It wasn't ultimately about foreign policy or past wrongs or anything that we could critically examine. Nope, it was just about some dude giving us a sucker punch in front of our woman and our friends. We couldn't be men again till we got him back in a, uh, fair fight where he was out-manned and out-gunned. I imagine that in bars across America tonight, there will be men belly-bumping and raising beers to the death of EEEVIL and the victory of righteous America. There'll probably be a fair amount of the same in Canada, no doubt and in a few other countries.
Hopefully, there will be a few people who will see the bravado for what it is: a cover for the utter failure of the war on terror to deliver a renewed Pax Americana. The US ruling class can encourage all the chest-thumping that it wants. But that won't win the war in Afghanistan and it won't stop the wave of revolutions in the Middle East. It won't reverse the decline of the USA relative to China and the rest of the world, or the loss of hegemony in Latin America. It won't bring back the dead - not the dead from the World Trade Center nor those hundreds of thousands killed by US guns and bombs as the empire sought to rejuvenate its manhood. And it won't stop the resentment and anger that generated support for al-Qaeda in the first place.
In my own opinion, revolution in the Middle East has meant that al-Qaeda's model has been superceded and marginalized. Killing bin Laden is like putting out a fire in a garbage can when the whole neighbourhood is going up in flames. It might make America feel good but it's still pointless. And tomorrow the hangovers will hurt just as much as they always do.


White House: Bin Laden tried to hide behind women during battle - The Globe and Mail

Afghanistan, Drugs & Bank Bailouts

EVER WONDER WHERE SOME OF THE BANK BAILOUT MONEY CAME FROM? According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it came from the Afghan opium trade. Foreign Policy in Focus has a fascinating article analyzing the recent UNODC study on the drug trade, entitled "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium."
While the original study headlines the role of the Taliban in the Afghan opium trade, the FPF article notes that buried deep in the study is the admission that the Taliban receives less than 15% of its funding from drugs and that it likely only benefits from 4% of the Afghan drug trade. Poppy farmers, for instance, take about 21% of the drug trade's earnings. And the rest?

"...the remaining 75% is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers — in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade."

Besides "our" allies being the main beneficiaries - not surprising since many of the people NATO and the USA put into power in 2001 were widely recognized to be warlords with large stakes in the drug trade. In comparison, the Taliban had outlawed poppy cultivation in 2000 based upon a promise from UNODC to provide aid to offset the revenue losses that would result from the ban. That aid never arrived:

That basic logic prompted UNODC to open negotiations with the Taliban once they had gained control over much of Afghan territory, using Executive Director Pino Arlacchi's hollow offer of USD 250 million as bait and raising unrealistic expectations about international recognition. In September 2000, two months after Mullah Omar's decree, Arlacchi announced that, instead of compensation, UNODC would close down all operational activities in Afghanistan. The decision took even UNODC staff in the country by surprise. They learned about it from a BBC broadcast. The Taliban were understandably angry: "We have fulfilled our obligations. We demand that the agreement we made should be fulfilled up to the end," said Abdel Hamid Akhundzada, director of the Taliban's High Commission for Drug Control. "We have done what needed to be done, putting our people and our farmers through immense difficulties. We expected to be rewarded for our actions, but instead were punished with additional sanctions" (Transnational Institute, 2001).

It is likely that the UN backed off on the aid under direction from the US which was in secret negotiations with the Taliban until five weeks before September 11 to build gas and oil pipelines from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, to a Pakistani port. The Taliban were resisting the US conditions and US negotiators were at turns offering threats and rewards to them. According to the French author of the widely read book "Bin Laden: the forbidden truth", US negotiators told the Taliban that "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." However, Colin Powell, US Secretary of State at the time, did provide a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) grant of US$43 million - a drop in the bucket - to aid Afghan farmers who lost significant revenue from their traditional cash crop. One is tempted to see this as an incentive to submit to the conditions offered to win the release of further aid.
As a result of the Taliban ban on poppy cultivation, Afghanistan went from providing 75% of global opium to zero almost overnight - a drop of 4,000 metric tons. Besides demonstrating just how much the US/NATO invasion has transformed Afghanistan into a "narco-state", to use DEA parlance, it also demonstrates, once more, just how craven and dishonest was UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair is now all over the media saying that if the WMD justification hadn't worked he would have invaded Iraq in any case. The same dishonest - and deadly - method of international relations applied to Afghanistan. Blair stated that they would "bomb their poppy fields" even though there were none. And Downing street backed up this fiction:

