Thomas Paine said it best.

"It has been thought," he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, "...that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: And this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."

Empire vs. Republic

George W. Bush’s doctrine of preemptive wars is creating a new deep divide in U.S. politics. On one side, Bush and his backers see the Iraq War as the start of an American global empire built around unparalleled military power. On the other, a scattered grouping of skeptics dig in for what they see as a fight for the soul of the American republic.


Without doubt, the Bush side now owns the strategic high ground, asserting vindication in the U.S. ouster of Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein. Bush also can claim near total mastery of a U.S. news media that shed any pretense of “objectivity” as it flooded the nation with heroic images of American soldiers and heart-warming scenes of grateful Iraqis, while downplaying civilian dead and growing signs that many Iraqis resent the U.S. occupation.

The anti-empire side finds itself pinned down, too, by accusations that its opposition to the three-week war was naïve and even disloyal. Plus, it's a disorganized mix of political interests, ranging from old-time conservatives to traditional liberals, from the likes of Pat Buchanan to Howard Dean. Yet as imbalanced as this struggle now appears, both sides agree that it holds in its outcome the future of the American democratic experiment.

The pro-empire side argues that only a militarily assertive United States can address what Bush calls “gathering dangers” facing the nation – even if that means tighter constraints on liberty at home and freer use of U.S. troops abroad. The pro-republic forces say Bush’s imperial strategy is a sham – false security that cedes life-and-death national decisions to the dictates of one man.

Shallow Media

To the pro-republic side, part of the price for empire is the increasingly shallow U.S. news media that largely sanitized the war. Rather than troubling Americans with gruesome images of mangled and dismembered Iraqi bodies, including many children, the cable networks, in particular, edited the war in ways that helped avoid negativity and gave advertisers the feel-good content that plays best around their products.

Fox News may have pioneered this concept of casting the war in the gauzy light of heroic imagery, where Iraqi soldiers were “goons” and interviews with Americans at war were packaged with the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the soundtrack.

But the supposedly less ideological MSNBC may have carried the idea to even greater lengths with Madison-Avenue-style montages of the Iraq war. One showed U.S. troops in heroic postures moving through Iraq. The segment ended with an American boy surrounded by yellow ribbons for his father at war, and the concluding slogan, “Home of the Brave.”

Another MSNBC montage showed happy Iraqis welcoming U.S. troops as liberators and rejoicing at the toppling of Hussein. These stirring pictures ended with the slogan, “Let Freedom Ring.”

Left out of these “news” montages were any images of death and destruction. For instance, there was no scene of a newly orphaned 12-year-old Iraqi boy waving the stump of what’s left of his arms. No sense either of the unspeakable pain of a father who was injured in a U.S. bombing and was about to learn that his three young daughters, who were the center of his life, were dead.

The happy montages also sanitized out the horror of a mother who found her 20-year-old daughter in the ruins of a bombed-out restaurant, first her torso and then her head. The U.S. had bombed the restaurant in a residential area thinking Hussein was there.

Cable news also downplayed evidence that many Iraqis, while glad to see Hussein gone, were angered by the U.S. invasion and its aftermath, which brought widespread destruction, arson and looting, including the loss of priceless antiquities of Mesopotamia dating back more than 5,000 years. The reaction to the U.S. occupation has included marches by thousands of Iraqis demanding withdrawal of U.S. troops and calling for an Iran-like Islamic state.

The Wall Street Journal took note of the dueling coverage presented by domestic CNN and its CNNI Networks, which broadcasts to international viewers. While domestic CNN focused on happy stories, such as the rescue of U.S. prisoner-of-war Jessica Lynch, CNNI carried more scenes of wounded civilians overflowing Iraqi hospitals.

“During the Gulf War in 1991, [CNN] presented a uniform global feed that showed the war largely through American eyes,” the Journal reported. “Since then, CNN has developed several overseas networks that increasingly cater their programming to regional audiences and advertisers.” [WSJ, April 11, 2003]

Left unsaid by the Journal’s formulation of how CNN’s overseas affiliates “cater” to foreign audiences was the flip side of that coin, that domestic CNN is freer to shape a version of the news that is more satisfying to Americans and to U.S. advertisers.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/042103a.html

A nation lost


By James Carroll, 4/22/2003

EVEN BEFORE conclusions can be drawn about the war in Iraq (Saddam? Weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi stability? Cost to civilians? Syria?) a home front consensus is jelling around a radical revision of America's meaning in the world.


