Palestine 2007: Genocide in Gaza, Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank

Ilan Pappe, The Electronic Intifada, 11 January 2007

A general view of Har Homa settlement, built on the land of West Bank city of Bethlehem, and considered by Israel to be part of 'Greater Jerusalem', 29 November 2006. (MaanImages/Magnus Johansson)

On this stage, not so long ago, I claimed that Israel is conducting genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. I hesitated a lot before using this very charged term and yet decided to adopt it. Indeed, the responses I received, including from some leading human rights activists, indicated a certain unease over the usage of such a term. I was inclined to rethink the term for a while, but came back to employing it today with even stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.

On 28 December 2006, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem published its annual report about the Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories. Israeli forces killed this last year six hundred and sixty citizens. The number of Palestinians killed by Israel last year tripled in comparison to the previous year (around two hundred). According to B'Tselem, the Israelis killed one hundred and forty one children in the last year. Most of the dead are from the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli forces demolished almost 300 houses and slew entire families. This means that since 2000, Israeli forces killed almost four thousand Palestinians, half of them children; more than twenty thousand were wounded.

B'Tselem is a conservative organization, and the numbers may be higher. But the point is not just about the escalating intentional killing, it is about the trend and the strategy. As 2007 commences, Israeli policymakers are facing two very different realities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the former, they are closer than ever to finishing the construction of their eastern border. Their internal ideological debate is over and their master plan for annexing half of the West Bank is being implemented at an ever-growing speed. The last phase was delayed due to the promises made by Israel, under the Road Map, not to build new settlements. Israel found two ways of circumventing this alleged prohibition. First, it defined a third of the West Bank as Greater Jerusalem, which allowed it to build within this new annexed area towns and community centers. Secondly, it expanded old settlements to such proportions so that there was no need to build new ones. This trend was given an additional push in 2006 (hundreds of caravans were installed to mark the border of the expansions, the planning schemes for the new towns and neighborhoods were finalized and the apartheid bypass roads and highway system completed). In all, the settlements, the army bases, the roads and the wall will allow Israel to annex almost half of the West Bank by 2010. Within these territories there will be a considerable number of Palestinians, against whom the Israeli authorities will continue to implement slow and creeping transfer policies -- too boring as a subject for the western media to bother with and too elusive for human rights organizations to make a general point about them. There is no rush; as far as the Israelis are concerned, they have the upper hand there: the daily abusive and dehumanizing mixed mechanisms of army and bureaucracy is as effective as ever in contributing its own share to the dispossession process.

The strategic thinking of Ariel Sharon that this policy is far better than the one offered by the blunt 'transferists' or ethnic cleansers, such as Avigdor Liberman's advocacy, is accepted by everyone in the government, from Labor to Kadima. The petit crimes of state terrorism are also effective as they enable liberal Zionists around the world to softly condemn Israel and yet categorize any genuine criticism on Israel's criminal policies as anti-Semitism.

On the other hand, there is no clear Israeli strategy as yet for the Gaza Strip; but there is a daily experiment with one. Gaza, in the eyes of the Israelis, is a very different geo-political entity from that of the West Bank. Hamas controls Gaza, while Abu Mazen seems to run the fragmented West Bank with Israeli and American blessing. There is no chunk of land in Gaza that Israel covets and there is no hinterland, like Jordan, to which the Palestinians of Gaza can be expelled. Ethnic cleansing is ineffective here.

The earlier strategy in Gaza was ghettoizing the Palestinians there, but this is not working. The ghettoized community continues to express its will for life by firing primitive missiles into Israel. Ghettoizing or quarantining unwanted communities, even if they were regarded as sub-human or dangerous, never worked in history as a solution. The Jews know it best from their own history. The next stages against such communities in the past were even more horrific and barbaric. It is difficult to tell what the future holds for the Gaza population, ghettoized, quarantined, unwanted and demonized. Will it be a repeat of the ominous historical examples or is a better fate still possible?