“A senior Downing street aide said: ‘We have reliable information that the Taliban are planning to use money from drugs to finance military action, and that bin Laden has ordered farmers to step up production…”

But if the Taliban have never been the major beneficiaries of the Afghan drug trade, there have certainly been others. In particular, western banks have used drug money to lubricate the interbank credit system during the 2008 credit crisis. According to the UNODC report, somewhere between US$400-$500 billion in drug money has found its way into the banking system.

In fact, Antonio Maria Costa [UNODC exec. director] was quoted as saying that drug money may have recently rescued some failing banks: "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities," and there were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way." "At a time of major bank failures, money doesn't smell, bankers seem to believe," he wrote in UNODC's 2009 World Drug Report (emphasis in original).

While the UNODC report may have attempted to provide a cover to further justify the war in Afghanistan, their use of stats that counter the report's headline claim actually reveals one more sordid truth about the war in Afghanistan. In addition to the death, destruction and destabilization of the region, the war has facilitated a massive growth in the Afghan poppy trade. From 200 tons in 1980, Afghanistan last year produced 6,900 tons and now controls 90% of the global opium trade. Upwards of 1.5 million Afghans are employed in poppy cultivation. And it reveals an irresolvable contradiction for the US: the more they attack the drug trade, the more they attack their own allies, some of whom - like Hamid Karzai's brother - are on the US' payroll. And most of all it hurts poor Afghan farmers who rely on the poppy trade to sustain their livelihood. It is they who will fill the ranks of the insurgency.

Obama Plans "Horrific Outburst Of Violence" For Afghans

God "told" George to go to war

THERE MUST BE A STRONGER WORD THAN "HYPOCRITE" to describe the moral depravity of condemning a single killer who shoots down 13 unarmed US military personnel, while planning on sending 34,000 heavily armed military personnel to shoot down Afghans. I'm open to suggestions because that's apparently the plan that's being considered by President Obama, this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
There also ought to be a word for the media that doesn't notice this not-very-subtle contradiction in values and, instead, masturbates over whether Hasan attended religious services at the same mosque as men linked to 9/11 or whether he handed out Korans on the day he went on a rampage. Does anyone perform background checks on the people who go to church with George W. Bush? How about Timothy McVeigh? (I know, putting the two men together is an unfair association - Bush is responsible for far more deaths than McVeigh). Did the two men say their prayers on the mornings in which they killed people? Certainly God "told" George personally that he ought to "end the tyranny in Iraq", "fight terrorists" in Afghanistan, and get the Palestinians their state. Why does no one suggest, as all the media are implying with their obsession about Hasan's religious activities, that Christianity is an especially dangerous religion, the practice of which must be closely observed?
I guess the word we're looking for here is also hypocrite. Perhaps the best we can do is modify it with the word racist, since it's apparent that anyone with a Muslim background comes in for special treatment and assessment that's not applied to the rest of the population.

Afghanistan: Anti-War President Ramps Up War

If the multiple missile strikes inside Pakistani territory didn't make the point, this article in the New York Times puts an exclamation point on it. Obama means war.

"Mr. Obama is preparing to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan over the next two years, perhaps to more than 60,000 from about 34,000 now."

Of course, anybody who's been listening knew that Obama's strategy was always about increasing the troop commitment in Afghanistan, but the sheer hawkishness of his strategy hasn't really been so apparent. The article in the Times makes it so - no longer is there going to be the fig leaf of "development" that used to happen through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, albeit in a half-assed, uncoordinated way that prioritized military objectives. Now, the US has "a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development." Anybody thinking of getting married in Afghanistan must be worried, since US war-making seems to include bombing a lot of wedding parties.

