America: The Real Evil Empire by Stephen Lendman

America: The Real Evil Empire

by Stephen Lendman

On March 8, 1983, Ronald Reagan coined the term. He did so addressing the National Association of Evangelicals.

He called communism "the focus of evil in the modern world." Don't "ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire…and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil," he said.

Cold War politics returned. More venomously than earlier. Putin is targeted. He's public enemy No. 1.

Doing so turns truth on his head. Paul Craig Roberts justifiably calls him the world's moral leader. 

A previous article said he shames his Western counterparts. He makes Obama look buffoon-like. 

He does it with straight talk. Telling it like it is. Explaining what people most need to know. Unambiguously. Truthfully. 

Polar opposite US politicians. Featuring Big Lies. Scorning vital truths. Supporting wrong over right. Making the world safe for monied interests.

Permanent war is official US policy. So is mass extermination. Begun centuries earlier. 

Doing so reduced America's indigenous population to a tiny fraction of its original numbers. Millions were slaughtered in cold blood.

Centuries of slavery were horrific. Black Africans were captured, branded, chained, force-marched, beaten, encaged, and stripped of their humanity.

Around 100 million were sold like cattle. Millions perished during  deplorable Middle Passage conditions.

Genocidal US policy continues in new forms. Technological advances facilitate it. America's killing machine knows no limits. 

One genocide follows others. Countries are ravaged and destroyed. Tens of millions perished. 

Winning hearts and minds don't matter. Stomping on people remains ongoing. 

Death squad diplomacy eliminates nonbelievers. Madness defines US policy. Police state harshness criminalizes right over wrong defenders.

Making the world safe for democracy is pure fantasy. America tolerates it nowhere. For sure not domestically.

High crimes are rewarded. Upside down reality endangers everyone. Popular needs go begging. 

Conquest, occupation, colonization, and exploitation are prioritized. Ordinary people are on their own sink or swim. 

Wars are considered peace. They rage without end. Things go from bad to worse. 

Propaganda works as intended. Minds are manipulated to support war. Truth is suppressed. Fear is stoked. 

Patriotism, national security, and democratic values are highlighted.

Longstanding US policy prioritizes militarism, wars, homeland security, and related operations.

Doing so has nothing to do with external or internal threats. Nor humanitarian intervention. Nor responsibility to protect.

Nor spreading democratic values. It's about advancing America's imperium.

What Michael Parenti calls "the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries."

"(T)he dominant politico-economic interests of one nation" over others. "(F)or their own enrichment…"

"(S)tealing land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people." Dominating other economies and political systems.

Accumulating enormous amounts of wealth in the process. Using money to make more of it. Increase power. Gain market control. Exploit resources and labor.

Societies are destroyed and remade. Nations are pillaged for profit. Populations become disenfranchised. Workers become serfs. Local cultures become mass-market consumer ones.

Agribusiness replaces local farming. Competitive industries are eliminated.  Foreign investment crowds out local capital. 

Dominance legitimizes capital's divine right. Plunder assures obscene profits. Capital accumulation demands more. Profiteering becomes a be-all-and-end-all.

Democracy is pure fantasy. US elections are pre-scripted. Secrecy and back room deals substitute for a free, fair and open process.

Candidates are pre-selected. Big Money owns them. Key outcomes are pre-determined. Voters have no say.

Both major parties share blame. They're two sides of the same coin. 

Not a dime's worth of difference on issues mattering most separates them. Americans get the best democracy money can buy.

Independents are shut out. Media scoundrels ignore them. Voter disenfranchisement is rife.

Millions can't vote because of past criminal records. Mostly what civilized societies call misdemeanors. Excluding prison. Assessing small fines or warnings.

Half of eligible voters opt out because their interests aren't addressed. Losers are declare winners. And not just for president.

Electoral democracy is pure fantasy. America is constitutionally flawed by design. 

We the people aren't served. Wealth, power and privilege alone matter. Tom Paine called voting "the primary right by which all other(s) are protected."

America's corrupted process makes it impossible. Democracy is a figure of speech. A four-letter word. A sham no just society would tolerate.

No country in world history did more harm to more people over a longer duration than America. None match its ruthlessness.

Its shameless human and civil rights records. Its pariah state status. Its genocidal high crimes against peace.

Its global gulag. The world's largest by far. Filled with thousands of political prisoners. 

Supplemented by global torture prisons. In dozens of countries. Operating out of sight and mind.

Crime bosses make policy. Monied interests control them. New World Order ruthlessness is official policy. 

International, constitutional and US statute laws don't matter. Washington rules alone apply.

The Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) is one of nine likeminded UN bodies. Each responsible for overseeing a particular treaty's implementation. 

UNHCR documented US human rights abuses. Assessing its noncompliance with International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provisions. 

Fundament human and civil rights. Signatories are required to respect free speech, assembly and religion.

Electoral rights, due process and judicial fairness. Self-determination and other universally accepted rule of law principles. 

UNHCR condemned grave US human rights breaches. Citing institutionalized torture, drone killings, and failure to close Guantanamo.

Mandatory immigrant detentions and mass deportations, as well as lawless NSA spying, among other issues.

It criticized Washington's failure to uphold human rights standards worldwide. It cited whitewashed CIA renditions, forced disappearances, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. 

Excessive secrecy was raised. Torture victims denied redress. Permitting torture-coerced confessions as evidence. Despite America's Supreme Court banning it.

Enforcing guilt by accusation. Denying habeas rights and judicial fairness. Substituting kangaroo court justice for the real thing. 

Police states operate this way. America is by far the worst. At home and abroad.

Disturbing death penalty imposition disparities adversely affect America's most disadvantaged. African-Americans, Latinos and other people of color.

Justice is a four-letter word. Excessive force is used with impunity. Including beatings and gun-related deaths.

Dissent is criminalized. So is homelessness. Juveniles sentenced to life without parole. For homicides based on flimsy evidence or none at all.

Adults can face life imprisonment for alleged "non-homicide related" crimes. Abusive prolonged solitary confinement persists. Doing so constitutes torture.

Mandatory immigration detentions are reprehensible. Mass deportations deeply troubling. 

Obama disgracefully expelled more immigrants and others than all his predecessors combined.

Murder, Inc. is official US policy. Death squads operate in 130 or more countries. So do CIA agents licensed to kill. 

US citizens may be targeted at home or abroad. No one anywhere is safe. Summary judgment means no arrests. No Miranda rights. 

No due process. No trial. Just a bullet, bomb or slit throat. It's official Obama policy. Diktat authority denies justice to anyone ordered killed.

Obama self-appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. He decides who lives or dies. Who's lawlessly indefinitely detained.

Equity and justice don't matter. Fundamental freedoms are disappearing in plain sight. Tyranny replaced them. It's almost full-blown.

Anyone anywhere may be thrown in military dungeons. Indefinitely held without charges or trial. Based solely on suspicions, baseless allegations or none at all.