Creating the prison and throwing the key to the sea, as UN Special Reporter John Dugard has put it, was an option the Palestinians in Gaza reacted against with force as soon as September 2005. They were determined to show at the very least that they were still part of the West Bank and Palestine. In that month, they launched the first significant, in number and not quality, barrage of missiles into the Western Negev. The shelling was a response to an Israeli campaign of mass arrests of Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists in the Tul Karem area. The Israelis responded with operation 'First Rain'. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the nature of that operation. It was inspired by the punitive measures inflicted first by colonialist powers, and then by dictatorships, against rebellious imprisoned or banished communities. A frightening show of the oppressor's power to intimidate preceded all kind of collective and brutal punishments, ending with a large number of dead and wounded among the victims. In 'First Rain', supersonic flights were flown over Gaza to terrorize the entire population, succeeded by the heavy bombardment of vast areas from the sea, sky and land. The logic, the Israeli army explained, was to create pressure so as to weaken the Gaza community's support for the rocket launchers. As was expected, by the Israelis as well, the operation only increased the support for the rocket launchers and gave impetus to their next attempt. The real purpose of that particular operation was experimental. The Israeli generals wished to know how such operations would be received at home, in the region and in the world. And it seems that instantly the answer was 'very well'; namely, no one took an interest in the scores of dead and hundreds of wounded Palestinians left behind after the 'First Rain' subsided.

The bar set continually higher: Palestinians pass by a pool of blood after the Israeli shelling of a residential area in Beit Hanoun in the northern of Gaza Strip in which at least 18 people were killed, 8 November 2006. (MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)

And hence since 'First Rain' and until June 2006, all the following operations were similarly modeled. The difference was in their escalation: more firepower, more causalities and more collateral damage and, as to be expected, more Qassam missiles in response. Accompanying measures in 2006 were more sinister means of ensuring the full imprisonment of the people of Gaza through boycott and blockade, with which the EU is still shamefully collaborating.

The capture of Gilad Shalit in June 2006 was irrelevant in the general scheme of things, but nonetheless provided an opportunity for the Israelis to escalate even more the components of the tactical and allegedly punitive missions. After all, there was still no strategy that followed the tactical decision of Ariel Sharon to take out 8,000 settlers whose presence complicated 'punitive' missions and whose eviction made him almost a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, the 'punitive' actions continue and become themselves a strategy.

The Israeli army loves drama and therefore also escalated the language. 'First Rain' was replaced by 'Summer Rains', a general name that was given to the 'punitive' operations since June 2006 (in a country where there is no rain in the summer, the only precipitation that one can expect are showers of F-16 bombs and artillery shells hitting people of Gaza).

'Summer Rains' brought a novel component: the land invasion into parts of the Gaza Strip. This enabled the army to kill citizens even more effectively and to present it as a result of heavy fighting within dense populated areas, an inevitable result of the circumstances and not of Israeli policies. With the close of summer came operation 'Autumn Clouds' which was even more efficient: on 1 November 2006, in less than 48 hours, the Israelis killed seventy civilians; by the end of that month, with additional mini operations accompanying it, almost two hundred were killed, half of them children and women. As one can see from the dates, some of the activity was parallel to the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, making it easier to complete the operations without much external attention, let alone criticism.

From 'First Rain' to 'Autumn Clouds' one can see escalation in every parameter. The first is the disappearance of the distinction between civilian and non-civilian targets: the senseless killing has turned the population at large to the main target for the army's operation. The second one is the escalation in the means: employment of every possible killing machines the Israeli army possesses. Thirdly, the escalation is conspicuous in the number of casualties: with each operation, and each future operation, a much larger number of people are likely to be killed and wounded. Finally, and most importantly, the operations become a strategy -- the way Israel intends to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip.

A creeping transfer in the West Bank and a measured genocidal policy in the Gaza Strip are the two strategies Israel employs today. From an electoral point of view, the one in Gaza is problematic as it does not reap any tangible results; the West Bank under Abu Mazen is yielding to Israeli pressure and there is no significant force that arrests the Israeli strategy of annexation and dispossession. But Gaza continues to fire back. On the one hand, this would enable the Israeli army to initiate more massive genocidal operations in the future. But there is also the great danger, on the other, that as happened in 1948, the army would demand a more drastic and systematic 'punitive' and collateral action against the besieged people of the Gaza Strip.

A source of satisfaction for Israel: Palestinians inspect a burnt vehicle belonging to Colonel Mohammad Ghareeb, the deputy chief of preventive security in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The vehicle was burnt during factional clashes between Fatah and Hamas. (MaanImages/Wesam Saleh)

Ironically, the Israeli killing machine has rested lately. Even relatively large number of Qassam missiles, including one or two quite deadly ones, did not stir the army to action. Though the army's spokesmen say it shows 'restraint', it never did in the past and is not likely to do so in the future. The army rests, as its generals are content with the internal killing that rages on in Gaza and does the job for them. They watch with satisfaction the emerging civil war in Gaza, which Israel foments and encourages. From Israel's point of view it does not really mater how Gaza would eventually be demographically downsized, be it by internal or Israeli slaying. The responsibility of ending the internal fighting lies of course with the Palestinian groups themselves, but the American and Israeli interference, the continued imprisonment, the starvation and strangulation of Gaza are all factors that make such an internal peace process very difficult. But it will take place soon and then with the first early sign that it subsided, the Israeli 'Summer Rains' will fall down again on the people of Gaza, wreaking havoc and death.

