Here’s a little bit of news on which to end another messy week in the imperium. According to Esther Schrader in the Los Angeles Times (U.S. to Realign Troops in Asia), as part of a long-term reshuffling of our global garrisons and a repositioning of our troops away from Cold War bases in Germany, Japan, and South Korea to new bases in the “new” Europe, that is, the Eastern European SSRs of the old Soviet empire (and the those of the old Soviet empire in Central Asia) as well as in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, the U.S. is ” seeking agreements to base Navy ships in Vietnamese waters and ground troops in the Philippines.” In this way do old wars end and new ones begin. Given that foreign policy is now largely housed in the Pentagon, “reconciliation” with Vietnam (and so the official burial of the defeat from which the military has been running for three decades) would have to be military-to-military in nature — and what better than to somehow secure a toehold on future basing rights in Vietnam. Irony anyone?
I thought I might end my week of dispatches with a package of odds and ends that fascinated me and might offer you a range of weekend readings. Tom
The fox is in the henhouse, or history, forget about it:
In a country where connecting the dots is a dangerous occupation, bound to lead you to lands and acts you’d otherwise prefer to ignore, Chalmers Johnson nonetheless connected a few of dots last weekend in the Los Angeles Times Book Review section. In a review of Charlie Wilson’s War, he tells a fascinating and labyrinthine tale of how a Bible-belt Texan democrat in the House of Representatives helped pay for the “successful” arming of the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan whose unintended consequences don’t seem to be finished with us yet.
The enemy of our enemy
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, George Crile, Atlantic Monthly Press: 550 pp., $26
By Chalmers Johnson
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review
May 25 2003The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every “secret” armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the “secret war” in Laos, aid to the Greek colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of Salvador Allende in Chile and Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the agency’s activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States. The CIA continues to get away with this primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” and “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic,” to be published in January by Metropolitan Books.
The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every “secret” armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the “secret war” in Laos, aid to the Greek colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of Salvador Allende in Chile and Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the agency’s activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States. The CIA continues to get away with this primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” and “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic,” to be published in January by Metropolitan Books.
To read more Johnson click here
Dismantling the top-down command structure of regulation at home, setting it up abroad:
Jay Bookman of the Atlanta-constitution has written his column this week on the Bush worldview. What particularly appealed to me was the openness with which Bookman considered the radical nature of our president’s acts and plans. You can hear a mind thinking aloud on the page — which is honest and rare.
Bush’s radical worldview is a big risk
By Jay Bookman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
May 29, 2003George W. Bush was elected as a conservative but governs as a radical. And in the end, most radicals prove to be failures.
But the exceptions to that rule — well, they change the world, often for the better.
Certainly, the president does not lack confidence in his goals. Rather than preserve the status quo or tinker at the margins, he and his advisers pursue an agenda of dramatic transformation that would inspire awe under any circumstances.
But coming from an administration that just 30 months ago drew fewer votes than its main challenger, the ambition is even more impressive. In fact, the scope of proposed change is difficult to even describe.
Tax cuts last year, tax cuts this year, tax cuts next year, too — and forget about deficits.
Jay Bookman is deputy editorial page editor.
To read more Bookman click here
Smart bombs, dumb war:
In Slate, Fred Kaplan assesses our “precision” war based on a new report released by the Air Force. As with a number of writers on military affairs, Kaplan’s slant here is to guide the Pentagon toward better purchasing power in weaponry. I always find this an odd approach for a journalist, but the piece is valuable nonetheless, particularly if read in conjunction with Body Counts, Jonathan Steele’s recent piece in the British Guardian on a much overlooked subject, Iraqi military casualties and Paul Rogers latest summary of the post-war era in Iraq from the openDemocracy website, which follows.
Bombing by Numbers
The Iraqi air war wasn’t as modern as it looked
By Fred Kaplan
Slate
May 27, 2003With no fanfare, the U.S. Air Force recently released the official statistics on what it did during Gulf War II-how many planes of what sort flew how many sorties and dropped how many bombs of which types on what kinds of targets. The numbers confirm much and dispel much else of what we’ve assumed or been told about this “high-tech war.”
The unclassified report-titled Operation Iraqi Freedom by the Numbers, signed by Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley, commander of CENTAF (Central Command Air Forces), and available on John Pike’s wondrously useful Web site globalsecurity.org-confirms that the part of the war concerned with intelligence-gathering, target-acquisition, and real-time battlefield command-and-control was very high-tech indeed.
However, many of the weapons used were quite old-some of them nearly antique-and most of their missions were not in the least bit exotic.
To read more Kaplan click here
The Iraqi calculus
By Paul Rogers
openDemocracy
May 29, 2003Towards the end of the intense and chaotic Iraq war, reports have begun to emerge of large numbers of civilian casualties. While coalition sources played these reports down or ignored them altogether, independent analysts such as www.iraqbodycount.net were beginning to accumulate evidence from multiple sources suggesting that up to 2,000 civilians had been killed and many thousands injured.
In the six weeks since the end of the war, much more information has emerged, and it shows that the number of civilians killed was much higher than the early evidence suggested. In particular, casualty figures began to be made available from hospitals across Baghdad and from elsewhere in Iraq. These suggest that over 6,000 civilians were killed in the three weeks of war, added to whom are the continuing casualties from unexploded cluster munitions and other weapons.
To read more Rogers click here
Blogging from Baghdad: “Two months like this is too much, three months is a disaster”:
And finally, I send you off for your weekend with the remarkable tale of the Baghdad Blogger.
Salam’s story
By Rory McCarthy
The Guardian
May 30, 2003No one in Baghdad knew who he was or the risks he was taking. Apart from a select group of trusted friends, they still don’t. The telephones and the internet haven’t worked here since the collapse of the regime, so the Iraqis never had a chance to read the diaries of the Baghdad Blogger. Outside the country, many didn’t even believe that the man who wrote only under the sobriquet Salam Pax truly existed. It was the great irony of the war. While the world’s leading newspapers and television networks poured millions of pounds into their coverage of the war in Iraq, it was the internet musings of a witty young Iraqi living in a two-storey house in a Baghdad suburb that scooped them all to deliver the most compelling description of life during the war.