Due process, civil protections, and judicial fairness are null and void. Presidents may order anyone arrested and imprisoned for life without charge or trial. 

Abuse of power replaced rule of law protections. It's happening in real time. Obama abuses diktat power. Unitary executive authority.

The late Chalmers Johnson called it "a ball-faced assertion of presidential supremacy...dressed up in legalistic mumbo jumbo."

Obama exceeds the worst of his predecessors. He usurped the power of life and death. Including against US citizens.

Prioritizing killing drones, death squads, or other means. Eliminating America's enemies alone matters. Real or invented makes no difference. 

Waging war on whistleblowers. Nonbelievers. Muslims. Latino immigrants. Environmental and animal rights activists unjustifiably called terrorists.

Anti-war activists. Global justice supporters. People associated with so-called "undesirable groups."

Presidents have public emergency powers. Enabling them to declare martial law. Suspend constitutional protections.

For so-called national security reasons or none at all. Deploying US troops on US streets. Militarizing state and local police forces.

Doing it to suppress whatever is called disorder. Including free expression, the right of assembly. petitioning government for redress of grievances publicly.

Opposing imperial lawlessness. America more than ever is unfit to live in. Unsafe by any standard.

Ruthless. Repressive. Cruel. Malicious. Vicious. Violent. Lawless. Criminally culpable of high crimes against peace.

Legal protections don't help. No one is safe anywhere. Advancing America's imperium matters most. 

So does serving wealth, power and privilege. America the beautiful benefits them alone. Others take the hindmost.

Humanity is ruthlessly targeted. Battlefields shift from one theater to others. Gangsterism is official US policy. It's the American way.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Italian Mercenary initiated the American Holocaust of 65 Million

The trail of tears and celebrating an American Holocaust

During a news conference at the UN General Assembly session last month, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez spoke of an emerging "American Indian" style of socialism in Latin America. Chavez hailed fellow Latin American presidents who are of native American stock, including Evo Morales of Bolivia, who Chavez called a "proud Aymara."

Matched against the newly-emerging native American power movements in Latin America is the fact that the United States continues to celebrate a holiday in honor of an Italian mercenary in the employment of the Spanish crown whose mercantilist brigands brought forth in the Western Hemisphere a six hundred year Holocaust that saw the genocide of 65 million native Americans through warfare, premeditated slaughter, disease, and famine. Columbus's arrival also presaged the destruction of the 500 native American nations that graced the Western Hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego.

The peculiar celebration of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the "New World" is generally billed as a celebration of Italian-Americans in the United States. However, for native Americans, it is a celebration of colonialism, mercantilism, imperialism, and racism. If there is a need to celebrate Italian contributions to America, why not celebrate Frank Sinatra Day? Certainly, his musical contributions, unlike the pestilence and colonial greed introduced by Columbus, did not lead to the wholesale slaughter of an entire race of people.

Or, at the very least, October 12 could be a dual-holiday, Columbus Day for those who want to celebrate the exploits of a genocidaire, and, as it is celebrated in Venezuela, a "Day of Indigenous Resistance," for those who want to remember the holocaust of the native Americans. For Africans, Columbus is remembered as a Portuguese slave trader who pimped out his services to the Portuguese.

Today, the United States "celebrates" the native Americans by naming its sports teams "Washington Redskins" (Andrew Jackson, who graces the twenty dollar bill, and his Indian fighters skinned native American males from the waist down and fashioned pants from their skin, i.e. "redskin pants") and "Cleveland Indians" (with a racist logo of bucked tooth native American). For some Americans, native American reservations are now gambling meccas. Jailed GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who employed every shyster business tactic he could think of to maximize his profits from lobbying for Indian gaming and casinos, called his native American clients "monkeys" (his name for the Choctaw tribal council), "troglodytes," "morons," and "mofos."

The sovereignty of native American nations, enshrined by the treaties various U.S. Presidents sign with the tribal nations, has been perverted by a group of "mishpucka" gangsters intent on abusing the sovereignty of the tribes to foster gambling, as its associated vices of booze, cigarette and drug smuggling, and prostitution.

President Chavez told the press in New York that he once served, as a Venezuelan military officer, with a mission sent to Guatemala. There, he witnessed the local Guatemalan special forces, the School of the Americas-trained Kaibiles, boasting of their massacres of the native Mayan Indians. Chavez said he then realized that those were "my people" being killed by the Guatemalan military. Chavez said he vowed that the native Americans people would no longer be subjected to such brutality and as President of Venezuela, Chavez has made common cause with those Latin American leaders and groups that are fighting the neo-imperialism directed against the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. And it is no coincidence that the only country in the Americas that is named after Columbus is Colombia, a narco-fascist-run nation that will soon host seven U.S. military bases, courtesy of Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama.

On this day, there should be a presidential ceremony at a site on the Washington Mall that honors the Holocaust. Not the museum at the west end of the Mall, the European Holocaust Museum, but the one at the east end of the mall, the Native American Museum. Those who visit the Native American Museum will hear a recording describing the holocaust of 65 million native Americans. It is the Holocaust that no one wants to talk about -- it is holocaust denial in the extreme.

But now, back to the real America. Everyone go out and take advantage of those Columbus Day sales. After all, it is a fitting way to celebrate someone who was doing the blood-soaked bidding of the Spanish mercantilists and capitalists of his day.

America the Beautiful

Robert Fisk: Semantics can't mask Bush's chicanery

This goes beyond hollow laughter. Since when did armies go around 're-liberating'


After his latest shenanigans, I've come to the conclusion that George Bush is the first US president to march backwards. First we had weapons of mass destruction. Then, when they proved to be a myth, Bush told us we had stopped Saddam's "programmes" for weapons of mass destruction (which happened to be another lie).


Now he's gone a stage further. After announcing victory in Iraq in 2003 and "mission accomplished" and telling us how this enormous achievement would lead the 21st century into a "shining age of human liberty", George Bush told us this week that "thanks to the surge, we've renewed and revived the prospect of success".

Now let's take a look at this piece of chicanery and subject it to a little linguistic analysis. Five years ago, it was victory – ie success – but this has now been transmogrified into a mere "prospect" of success. And not a "prospect", mark you, that has even been glimpsed. No, we have "renewed" and "revived" this prospect. "Revived", as in "brought back from the dead". Am I the only one to be sickened by this obscene semantics? How on earth can you "renew" a "prospect", let alone a prospect that continues to be bathed in Iraqi blood, a subject Bush wisely chose to avoid?

Note, too, the constant use of words that begin with "re -". Renew. Revive. And – incredibly – Bush also told us that "we actually re-liberated certain communities". This, folks, goes beyond hollow laughter. Since when did armies go around "re-liberating" anything? And what does that credibility-sapping "actually" mean? I suspect it was an attempt by the White House speech writer to suggest – by sleight of hand, of course – that Bush was really – really – telling the truth this time. But by putting "actually" in front of "re-liberate" – as opposed to just "liberate" – the whole grammatical construction falls apart. Rather like Iraq.