Centered on coercive unilateralism, the new doctrine assumes that the United States not only stands apart from other countries but above them. The primitive tribalism of boys at football games -- ''We're number one!'' -- has been transformed into an axiom of strategy. Military force has replaced democratic idealism as the main source of US influence.

Formerly conceived of as essentially defensive, US armed services are now unapologetically on the offense. Aggression is prevention. Diplomacy is reduced to making the case for impending war and then putting the best face on war's denouement. The aim of all this is not world dominance but world order. That world order in the new age requires American dominance is an unintended consequence of America's power-altruism. That ''We're number one'' makes the world safe for everybody -- if only they accept it.

This new vision is clear, its advocates are powerful, and with Iraq its main blocks are in place, with obvious implications for countries as geographically dispersed as Iran and North Korea. What are the elements of an alternative vision? In a world traumatized by terrorist threat, weapons proliferation, and the sensationalism of Fox and CNN, disruption is infinitely magnified.

When such horror strikes, whether from twin towers collapsing or twin snipers shooting strangers, can human beings put faith in something other than overwhelming force? What strategies should critics of the new US doctrine of coercive unilateralism employ in opposing it? Learning from the past, I think of several:

Don't cede the language of morality to the right wing. Manichaean bipolarity oversimplifies good and evil, banalizing both. Still, some things should be done because they are right or opposed because they are wrong.

Critics of the intended new Pax Americana should not hesitate to say that long-agreed ethical principles are being violated. It is wrong to break treaties, as the United States is doing in its treatment of POWs in Cuba. It is wrong to wage aggressive war, as the United States now openly does. To make decisions for or against such policies on supposedly pragmatic grounds is to break the crucial link between means and ends, as if an outcome (''regime change'') can justify whatever was done to accomplish it. In the long run, the only truly pragmatic act is the moral act.

Be skeptical of ''homeland security.'' The American tradition prefers the risks associated with liberty to the risks associated with bureaucratic control. The new homeland security state threatens the kind of excess that came with the national security state after World War II. It was the National Security Act of 1947, after all, that laid the groundwork for the univocal bureaucratizing of government based in the Pentagon that marginalized debate and eliminated the natural checks of multiple power centers.

''National security,'' defined by anti-Communist paranoia at home and abroad, was false security. ''Homeland security'' promises to be a paranoid reprise.

Be suspicious of foreign policy based on ''worst case'' thinking. During the Cold War, the United States made fearful assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions that turned out to be entirely false -- assessments that shaped policy. Low-level intelligence estimates regularly reported mere possibilities of hostile threat, which, reported up the chain of command, were transformed into certain facts. Thus, Soviet troop strength was wildly overestimated in the beginning of the era; Soviet missile strength was overestimated in the middle; Soviet political strength was overestimated at the end. The result was a US-driven nuclear arms race, the effects of which still threaten the world.

The worst case for the Soviet Union existed only in Washington's fantasy. And now it seems that the Saddam worst case resides in the same place. A nation that is so driven by fear will always find things to be afraid of. That nation's gravest threat arises, of course, from what it then does to defend itself.

Beware of war as an organizing principle of society. It should be a source of alarm, not pride, that the United States is drawing such cohesive sustenance from the war in Iraq.

Photographic celebrations of our young warriors, glorifications of released American prisoners, heroic rituals of the war dead all take on the character of crass exploitation of the men and women in uniform. First they were forced into a dubious circumstance, and now they are themselves being mythologized as its main post-facto justification -- as if the United States went to Iraq not to seize Saddam (disappeared), or to dispose of weapons of mass destruction (missing), or to save the Iraqi people (chaos), but ''to support the troops.'' War thus becomes its own justification. Such confusion on this grave point, as on the others, signifies a nation lost.



James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 4/22/2003.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/112/oped/A_nation_lost+.shtml

Sacrifice?

Ask not what you can do ...



VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney still receives paychecks from Halliburton. This money is “deferred compensation” from his time as the conglomerate’s CEO. Apparently, taking deferred compensation when he resigned, instead of a lump sum, offered “tax advantages.”