And one should never tire of stating the inevitable political conclusions from this dismal reality of the year we left behind and in the face of the one that awaits us. There is still no other way of stopping Israel than besides boycott, divestment and sanctions. We should all support it clearly, openly, unconditionally, regardless of what the gurus of our world tell us about the efficiency or raison d'etre of such actions. The UN would not intervene in Gaza as it does in Africa; the peace noble laureates would not enlist to its defense as they do for causes in Southeast Asia. The numbers of people killed there are not staggering as far as other calamities are concerned, and it is not a new story -- it is dangerously old and troubling. The only soft point of this killing machine is its oxygen lines to 'western' civilization and public opinion. It is still possible to puncture them and make it at least more difficult for the Israelis to implement their future strategy of eliminating the Palestinian people either by cleansing them in the West Bank or genociding them in the Gaza Strip.


Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. His books include, among others, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (London and New York 2005) and his latest, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).
---

Ilan Pappé - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Related Links

BY TOPIC: Israel attacks Gaza: "Operation Autumn Clouds" (1 Nov 2006- )

BY TOPIC: Massacre in Beit Hanoun (8 November 2006)

BY TOPIC: Israel invades Gaza: "Operation Summer Rain" (27 June 2006)

BY TOPIC: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions

A rare voice: An interview with author Ilan Pappe, Christopher Brown (11 December 2006)

Brace Yourself for 2007

January 3, 2007

By Leon Hadar

There was a certain end-of-an-era feeling in Washington in the last few weeks of 2006. In the aftermath of the Republican loss of Congress in November, interpreted by most pundits as the American public's repudiation of President George Bush's policy in Iraq, the expectation in the U.S. capital was that the city would enter the last stage of the post-9/11 neoconservative revolution.

The scenario outlined by insiders was the following: The Iraq Study Group (ISG) would issue its recommendations to start gradual U.S. disengagement from Mesopotamia. That would provide a political cover for President Bush and Congress to start planning for the withdrawal of some troops for Iraq and for opening a dialogue with Iran and Syria, all of which would help produce a new national consensus at home while encouraging Washington to move in a more multilateral direction abroad.

But as we enter 2007, it's becoming clear that those earlier expectations were quite inflated. President Bush and his top aides have insisted that the administration will not consider the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. In fact, the White House seems to be in the process of moving in the other direction.

It is apparently going to increase by at least 30,000 the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have also stressed that they are not planning any diplomatic overture to Tehran or Damascus. If anything, there are indications that the U.S. is projecting its military presence in the Persian Gulf to demonstrate to Iran that it "means business."

Indeed, there is growing pressure on the Bush administration to "do something" about Iran's alleged nuclear military program coming from both Saudi Arabia and the other Arab-Sunni regimes in the region as well as from Israel and its supporters in Washington.

In short, while the Bush administration hasn't officially rejected the ISG's recommendations, it is doing exactly that in practical terms, recommitting itself to the hegemonic strategy in the Middle East it has been pursuing since it decided in the aftermath of 9/11 to oust Saddam Hussein from power. As President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have implied in private and public comments, they will not be running for office in 2008 and are therefore under no domestic political pressure to make dramatic changes in their foreign policy.

Mr. Bush knows that his historical legacy will be determined by what happens in Iraq and the Middle East. Notwithstanding his upbeat rhetoric, he has probably concluded that there won't be any U.S. victory in Iraq in the next two years.

His successor in the White House will then have to continue managing what will probably become a permanent U.S. military commitment in the Persian Gulf. Mr. Bush hopes that 20 or 30 years from now, historians will compare him to President Harry Truman, who was not very popular at home when he led the U.S. into a costly military intervention in Korea in 1950, but who is regarded today as the architect of the successful U.S. Cold War strategy.

More likely, President Bush will feel in the next year or two like President Lyndon Johnson, who faced very strong public and congressional opposition to the growing U.S. military intervention in Vietnam in the mid-1960s.