For by my reckoning, we have now "re-liberated" Fallujah twice. We have "re-liberated" Mosul three times and "re-liberated" Ramadi four times. The scorecard goes on. My files show that Sadr City may have been "re-liberated" five times, while Baghdad is "re-liberated" on an almost daily basis. General David Petraeus, in his pitiful appearance before the US Senate armed services committee, was bound to admit his disappointment at the military failure of the equally pitiful Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Basra. He had not followed Petraeus' advice; which was presumably to "re-liberate" the city (for the fourth time, by my calculation but with a bit more planning).

Indeed, Petraeus told senators that after his beloved "surge" goes home, the US will need a period of "consolidation and evaluation" – which is suspiciously close to saying that the US military will be, as the old adage goes, "redeployed to prepared positions". Ye gods! Where will this tomfoolery end?

In statistics, perhaps. By chance, as Bush was speaking this week, my mail bag flopped open to reveal a letter from my old American military analyst friend, George W Appenzeller. He gently (and rightly) corrects some recent comparative figures I used on US casualties in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. "In previous wars," he writes, "the US army has not reported to the public the number of wounded who are treated and immediately released back to duty. They have reported these casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars".

So here are a few Appenzeller factoids (glossed by Fisk, so the responsibility is mine!). The correct ratios for wounded in action vs killed in action for Iraq and Afghanistan is 8.13 to 1; for Korea, it's 7.38 to 1 and for Vietnam it's 6.43 to 1.

The true number of US wounded in Iraq until 18 March this year was 13,170, of whom 8,904 were so badly wounded that they required air evacuation to hospitals outside Iraq. The number of killed in action in Iraq is 3,251. (The other 750 died in accidents or of sickness.) But this does not include the kind of figure that the Pentagon and Bush always keep secret: an astonishing 1,000 or more Western-hired mercenaries, killed in Iraq while fighting or killing for "our" side.

But now I'll let George Appenzeller speak in his own words. "There are widely ranging estimates, but roughly 450,000 individuals ... fought on the ground in Vietnam ... At the height of the Vietnam war there were 67,000 ground combat troops there. That is roughly the number of ground combat troops the US presently has deployed in Iraq. Interestingly enough, that is also about the number of ground combat troops the US had fighting at any one time in the Korean war.

"The US army now has a much leaner and meaner organisation than in the past with a higher proportion of combat troops to total troops. All those American civilian truck drivers and Bangladeshi cooks have freed up troop slots that have gone to the combat arms."

No, Iraq has not yet reached Korea and Vietnam proportions. The three-year Korean war resulted in 33,686 US battle deaths and about 250,000 US wounds, an average of 94,562 casualties per year. The American phase of the Vietnam war lasted 14 years and resulted in 47,378 US battle deaths and 304,704 US wounds, an average of 25,149 casualties per year and an average of 66,792 during the four years of 1966-1969, the height of American fighting.

The Iraq war has lasted five years and has resulted in 3,251 battle deaths and 29,395 wounds, an average of 6,529 casualties per year. "Thus, the average number of killed and wounded during the Korean war was three times the total number of killed and wounded in the five years of the Iraq war. The average number of killed and wounded during each of the most difficult years of the Vietnam war was twice the total for the five years of the Iraq war."

Now for much more blood, the civilian variety. According to George, "About 1,600,000 were killed in the Korean war, 365,000 (according to American authorities) and four million (according to the Vietnamese government) during the American phase of the Vietnam war, and who knows how many in Iraq. No fewer than 250,000, certainly."

Not that long ago, Bush claimed that civilian fatalities in Iraq were "30,000 more or less" – again, note the "more or less" – but I can see why these statistics matter even less for him. It's not just that we don't care a damn about Iraqi lives. We are going to care even less about Iraqi civilian casualties when we walk backwards, when we are renewing and reviving and re-liberating all over again.

Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet


According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.

In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal. Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years of the occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.

The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.

These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century -- the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq -- the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community" has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions, there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism -- the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won't.

But there's more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That's wrong morally -- we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to "collateral damage." It's also factually incorrect -- as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz's number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There's no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.

Like the earlier study in the Lancet -- one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results -- this new research is already being dismissed out of hand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it's become conventional wisdom (based on several studies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, has had trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):



[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year, which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.


1.5 billion rounds per year … more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000 -- and is usually given as less than 20,000 -- that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around. Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.

If it weren't for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.

Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having an illicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it's important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.

With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraq war will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage.

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/62728/

Imperial Autism by Tom Engelhardt

The former Cockney flower-girl-turned-elegant- English-speaker Eliza Doolittle caught something of our moment in these lyrics from My Fair Lady: "Oh, words, words, words, I'm so sick of words…. Is that all you blighters can do?" Of course, all she had to do was be Pygmalion to a self-involved language teacher. We've had to bear with the bloviating of almost every member of Congress, the full-blast PR apparatus of the White House, and two endless days of congressional testimony from Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, not to speak of the flood of newspaper, radio, and TV stories about all of the above and the bevy of experts who are hustled out to do the horse-race assessments of how the general and ambassador performed, whether they "bought" time for the president, and the like.

And – count on it – that's just the beginning. The same cast of characters will be talking, squabbling, spinning, and analyzing stats of every sort for weeks to come – with a sequel promised next spring. Everyone knows that's the case, just as everyone has known since mid-summer that we would get to this point and, when we did, that things similar to those said (and written) in the last two days would indeed be said (and written), and that nothing the blighters would say or write would matter a whit, or change the course of events, or the tide of history, even though whole forests might be pulped in the process and it would be springtime for hyperbole and breathless overstatement in the world of news.

There has been a drumbeat of growing excitement in the press, preparing us for "pivotal reports," a "pivotal hearing," "highly anticipated appearances," and "long-awaited testimony," or, as both the Washington Post on its front page and ABC World News in a lead report put it, "the most anticipated congressional testimony by a general since the Vietnam War."