No one likes paying taxes. And lots of people use creative means to lower their tax bite. But there is something unseemly about the vice president of the United States remaining on the payroll of a private company in order to elude taxes — especially considering that Cheney is awash in money after his rocky tenure at Halliburton.

He made $10 million in salary and bonuses, plus something like $30 million in stock options. That’s for five years of work. You’d think Cheney could afford to share a little of that wealth with the government he’s helping to lead, especially to avoid the ethically questionable situation of remaining on the payroll of a company that gets billions of dollars in government contracts.

We’ve come a long, long way from “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Then again, under Cheney’s leadership, Halliburton found plenty of “tax advantages.” The number of Halliburton subsidiaries establishing offshore headquarters to evade federal taxes increased from nine to 44 during Cheney’s five years.

The company went from paying $302 million in taxes in 1998 to receiving an $85 million rebate in 1999. Meanwhile, much of the income Halliburton didn’t pay taxes on was coming from billions of dollars in government contracts Cheney helped secure.

Halliburton isn’t the only company sneaking offshore to ease or erase its tax burden. The IRS estimates that eliminating the offshore loophole would bring in $70 billion annually. Coincidentally, that’s almost enough to pay for President Bush’s war in Iraq.

Legislation to outlaw this practice, called the “Corporate Patriot Enforcement Act,” is going nowhere, perhaps because so many of these companies use a small fraction of their ill-gotten gains to shower money on Congress.

Republicans in Congress even derailed an attempt to simply prevent corporate “ex-patriots” from winning homeland security contracts.

Tax cheats shouldn’t get government contracts. And a person more interested in “tax advantages” than in honorably, honestly and ethically serving his country shouldn’t be vice president of the United States.

http://www.wvgazette.com/section/Editorials/200304201/

Our Ignorance, Their Want

by Maureen Farrell

"Oh, man, look here. Look, look, down here," exclaimed the ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dreaded.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom. . . ." -- Charles Dickens

* * *

By now, many are familiar with Operation Northwoods, the U.S. plan to wage terrorist attacks against American citizens and blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for war. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document read. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," it continued. Developed through the far-right stewardship of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, in an early '60s atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia, Operation Northwoods was approved by all Joint Chiefs of Staff, but nixed by the civilian leadership. "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will," Body of Secrets author James Bamford told ABC News "and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html

Sound familiar? Just wait.

Though President Kennedy assured Lemnitzer that America would never overtly attack Cuba, military ideologues met one month after submitting Northwoods and wrote a memo to Robert McNamara claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw "no prospect" of Castro being overthrown through "internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures," felt that "military interventions [would] be required to overthrow the present Communist regime." The memo indicated that the Joint Chiefs believed that this could be "accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunity for solicitation of U.N. action" and that after U.S. forces assured "rapid essential control of Cuba, continued police action would be required." In other words, they would bypass the U.N. and America's military would keep Cuba's peace. "[W]hat Lemnitzer was suggesting," Bamford wrote, "was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.-controlled police state."

Our Ignorance, Their Want

by Maureen Farrell

"Oh, man, look here. Look, look, down here," exclaimed the ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dreaded.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom. . . ." -- Charles Dickens

* * *

By now, many are familiar with Operation Northwoods, the U.S. plan to wage terrorist attacks against American citizens and blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for war. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document read. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," it continued. Developed through the far-right stewardship of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, in an early '60s atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia, Operation Northwoods was approved by all Joint Chiefs of Staff, but nixed by the civilian leadership. "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will," Body of Secrets author James Bamford told ABC News "and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html

Sound familiar? Just wait.

Though President Kennedy assured Lemnitzer that America would never overtly attack Cuba, military ideologues met one month after submitting Northwoods and wrote a memo to Robert McNamara claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw "no prospect" of Castro being overthrown through "internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures," felt that "military interventions [would] be required to overthrow the present Communist regime." The memo indicated that the Joint Chiefs believed that this could be "accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunity for solicitation of U.N. action" and that after U.S. forces assured "rapid essential control of Cuba, continued police action would be required." In other words, they would bypass the U.N. and America's military would keep Cuba's peace. "[W]hat Lemnitzer was suggesting," Bamford wrote, "was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.-controlled police state."