However, endless pain and misery for the locals aside, someone ought to tell Obama what happened to every other empire that has tried to subdue Afghanistan. It isn't for nought that Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires. And now it looks as though, in a move eerily similar to escalation in Vietnam, the Americans are taking things out of the hands of their local puppet, who is having his video-call privileges with the President of the United States taken away. The Americans will focus on regional strongmen and brute military force to defeat the resurgent Taliban.

Where have we heard this song before?

Without a full scale invasion of Pakistan, the US and sycophantic allies like Canada, will never defeat the Afghan insurgents. But such an invasion would turn Pakistan into one more failed state as the already extensive internal rot of the Pakistani state apparatus collapses under the external and internal pressures. From battling a low tech, mostly localized insurgency within a tiny undeveloped country, the US risks opening up a front against a country with a population of 172 million and an ample supply of nuclear weapons. Yet, as dumb as this sounds, it is the Obama plan for fighting terrorism. He has just made Afghanistan his war and he risks being destroyed by it, just like Bush was destroyed by Iraq.

Obama: Change We Can Almost Believe In

Every newspaper, every TV station, every blogger, hell almost every person on the planet, was eyeballing the inaugural proceedings in "Rome" today. Obama is in and Bush is out. To have replaced that reactionary, cretinous hypocritical bastard Bush with a black man who grew up without the privileges of wealth that Dubya enjoyed - well, that was a pretty sweet sight.

And, as a black man in a nation built upon black slavery and vicious racism, Obama has an unassailable authority (at present) to be the bearer of his slogan calling for "Change we can believe in". He is intelligent and articulate and has an uncanny ability to engage with the concerns that Americans face.

Okay, all that said: let's face it, he's not that radical. In fact, he's a centre right Democrat. He wants to increase troops to Afghanistan by tens of thousands, an act that would surely destabilize Pakistan further, possibly facilitating its collapse.

Obama wants to bail out the rapidly sinking economy - but let's be clear: he's talking about throwing cash at the market in order to refloat it. Sure, there'll be some new regulations to try and keep it on the rails - but for all the tax dollars that have already been thrown at the banks and the corporations and the hundreds of billions more to come, don't expect to see the government taking any serious control in order to ensure any kind of democratic accountability. 

The state intervention that Obama is supporting - that almost all of the economic elites are supporting, many much more radically so than Obama's team - is still really just neo-liberalism by another name. Look for bailouts to include significant wage concessions from important groups of workers, like those in the auto industry. For the heads of the banks, there will be reduced bonuses this year - for auto workers, there will be cuts to health benefits, pensions, working conditions and living expenses.

And back to foreign policy, no one should forget his silence as Israel pounded the hell out of Gaza. It may be a step up from the usual "go get 'em, Israel" chorus but not by much. And his ultra-zionist chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, (whose father was a terrorist with the far right Irgun) will, I'm sure, make certain that silence will be as good as it gets in this department.

Obama has stacked his cabinet with dinosaurs and right wingers, including Republicans. He even chose a kooky, powerful, homophobic evangelist, Rick Warren, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.

There is no doubt that Obama rode to the White House on a wave of unbridled enthusiasm and hope. You could see it in the eyes of some of the million plus that turned out for his inauguration today in Washington. People literally wept with joy, unable to believe that a black man was in the White House,  just over 45 years after the Voting Rights Act. That excitement, newfound confidence and enthusiasm could be the basis for a mighty social movement that pushes Obama beyond where his ossified cabinet would have him go. It could translate into local victories for union, anti-racist, gay rights and pro-choice struggles. It could turn the tide against the Right, who have been ascendent for too long. But to do so, that energy must not be tied to the agenda of Obama's White House. 

It wasn't Obama who created the mood in America against the war in Iraq - he responded to it. It wasn't Obama who was behind the growing sentiment that corporations and banks were screwing ordinary people. He spoke to a feeling that already existed. Obama has taken those sentiments up an incredible step to the highest post in the land. The movement that put him there must seize the opportunity that he has created to push for even more, to demand that the whole dream be fulfilled.