Petraeus himself has been treated in the media as a celebrity, somewhere between a conquering caesar and the Paris Hilton of generals. Nothing he does has been too unimportant to record, not just the size of his entourage as he arrived from Baghdad, or the suite he was assigned at the Pentagon, or even his "recon" walk through the room in the House of Representatives where he would testify Monday, but every detail. Somehow, when he refused to give interviews before his "long-awaited" appearance, lots of Petraeus-iana slipped out anyway:

"[H]e also has taken short breaks for walks with his wife … for dinner with their daughter, who lives in the area, and for lunch with his wife's parents. On his daily jogging route he maintains a brisk, steady pace over a seven-mile route, snaking from Fort Myer, across the Potomac and through Georgetown…"

Sigh…

So who, exactly, was so eagerly awaiting the jogging general's testimony? If a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll is any indication, a majority of Americans weren't among that crowd. They had already discounted whatever he would say – I doubt the ambassador even registered – as "exaggerated" and "a rosier view" than reality dictated before his face and that chest full of ribbons hit the TV screens. ("Just 23 percent of Democrats and 39 percent of independents expected an honest depiction of conditions in Iraq.") This was simple good sense. What exactly could anyone outside of Washington have expected the general – who had a hand in creating the president's "surge" strategy, is now in charge of the "surge" campaign, and for months has been delegated the official administration front man for what was, from day one, labeled a "progress report" – to say? An instant online headline caught the mood of the Petraeus moment while his first round of testimony was still underway: "Gen. Petraeus Sees Iraq Progress." Ah, yes…

And what in the world could anyone have eagerly anticipated from our unbudgeable president? Just what occurred. And yet, in our media, and inside Washington, the drumbeat for "an anticipated moment of truth" continued, as if something were actually at stake. Take just one example. On Sunday, the Washington Post had a hard-breathing piece by no less than six of its best journalists, with the headline, "Among Top Officials, 'Surge' Has Sparked Dissent, Infighting."

It focused on a reported "clash" between Gen. Petraeus and his theoretical boss, Centcom Commander Adm. William J. Fallon. It seems that the two fell into a near end-of-the-world-style struggle because Fallon had begun "developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops." ("'Bad relations?' said a senior civilian official with a laugh. 'That's the understatement of the century. … If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it.'") Naturally, Petraeus, like the president, wanted to continue to surge full-strength (as we now know – not that we didn't before – from his slow-as-molasses plan to drawdown American forces). But what did that radical Fallon have in mind that led to a "schism"? According to a source who spoke to a Post reporter, it "involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010." Imagine a Centcom commander as a force slasher!

But hold on a moment. Combat forces make up, at best, less than half of all U.S. forces in Iraq; so if, by 2010, the good admiral wants only three-quarters of those combat troops withdrawn, then we're still left with at least 80,000 or more troops in that country three years from now.

Well, I'm with Eliza D – and so, evidently, was the technology of the House hearing room in which the general and the ambassador appeared on Monday. After chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) and various other congressional representatives introduced the hearings for what seemed like hours, the general was finally given the floor for his "long-awaited" testimony. His mouth began to move but in a resounding silence. The mike had failed and (except for Code Pink protesters rising from the audience to shout and be escorted out) the room fell into just about the only Iraqi silence of these past, "eagerly anticipated" months – and what a relief that was. While Skelton fumed, the announcer on MSNBC suggested, "The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq is apparently powerless over the sound system in the hearing room."

It was a moment that had Iraq written all over it. After all, has anything worked as planned or dreamed since March 2003?

Of course, 15 minutes later the mike had been replaced (though the room lights then proceeded to flicker as if in distant communion with electricity-less Baghdad) – in Iraq, you suspect, people would have just started shouting – and the general did finally launch on his monotonal, mind-numbing, expectedly boilerplate testimony. He promised that, if all went well, American troops would be back to pre-surge levels by mid-July 2008, 10 months from now, 18 months from that plan's beginning. "Progress" indeed.

The general's testimony would be dealt with in the tones of gravitas that journalists-cum-pundits and pundits-cum-pundits reserve for moments like this. Yet, given the original expectations of the Bush administration, some of the testimony Petraeus (and later Crocker) had to offer would have been little short of hilarious if the subject weren't so grim. (Good news! Four years after the invasion of Iraq, we finally have the former Ba'athists of al-Anbar Province, whom our president used to refer to as "dead-enders," on our side! Even better, we're arming them and all is going swimmingly!)

Buying a precious extra six-plus months for the White House, the general also suggested that it would be premature to think beyond next July, when it came to "drawdown" plans, and that we should, instead, all reconvene in mid-March 2008 for more of the same.

Sigh…

You can, of course, already begin writing the script for that "eagerly anticipated," "long awaited," "pivotal" moment when the situation in Iraq will be predictably worse, predictably more precarious, and predictably surprising to the general and the ambassador.

As aids for his testimony, Petraeus had brought along a profusion of enormous, multicolored charts to illustrate his points. Many of them – amazingly enough – seemed to have more or less the same blue, red, or yellow lines, each of which crested about chart middle and then essentially nose-dived toward the present moment. The message was clear: Good news on the numbers! Everything's falling! You didn't need to be an expert – you essentially didn't need to know a thing – to find the confluence of those descending lines with the general's appearance in Washington a tad tidy.

As for me, I found it hard to believe that those charts hadn't been recycled from the Vietnam era, when Petraeus' equivalent, Gen. William Westmoreland, used similar brightly colored, bar-coded, son-et-lumière aids to wow visiting congressional delegations with the metrics of "progress" in his war. Now, once again, we're knee deep in the Big Metric, flooded with so many different kinds of stats that you can hardly tell one from another (though most involve dead bodies). If you remember the Vietnam era, there's a simple rule here: When the top brass hauls out the pretty charts, duck…

In the meantime – mind you, this is Iraq, where nothing has been orderly – everything was, we were assured, to proceed in an orderly fashion, summed up in the general's wonderfully tidy, if somewhat Orwellian-sounding formula, "from leading to partnering to overwatch."

Hmm… "overwatch." I wonder who first woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night with that lovely term on the brain? I wonder what it even means? I wonder where we'll be "overwatching" from? Perhaps from that monstrous embassy that we've almost completed in Baghdad, the largest on this or any other planet, or from our vast permanent-seeming base towns like the one with the 17-mile security perimeter that the president visited in Iraq's western desert, but that no reporter accompanying him even thought to describe for us. (Oh, back in November 2006, that base, as a British reporter described it, already had the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool, a movie theater showing the latest flicks, and two bus routes.)

Like Eliza, I'm for skipping the words at this point. After all, what does all the talk mean if, in September 2007, the U.S. is building yet another base in Iraq, this time near the Iranian border, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The military describes it as a "life support area" – don't ask me what that means – with this added definition: "[It's] not really permanent, although it will be manned 24/7 and will be used for as long as necessary."

What does all the talk mean if, as the Washington Post's indefatigable Walter Pincus noted, also on Monday, the U.S. Commerce Department is looking for a new legal adviser for Iraq with a contract running through July 31, 2008, plus two possible 12-month extensions. (There we are in 2010 again!) This adviser is to help the poor, ignorant Iraqis as "they draft the laws and regulations that will govern Iraq's oil and gas sector." After all, as the proposal makes clear, the Commerce Department (U.S., not Iraqi) "will be providing technical assistance to Iraq to create a legal and tax environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment in Iraq's key economic sectors, starting with the mineral resources sector." And "conducive" is just such a nice word! Even nicer than "sovereignty."