Not only has he been confronted with a more skeptical, if not hostile press corps, but starting early this year, Congress will be under the control of the opposition party, whose leaders are planning to launch probes and hearings aimed at assessing the administration's conduct in Iraq.

The combination of a critical media and scolding from Congress is bound to make life even more miserable politically for the White House. It will certainly make it even less likely that the White House and the Democratic Congress will be able to reach agreements on a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues, ranging from the Middle East and international trade to taxes and Social Security.

But the Democrats are constrained in terms of their congressional power to force Mr. Bush, the commander in chief, to make major changes in his Iraq policy. That is certainly the case when one considers that the Democrats themselves are not united over a coherent policy in Iraq. But there is little doubt that the political debate in Washington over Iraq and other issues will become very nasty in 2007, especially as the politicians start preparing for the 2008 presidential and congressional races.

At the same time, unexpected developments relating to the Middle East – Israeli attacks on Iran's nuclear sites, a full-blown civil war in Iraq, a major terrorist attack – could certainly change the balance of power in Washington by either weakening or strengthening Mr. Bush's position. Whatever happens, one thing is clear: The politicians in Washington and the journalists covering them will be very busy in 2007. That's what happens when you live in interesting times.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings Ltd.

The Imperial Path in 2007

Tomgram: On the Imperial Path in 2007

[Note to readers: Tomdispatch returns in the New Year ready to roll and with a year-inaugurating theme. Consider today's piece an introduction to a January-long exploration of America's imperial mission, the Pentagon's role in it, and the militarization of our society. Though Robert Dreyfuss will, this week, be laying out Iraq policy options, and Elizabeth de la Vega as well as David Swanson will soon survey this season's legal and investigatory landscape, a number of upcoming posts will focus on our militarizing future. Look forward to: Nick Turse on urban war-fighting plans for 2025; a Michael Klare two-parter on the global militarization of energy policy; Frida Berrigan on the weaponry in our future; and Chalmers Johnson on our imperial fate. Tom]

Let's Do It Again!

Doubling Down on the Imperial Mission in 2007
By Tom Engelhardt

Okay, folks, it's time for a year-opening sermon. And like any good sermon, this one will be based on illustrative texts, in this case from 2006, and inspirational passages plucked from them. Its goal, as in any such quest, will be to reveal a world normally hidden from us in our daily lives.

Every day, it seems, essential choices are being made in our names by our top officials, civilian and military, many of whom, as the year ended, only reaffirmed that our country is headed down an imperial path in the Middle East and elsewhere, a path based on dreams of domination and backed, above all else, by the principle of force. No matter their disagreements over the administration's Iraq catastrophe, on this, agreement has remained so widespread as to make all discussion of the basics seem beside the point. Despite recent failures on the imperial path, consideration of other paths remains almost inconceivable.

Naturally, the continual act of choosing the path we are on, and the hardly noticed Pentagonization and Homeland Securitization of our own society that goes with it are never presented to Americans as such. If no alternatives to what we are doing are ever suggested, then logic is with the doers, no matter the staggering problems on the horizon.

In fact, what we do in the world -- how, for instance, we choose to garrison the planet -- is seldom presented as a matter of choice at all. Either it's been forced on us by "them" -- the rogues, the jihadis, the madmen, the evil ones -- and so is the only path to our obvious safety (as defined by our betters in Washington); or it's so obvious that nothing needs to be done but reaffirm it. As in all Washington debates at this moment, what's truly important is simply to decide how to make that imperial path less rocky and those dreams of domination that pass for American "security" more achievable (or even, as in Iraq, less noticeably catastrophic).

End of introduction to sermon. Now to the illustrative texts and examples.

Expand the Mission

For my first text, let me take an e-letter that the college-age daughter of a friend received the other day from a Marine Corps Officer Selection Officer, inviting her to "an awesome summer training program called the Platoon Leader's Course." Think of it as Marine Corps summer camp. No uniforms ("This is not ROTC!"), but reasonable amounts of moolah. Here's some of what was on offer to her, part of a desperate military's Iraq-era appeal to citizenly duty:

"You will earn approximately $2,400 (six weeks) or $4,000 (ten weeks) plus room and board during the training. How's that for a summer job?... You will not incur any obligation to the Marine Corps even after completing the training. (You can choose whether or not to continue with the program)... Tuition assistance will be available to you after you complete training this summer. You could potentially earn $8,000 to $25,000 for school, depending on graduation date."

Imagine! The Marine Corps is willing to pay young people to go to a uniform-less summer camp to test their "leadership potential," with no commitment to the Corps necessary. Consider that; then consider what was certainly the President's only significant decision of the holiday season past -- to permanently expand the U.S. military by as many as 70,000 troops.

Now, as in some old math problem, the question is: How do you connect these two points. (Hint: Not with a straight line.)

Faced with a public shot across the bow in testimony before Congress by Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker, who warned that the Army "will break" under present war-zone rotation needs, President Bush responded on December 19th. He brought up the "stressed" nature of the U.S. Armed Forces and, while still officially hesitating about his "way forward" in Iraq, said, "I'm inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops -- the Army, the Marines. And I talked about this to Secretary [Robert A.] Gates, and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building [the Pentagon], come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea." All this was, he added, "to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists."

Ah… that makes things clearer.

Of course, to get those new "volunteer" officers and men, who have generally been none too eager to volunteer for the Army and the Marines in the midst of a disastrous, far-away, increasingly incomprehensible set of double wars, you'll have to pay even more kids more money to go to no-commitment summer camp; and, while you're at it, you'll have to lower standards for the military radically. You'll have to let in even more volunteers without high-school diplomas but with "moral" and medical "waivers" for criminal records and mental problems. You'll have to fast-track even more new immigrants willing to join for the benefits of quick citizenship; you'll have to ramp up already high cash bonuses of all sorts; you'll have to push the top-notch ad agency recently hired on a five-year contract for a cool billion dollars to rev up its new "Army Strong" recruitment drive even higher; you'll certainly have to jack up the numbers of military recruiters radically, to the tune of perhaps a couple of hundred million more dollars; and maybe just for the heck of it, you better start planning for the possibility of recruiting significant numbers of potential immigrants before they even think to leave their own countries. After all, it's darn romantic to imagine a future American all-volunteer force that will look more like the old French Foreign Legion -- or an army of mercenaries anyway. All in all, you'll have to commit to the fact that your future soldier in your basic future war will cost staggering sums of money to hire and even more staggering sums to retain after he or she has had a taste of what "leadership potential" really entails.

Put another way, as long as Iraq remains a classic quagmire for the Army and Marines, any plan to expand the U.S. military in order to make it easier to fight such wars in the future, threatens to become a classic financial quagmire as well. In other words, Iraq and military expansion don't fit together well at all. And yet, looking at the state of our military in Iraq in a certain light, expansion seems so… well, logical.

After all, the American military, now at just over 500,000 troops, stood, at the time of the First Gulf War, at 703,000. (Of course, no one now counts the quite expensive hired mercenaries who envelop our military -- the privatized, Halliburton-style adjuncts, who cook the food, build the bases, do the cleaning, deliver the mail and supplies, perform interrogation duties, and so on, and whose increase has been striking as has the growth of rent-a-mercenary corporations whose armed employees are, for instance, all over Iraq.) In addition, it has long been clear that the Armed Forces could not take the strain of failing wars in Central Asia and the Middle East forever, not to speak of increased "commitments" in the Persian Gulf and the normal massive global basing and policing that the Pentagon regularly refers to as our "footprint" on the planet. Added to this, the President seems to be leaning towards increasingly the pressure on military manpower needs by "surging" -- the Vietnam era word would, of course, have been "escalating" -- up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad and al-Anbar province, while naval and air forces (with an obvious eye to Iran) are simultaneously ramped up in the Persian Gulf.

In light of Iraq, military manpower needs cry out to be dealt with. In light of Iraq, dealing with them any time soon will be prohibitively expensive.

In Washington, this conundrum leads nowhere in particular. Instead, in the spirit of imperial-mission logic (and with the urge to bash the Bush administration for being late to such an obvious support-our-troops position), Democrats simply leaped onto the expand-the-military bandwagon even faster than Republicans. In fact, leading Democrats had long been calling for just this sort of expansion. ("I am glad [the President] has realized the need for increasing the size of the armed forces... but this is where the Democrats have been for two years," commented Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the new House Democratic Caucus chairman.) The Democratic leadership promptly pledged to make such an expansion one of its top reform priorities in the New Year.

To get those numbers significantly higher will, it's estimated, take a decade and unimaginable sums of money (as well as those lowered standards). And, if the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan worsen, as they almost certainly will, and American casualties rise with no end in sight, you can start going through your multiplication tables. This could be considered but a form of ongoing blowback from American imperial shock-and-awe tactics in Iraq and presents some curious choices to our leaders. After all, to take but one example, those most eager to expand the military, with their eyes on the imperial future, should be eager to liquidate the Iraqi mission as soon as possible.

But a far more basic choice lurks -- one rarely alluded to in the mainstream. If we voted on such things –- and, in truth, we vote on less and less that matters -- the choice that actually lies behind the Marine e-letter to my friend's daughter might be put this way: Expand the military or shrink the mission?

This is the essential question that goes largely unmentioned -- and largely unthought as well. In the meantime, money will continue to pour into military recruitment ad campaigns, bonuses, and summer camps. In the meantime, those Marine e-letters will continue to go out. In the meantime, money will continue to pour into the Pentagon and the national security world generally. In the meantime, we will continue to build our near billion-dollar embassy, the largest on the planet, in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone. In the meantime, the imperial and military paths will continue to fuse, and the Pentagon will continue to take on new roles, even outside "declared war zones," in intelligence, diplomacy, "information operations," and other "self-assigned missions"; so that, as Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times recently described it, even our embassies will increasingly be militarized outposts in the global war on terror.

Shrinking the mission -- choosing some path other than the imperial one (in part by redefining what exactly our national interests are) -- would, of course, address many problems. It would make paying young people thousands of dollars to test their leadership potential or thinking about scouring Central America for a future Foreign Legion far less necessary. But no one in Washington -- not in the Bush administration, not in James A. Baker's Iraq Study Group, which recently captured the Inside-the-Beltway "middle ground" on Iraq policy, not in the Democratic leadership -- is faintly interested in shrinking the American global mission. No one in Washington, where a kind of communal voting does go on, is about to vote "no" to that mission, or cast a ballot for democracy rather than empire.

Expanding the military may seem like a no-brainer in response to the Iraq crisis. As it happens, it's anything but. Unfortunately, few ever discuss (as, for instance, Chalmers Johnson did in his book, The Sorrows of Empire) the 700-plus military and intelligence bases we retain around the world or ask why exactly we're garrisoning the planet. No one, in these last years, has seriously challenged the ever expanding Pentagon budget; nor the mushrooming supplemental requests for Iraq and Afghanistan, including the record-setting latest for almost $100 billion; nor, generally, the fact that paying for actual war-fighting is no longer considered an appropriate part of the Pentagon's normal budget process.

No one challenged it when, in 2002, the United States gained a new North American Command (Northcom), making U.S. citizens but another coequal part of the Pentagon's division of its imperial world, along with those who live in regions covered by Centcom, Paccom, and the just authorized Africa Command (Africom). No one challenged the vast expansion of Pentagon intelligence activities. No one offered a challenge as the military took on ever more civilian domestic duties, including planning for the potential arrival of a pandemic disease on our shores or for future Katrinas. No one seriously challenges the plans the Pentagon has on the drawing boards for exotic, futuristic hardware meant to come on line decades from now that, along with futuristic military tactics already being worked out, will help predetermine the wars most Americans don't even know we are going to fight -- from the vast mega-slum-cities of the Third World to the borderlands of space.

No one considers what the Pentagonization of our world and the Homeland Securitization of our country is doing to us, because militarism here has never taken on the expectable forms -- few vast military parades or displays (despite the almost full-scale militarization of Presidential funerals); few troops in the streets; no uniforms in the high councils of government. In fact, it's one of the ironies of our particular form of militarization that when our military -- no longer really a citizen army -- goes to war and troops begin to die, less Americans are touched by this than perhaps at any time in our recent history.

Shrink the mission or expand the military? Your choice?

Fat chance.

An Expeditionary Mentality

Like all crucial questions, the one never asked nonetheless remains deeply embedded in our most essential texts as in our lives and our world. All you have to do is keep an eye out and you can catch endless examples of the choices that have already been made for us -- and are being regularly ratified in our names, but largely without our knowledge or the slightest consultation by the men (and they are largely men) who define what an American world is supposed to mean and simply can't imagine it any other way.

Let me just offer a few illustrative and largely overlooked gems from 2006 (with modest commentary):

Last May, in the opening statement at his confirmation hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee for the post of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael Hayden, former head of the National Security Agency, offered the following promise to Congress:

"If confirmed as Director, I would reaffirm CIA's proud culture of risk-taking and excellence, particularly through the increased use of non-traditional operational platforms, a greater focus on the development of language skills, and the inculcation of what I would call an expeditionary mentality."

"An expeditionary mentality" -- in order to "keep America safe." The phrase, so Kiplingesque, so British Empire, did not so much as draw a comment from the assembled Senators or a peep from the press. While much in Hayden's testimony was highlighted, this essential promise passed essentially unnoticed. And why should that surprise anyone? After the tenure of the previous two directors, George "Slam Dunk" Tenet and the ham-handed Republican Party hack Porter Goss, it was, in the Washington context, a simple promise of performance enhancement. On the imperial path, after all, an expeditionary mentality is a perfectly reasonable thing to have.

Let's Do It Again!

Or consider the following comment from Col. Conrad Crane, director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute and a key figure in overseeing the production and recent release of a 279-page joint Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

"If we've created a manual that is just good for Iraq and Afghanistan, we've failed… This thing has got to be focused on the future and the next time we do this."

The next time we do this. Okay, call that realism along the imperial path. After all, if somehow, post-Vietnam, the U.S. military was in denial about waging future counterinsurgency wars, it's perfectly logical to assume that it shouldn't be again; not if these are to be "our" wars of the future. Or as another of the key drafters of the guidebook, Lt. Col. John A. Nagl put it, "We are codifying the best practices of previous counterinsurgency campaigns and the lessons we have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan to help our forces succeed in the current fight and prepare for the future."

And yet, like so much else, that counterinsurgency how-to-do-it is also a functional vote for an imperial mission few of us have ever had the chance to really consider, no less opt for. And why is it that when I read Crane's comment, I think to myself -- as if I were a parent dealing with thoughtless children -- no, no, the lesson of our moment isn't: Do it right the next time. It's: Don't do it!

"We're Going to Be Here a Long Time"

But you can hardly blame Colonels Conrad and Nagl, not when just about all strands of official thought in and around Washington point toward those future wars. On the one hand, we have the latest neoconservative proposal, direct from the American Enterprise Institute, promoted personally to the President by former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane and AEI star Frederick Kagan, and heavily lobbied for by presidential candidate Sen. John McCain. It calls for Bush to order a "surge" of 30,000 or more American troops (long term) into what former counterterrorism tsar Richard Clarke now calls the "Iraqi sinkhole." These are the people who, as Inter Press Service analyst Jim Lobe commented recently, are intent on making "one final effort… to persuade the president that, by ‘doubling down' on his gamble on Iraq, he can still leave the table a winner and ‘transform' the entire Middle East."

If taken, this will be but the latest in a long line of gambler's choices on the neocon imperial path to remaking the Middle East. And while others in Washington or Iraq, including top U.S. commanders, may not back such an obviously wobbly policy decision, doubling down on the imperial path itself is another matter entirely. News reports in late December indicated that the U.S. and Britain were already deploying a new set of warships to the Persian Gulf, possibly including a second American aircraft-carrier task force, which would join the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower already on station there. No one had any doubt that these moves were aimed at Iran.

In the meantime, our new Secretary of Defense Robert A. Gates, until recently a member of the "realist" Iraq Study Group, sent in from Papa Bush's world to clean up the mess in Baghdad, made his first official trip to the Iraqi capital to meet with American commanders. While those ships headed Gulf-ward, he had a few choice things to say on the subject of the American imperial mission in the Middle East. In a breakfast meeting with American soldiers, he offered the following:

"[W]e need to make damn sure that the neighbors understand we're going to be here a long time, ‘here' meaning the Persian Gulf area, not necessarily here in Iraq."

That this was no passing spontaneous outburst he made clear with this comment in a press briefing:

"I think the message that we are sending to everyone, not just Iran, is that the United States is an enduring presence in this part of the world. We have been here for a long time. We will be here for a long time and everybody needs to remember that -- both our friends and those who might consider themselves our adversaries."

When the "realist" Secretary of Defense talks in this fashion about our enduring regional "footprint," he's voting for the imperial path in the name of all Americans. He's also reminding us that, with every passing moment, that path and the military one are becoming a single way into the future. He's ensuring that when our counterinsurgency warriors, armed with their latest weaponry and manuals, hit the sands of wherever, they won't sound that different from the soldier at that breakfast in Iraq who described what it's like to "advise" the Iraqi military: "The more they work with us, the more they're slowly picking up on our traits. I mean, you see them sort of starting trying to act like us and stuff, and it's good; you know, little brother trying to act like a big brother…"

This is offered in the same patronizing imperial spirit in which President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and others once talked about teaching the Iraqi child how to ride the "bike" of democracy and debated when to take off the "training wheels." It helps explain why our imperial path and that giant "footprint," all of which seem so natural to us as hardly to be an imposition on others, appeal so little elsewhere in the world. It helps explain why no counterinsurgency guide, no deployment of aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf, no upping of the Pentagon budget, or sending of "intelligence" agents, military or CIA, into the universe with an "expeditionary mentality," will ever make this planet a comfortable, conquerable, garrison-able place. It helps explain just why the imperial path is ever more costly.

Flies and Sledgehammers

Recently, deputy director for the war on terrorism within the Strategic Plans Office of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, Gen. Mark O. Schissler, told the Washington Times,

"We're in a generational war. You can try and fight the enemy where they are and where they're attacking you, or prevent them and defend your own homeland… [Islamist extremists are] absolutely committed to the 50-, 100-year plan."

It was a typical comment of our moment in which "they" invariably leave helpless us no other option but to prepare for their 100-year or multigenerational struggle.

So, with us headed down what various administration officials have long thought of as a century-long path of war, let me conclude this little sermon by returning to the Marine recruitment e-letter my friend's daughter received. It ends with an encouraging challenge: "This is an unparalleled opportunity to see if you have what it takes to be a leader in one of the most elite organizations in the world without committing yourself to service." Then, after the recruiting officer's sign-off, comes what clearly is meant to be an inspirational quote for the prospective military leader of America's future:

"Sometimes killing a fly with a sledgehammer is entirely appropriate. It doesn't make the fly any more dead, but the rest of the flies sure sit up and take notice. -- Major I. L. Holdridge, USMC"

Retired Marine Major Holdridge, it turns out, is the creator of a video game, TacOps, used by military trainers and available in commercial form. His comment reminded me of something Boston Globe columnist James Carroll said in a Tomdispatch interview back in September 2005. Carroll was pointing out that George Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks was partly a result of his particular character (and faith) and partly of what was available to him in our "arsenal" of responses, so to speak -- because the process of Pentagonization, of militarization, had already been underway in this country for so long.

"The meshing of Bush's temperament and a long-prepared American institutional response was unfortunate, but there it was. As somebody said, when he turned to his tool bag to respond to the mosquito of Osama bin Laden, the only tool he had in it was a hammer, so he brought it down on Afghanistan and destroyed it; then he brought it down on Iraq and destroyed it, missing the mosquito, of course."

Rest assured, as the year 2007 begins, our imperialists and militarists are deep into preparations for General Schissler's 100 Year War. They are already producing the next set of sledgehammers, the next set of military responses, for our next set of crises. At this point, it would be shocking (not to say awesome) if these weren't sooner or later applied.

Expand the military or shrink the mission?

Americans may never vote on this question, symbolic as it is of the critical choices being made in our name; but make no mistake, the rest of the world is already "voting" -- some literally on ballots, as in Latin America; some by arms (and polls), as in the Middle East; some via old-style great power politics, as in Central Asia. Americans may not know it, but the mission is shrinking, even as the weaponry grows ever more dangerous and the imperial path gets ever bumpier, more potholed, better mined. Expanding the military will only increase the costs in every sense of the word.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

The Recession of 2007

December 02, 2006

by John Mauldin

One of my favorite cartoons of all time is that of a very scrawny mouse caught out in an open field with a rather large hawk swooping down on it. There is no place to run, no place to hide. All the mouse can do is face the hawk and give him the bird, so to speak. The caption runs something like, "In the face of total disaster the only appropriate response is utter defiance."

And while the economic data is not a total disaster, it has not been good this week. Yet the response of investors everywhere is defiance, or at the very least serious nonchalance.

Recession possibilities? "What recession? I spit on your talk of recession." They continue to assume that things will turn out much better than merely OK. All manner of investments are priced for perfection, perfection being defined as growth slowing enough to take out inflation risk yet not enough to hurt the ever upward rise of corporate profits. Goldilocks is the name of the game.

The stock market did close down somewhat today, yet as trading came to the end of the session, it rose over 100 points from its low of the previous few hours. All you can do is just marvel at the amazing capacity of investors to embrace risk in the face of this week's economic data, which we will look at in some detail today.

And after we dissect the parade of bad news, I will tell you why it is not all that bad. I continue to believe we will see a recession next year, but not a major one. Let's jump into the data.

Housing: The Roof Leak Gets Worse

--MORE--