What do the words mean, if the far edge of Armageddon, as defined in Washington or in military-insider politics, leaves enough American troops in Iraq to fill a couple of baseball stadiums – or several gigantic bases – in 2010?

At some level, the situation seems remarkably uncomplicated, if you skip the words (and the words about the words). As has always been true, the top figures of the Bush administration remain completely unmoved by, and unmovable by, words which, as is well known, are only meant to move other people; the Republicans in Congress – after all this time, despite all the dismal polling figures – are still on bended knee to the Bush administration, so powerless that they feel incapable of striking off on their own. (Sen. John Warner, R-Va., who isn't even seeking reelection, recently begged the president to please, please, pretty please, send home a few thousand troops, any troops at all, and call it a day. And, in his testimony, Gen. Petraeus threw the senator a carefully gnawed bone, agreeing to do just that.)

The congressional Democrats are too weak (and divided) to change policy – and let's be honest, even if they did, this administration would undoubtedly pay no attention whatsoever to anything they mandated. The Republican candidates for president (minus the maverick Ron Paul, who isn't really a Republican at all) have bowed down low before presidential Iraq policy, as if before a pagan idol in the desert, in search of the "base vote." Democratic candidates for president (Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel excepted) are running "tough" (which means running scared and cautious) on Iraq. If, in 2008, the war actually proves good for business at the polls for Democrats, then, to their consternation, they'll find they've just inherited a disastrous war, that they're likely to be blamed for losing it, and that they're in charge of Hell, not the Oval Office or Congress. (And note that, out of kindness to all of you, I'm not even mentioning Iran… though there was that nice, giant block of type over Iranian territory on a Petraeus-displayed map labeled "Major Threats to Iraq" that said: "Lethal Aid, Training, Funding.")

Given this lineup of forces, how could it have been anything but "words, words, words" in Washington, even while it was death, death, death in Iraq?

What those words do, however, is fill all available space, reinforcing a powerful sense that Washington's importance in the scheme of things is the one unquestionable reality on our planet. The rest of the world hardly registers, except in the mode of frustration.

Is there a single ounce of humility anywhere in Washington? Can we even imagine that, somewhere on Earth, someone doesn't think about us?

Gen. Petraeus, always identified as having "earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University as a young officer," is said to be a man with a high regard for his own reputation. Hasn't he noticed, then, that, for one extra star and his Warholian 15 minutes of fame, he's made himself this country's fourth commander of American forces in Iraq in less than five years? Each of those commanders had a plan. Each was confident. Each claimed "progress." And, once upon a time, each was embraced by the president as the man to give him "advice." Ambassador Crocker is similarly the fourth American civilian viceroy to head up our caliphate of Baghdad. He now has "carte blanche" there. But carte blanche to do what?

Could these men really believe that, with them, the occupation of a crucial country in the embattled oil heartlands of the planet would finally head down the IED-pocked path of success? Is the vanity of American officials as great as that? Was it really worth turning so many Iraqis into red and blue lines, into military metrics?

To grasp the Petraeus moment, you really have to re-imagine official Washington as a set of drunks behind the wheels of so many SUVs tearing down a well-populated city avenue – and all of them are on their cell phones. They hardly notice the bodies bouncing off the fenders. For them, the world is Washington-centered; all interests that matter are American ones. Nothing else exists, not really. Think of this as a form of imperial autism and the Petraeus moment as the way in which the White House and official Washington have, for a brief time, blotted out the world.

The Petraeus Report By STAN GOFF

In military drill there is something called the preparatory command and the command of execution. These were the two commands, followed in lockstep by the press yesterday:

Prepare to kiss ass.

Kiss ass.

Or should I say David Petraeus' ass, followed by a whole raft of retired generals who were immediately featured on the television "news" to re-spin the Petraeus' spin, where he used the terms "al Qaeda Iraq" and "ethno-sectarian" about 2,000,000 times apiece in the space of a few hours.

Members of Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War, who had infiltrated the hearing room, were serially arrested when they took their turns shouting things like "How long will you listen ot these people?" and "Liar!" from the back of the room. God bless 'em.

The articulate, level-voiced General, though he only went to combat when Bush invaded Iraq, has more fruit salad on his chest than any veteran of three previous wars.

Cheney's input was in evidence in the psyop, mantra-like repetition of the key phrases as a form of mass mesmeric suggestion... "al Qaeda Iraq" ... "ethno-sectarian"... "al Qaeda Iraq" ... "ethno-sectarian"... "al Qaeda Iraq" ... "ethno-sectarian"... "al Qaeda Iraq" ... "ethno-sectarian"...

All designed to instill the same refrain we heard in the runup to the war, Iraq associated with 9-11…oh, that's tomorrow! Surprise!

...and of course, the war is an affair of those ethno-sectarian primitives (the former guerrillas who were handed Anbar Province have been re-spun into "tribal" leaders and sheiks"). The US occupation force (therein referred to as "coalition forces") is just there trying to keep them from slaughtering each other, provoked as they have been by who? Oh yeah, "al Qaeda Iraq."

Rumsfeld's ghost made its early appearance with the charts and graphs. Metrics, anyone? The Commander-in-Chief, in rallying the most revanchist sectors of his diminishing base, recently invoked Vietnam and the betrayal thesis: that liberal press and those left-wing hippies undermined the war effort, and if we could have killed just a million more Vietnamese, goddamit, we'd have won. With Rumsfeld's metrics in Petraeus' mouth yesterday, we have squared the circle with the simultaneous reincarnation of Robert MacNamara and William Westmoreland.

Light at the end of the tunnel, anyone?

No Cheney-Rumsfeldian tableau is complete without its diabolus ex machina -- Iran naturally. Petraeus invoked Iran early and often, beginning with the now widely accepted and completely unsupported claim that Iran is supplying weapons to Iraqi "insurgents." This is one that provoked the arrest of a Code Pinker in the back benches, when she shouted "That's a lie!"

She was right, of course. This phony claim, originated out of the Public Affairs offices of the Pentagon, has nonetheless become an article of faith with the "journalists" of the American corporate fourth estate.

The most enjoyable and potentially redemptive aspect of the whole dog-and-pony show were the handful of Congress members who -- under pressure from war-weary constituents and the polls showing rock-bottom approval ratings for the newly-empowered Democrats -- lit into Petraeus with a vigor seldom seen in the hallowed halls of hearingdom.

Congressman Tom Lantos (D - California) assaulted the credibility of the administration with an unusual enthusiasm, with -- of course -- a ritual denunciation of Iran, and called for immediate withdrawal of US forces. Fellow Californian Loretta Sanchez as much as called Petraeus and his co-conspirator Crocker liars.

Others weighed in, along partisan lines mostly. Nothing shocking there, though my gut tells me that the California Democratic Party -- holding within its embrace Barbara Lee, the sole Congressional dissenter against the resolution granting the Bush administration war-making powers -- is thinking about its besieged national Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, now facing an electoral challenge from Cindy Sheehan.

Unfortunately, this is the backdrop. The 2008 elections, not the charnel house of American occupation in Iraq.

Behind all the panting about the "heroism" of US troops, and the "sacrifices" of military families who see that dreaded military in the driveway, this is mostly about political ambition and the family feud over which party will run the executive committee for Wall Street and the defense industries.

Not a single member of Congress yesterday cited the most recent extrapolation of Lancet Report showing that around a million Iraqis have been "sacrificed" by the occupation. In a typical US neighborhood with families averaging four, this would be represented by a funeral in every sixth house.

'Spose I've said this before, but the target of our misbehaviors (at least Code Pink and IVAW were on hand to disrupt yesterday) must be the Democratic Party. They can ignore another protest on the National Mall, but they can't ignore people occupying their local Congressional offices. These occupations to end the occupation need to become ubiquitous.

Last year, I shocked many colleagues by recommending they vote for Democrats across the board in 2006, but folks didn't read the fine print. We needed to put these people in power to expose them. They were taking cover in the "we're-just-a-minority" bunker. Now they are in the open, and the institutional rot as well as the class loyalties of the Democratic Party are on vivid display.

What we saw o Monday, aside from the Petraeus-Crocker Show, in the loss of good manners by a few Democrats, was a display of the latent power of a wakeful people. The Code Pinkers and Iraq Veterans Against the War represent a minority in American politics right now, just as anti-slavery advocates once were. But let there be no confusion; this minority -- which numbers now in the millions -- has the power to put its principles into action in an instrumental way: by threatening the fortunes of one of the ruling class parties in the United States on the issue of a criminal imperial war.

Misbehavior works. Delegitimate. Disobey. Disrupt.

Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and "Sex & War" which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Goff can be reached at: stan@stangoff.com





"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow

U.S. Media Ignores Estimate of 1 Million Iraqi Deaths

Yesterday a radio interviewer in South Africa asked me what had been the response of the "mainstream media in the United States" to Just Foreign Policy's ongoing estimate of the Iraqi death toll from the U.S. invasion and occupation, which on Thursday crossed the one million mark.




Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. A main motivation for constructing the web counter was to keep the "Lancet study" alive. The "Lancet study," you'll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published - and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion - so it's little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question.

The Lancet study is the only existing study that uses the method accepted all over the world for estimating deaths due to large-scale violent conflict: a cluster survey. Its principal deficit for understanding the current situation is that the survey it was based on is now a year old, so that when people want to invoke the Lancet study to describe the death toll, they are likely to say, "a year ago the death toll was over 600,000" - leaving out what has happened since. Since the Lancet study is "old news," it's progressively easier to ignore it over time. It was this problem that gave us the idea of constructing an ongoing, rough update.

The tally of deaths reported in the Western media by Iraq Body Count, although it gives an inaccurate picture of the overall death toll, does have the advantage that it is regularly updated. So while the Iraq Body Count tally, by itself, doesn't help us understand the overall death toll, it does give us some information about the trend over time, because one can compare, for example, the Iraq Body Count tally today with the Iraq Body Count tally from July 2006.

Thus, we constructed our ongoing online estimate - for which we provide the code so you can include it on your own web page - by extrapolating from the Lancet estimate using the trend provided by Iraq Body Count.

Our extrapolation assumes that Iraq Body Count is capturing a fixed proportion of the true level of deaths over time. This is a conservative assumption, because it is likely that Iraq Body Count is capturing a smaller share of the true death toll over time, as reporting from Iraq becomes progressively more difficult. By assuming that Iraq Body Count captures a constant share, we will tend to underestimate the true death toll.

Note that the number we focus on is the Lancet estimate of excess deaths due to violence. Thus, we understate the death toll by ignoring, say, increased deaths due to cholera which could be attributed, at least in part, to the destruction resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Note further that a straight-line extrapolation from the Lancet study - ignoring any increase in the death rate in the last year from the average between March, 2003 and July, 2006 - an average that includes the first year of the occupation, when by all accounts the death rate was lower - would still result in more than 750,000 excess deaths due to violence.

Increasingly, the U.S. occupation is described as a passive onlooker to the violence. This is deeply misleading for two reasons. First, the civil war - or civil wars - that have been unleashed in Iraq was a predictable - and predicted - result of the U.S. invasion. Everything is predicted if one searches enough, but in this case, for example, James Baker gave the threat of unleashing a civil war as a key reason why the U.S. didn't go to Baghdad in 1991, so it's absurd to treat this as an unforeseeable consequence. Second, the picture is being obscured by underreporting in the U.S. of deaths from U.S. air strikes, raids, and shooting at checkpoints.

Why does this matter? Obviously, we have a responsibility to understand the world as best we can, and nowhere is this responsibility greater than in trying to understand the consequences of the actions of our government. But the question is particularly urgent, because there is a major effort underway to rehabilitate the war politically, by cherry-picking - and misinterpreting - current developments. The surge is working, we are told: it must be given more time. If the scale of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion becomes part of the debate, this sleight-of-hand will be much harder to maintain.





"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow


www.milfuegos.net


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Vietnam - the American Holocaust

part 1/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggnarSzFiY&mode=related&search=

part 2/2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s38dbX9ttLg&mode=related&search=

part 3/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZkMxRKirE&mode=related&search=

Children: victims of Agent Orange
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSevYf4ZIcQ&mode=related&search=

American Nazis in Vietnam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C-8aGyDP4

A short clip from the video - Vietnam: American Holocaust
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCgZLwAzr28&mode=related&search=

THE NEXT WAR, AND THE NEXT, The militarization of outer space By Jack A Smith

(For the first part of this two-part article, see The futuristic battlefield)

Outer space begins where Earth's atmosphere ends, some 100 kilometers above the globe's surface. The United States wants the ability to militarize outer space to sustain its world dominance. The Pentagon can already monitor the world from space. Now it seeks to develop and deploy military systems in space that allow the US to strike with great force anywhere on Earth in less than an hour.

The Defense Department's Global Strike Integration policy seeks to "gain and maintain both global and theater space superiority and deliver tailored, integrated, full-spectrum space support to the theater commander, while maintaining a robust defensive global counter-space posture".

This means occupying space with surveillance and reconnaissance satellites and anti-satellites, ballistic missiles, missile or kinetic interceptors, and other advanced technology weapons to assist US land, sea and air forces in maintaining military hegemony throughout the world. It also means preventing any other country, by force if necessary, from using space for similar purposes, including self-defense.

Aside from the satellites, which have become key to the Pentagon's battle plans, most of the other technology is in the research and development stage or awaiting deployment decisions from the White House that are complicated by political complexities.

The George W Bush administration - especially the Defense Department and particularly the US Air Force (USAF) - is anxious to launch a full-scale militarization of space, regardless of its enormous expense and the fact that it will inspire worldwide condemnation, generate a dangerous arms race in outer space, and undoubtedly enhance prospects for major wars in this century.

The rightists and neo-conservatives are not unaware of these potential consequences but they are confident the US will prevail because of its overwhelming power. In effect, "It's worth the price."

But that mindset is not shared so far by most Americans outside the hard right, particularly in the absence of any other country that could come near to threatening the United States for global primacy. In addition, virtually every other nation in the world, including Washington's close allies in Canada and the European Union, opposes the weaponization of space, as is evident from repeated votes at the United Nations.

What this means is that the US is clearly heading toward space militarization - more slowly during the Bill Clinton administration, more swiftly during the Bush administration - but not yet with the acceleration the war hawks demand or the Bushites would prefer.

The annual US space budget amounts to about US$36 billion. This constitutes 73% of what the world's nations collectively spend on space, including China, Russia, the European Union, Japan and India, according to the Space Security Project.

At a certain point, perhaps in the not distant future, one Washington administration or another may be able to convince the American people, and particularly the elite that rules the country, that Russia, China or both have become such grave threats to US hegemony that survival depends on extending the reach of Fortress Americana into the heavens. Since the Second Cold War against both these countries is getting under way, the pretext is in the process of becoming established.

The plan to use outer space as part of America's war preparations was put forward by the right wing during the vehemently anti-Soviet years of the 1980s, resulting in president Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" anti-missile program and the creation of the Air Force Space Command in 1982, the mission of which is to "defend North America through its space and intercontinental-ballistic-missile operations - vital force elements in projecting global reach and global power".

By the 1990s, the neo-conservatives were developing ideas for projecting US power throughout the world, including the militarization of space - resulting in an influential document published in 2000 by the Project for the New American Century titled Rebuilding America's Defenses. A year after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center, President Bush included most of these ideas in a new National Security Strategy for the United States. At about the same time, Bush withdrew the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which had barred development of missile defenses and space-based systems.

One complication for the Pentagon is that the US, as a signatory of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, may not "place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction (chemical or biological killers), install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner".

Thus at this stage the US military space program is based on "conventional" warfare, not weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but with a few adjustments this could change. For instance, more than 70% the Pentagon's "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad during the first days of the invasion of Iraq was coordinated and sent to target through military satellites in space. These bombs were conventional explosives, but satellites could have guided nuclear weapons as long as they were not launched from space.

According to Hans M Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, "Although Global Strike is primarily a non-nuclear mission, the information collected [about the program] reveals that nuclear weapons are surprisingly prominent in both the planning and command structure for Global Strike."

Both China and Russia, among many nations, have been attempting to gain UN passage of a new treaty banning conventional weapons in space as well as WMD, and also prohibiting the use of satellites to guide warfare on the ground. True to its militarist imperative, the US will not allow any such treaty to interfere with its plans.

Bush put forward a 10-page unclassified version of the new US National Space Policy last October, superseding the Clinton administration policy of September 1996, but it generally obfuscated the government's real intentions. The new policy was similar in some instances to the Clinton era policy but more unilateral, arrogant and favorable toward space militarization, though not coming out with it honestly.

Only by reading between the convoluted lines was it possible to comprehend fully that the US government intends to do as it pleases militarily in outer space, including preventing other countries from obtaining a similar strategic advantage.

Here is an example: "The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by all nations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, 'peaceful purposes' allow US defense and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national interests."

(Translation: Since we respect your peaceful purposes, you must respect ours, so butt out.)

Here's another: "The United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit US access to or use of space. Proposed arms-control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing, and operations or other activities in space for US national interests." (Translation: The US intends to militarize space, and as the principal member of the Security Council and world hegemon, we will not allow a new treaty to abrogate our rights.)

Another: Under the title "National Security Space Guidelines", the document declared that the Defense Department would:

"Develop and deploy space capabilities that sustain US advantage and support defense and intelligence transformation."
Provide "reliable, affordable, and timely space access for national-security purposes".
"Provide space capabilities to support continuous, global strategic and tactical warning as well as multi-layered and integrated missile defenses."
"Develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries."

(Translation: We're ready to roll, so move out of the way.)

Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, said that while the new policy "doesn't go as far as some space hawks wanted it to in openly endorsing the strategy of fighting 'in, from and through' space, neither has it served to put a blanket - even a thin one - on those ambitions. And in taking a decidedly 'us against them' tone, it is likely to further cement the view from abroad that the United States has taken on the role of a 'Lone Space Cowboy'."

It took four years and three dozen revisions until a final version of the National Space Policy was approved - a reflection of how complex it must be to transform a military plan to control the world into a space travelogue. The report was actually delayed for 15 months after press reports revealed that Bush was leaning toward a USAF request for a presidential directive permitting the deployment of weapons in space. The uproar evidently persuaded the Bushites to tone down the policy - a problem solved by not mentioning it.

Moscow and Beijing have been calling for years for an international ban on any kind of weaponization of outer space, including militarized reconnaissance and communications satellites, and conventional weapons as well as WMD. In 2002, China and Russia, co-sponsored by Vietnam, Syria, Indonesia, Belarus and Zimbabwe, presented a proposal to the United Nations for a treaty to demilitarize space completely, tentatively called the "Prevention of the Deployment of Weapons in Outer Space [and] the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects". The US not only rejected the possibility of such a treaty, it refused even to discuss the matter.

Meanwhile, a number of other resolutions have also been introduced concerned with preventing an arms race in space and gained impressive majorities.

In 2000, for example, a resolution on the Prevention of an Outer Space Arms Race was passed with a vote of 163-0 with three abstentions, Micronesia, Israel and the United States. In 2003, the UN vote to prevent an arms race in space was 174-4, with the Marshall Islands joining the "Big Three", which all voted in opposition this time. Last year, the UN General Assembly vote on preventing an arms race in space was passed 166-1. Israel abstained. The US voted No.

Publicly, Washington maintains that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and other legal measures render a new treaty redundant, but that's only because the treaty allows the US to militarize space via the back door of satellites with battlefield connections and weapons other than WMD. Most of the rest of the world opposes any militarization of space, and Washington and Israel evidently cannot even always rely on the Marshall Islands and Micronesia.

The Bush administration has repeatedly expressed contempt for the Russia-China treaty proposal and similar efforts from other countries. Former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps the most vociferous of the neo-conservative initiators of the Iraq war, declared in October 2002, "Space offers attractive options not only for missile defense, but for a broad range of interrelated civil and military missions." Former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, another war hawk, commented in Geneva in September 2004, "We are not prepared to negotiate on the so-called arms race in outer space. We just don't see that as a worthwhile enterprise."

The White House is reluctant openly to acknowledge its intention to militarize space, but the USAF in particular has been quite frank. In 1996, the then head of the Space Command, General Joseph W Ashy, was quoted as saying: "We're going to fight from space, and we're going to fight into space. That's why the US has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms. We will engage terrestrial targets some day - ships, airplanes, land targets - from space."

In 2004, Under Secretary of the Air Force Peter B Teets, discussing America's intentions in space, declared bluntly, "We are paving the road of 21st-century warfare." In May 2005, the New York Times quoted General Lance Lord, another head of the Space Command, as revealing, "Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future." He did not explain how space superiority is obtained, but there is only one way - dominant military force.

The USAF acknowledges that the militarization of space is a prime objective. Air Force Doctrine Document 2-2.1 on "Counterspace Operations", published in August 2004 (and available online), states: "US Air Force counter-space operations are the ways and means by which the air force achieves and maintains space superiority. Space superiority provides freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack."

General John P Jumper, air force chief of staff in 2004, wrote in the foreword to Document 2-2.1: "Counter-space operations are critical to success in modern warfare. The rapid maturation of space capabilities and the evolution of contingency operations have greatly enhanced the effectiveness of air and space power. Combatant commanders leverage space capabilities such as communication; position, navigation, and timing; missile warning; environmental sensing; and reconnaissance to maintain a combat advantage over our adversaries. Space superiority ensures the freedom to operate in the space medium while denying the same to an adversary. The development of offensive counter-space capabilities provides combatant commanders with new tools for counter-space operations."

So what has the Pentagon accomplished so far? Here are some hints from Giuseppe Anzera, an Italian professor, in Star Wars: Empires strike back (August 18, 2005), an article circulated by the Power and Interest News Report:

On the technological level, the Pentagon's planning is in the advanced stage: some projects - aimed at space weaponization - have already been in place for some time. Among the (partially known) Pentagon's new plans, the two most interesting projects are the "Global Strike" program and the "Rods from God" program. Global Strike involves the employment of military space planes capable of carrying about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of high-precision weapons (with a circular error probability less than 3 meters) with the primary use of striking enemy military bases and command and control facilities in any point of the world.

The main strength of military space planes is the ability to reach any spot on the globe within 45 minutes. This is a short period of time that could provide US forces with a formidable quick-reaction capability, as opposed to the enemy's subsequent inability to organize any effective defense. Such a weapon's primary target would be the enemy's strategic forces and - according to US Air Force sources widely quoted in the news - the Pentagon is inclined to give priority to this project. One of the main reasons, these sources say, is that the Pentagon itself - after spending more than US$100 billion - has finally admitted its failure to create an infallible Earth-based, anti-missile system to protect American soil from ballistic strikes.

The so-called Rods from God project, according to Anzera, "consists of orbiting platforms stocked with metal tungsten rods about 6.1 meters long (20 feet) and 30 centimeters (1 foot) in diameter that could be satellite-guided to targets anywhere on the Earth within minutes, for the rods would move at more than 11,000 km/h (6,835mph). This weapon exploits kinetic energy to cause an explosion the same magnitude of that of an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, but with no radioactive fallout. The system would function due to two satellites, one of which would work as a communications platform, while the other would contain an arsenal of tungsten rods."

The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency is developing space-based missile interceptors (SBIs) at a cost of up to $600 million over several years, complete with a test bed for experimentation. This would appear to be a weapon in space, but Bush administration spokesman Tony Snow managed not to crack a smile when he answered a press-conference question on October 18 by declaring that "defense from space is different than the weaponization of space".

Other projects on the Pentagon's space drawing boards or in development include the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile that can travel at 5,800km/h; space-mirror satellites redirecting laser beams from Earth against any orbit or surface target, and satellites that send out radio waves with a high range in power and breadth; high-energy lasers of various kinds; a robotic spacecraft capable of determining whether a particular satellite is a "danger" to the US, in which case it will be able to sabotage the offending instrument; rockets with blunt heads that function as kinetic-energy interceptors; a weaponized glider known as the Common Aero Vehicle that can be rocketed into space and travel at hypersonic speeds to target objects on Earth; an experimental spacecraft system; and much more.

On February 15, the Associated Press reported that Russia is fed up with US proposals for an ABM system not only in space but particularly Washington's plan to deploy anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, practically in President Vladimir Putin's face. The news agency quoted General Yuri Baluyevsky, the chief of the Russian General Staff, as indicating Moscow might withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty if the US sets up missile defense in Eastern Europe. The IRNFT eliminated medium-range missiles that had been based in Europe.

Fearing that the momentum toward space war preparations will dissipate when Bush and the neo-conservatives leave office, the right-wing warmaking faction has accelerated its campaign for the weaponization of space. A legion of conservative hawks from various think-tanks banded together last year as the "Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship and the 21st Century", and published a document of more than 200 pages calling for an extensive military space program.

Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (January/February 2007), Theresa Hitchens said the document was "written in language so incendiary it should be banned from carry-on luggage, [and] lashes out against opponents of the weaponization of space, branding them as a cabal of 'arms-control extremists, pacifists, realpolitik practitioners, [and] anti-Americans' bent on 'unilateral disarmament' of the US".

In conclusion, we return to the theme introduced at the beginning of this two-part article - US militarism.

As Chalmers Johnson wrote in The Sorrows of Empire, "The United States has been inching toward imperialism and militarism for many years. Disguising the direction they were taking, American leaders cloaked their foreign policy in euphemisms such as 'lone superpower', 'indispensable nation', 'reluctant sheriff', 'humanitarian intervention', and 'globalization'."

However, with the advent of the Bush administration in 2001, these pretenses gave way to assertions of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. Bush didn't transform the United States into a militarist society. Militarism developed long before he took office, at least by the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s, when America's political leaders initiated a virtual state of perpetual war preparations and warfare that continues to this day, long after the US has become a near-impregnable fortress, long after the demise of any possible enemies of substance.

Nor did Bush transform the United States into an imperialist country. Imperialism motivated Washington's unjust seizure of Mexican lands in 1848. Imperialism motivated the 1898 war against Spain to extend US hegemony to Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and it has continued ever since, growing stronger in the post-Soviet period of unipolar geopolitical domination supported by unparalleled military power.

Bush is arguably the most dangerous president in US history - he has launched unjust wars, threatened many countries, and broken treaties. But he could not have done so without the political weapons of militarism and imperialism, weapons that have been handed down from president to president for some 60 years.

At issue in this exploration of the US government's warmaking preparations and intentions is not simply what progressive-thinking people are going to do about Iraq today or Venezuela, Iran and China tomorrow. The real question is what will they do about the catastrophic combination of militarism and imperialism that makes continual war preparations and warfare an indelible characteristic of the American state. It is not simply a matter of getting rid of George W Bush because of Iraq or getting rid of Lyndon Johnson because of Vietnam. If we do not get rid of militarism and imperialism we are simply paving the way for the next war, and the next, and the next.

Jack A Smith is former editor of the (US) Guardian Newsweekly and editor of the Hudson Valley (New York) Activist Newsletter.


"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano