Bernie Sanders panel on the Iran deal and the danger of an Iran War

Bernie Sanders held a town hall on Monday, Breaking the Deal: A Town Hall on Trump's Iran Decision 05/14/2018:

The panel includes featuring Joe Cirincione, President of the Ploughshares Fund; Lara Friedman of Peace Now; Rob Malley, head of the Crisis Group; and, Suzanne Dimaggio of New America.

With the Trump Administration doing its version of the 2002 buildup to war, everyone concenred about it needs to be aware of major events in the Middle East that affect the environment in which Trump would launch a war against Iran.

This is one of them: David Halbfinger, Killings in Gaza, New Embassy in Jerusalem, and Peace as Distant as Ever New York Times 05/14/2018; Declan Walsh, Waves of Gazans vs. Israeli Tear Gas and Bullets: Deadliest Mayhem in Years New York Times 05/14/2018; Amnesty International, Israel/OPT: Use of excessive force in Gaza an abhorrent violation of international law 05/14/2018.

Halbfinger reports, "At least 60 were killed and thousands injured, local officials said — the worst day of carnage there since Israel invaded Gaza in 2014." Despite apparently all 60 deaths being Palestinians killed by the Israeli Army, both Israel and the Trump Administration said it was all the fault of Hamas.

Sen. Sanders tweeted yesterday:

The United States must play an aggressive role in bringing Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and the international community together to address Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and stop this escalating violence.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 14, 2018

Bernie's fellow progressive Senator, Elizabeth Warren, tweeted the following on the Gaza killings:

[sound of crickets]

Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic "Resistance" in the Senate, tweeted on Gaza:

[crickets]

Nancy Pelosi, head of the the Democratic "Resistance" in the Senate, tweeted on Gaza:

[crickets]

Corporate Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, tweeted on Gaza:

[crickets]

Corporate Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, tweeted on Gaza:

[crickets]

Who-knows-what-kind-of Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris, tweeted on Gaza:

[crickets]

Remembering Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Andrew Bacevich reviews the new biography of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. by Richard Aldous in Schlesinger and the Decline of Liberalism Boston Review 10/10/2017.

Schlesinger is particularly known for his biographical works on Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and of John and Bobby Kennedy. I was expecting him to focus on Schlesinger's advocacy for a hawkish Cold War foreign policy. He does note that in the 1960s, "With the Vietnam War now in full swing, he dashed off a blistering critique of Lyndon Johnson’s policy, titled The Bitter Heritage (1967), insisting that had [John] Kennedy lived he would have avoided war."

Instead, Bacevich focuses on the vision of domestic politics that Schlesinger advocated, promoted and celebrated, a view New Left critics in the 1960s called "Cold War liberalism," a term I still use myself, actually. Schlesinger was a relatively early opponent of the Vietnam War and supported Bobby Kennedy's antiwar efforts. He was not entirely hostile to more nuanced views of the early Cold War when he wrote in 1967 (Origins of the Cold War Foreign Affairs 46:1 [Oct]):

As the Cold War has begun to lose its purity of definition, as the moral absolutes of the fifties become the moralistic clichés of the sixties, some have be gun to ask whether the appalling risks which humanity ran during the Cold War were, after all, necessary and inevitable; whether more restrained and rational policies might not have guided the energies of man from the perils of conflict into the potentialities of collaboration. The fact that such questions are in their nature unanswerable does not mean that it is not right and useful to raise them. Nor does it mean that our sons and daughters are not entitled to an accounting from the generation of Russians and Americans who produced the Cold War.

This was more a barbed but polite expression of condescension to left historians' critiques of American Cold War policies prior to the mid-sixties. In the same spirit, in a footnote referring to D.F. Fleming, David Horowitz, William Appleman Williams and Gar Alperowitz, he says rather caustically, "The fact that in some aspects the revisionist thesis parallels the official Soviet argument must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writers, all of whom, so far as I know, are independent-minded scholars." Which was 1967 academic-speak for, "Yeah, they sound like Commies but we need to take what they're saying at least a little seriously."

And, yes, he was referring to that David Horowitz, who had a few years of a career as a leftie writer significant enough to be cited by Arthur Schlesinger but later pursued a career in the far-right ditch. His current online Frontpage Mag (which my gag reflex won't allow me to link) features one of his tweets saying, "Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out." I don't know whether he means that as a slur on Mean Libruls or as an autobiographical comment. Let me say that the fact that in some aspects of his current polemics thesis parallel Putinist Russian propaganda of the kind we've heard so much about lately, must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writer, who is, so far as I know, an independent-minded flaming rightwinger.

Yet even though Schlesinger wasn't much impressed by leading New left "revisionist" history, a term he uses as mostly pejorative, his 1967 sketch of the origins of the Cold War are notably different from the Cold War triumphalism with came with the "end of history" circa 1990.

He stresses that leaders on both Russia and the Western Allies were doing a lot of improvising. He talks about how the two major competing establishment views, "realists" and "universalists," evaluated the options in light of different assumption about why nations behave the way they do. And he states a chastened-sounding view that common among both Democratic and Republican advocates of nuclear arms control and efforts to dial back the two superpower tensions, as the US and the Soviet Union were called for decades: "The Cold War ... was the product not of a decision but of a dilemma. Each side felt compelled to adopt policies which the other could not but regard as a threat to the principles of the peace. Each then felt compelled to undertake defensive measures."

That approach does tend to minimize any cynical or malicious motive on the part of the US military-industrial complex. Which is still alive and well, by the way: William D. Hartung, The Scandal of Pentagon Spending TomDispatch 10/10/2017.

Bacevich writes of Schlesinger's outlook and influence:

The cause to which he devoted his professional life was the promotion of U.S. liberalism, in his view “the vital center” of U.S. politics.

As a prodigiously gifted historian, Schlesinger celebrated the achievements of those he deemed liberalism’s greatest champions, notably Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the martyred Kennedy brothers. As a skillful polemicist, he inveighed against those he saw as enemies of liberalism, whether on the communist left or the Republican right. As a Democratic operative, he worked behind the scenes, counseling office seekers of a liberal persuasion and drafting speeches for candidates he deemed likely to advance the cause (and perhaps his own fortunes).

Bacevich also notes without being nasty about it that Schlesinger acted as the "court historian" of the Kennedy Administration. Which is true. Hey, every court needs its own historian, including the Court of Camelot.

Schlesinger passed away in 2007. He was very much an opponent of the Iraq War. In this polemical article in the very early days of the Iraq War, Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of War Los Angeles Times 03/23/2003, he still couldn't resist taking a poke at those annoying lefties:

How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists? [my emphasis]

He knew that the phrase "infantile leftists" had been made famous by Lenin. But given the intensity of his opposition to the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq, it's not unreasonable to imagine he was thinking those immature lefties wouldn't be nearly effective enough in articulating what a spectacularly bad idea it was:

The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an
earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.

Yo! I agreed with him on that in 2003 and if any thing even more so in 2017. He closed that polemic this way:

[Saddam] Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power? "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.

America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."

Yeah, that's a man and a historian worth remembering.

North Korea, nuclear proliferation and regime change

Robert Parry makes an important point about a huge problem with US nuclear nonproliferation right now (How ‘Regime Change’ Wars Led to Korea Crisis Consortium News 09/04/2017):

... the current North Korea crisis, which could end up killing millions of people, can be viewed as a follow-on disaster to President George W. Bush’s Iraq War and President Barack Obama’s Libyan intervention. Those wars came after the leaders of Iraq and Libya had dismantled their dangerous weapons programs, leaving their countries virtually powerless when the U.S. government chose to invade.

In both cases, the U.S. government also exploited its power over global information to spread lies about the targeted regimes as justification for the invasions — and the world community failed to do anything to block the U.S. aggressions.

And, on a grim personal note, the two leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, were then brutally murdered, Hussein by hanging and Gaddafi by a mob that first sodomized him with a knife.

Paul Jay and Larry Wilkerson discuss that point among others related to North Korea in Larry Wilkerson: North Korea is Not an Existential Threat - But Many People Benefit by Saying It Is The Real News 09/05/2017:

This report includes a recent clip of Vladimir Putin making that same point about the effect of the Iraq and Libya wars on nuclear proliferation. I suppose these days we need to specify that surely Putin has some possibly nefarious agenda in saying so. But that makes it no less true.

Wilkerson also wrote about North Korea three weeks ago, before the supposed thermonuclear test now in the news, The American Conservative 08/18/2017. And he references the regime change problem there, too:

[W]hat makes North Korean leaders so desperate about their capacity to fulfill that goal [of maintaining the current dynasty in power]? That too is not hard to answer: the military power of the United States, power that has been used to unseat Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and in the attempt to unseat Bashar al-Assad. Recently, President Trump even threatened Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with a possible U.S. military intervention in that country.

We've been down this road before

And we'll be living with the consequences for a long time. From the previous one, I mean, i.e., the invasion of Iraq 2003.

Julian Borger, White House 'pressuring' intelligence officials to find Iran in violation of nuclear deal The Guardian 08/28/2017.

Yes, we've been down this road before.

Sanctions can lead to war

It's true as a general matter that economic sanctions can bring pressure on a country without leading to war. It's also true that our general political culture regards sanctions are a relatively harmless war of pressuring a country that isn't doing what we Americans want. And we don't generally view sanctions as a step toward war. But sometimes they can be.

I'm still bumfuddled by the Senate vote yesterday about sanctions on Russia and Iran. It was hard from the early news reports to tell what they actually about. That's among the few news reports that people were able to find even with the Google machine.

Oh, and there's this:

Two days after Tillerson says US seeks regime change in Iran, Trump reveals he's investigated for obstruction of justice. Who'll fall first?

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) June 16, 2017

What.The.****?

ThinkProgress generally reflects the corporate Democratic perspective. but they also often do good reporting. Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani reports for them in Tillerson calls for regime change in Iran 06/15/2017, "[Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson was asked on Wednesday whether the United States supports regime change inside Iran. He replied in the affirmative, saying that U.S. policy is driven by relying on 'elements inside of Iran' to bring about 'peaceful transition of that government.'"

Peaceful change? Like in 1953? Or maybe Brazil 2016? What could possibly go wrong?

Matthew Calabria and several co-writers wrote recently in a piece for the Atlantic Council, Bringing Iran Back into the Global Economy Will Bolster the JCPOA 06/07/2017:

Given the absence of bilateral ties, Washington lacks sufficient leverage to push Iran in one direction or another to advance core US regional interests—peace, security, prosperity, and stability. Unless the United States changes course, Iran will continue supporting anti-American aims, turning to European, Russian and Asian sources of investment and trade.

We recommend that the Trump administration issue a general license through the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to allow US banks to complete dollar-clearing transactions for Iranian entities, except for those individuals and organizations on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.

A license for dollar-clearing transactions would signal that the United States intends to go beyond the letter of its JCPOA commitments and honor the spirit of the accord, which promised Iran major economic benefits in return for long-term restrictions on its nuclear activities. Licensing would also undercut anti-US rhetoric from Iranian hardliners who maintain that the United States does not want to improve relations with Iran. Iran has a sizeable young, well-educated and pro-Western population that supports relations between Washington and Tehran. The United States should strive to maintain the goodwill of the younger generation; improving Iran’s economy is crucial to this goal.

Approving dollar-clearing transactions would also facilitate increased trade between Europe and Iran. Generally, the more ties Iran has to international markets and to Western countries, the more willing Iran should be to abide by international norms. If the United States facilitates Iran’s integration into international markets, Iran would have more to lose by violating these norms. Moreover, it would lessen the possibility that the European Union or other countries would lobby to have their currency replace the dollar as the global reserve standard.

I remember in the 1990s when Bill Clinton signed off on a Congressional resolution pushed by warmongers committing the US to a policy of "regime change" in Iraq. And we did it in a few years, even though Iraq had given up its "weapons of mass destruction." Libya agreed to give up their "WMDs" and a few years later we intervened militarily to overthrow the same government and leave violent chaos behind. Oh, and the head of state that made the disarmament deal with the US was unceremoniously murdered in the process. Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thought that was a big laugh, saying, "We came, we saw, he died." More specifically, he was anally raped with a bayonet and murdered just afterward.

Now Iran reaches a nuclear agreement that goes beyond the Non-Proliferation Treaty - and a couple of years later the Secretary of State declares "regime change" to be our policy there, too. And the Senate passes new Bipartisan sanctions near-unanimously.

Hey, North Korea, have we got a deal for you! Give up your nukes and we'll always be nice to you after that, honest to goodness we will! Pakistan? India? Let's talk about you giving up your nukes!

NATO in a new light in the Trump Era

Der Spiegel's most recent cover story about Trump's anti-European position on the Paris Accord on global warming is available in English, and it's quite an interesting one: Donald Trump's Triumph of Stupidity 06/02/2017.

This was the cover for the German version of the story:

There are a number of passages in the article that helps put the current state of relations between the EU and the United Statesss. Like these:

Merkel's verdict following Trump's visit to Europe could hardly be worse. There has never been an open break with America since the end of World War II; the alienation between Germany and the U.S. has never been so large as it is today. When Merkel's predecessor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, refused to provide German backing for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, his rebuff was limited to just one single issue. It was an extreme test of the trans-Atlantic relationship, to be sure, but in contrast to today, it was not a quarrel that called into question commonly held values like free trade, minority rights, press freedoms, the rule of law -- and climate policies. ...

Merkel, who grew up in the Soviet sphere of influence, never had much understanding for the anti-Americanism often found in western Germany. U.S. dependability is partly to thank for Eastern Europe's post-1989 freedom.

Merkel has shown a surprising amount of passion for the trans-Atlantic relationship over the years. She came perilously close to openly supporting the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and enjoyed a personal friendship with George W. Bush, despite the fact that most Germans had little sympathy for the U.S. president. Later, Merkel's response to the NSA's surveillance of her mobile phone was largely stoic and she also didn't react when Trump called her refugee policies "insane."

As such, Merkel's comments last Sunday about her loss of trust in America were eye-opening. It was a completely new tone and Merkel knew that it would generate attention. Indeed, that's what she wanted. ...

In the past, it had always been the British and the Eastern Europeans who stood in the way of the joint efforts promoted by Germany and France -- for the most part out of fear that an internal European competitor to NATO could result. But Britain's decision to leave the EU also means that it will no longer be able to block such efforts. The Eastern Europeans, meanwhile, who see themselves as being on the front against Russia, have lost faith in Trump's pledges to the alliance. [my emphasis]

This is a good reminder that the rift between the US and leading NATO allies like Germany and France over the Iraq War was dramatic and serious.

The current tensions in the NATO alliance continue that earlier confrontation in some important ways. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was an especially popular spokesperson for neoconservative advocates of war with Iraq. In the light of objections to preventive war in Iraq from NATO allies Germany and France, Krauthammer mocked NATO as essentially militarily useless to the United States (U.S. power rises as NATO fades into irrelevance Chicago Tribune/Washington Post wire 05/27/2017 05/27/2002)

NATO may still have a role in peacekeeping (especially in Europe's own Balkan backyard) but not in war-making. As a serious military alliance it is finished. But there is no need for a funeral. NATO can be usefully re-imagined. Its new role should be to serve as incubator for Russia's integration into Europe and the West.

It is precisely because NATO has turned from a military alliance into a trans-Atlantic club of advanced democracies that it can now safely invite Russia in--and why Russia has so reconciled itself to NATO. Russia recognizes NATO's shift from a military to a political organization. That is why it has so muted its objection to NATO's expansion into the former Soviet republics of the Baltic states.

That idea used to make the Russians apoplectic. But with NATO a hollow shell, they are relaxed about having us in, and we are relaxed about having them in. The unprecedented place at the NATO table recently offered Russia by the Bush administration is the correct next step in NATO's transformation. Join the club.

NATO is dead. Welcome, Russia, to the new NATO. [my emphasis]

Chris Patten, then the EU Commissioner for External Relations, reacted publicly to George W. Bush's use of the phrase "axis of evil" including Iraq in his 2002 State of the Union Address, a speech which seemed to signal a determination to go to war with Iraq (Jonathan Freedland, Patten lays into Bush's America The Guardian 02/08/2002):

Chris Patten, the EU commissioner in charge of Europe's international relations, has launched a scathing attack on American foreign policy - accusing the Bush administration of a dangerously "absolutist and simplistic" stance towards the rest of the world.

As EU officials warned of a rift opening up between Europe and the US wider than at any time for half a century, Mr Patten tells the Guardian it is time European governments spoke up and stopped Washington before it goes into "unilateralist overdrive".

"Gulliver can't go it alone, and I don't think it's helpful if we regard ourselves as so Lilliputian that we can't speak up and say it," he says in today's interview.

Those were the days when the national press was treating Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld like a rock star. Remember this? Defence Secy comments on Europe, France, Germany AP 07/30/2015:

Rummy didn't have no use for "Old Europe" (Outrage at 'old Europe' remarks BBC News 01/23/2003):

"Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem," Mr Rumsfeld told Washington's foreign press corps on Wednesday.

"But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they're not with France and Germany... they're with the US.

"You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't," he said. "I think that's old Europe."

On Thursday, the French and German leaders reiterated their opposition to war as they continued celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Elysee Treaty between their two countries.

"We are both of the opinion... that one can never accept it when it is said that war is unavoidable," [SPD German] Chancellor [Gerhard] Schroeder said in an address to hundreds of French and German students in Berlin attended by Mr Chirac.

"War may never be considered unavoidable."

A spokeswoman for Mr [conservative French President Jacques] Chirac called for calm in the dispute.

Joachim Fritz-Vannahme discussed how Rummy and the Cheney-Bush Administration differentiated between Old and New Europe in that context (“Falke, Hahn, Taube. Washingtons Schmähung trifft die Europäer im Augenblick der größten Uneinigkeit” Die Zeit 6 Feb 2003; translation by Allison Brown at GHDI, accessed 06/08/2017):

How quickly a banality can turn into an insult! Donald Rumsfeld’s apt expression “New Europe,” meaning a Europe whose focus is shifting from Western to Central Europe, already enjoyed great popularity as a key geostrategic term years ago. This was especially true in Paris, the stronghold of “Old Europe,” where, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many worried about the role they would play.

Rumsfeld’s invective hit Europeans at the moment of their greatest discord. The common foreign policy that they so readily invoke still remains a Cloud Cuckoo Land where everyone can build his or her own nest, whether he be a British hawk, a German dove, or a French rooster. This could be seen on Monday, when the EU foreign ministers were able to muster only a minimum of unity at their meeting in Brussels. The inspectors,* they demanded, should be given more time. But not even behind closed doors did they discuss what would happen when time ran out, or how Great Britain, France, Spain, and Germany – the four EU members on the UN Security Council – would vote: individually or (as virtually no one in Brussels believes) in concert for Europe?

Everything seems crystal clear from Rumsfeld’s perspective. His reference to Old Europe is an attack on the insubordinate German-French entente. Spain, Portugal, and Italy, on the other hand, are being entered on the map of well-behaved New Europe by the Pentagon surveyor.

What that translated into is that a few long-time NATO members with conservative governments, along with "Bush's Poodle" Tony Blair of British New Labour, wanted to kiss up to the Cheney-Bush Administration over invading Iraq.

But Rummy was also favoring newer NATO members who also wanted to do so. Fritz-Vannahme quotes Le Monde from that time, "A large internal market with the protection of NATO. That is the image of the EU that people have in Prague, Warsaw, or, say, Budapest. That is opportune for the United States, since that's its idea of Europe as well."

That last point is important. The United States historically favored European unity, which now takes the form of the European Union. But the US has also favored a broader but relatively weak EU, one that in particular would not be able to unite around a common foreign policy or form a significant central EU military force of its own. So under the three previous administrations, the US encouraged the US to expand EU membership to former Warsaw Pact countries sooner rather than later. On the one hand, this provided EU aid for their development. But it also expanded the number of countries that had to be brought into unison for major decisions in the EU, thus making the prospects for greater unity dimmer and more distant.

Something similar was taking place in NATO, an alliance that in reality has always been under American direction despite considerable time and effort placed on consultation. The alliance undertook and enlargement of its membership after the fall of the Berlin Wall. German unification added the former East Germany to NATO. The NATO website conveniently provides this historical sketch (Enlargement 06/07/2017):

Based on the findings of the Study on Enlargement, the Alliance invited the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to begin accession talks at the Alliance’s Madrid Summit in 1997. These three countries became the first former members of the Warsaw Pact to join NATO in 1999.

At the 1999 Washington Summit, the Membership Action Plan was launched to help other aspirant countries prepare for possible membership.

Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia were invited to begin accession talks at the Alliance’s Prague Summit in 2002 and joined NATO in 2004. All seven countries had participated in the MAP.

NATO's website says of the process, "The new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe were eager to guarantee their freedom by becoming integrated into Euro-Atlantic institutions."

The Cheney-Bush Administration used the desire of those Central and Eastern European countries to be part of NATO, in significant part out of continuing fear of future Russian aggression, as a way to exert counterbalancing influence to German and French dissent within the alliance. And those new members were particularly interested in having American guarantees against outside aggression.

What the Spiegel article cited at the start of this post brings out significantly changes that situation. "The Eastern Europeans, meanwhile, who see themselves as being on the front against Russia, have lost faith in Trump's pledges to the alliance." (my emphasis)

Britain is now leaving the EU, as well. Britain has what is fondly called the "special relationship" with the United States, which means that since the Suez Crisis of 1956, British policymakers have tried to avoid being in opposition to the US on any major foreign policy issue, though they tended not to be thrilled by the US war in Vietnam. But this gave the US a major way to influence decisions of the EU, since Britain was more likely to side with the US on major issues than France or Germany, which was also the case with the invasion of Iraq.

Now Britain is out of the EU. And the Eastern European countries will have to look more to their European partners now for assurances of assistance against military threats from Russia. Which has become more urgent over the last 15 years as Russia has pushed back hard in Georgia and Ukraine against the prospects of those countries aligning more formally with the EU and NATO.

This creates a significantly new situation, in which the EU countries are now likely to perceive much greater urgency in cooperation with each other. Including in opposition to policies from Washington that they find undesirable.

And the EU's principal leader, Angela Merkel, isn't feeling inclined to make things easier for Washington this time around. On the contrary, she's rallying other European countries to create a major effective counterbalance to US power.

Tom Hayden on the end of the Iraq War

This is a piece from the recently deceased Tom Hayden on the 2011 withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, In Iraq, Peace at Last Peace Exchange Bulletin 12/15/2011. He recalls the significance of the anti-Iraq War peace movement. And he notes why it was a good thing the withdrawal was happening.

In the years leading up to the 2008 election, there were at least 10 national antiwar demonstrations that drew more than 100,000 participants each. The movement helped Rep. Barbara Lee to rise from a lone war opponent in Congress to the leader of a bloc of as many as 200 representatives calling for an end to the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Those combined forces — the peace movement and lawmakers who opposed continuing the Iraq war — created a political climate that enabled Obama to end the Iraq war over the objections of many in the Pentagon and most of his Republican presidential rivals.

Obama's position on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shifted occasionally during the decade, illustrating the powerful conflict of forces in play. In 2008, he seemed ready to accept the advice of the establishment-oriented Iraq Study Group, which recommended leaving a residual force of 10,000 to 15,000 troops in Iraq. After being elected, though, he surprised everyone by announcing in early 2009 that all U.S. forces would be pulled out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

In recent months, the administration seemed to be considering leaving behind a few thousand troops to continue training Iraqi forces, but it abandoned the idea after failing to reach a deal with the Iraqi government on legal immunity for the American troops.

Some peace activists view the fact that thousands of advisors and contractors will remain in Iraq on the U.S. Embassy payroll as evidence of a secret plan to continue the war by other means. But the war is as over as a war can be, and the peace movement should celebrate. Removing troops from Iraq will save tens of billions of dollars a year, and it will also save lives. [my emphasis]

That's the withdrawal Republicans are still criticizing Obama over. Even though it was the Cheney-Bush Administration that negotiated the withdrawal arrangement.

Truthdig's Tom Hayden reprint column today is from 04/09/2006, Revolution, Protest and America. It's the transcript of an interview that appeared in the Cuban publication Juventud Rebelde. One of the questions was about the US peace movement:

Can you explain why the level of protests in the U.S. against the war in Iraq is not as notable as during the war in Vietnam?

The difference is that during Vietnam there was a military draft and the number of casualties was far, far higher. Relatively speaking, therefore, the level of protests today is greater—200,000 in October 2002 in D.C.; 1 million in February 2003; 500,000 in New York in 2004; 300,000 in D.C. in 2005. The reformist presidential campaign of Howard Dean was larger than the antiwar Eugene McCarthy campaign of 1968. A majority of Americans, including a majority of U.S. soldiers, want a troop withdrawal within this year. The “notable” difference, I believe, is that there was a broader radical movement around the world, certainly in 1968, than there is today. That makes the antiwar movement, here and globally, a surprising development, it seems to me.

Tom analyzed the antiwar movement of the 2000s in more detail in Ending the War in Iraq (2007). There, he cites Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential candidacy. "Dean served as an unprecedented threat to the incumbent hierarchy of the Democratic Party. But the campaign had only been possible because the antiwar movement needed an outlet for rising public anger over Iraq. Dean would have gone nowhere if he had campaigned solely on his Vermont health care plan."

He also notes, "For the first time, a grassroots movement of antiwar union activists gained the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, long an accomplice of the neoconservatives and even the CIA in American foreign policy."

And his book is a reminder that the early days of mass blogging coincided with the start of the Iraq War. "Online activism mushroomed, as progressive blogs averaged five million readers a day at the height of the 2004 campaign season, to twenty times the size of its 2003 audience." He also takes note of this comparison to the anti-Vietnam War movement:

Beyond the corridors of a cautious Congress, a June 2005 Harris poll showed that sixty-three percent of Americans supported a one-year withdrawal timetable. By early 2005, while U.S. combat deaths reached nearly 1,500 in Iraq, the percentage who believed the war was a mistake passed the fifty percent level, which had not occurred in the Vietnam era until the Tet Offensive of February 1968, after some 20,000 American deaths. Something had changed.

The following year, antiwar sentiment played a significant role in the Democrats' strong showing and retaking the House in the 2006 midterms.

Tom Hayden had a strong sense of the politics and sociology of change.

Tom Hayden on base and leadership in the Democratic Party

"Just as politics is too important to be left to politicians, so is the Democratic Party too important to be left to the Democratic leadership." - Tom Hayden, Ending the War in Iraq (2007)

Pre-Debate misellany

The Peter Peterson Foundation mainly exists to lobby for privatizing the Mississippi River of cash flows, aka, Social Security. They have Seven Questions on Debt for the Final Presidential Debate 10/17/2016. The first one starts out like this: Our debt is already at historically high levels, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that it will soar to 141 percent of GDP in 30 years ..." Even leaving aside the quality of the particular analysis cited, this is meaningless. Countries issuing debt in their own currency are not going to go bankrupt. The debt hype from the Peterson Foundation is all about saying, spending is too high! We're turning into Greece! We have to cut Social Security benefits now now NOW!! It's reactionary nonsense.

David Sirota and Avi Asher-Schapiro report on a corporate Democrat's scheme to start the privatization of Social Security in Hillary Clinton And Wall Street: Financial Industry May Control Retirement Savings In A Clinton Administration International Business Times 10/19/16. It's a longish article. But what it comes down to is major Clinton donor Tony James, who is president of the Blackstone Group, wants to raise the payroll tax. But not to increase benefits on Social Security or Medicare. Instead, he wants to see it put into what he's selling as a 401(k) type plan that would be run as a national program, unlike individual 401(k) plans in which the employee can select the investments. And the idea is to loosen the rules on such investments to that hedge funds and investments bankers can collect fees from selling risky investments of the kind pension funds are starting to reduce their presence in their portfolios:

The James-Ghilarducci plan in fact offers substantial potential benefits for companies like Blackstone. It would provide Wall Street with a new, government-guaranteed revenue stream, and would also help the industry circumvent legal and market obstacles to reach a wider swath of the retirement savings business.

Alternative investment firms have tried to break into the $4 trillion 401(k) market for years, but their products, such as real estate and long-term private equity investments, are less easily transferable to cash, making them a difficult fit for 401(k)s. On top of that, 401(k)s are regulated by federal rules that discourage illiquid, high-risk investments — and make 401(k) overseers vulnerable to lawsuits if they move workers money into such investments. A new federal rule could further complicate alternative investment firms’ efforts to access the retail market because it “suggests that there are certain investments that are so costly, complex, or opaque that they cannot be recommended to retirement investors,” said Barbara Roper of the Consumer Federation of America.

The James-Ghilarducci plan would effectively circumvent many of those obstacles, allowing alternative investment firms to access billions of retail customer dollars that have been out of reach. ...

Some major institutional investors appear to be responding to the warnings. Just this month, officials at the California State Teachers Retirement System — one of the largest pensions in the world — announced that high fees had convinced them to follow other major pension systems and pull $20 billion out of its investments with private money managers. [internal links omitted]

As long as there are investment banks and hedge funds, they will always be coming up with new schemes to plunder Social Security.

Dave Levinthal and Michael Beckel point to a questionable practice by some journalists in Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash Center for Public Integrity 10/17/2016.

Javier Solana and Strobe Talbot provide a sadly conventional defense of neoliberal globalism in The Decline of the West, and How to Stop It New York Times 10/19/2016.

So does Thomas Friedman, aka, Little Tommy Friedman Age 6, in WikiHillary for President New York Times 10/19/2016. Charlie Pierce skewers him for it memorably in No, Hillary Clinton Should Not Go Business Class When She Gets into Office Esquire Politics Blog 10/19/2016.

Little Tommy says this:

Do we need to make adjustments so the minority of the U.S. population that is hurt by freer trade and movements of labor is compensated and better protected? You bet we do. That’s called fixing a problem — not throwing out a whole system that we know from a long historical record contributes on balance to economic growth, competitiveness and more open societies.

Pierce's retort to that: "Well, that's mighty oligarchical of you, son. In the long run…etc." The latter being a reference to John Maynard Keynes' famous saying, "In the long run we are all dead." Keynes was referring to economists who couldn't come up with meaningful policy proposals to counter recessions and depressions but instead just reassured everyone that everything will get better eventually.

Solana and Talbot offer their own version of this stale bromide:

These handicaps make it even more important for Western governments to address their citizens’ legitimate concerns about the impact of globalization. They must work to cement a new political consensus that will restore public support for free and fair international trade. ... There will have to be remedial action at home. Vulnerable workers in developed nations deserve better safety nets, as well as ambitious and effective retraining opportunities in growing sectors of economy.

And the same people who have been promoting this line of thought for decades are generally also lend a sympathetic ear to the Pete Petersons of the world who want to abolish the existing public social safety net by changing it into a privatized version on which billionaires can make more billions.

This kind of bland promise reminds me of a saying that was used in Argentine politics during the neoliberal governments of Carlos Menem: the promise harsh winters that always come, to be followed by beautiful springs that never arrive.

And, oh yeah, there's an Iraqi offensive under way to retake Mosul from the Islamic State:

• Daniel Davis, Why the Battle for Mosul Could Become a Total Disaster National Interest 10/18/2016
• Semih Idiz, Turkey hasn't given up on role in Mosul battle Al-Monitor 10/18/2016
• Fred Kaplan, ISIS Will Lose in Mosul. But Who Actually Wins? Slate 10/17/2016
• Juan Cole, 7 Things to Know about Mosul Informed Comment 10/17/2016

Juan Cole warns against the catastrophe of direct US intervention in Syria

The more it looks like Hillary Clinton will win the Presidential election against the stark, raving Trump, the more immediate the question becomes of how strongly will the Democrats in Congress and the grassroots will resist foolish, reckless or destructive foreign policies attempted by a new Clinton Administration.

Juan Cole warns in Monsters to Destroy: Top 7 Reasons the US could not have forestalled Syrian Civil War 08/12/2016:

The interventionist temptation, muted since the Iraq imbroglio, is now returning. Sec. Clinton’s team are already talking about taking steps to remove Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from office as soon as they get into the White House. An excellent and principled NYT columnist called the non-intervention in Syria President Obama’s worst mistake.

I understand the impulse. Who can watch the carnage in Syria and not wish for Someone to Do Something? But I beg to differ with regard to US intervention. We forget now how idealistic the rhetoric around the US intervention in Vietnam was. Johnson wanted to save a whole society from the Communist yoke. Our idealist rhetoric can blind us to the destruction we do (the US probably killed 1 to 2 million Vietnamese peasants, recalling Tacitus’ (d. after 117 CE) remark about the Pax Romana, “and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”–atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.) [my emp0hasis]

And he points to the experience of the Iraq War as something that should reasonably make American policymakers extremely reluctant to become more directly involved in the Syrian civil war. And the no-fly zone that Clinton is saying she will establish in Syria would be just such a qualitative escalation of US involvement. As Cole writes, "a ‘no-fly-zone’ [in Syria] is not a minor intervention but a very major one. Now that the Russian air force is flying in Syria, a no-fly zone for regime planes is completely impractical."

And he writes:

Civil wars like that in Syria are forms of micro-aggression. Fighting happens in back alleys and neighborhoods where no outsider understands the terrain. The US had 160,000 troops in Iraq in 2006-2007 when Iraqis fought a civil war that ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Sunnis from Baghdad and turned it into a Shiite city. So many thousands of people were killed each month that Baghdad police had to establish a morning corpse patrol. If Iraq was occupied and run by Americans but it still had excess mortality of hundreds of thousands, why does anyone think that a much more limited US intervention in Syria could forestall death on this scale? I am a little afraid that the widespread underestimation of civilian excess mortality in Iraq is producing the wrong impression here. Its death toll was similar to that of Syria. I also think it isn’t realized that US troops don’t know the language and can’t tell one player from another unless they are specially trained small special forces units. And, they are targets for suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices. When the US troops stopped patrolling major Iraqi cities in summer of 2009 the number of bombings and civilian casualties actually went down, because their patrols had been a target. [my emphasis]

But Cole supported the Obama Administration's military intervention in Syria, which Hillary Clinton apparently sees as a success to be repeated. Cole makes some self-criticism of his own position on Libya:

I supported the UNSC no-fly zone in Libya in 2011, but was dismayed to find that it soon became a NATO mission and then it soon became replaced by another policy entirely– bombing Tripoli and trying to change the regime. Critics forget that the initial resolution just wanted to protect civilians in places like Zintan from Gaddafi’s helicopter gunships. I perceived that once the no-fly zone was implemented, there were enormous political pressures on NATO generals to achieve a tangible victory– hence the bombing of Tripoli (which isn’t exactly the same as a no-fly zone). Then because the mission was transmogrified into regime change from above, the militias never demobilized. That there were no foreign ground troops was a plus in some ways, but it did also mean that no one was responsible for training a new army and incorporating the militias into it. Despite promising democratic elections, militia demands gradually undermined the civilian government, taking the members of parliament more or less hostage and leading to Libya having two or three governments, each with its own militia backers. And then some fighters declared for Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). So the intervention in Libya went from being a humanitarian one to a method of regime change to having a legacy of civil war. Why exactly would Syria be different? [my emphasis]

He notes in conclusion, "The most effective thing anyone has done to tamp down violence in Syria was the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire of the past spring and early summer. If someone wants an intervention, let’s try to get that one back on track."

US rolling disasters in the Middle East

"The United States needs to get into the habit of developing and implementing war termination strategies."

So says Chas Freeman as he takes a look at what Andrew Bacevich calls America's War for the Greater Middle East in his most recent book of that title: What America Keeps Getting Wrong in the Middle East The National Interest 06/13/2016. That comment was in particular reference to the inconclusive results of the Gulf War of 1991. Bacevich's chapter on that war is called "No Clean Ending." Bacevich concludes:

Viewed in the context of America' s expanding military involvement in the Greater Middle East ... Operation Desert Storm accomplished next to nothing. The Bush administration's declaration of victory in 1991 did, in fact, turn out to be premature. That results fell short of expectations stemmed less from flawed generalship, however, than from a fundamental misreading of the overall situation.

Although during the coming decade Washington developed an Ahablike mania regarding Saddam, the Iraqi dictator was merely a symptom of what the United States was contending with. The real problem had a multitude of aspects: the vacuum left by the eclipse of British imperial power; intractable economic backwardness and political illegitimacy; divisions within Islam compounded by the rise of Arab nationalism; the founding of Israel; and the advent of the Iranian Revolution.

It's hard to imagine how any victory over Iraq, no matter how complete, could have remedied this menu of challenges. After another decade of trying, the United States gave up the attempt. After 9/11, rather than vainly trying to prop up the Greater Middle East, Washington set out to transform it. A fundamental misreading of Desert Storm helped make that attempt appear plausible. The result was a disaster. [my emphasis]

Jeffrey Record wrote on the Gulf War in Dark Victory: America's Second War Against Iraq (2004):

Certainly in retrospect, the peace imposed on Iraq in 1991 was unsatisfactory. lt failed to unseat Saddam Hussein or thwart his continued attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, although international sanctions and inspections may have placed such weapons beyond reach. It left the Iraqi people impoverished by economic sanctions and imprisoned inside an exceptionally vicious police state. And because the coalition of 1991, with the exception of the United States and Great Britain, subsequently disintegrated over the issue of postwar policy toward Iraq, the peace ultimately proved unenforceable.

The Afghanistan War provides another example. Freeman writes, "The objectives of the NATO campaign have never been clear but appear to center on guaranteeing that there will no Islamist government in Kabul." He observes that this cold have been avoided by accepting the results of the first two months of the intervention:

The objectives of what was initially conceived as a punitive raid into Afghanistan in October 2001 were (1) to dismantle Al Qaeda and (2) to punish its Taliban hosts to ensure that “terrorists with global reach” would be denied a continuing safe haven in Afghanistan. The United States pursued these objectives by supporting mostly non-Pashtun enemies of the mostly Pashtun Taliban who had proven politico-military capabilities and staying power. A limited American and British investment of intelligence capabilities, special forces, air combat controllers and air strikes tilted the battlefield in favor of the Northern Alliance and against the Taliban. Within a little more than two months, the Taliban had been forced out of Kabul and the last remnants of Al Qaeda had been killed or driven from Afghanistan. We had achieved our objectives.

But instead of declaring victory and dancing off the field, we moved the goalposts. The United States launched an open-ended campaign and enlisted NATO in efforts to install a government in Kabul while building a state for it to govern, promoting feminism and protecting poppy growers. The poppies still flourish. All else looks to be ephemeral. [my emphasis]

Freeman criticizes the Clinton Administration's dual containment policy against Iraq and Iran, arguing that it was "plausible as a defense of Israel against its two most potent regional adversaries, Iran and Iraq. But it made no sense at all in terms of stabilizing the Gulf." One of the most predictable and obvious results of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was strengthening Iran's position in the region: "The U.S. occupation culminated in a 'surge' of forces that entrenched a pro-Iranian regime in Baghdad and that only its authors consider a victory."

He also sees the ill-conceived drone wars as bringing blowback against American policies in the Middle East, writing, "The terrorist movements U.S. interventions have spawned now have safe havens not just in Afghanistan, but in the now failed states of Iraq and Syria, as well as Chad, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sinai, Somalia and Yemen."

And Freeman warns against the illusions of Islamphobia:

In the end, the attribution of Muslim resentment of the West to Islam is just a version of the facile thesis that “they hate us because of who we are.” This is the opiate of the ignorant. It is self-expiating denial that past and present behavior by Western powers, including the United States, might have created grievances severe enough to motivate others to seek revenge for the indignities they have experienced. It is an excuse to ignore and do nothing about the ultimate sources of Muslim rage because they are too discomfiting to bear discussion. ...

For our part, Americans must be led to correct our counterproductive misunderstanding of Islam. Islamophobia has become as American as gun massacres. The presumptive candidate of one of our two major parties has suggested banning Muslims from entry into the United States. This is reflective of national attitudes that are incompatible with the cooperation we need with Muslim partners to fight terrorist extremism. If we do not correct these attitudes, we will continue to pay not just in treasure but in blood. Lots of it.[My emphasis]

Freeman makes this important observation about the current position of the US in the Greater Middle East, "The world’s reliance on energy from the Gulf has not diminished. But ours has. That gives us some freedom of maneuver. We should use it."

The Chilcot report on Britain's involvement in the Iraq War

An official British inquiry into the Iraq War has made its report. Thirteen years after the invasion.

By Steven Erlanger and David Sanger report on it in Chilcot Report on Iraq War Offers Devastating Critique of Tony Blair New York Times 07/06/2016:

The report’s 2.6 million words describe a prime minister who wanted stronger evidence of the need for military action and a more solid plan for occupying Iraq and reconstituting a government there. Beyond its pledge of fealty to Mr. Bush, the July 28, 2002, note warned broadly of the risks of “unintended consequences’’ from an invasion and presciently forecast that other European nations would be reluctant to back the war.

Continue reading the main story
But by the time the invasion was launched, most of Mr. Blair’s warnings and conditions had been swept aside, the report concluded. The chairman of the committee, John Chilcot, said on Wednesday morning that Mr. Blair had been advised by his diplomats and ministers of “the inadequacy of U.S. plans” and their concern “about the inability to exert significant influence on U.S. planning.”

Mr. Blair chose to override their objections.

BBC News provides a bullelt-point summary here, Chilcot report: Findings at-a-glance 07/06/2016.

Paul Pillar contrasts the Chilcot report to the The Iraq War and the American and British Ways of Retrospection The National Interest 07/08/2016:

The release of the Chilcot report ought to be the occasion for Americans to reflect on another asymmetry between the United States and Britain regarding the Iraq War: that it was the U.S. administration, not any British government, that initiated this whole horrible idea. The United Kingdom got involved because Blair was Bush's poodle, who was so concerned about keeping U.S.-U.K. relations harmonious that he wrote to George W. Bush, “I will be with you, whatever.” Americans ought to think about the responsibilities of global leadership, and about how easy it is to abuse a position of power in which even a significant and proud country like the United Kingdom will fall in line that way. Dragging Britain into the Iraq mess was such an abuse of power. It was a betrayal of one of America's most important and staunchest allies. It gives many, including not just in Britain but elsewhere, reason to be less inclined to follow the U.S. lead in the future. [my emphasis]

This is something the Obama Administration could and should have done.

The full report is available online.

Mysteries of the NATO Syria-Iraq intervention

This PBS Newshour report includes an interview with the British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon on the muddled multiple-party intervention in Syria and Iraq around Daesh/ISIS, UK accelerating pace of anti-ISIS missions, says defense secretary (transcript link) 12/11/2015:

It's a good illustration of the difficulty for the public to understand who's backing whom and what the goals of the various sides may be.

Fallon on Britain's Parliamentary authorization to start bombing Syria:

Well, I think a growing recognition that this border between Iraq and Syria is not recognized by ISIL itself, and it’s completely artificial and rather odd to be carrying out airstrikes on one side of the border, but the Royal Air Force having to turn back at the border and not follow through the other side of the border.

Change the border to the one between Vietnam and Cambodia and the Royal Air Force to US Air Force, and it takes on an very uncomfortable historical resonance. For that matter, make the border the one between North Korea and China, and we get another one, also very unpleasant.

This does not fill me with confidence.

He continues:

It was also a response to France and the United States and other countries that wanted Britain to step up its contribution to the campaign. And I’m delighted we’re now able to do that. We have doubled the number of strike aircraft that we have in theater. And we’re upping the tempo of our missions.

This gives me unpleasant memories, too, of the Clinton Administration's eight years of maintaining no-fly zones and sanctions against Iraq, which set the stage for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 after the 9/11 attacks gave the Cheney-Bush Administration an opportunity to promote jingoism and war with fewer questions being asked than might otherwise have been the case. The Obama Administration is sensible and restrained on the Syrian civil war and Daesh/ISIS compared to the Republican side. But, in his usual fashion, he frames his position as having the same goal as the Republicans (to the extent that the latter is discernible). He wants to destroy Daesh/ISIS but also wants to unseat their main opponent, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus. The other fighting force playing a major role on the ground seems to be the Al-Nusra Front, part of the current Al-Qaeda franchise. And while it may bear no especially meaningful relation to Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda of 2001, it's still Islamic fundamentalist and bitterly anti-American.

Judy Woodruff in her introduction to the interview said, "Meanwhile, today in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about his country’s war in Syria. For the first time, he said that Russian aircraft are now helping a rebel group, the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army."

Say what? I thought we gave up on them after they started defecting to Daesh/ISIS and Al-Nusra. And taking their American-supplied training and weapons with them.

And while we're strolling Memory Lane, the Pentagon may be up to one of its favorite tricks, from the days of padding "body counts" in the Vietnam War, as Daniel DePetris reports in Is the Pentagon Feeding Obama Bogus Intel on ISIS? The National Interest 12/11/2015. It was said of the Vietnam War that the US never lost a battle but still lost the war. Do you remember the Pentagon admitting to losing any battles in Iraq? Me neither.

Fixing our gaze on calamity - and hurting ourselves in the process

"The gaze fixed on calamity has an element of fascination. But therefore of secret complicity. So strong are the social bad conscience[s] of all who have a part in injustice, and the hatred of fulfilled life, that in critical situations they turn directly against self-interest as an immanent revenge."

- "Vain Terror," Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Edmund Jephcott translation; 2002)

Horkheimer and Adorno were looking intensely in Dialectic of Enlightenment at the lessons of the Third Reich and how it represented a catastrophically bad development of the instrumental reason stemming from the Enlightenment tradition. They continue directly from the above lines to say:

There was in the French bourgeois a fatal agency which ironically resembled the heroic ideal of the fascists: they rejoiced in the triumph of their likeness, as expressed in Hitler's rise, even though it threatened them with ruin; indeed, they took their own ruin as evidence of the justice of the order they represented.

This probably strikes most American readers today as more enigmatic than it did at the time, though they use an aphoristic style in that book that at times is reminiscent of Nietzsche.

But when it was first published in 1944, the reference would have been more obvious. The conservatives who saw themselves as representing the interests of German capitalism invited Hitler to become Chancellor of Germany in January, 1933. Not because they had signed own to the National Socialist program, but because they thought they could use Hitler to create a stable authoritarian order more along conservative, Bismarckian lines. They thought they could control him, as it is sometimes said.

The previous Chancellor Franz von Papen (1879–1969) was one of the leading political players who brought Hitler into the government. Hitler's Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 (1996) by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., gives a detailed and very readable account of those events. But Hitler made intensive use of the politics of calamity, using the Reichstag Fire as a pretext to gain emergency powers from Parliament that allowed him to rule as a dictator. After the Night of the Long Knives, aka, the Röhm Putsch, in which Hitler suppressed the followers of SA leader Ernst Röhm and killed many of them including Röhm himself, Von Papen was sidelined and the old conservatives were largely squeezed out of power.

So, Van Papen and the conservative capitalists of Germany were "fixed on calamity" in the form of their fears of Communist revolution, and they were willing to roll the dice on Hitler and the Nazis. The result within a few years was a disastrous war and the devastation of Germany.

But Horkheimer and Adorno argue that such conservatives were perversely led by the "social bad conscience" that went along with their fear of revolution, which psychologically represented to them "hatred of fulfilled life" in addition to more pragmatic concerns. Driven by irrational fears, they made a short-term choice according to instrumental rationality that was ultimately self-destructive in violation of a broader application of Reason.

It was also widely understood in 1944 that the fall of France had been facilitated by Fifth Column subversion and a spirit of less than steadfast resistance to Hitler on the part of the respectable classes of France. Even when they had been conquered and occupied, many of them were willing to go along to get along by supporting the pro-Hitler Vichy traitor regime: "they rejoiced in the triumph of their likeness, as expressed in Hitler's rise, even though it threatened them with ruin; indeed, they took their own ruin as evidence of the justice of the order they represented."

At the risk of running afoul of Godwin's Law, the psychological dynamic there struck me as having relevance to the kind of sky-is-falling warmongering that happens every time there is a dramatic terrorist attack involving Muslims ever since 9/11. The latest of course being last week's Paris attack.

As the (still) global hegemon, US politics is far, far more focused on the danger of underreacting rather than overreacting. But the US should have learned long ago, including in the period since 2001, that overreacting can also badly damage our national interest.

Paul "the Shrill One" Krugman makes a decidedly non-shrill and sensible plea for measured and considered reactions to the Paris attacks (Fearing Fear Itself New York Times 11/16/2015):

Like millions of people, I’ve been obsessively following the news from Paris, putting aside other things to focus on the horror. It’s the natural human reaction. But let’s be clear: it’s also the reaction the terrorists want. And that’s something not everyone seems to understand.

Take, for example, Jeb Bush’s declaration that “this is an organized attempt to destroy Western civilization.” No, it isn’t. It’s an organized attempt to sow panic, which isn’t at all the same thing. And remarks like that, which blur that distinction and make terrorists seem more powerful than they are, just help the jihadists’ cause.

... France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.

How can we, the West, NATO, "turn directly against self-interest" in this situation and bring "an immanent revenge" on ourselves? Pretty much the way we did after the 9/11 attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq. Krugman:

A much bigger risk [than "appeasement"], in practice, is that the targets of terrorism will try to achieve perfect security by eliminating every conceivable threat — a response that inevitably makes things worse, because it’s a big, complicated world, and even superpowers can’t set everything right. On 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld told his aides: “Sweep it up. Related and not,” and immediately suggested using the attack as an excuse to invade Iraq. The result was a disastrous war that actually empowered terrorists, and set the stage for the rise of ISIS.

And let’s be clear: this wasn’t just a matter of bad judgment. Yes, Virginia, people can and do exploit terrorism for political gain, including using it to justify what they imagine will be a splendid, politically beneficial little war.

Friday's Paris terrorist attack and the dream of rebooting history

The Austrian news service, Nachrichten.at, the website of the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, ran an editorial on Saturday, Europa in Krieg (Europe At War) 14.11.2015:

Unser Mitgefühl gilt allen Opfern, unsere Solidarität Frankreich.

Dabei hat das wahllose gestrige Morden nicht Frankreich allein gegolten. Es ist ein Anschlag auf Europa, unsere Werte, unsere Form des Zusammenlebens, unsere Prinzipien, die offenen Grenzen, das Nebeneinander verschiedener Kulturen, die Freiheiten. Die Codewörter dazu sind eindeutig: Syrien, Islamischer Staat, radikaler Islam. Unabhängig von der Zahl der Toten, die sich stündlich erhöht, steht der gestrige Tag gleichauf neben 9/11, er wird die globale Politik verändern. Europa befindet sich im Ausnahmezustand. Uns muss klar sein.

Es wird sich wehren und den Kampf aufnehmen. Es wird ihn überall dort führen müssen, wo der Angriff auf unsere Werte seinen Ausgang nimmt. Auch dazu bestehen keine Alternativen.

[All the victims have our sympathy, France has our solidarity.

In the event, the innumerable {sic} murders yesterday did not affect only France. It is an attack on Europe, our values, our form of living together, our principles, the open borders, the co-existence of different cultures, the freedoms. The code words there are clear: Syria, Islamic State, radical Islam. Regardless of the number of dead, that keeps increasing, yesterday stands next to 9/11, it will change global politics. Europe finds itself in a state of emergency. We must be clear.

It {Europe} will defend itself and take up the fight. It will have to conduct it everywhere from which the attack on our value originated. And there are no alternatives available.]

The euro crisis alone should have taught everyone that TINA (There Is No Alternative) can be a bad guide to action. At least, if the goal is to actually solve problems.

This kind of pompous, melodramatic declaration is painfully familiar to Americans. At least to the majority who don't want the Permanent War for Permanent Peace to which Donald Trump, Dr. Ben Carson and the rest of today's Republican Party leaders are committed.

Realism and reason go out the window with this kind of posturing. And it's not just newspaper editors. The French President struck a similar tone (Adam Nossiter et al, Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS 11/14/2015):

“It is an act of war that was committed by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, Daesh, against France,” President François Hollande told the nation from the Élysée Palace, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “It is an act of war that was prepared, organized and planned from abroad, with complicity from the inside, which the investigation will help establish.”

The Oberösterreichische Nachrichten editorial is sadly reminiscent of the war and revenge talk after the 9/11 attacks in the US.

The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany, but at least we didn't attack Germany. Early indications on the Paris attack Friday are that two of the places "from which the attack ... originated" could be Germany and Belgium. Hopefully, France will have the restraint not to invade either of those two countries. But defending our civilized values by bombing the crap out of some Arab (or maybe Persian) country has become a dreary cliche in American politics. So far, over 14 years after 9/11, our interventions and freedom bombs have left us with civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. The "war on terrorism" obviously hasn't done away with terrorism as a form of military conflict. And Europe is already experiencing a refugee crisis, many of whom are fleeing conflicts connected with our Afghanistan War and Iraq War, neither of which are entirely over.

The editorial's comment that the Paris attack "will change global politics" reminds me so much of the comment that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made to the Pakistani head of intelligence just after 9/11, "History starts today." But history didn't reboot itself. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is still supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their long-standing dispute with nuclear-armed India over Kashmir still takes precedence over Washington's demands in their strategic decisions, in which the current Afghan government is a "pro-Indian" danger in their eyes. (James Mann quotes the Armitage comment in Rise of the Vulcans, 2004)

And the justifiable outrage over the Paris attacks won't make any French intervention in Syria any easier. History didn't reboot on Friday any more than it did on 9/11/2001. Many of the current problems in the Middle East go directly back to the ways in which Britain and France enacted their civilizing mission to the Arab countries after they dismembered the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. France got Syria as a colony, uh, "mandate." France and Britain took the lead in their most recent effort to civilize Libya with bombs, which the US joined. Even supporters of that intervention have a difficult time seeing the results as anything but grim.

Friday didn't "change global politics" in any way that will make an military intervention in Syria and Iraq easier. Outside powers will still have to make choices among supporting the Syrian government, of Daesh/ISIS, or the Al Qaeda affiliate there. They will still have to navigate the conflicting allegiances of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar and Russia.

It's not as though nationalist delusions haven't already done tremendous damage to the EU with the euro and refugee crises, neither of which are over. A massive escalation of war in Syria will make the latter even worse. More border controls, more (literal) walls between countries, more refugees. The actions to come by France and NATO can certainly "change global politics" in some way. Further disintegrative pressures on the EU could definitely have that effect.

If the comment, "Europe finds itself in a state of emergency," is meant for, say, this weekend, it is just routine hyperbole. But if France or the EU were to respond to Friday's attack by creating something like a permanent state of emergency, well, Carl Schmitt will be laughing heartily in whatever nasty precincts of the Great Beyond he currently finds himself.

I see that France is already dropping their freedom bombs, which will surely kill no innocent civilians as the terrorists did in Paris on Friday. (Francia lanza primeros ataques aéreos contra ISIS en Siria La Opinión/BBC Mundo 14.11.2015)

By the way, the Obama Administration is still dropping our freedom bombs in Libya: Libya IS head 'killed in US air strike' BBC News 11/14/2015. Also magically avoiding killing civilian noncombatants, no doubt.

Prolonging the Afghanistan War and repeating old failures

The announcement that the Obama Administration is intervening militarily in Cameroon was bad. This is far worse: Michael Pizzi, Obama scraps Afghan troop withdrawal, passing war on to next president Aljazeera America 10/15/2015. Pizzi reports:

President Barack Obama on Thursday announced the U.S. will scrap its plan for a rapid withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 and will instead maintain a force of thousands in the country to assist with an increasingly fragile security situation, indefinitely prolonging a military engagement he was once eager to end. ...

The new plan, which follows months of deliberations among Obama, military leaders and the Afghan government, will leave the current U.S. force of 9,800 in Afghanistan through 2016 and a residual force of 5,500 until he leaves office in 2017. Stationed at four bases across the country, the troops will carry on their dual missions in Afghanistan: counterterrorism operations against Al-Qaeda and the country’s upstart ISIL franchise and training and advising the Afghan military in its fight against the Taliban.

What could possibly go wrong?

I wonder what the supposed presence of the Islamic State in Afghanistan means. This was the first I've heard of it.

This is already a bad omen: "Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who accused Obama of pursuing a 'politically motivated withdrawal' in Afghanistan, said Thursday that he was 'pleased' the president was reconsidering the rapid drawdown."

John McCain approves. This is definitely a grim portent.

Corey Dickstein and Josh Smith reports the story for Stars and Stripes, Obama to keep 5,500 American troops in Afghanistan into 2017 10/15/2015:

The Afghan forces progress has been slower than the U.S. had hoped when it ended the American role in combat operations at the end of last year.

Obama said the Afghans, who now have sole responsibility for the security of their country, will benefit from the continued presence of U.S. advisers “this fighting season and into next fighting season.”

It's a good time to pay attention to Andrew Bacevich's reflections of the US record on training local forces in situations like Vietnam and Afghanistan, omgram: Andrew Bacevich, Vietnamization 2.0 TomDispatch 10/13/2015. Nick Turse observes in an introduction to Bacevich's article:

After the United States toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian official in occupied Iraq, took a bold step. He dissolved Iraq’s military, deciding to replace Saddam’s 350,000-man army with a lightly-armed border protection force that would start with 12,000 troops and eventually peak at around 40,000 soldiers, supplemented by various police and civil defense forces.

Bremer’s best-laid plans imploded as an insurgency blossomed from the roiling mass of well-trained Iraqi military veterans he had ushered to the unemployment line and a civil war soon wracked the country. A bloodbath ensued and never ended, even as the U.S. surged in more troops and pumped in tens of billions of dollars to build what eventually became the 930,000-man strong Iraqi security forces. (That’s not much smaller than the South Vietnamese Army the U.S. built up in the late 1960s!) Along the way, there was plenty of progress. “Every single day, the Iraqi security forces are getting bigger and better and better trained and better equipped and more experienced,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. “You know, the one thing -- the one thing we have seen is that Iraq has developed a very good capability to be able to defend itself,” said Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta six years later. “And I think that's a reflection of the fact that the Iraqis have developed a very important capability here to be able to respond to security threats within their own country.”

And yet by 2014, the Iraqi military had (and was paying) more ghost soldiers -- troops who existed only on paper -- than the number of real soldiers Bremer had envisioned to secure the whole country back in 2003. As it happened, Iraq was anything but secure. Today, it’s a half-failed state, riven by sectarian strife, and has lost a significant portion of its territory to an extremist group incubated in U.S. prison camps. The country is now far worse off than the one the U.S. invaded in 2003.

Bacevich's article itself is titled, "On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail): Why Washington Can’t “Stand Up” Foreign Militaries." Bacevich recalls the Vietnam War, which provided a model for the current stages of failure of the American interventions in both Afghanistan and Iraq:

The United States had, of course, attempted this approach once before, with unhappy results. This was in Vietnam. There, efforts to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces intent on unifying their divided country had exhausted both the U.S. military and the patience of the American people. Responding to the logic of events, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had a tacitly agreed upon fallback position. As the prospects of American forces successfully eliminating threats to South Vietnamese security faded, the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves became priority number one.

Dubbed “Vietnamization,” this enterprise ended in abject failure with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet that failure raised important questions to which members of the national security elite might have attended: Given a weak state with dubious legitimacy, how feasible is it to expect outsiders to invest indigenous forces with genuine fighting power? How do differences in culture or history or religion affect the prospects for doing so? Can skill ever make up for a deficit of will? Can hardware replace cohesion? Above all, if tasked with giving some version of Vietnamization another go, what did U.S. forces need to do differently to ensure a different result?

At the time, with general officers and civilian officials more inclined to forget Vietnam than contemplate its implications, these questions attracted little attention. Instead, military professionals devoted themselves to gearing up for the next fight, which they resolved would be different. No more Vietnams -- and therefore no more Vietnamization.

Wars, refugees and complexities of anti-imperialism

The single most constructive thing that the United States, the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and even France and Britain could do to ease the refugee crisis in Europe would be to stop promoting wars and "regime change" operations in the Middle East.

Wofgang Münchau (The deadly disunity of the Europeans Financial Times 09/06/2015) writes on the EU and the European refugee crisis: "Angela Merkel is, for once, on the right side of the argument." (my emphasis) That is truly an historic moment!

He also says:

The EU has 500m inhabitants. Setting aside refugees, net immigration — the difference between those coming into and those leaving the EU — was 539,000 in 2013, about 0.1 per cent of the total population. Net immigration was higher in 2010, when it stood at 750,000. ...

Net immigration including refugees is clearly rising. Still, this is not an immigration crisis. It is a collective action crisis.

Its solution would be straightforward in the presence of a central authority empowered to take decisions. But this is not how the EU works. It works through co-ordination and harmonisation — through fiscal rules, banking regulation and neighbourhood policies. But none of them prevented the crisis, and none of them helps solve it.

As Yanis Varoufakis recently called attention to the way in which the dysfunctional response to the financial/debt crisis in the eurozone has compounded the problems the EU has in developed common policies and implementing them effectively, now particularly in the refugee crisis (On CNBC discussing Greece and Europe – full transcript, 4th September 2015 09/04/2015):

You’re quite right; in the end we created a common currency which divided us. And the deeper those divisions grew, the greater the failure to be united when it came to other matters. For instance, the refugee crisis. For instance, ways of dealing with the dearth of investment throughout Europe. Instead of getting closer together we were torn apart. In the United States, in the 19th Century, there was one financial crisis after another. Even at the beginning of the 20th century – and especially after 1929. Every time, the United States faced a major financial crisis it managed to consolidate. To get closer together. To create institutions that were common and which created shock absorbers for the system. In Europe, the idea was that we must bind ourselves together by means of the same currency in order to create this process. But, the first time a crisis tested us, following the financial that began in Wall Street, the City of London, and so on – we failed. Instead of consolidating, we are dividing and multiplying. And failing at other realms. So Europe’s monetary failure is spreading to other realms. [my emphasis]

Thalif Deen writes in Europe Invaded Mostly by “Regime Change” Refugees Inter Press Service 09/03/2015:

The military conflicts and political instability driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe were triggered largely by U.S. and Western military interventions for regime change – specifically in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria (a regime change in-the-making).

The United States was provided with strong military support by countries such as Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, while the no-fly zone to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was led by France and the UK in 2011 and aided by Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Canada, among others.

And the article highlights the concept of "regime change refugees":

The United States was directly involved in regime change in Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003) – and has been providing support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battling a civil war now in its fifth year.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who says he is “horrified and heartbroken” at the loss of lives of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean and Europe, points out that a large majority of people “undertaking these arduous and dangerous journeys are refugees fleeing from places such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS the term “regime change refugees” is an excellent way to change the empty conversation about the refugee crisis.

Obviously, there are many causes, but “regime change” helps focus on a crucial part of the picture, he added.

And the use of that term is a reminder that the anodyne phrase "regime change" describes a reality that can and sometimes does produce conditions that are catastrophically bad. Syrian and Ukraine are two current examples of that.

The left-Peronist site La Batalla Cultural raises an important point about regime-change operations in Los idiotas funcionales al imperialismo (Sept 2015; accessed 09/07/2015). The title, "The Useful Idiots of Imperialism," has a definite Leninist ring to it. But the point made by the article is a fairly basic one. Powerful countries like the US for Britain or France are happy to use democratic- and humanitarian-sounding claims and slogans to promote interventions whose aims are primarily narrow power-political ones. The difference in the US between "humanitarian hawks" and neoconservatives when it comes to advocating war is getting harder and harder to discern. Even the rhetoric is similar. Neocons are more likely to use cynically pragmatic arguments, but they have always used humanitarian claims to promote war as well.

The fact that a regime is bad in some way, even seriously bad, does not in itself justify military action against it. All the considerations of classic Just War theory still apply, including considering realistically whether the military action has a reasonable prospect of success. Any military action like the Iraq War of 2003 that produces more than a decade of civil war, massive population displacement and intensified international conflict is hard to see as one that ended up in a success in anything much more than killing a lot of Arabs and Kurds. Those who pointed the small chances of a good outcome prior to the invasion were not sympathizers of Saddam Hussein, as the Republicans inevitably called us. Actual sympathy for Saddam Hussein's general form of governance in the US was effectively nonexistent.

But it is possible to distinguish between the particular regime and the nature of a particular war. The Malvinas/Falklands War of 1982 is an excellent example. It pitted a cruel and unpopular dictatorship in Argentina against democratic Britain.

But Argentina had by far the better claim on the territorial question of to which country the islands belong. As the UN webpage on decolonization says as of this writing, " At present, 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories (NSGTs) across the globe remain to be decolonized, home to nearly 2 million people." The NSGT designation is a euphemism for "illegal colony." The Malvinas Islands are one of those cases. Ten of the 17, including the Malvinas and Gibraltar, are controlled by Great Britain.

In 1982, the Argentine military dictatorship landed its armed forces on the Malvinas. Britain retook the islands. But despite the unpopularity of the dictatorship, the war was tremendously popular among Argentines. That, of course, was part of the dictatorship's calculation. They hoped for a patriotic rallying to the government. Instead, the defeat of Argentina in that popular military cause was the nail in the coffin of the dictatorship. Losing wars is always unpopular. Losing wars that the public considers genuinely patriotic and justified is especially unpopular.

The current Argentine government headed by Cristina Fernández and the previous one held by her late husband Néstor Kirchner both strongly emphasized human rights and insisted on a thorough legal and educational reckoning with the crimes of the dictatorship.

But they also have pressed the claims of Argentina to the Malvinas - including the rights to major oil reserves to be controlled by the country that controls the islands - and have made a big deal out of honoring the veterans of the Malvinas War of 1982. Their recognition of the justness of Argentina's claim to the Malvinas in the 1982 war does not mean that they or their supporters admire the government that conducted the war. They don't even recognize the legal or moral legitimacy of that extra-constitutional and criminal dictatorship.

The Argentine Pope also supports the nation's legitimate claim to the Malvinas, as illustrated by this photo from August of this year, with him holding a sign saying, "It's time for dialogue between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Malvinas":

In an article appearing on Cristina's website, Alicia Barrios writes (A Francisco nadie lo toma por sorpresa #MalvinasArgentinas 21.08.2015):

Francisco es, fue y será muy malvinero. Todos los años, el 2 de abril, celebraba misa en la Catedral metropolitana junto a todos los familiares y ex combatientes de Malvinas. Los alentó y abrazó siempre. A las seis de la tarde las puertas del templo se abrían de par en par para ellos. Recordaba con emoción a los 649 caídos en combate. En ese día glorioso y doloroso para la memoria de los argentinos, de la misa salían con una sonrisa. Esperanzados para seguir luchando un año más. Antes era un ruego desde el país, ahora es desde el Vaticano para el mundo. Al Papa no lo tomó de sorpresa la presencia de Gustavo Hoyo, director de Diálogo Malvinas. Se acercó. Tomó la pancarta en sus manos y les dijo: “Sigan adelante”. Posó para la foto. Nunca dudó, sus homilías así lo demuestran, que las Malvinas son argentinas. Él sabe mejor que nadie, que decir la verdad no conforma a todos.

[Francisco is, was and will be a malvinero [i.e., supporter of Argentina's claim to the Malvinas]. Every year on April 2, he celebrated Mass in the Catedral metropolitana together with all the relative and ex-combatants of the Malvinas [from the 1982 war]. He always encouraged and embraced them. At 6:00 in the evening, the doors of the temple opened wide for them. He recalled with emotion the 649 fallen in combat. On this glorious and mournful day for the memory of Argentines, the left the Mass with a smile. We hoped to keep to keep fighting another year. Then it was a prayer from the country, today it is from the Vatican for the world. The Pope was not surprised by the presence of Gustavo Hoyo, director of Diálogo Malvinas [Diálogo por Malvinas, a campaign promoting Argentina's claims to the Malvinas]. He took the poster in his hands and told them, "Keep going forward." He posed for the photo. He never doubted, as demonstrated by his homilies, that the Malvinas are Argentine. He knows better than anyone to state the truth not accepted by everyone.]

For whatever reason, the Vatican decided they needed a little diplomatic dissimulation on that particular event, presumably to avoid the impression that the Pontiff was directly endorsing a particular political campaign, in this case on an issue rather than a candidate. (Nadia Khomami, Pope Francis 'tricked' into calling for Falklands talks The Guardian 08/20/2015)

See also: Carlos Cué, El Papa sostiene un cartel a favor del diálogo para las Malvinas El País 19.08.2015; Rosie Scammell, Pope Francis holds sign urging Falkland Islands dialogue, causes stir in Argentina Religion News Service/National Catholic Reporter 08/21/2015. The points Barrios makes about how Francis knew very well what he was doing are convincing. Who knows what the diplomatic mealy-mouthing afterward from Vatican press people was about?

Getting back to the polemical article in La Batalla Cultural, they are taking an anti-imperialist position informed by a Latin American view not so familiar to most Americans, and not always a comfortable one for people in the US and Europe. One widely-held perspective on the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-83 is known as the Two Devils theory, a kind of Both Sides Do It approach in which the crimes of the dictatorship are considered together with violent actions by the leftwing guerrillas in Argentina before and during the dictatorship. The latter are certainly a major part of the historical story. The now-annual journal La Lucha Armada en la Argentina, for instance, is a journal devoted primarily to a serious historical study of the leftwing guerrilla movements of that period.

But the crimes committed by the military government not only were far more massive in number. They also were done in the name of the Argentine nation and under general cover of law. And of the Christian religion, as the dictatorship endorsed a strong reactionary/national brand of Christianity that was deeply rooted in part of the Argentine Catholic Church. (Pope Francis has no justification for being proud of the general role he played during the dictatorship. But it's clear that he now identifies more with the liberation theology that was violently and murderously persecuted by the dictatorship.)

Americans can understand how the Two Devils theory can be misused as a defense of the dictatorship by reference to the current political movement in the US known as Black Lives Matter. White racists who want to see the widespread practice of (mostly white) police killing unarmed African-Americans (mostly men) continue, are eager to make a both-sides-do-it argument, arguing that the advocates against criminal violence by police practiced on young black men is somehow an incitement to active violence and murder against police. It is a bad-faith argument that really is directed only at providing phony justification for police murdering African-Americans at will and with impunity. (See Charlie Pierce, who addresses this issue though not exactly like I'm going here in Texas Cop Killing Could Spark National Backlash Against #BlackLivesMatter Esquire Politics Blog 08/31/2015)

Sometimes "both sides do it" is really an attempt to validate the actions of one side.

La Batalla Cultural (LBC) argues that not only is the Two Devils framing dominant in the way Argentines think about the dictatorship and the guerrillas. It also argues that this attitude carries over into views of foreign policy, and specifically to the Syrian conflict. LBC makes the point that a Two Devils approach to a situation like Syria, in which the Assad regime in Syria is equated with ISIS/Daesh and its Sunni backers can make an effective cover for regime-change intervention by countries like the US, France and Britain for whom alleged humanitarian concerns are entirely subordinate to other power-political consideration. LBC puts it this way:

Tenemos ahora en Medio Oriente un clásico escenario de invasión imperialista. Los Estados Unidos y sus amigos de la OTAN (en una palabra, el Occidente capitalista y cristiano) están poniendo la mesa para entrar con todo en Siria y hacer allí un nuevo Irak o Afganistán, para luego apropiarse de los recursos naturales y disponer de la suerte de los pueblos. ¿Cómo? Con estas sencillas jugadas, que son de manual:

1. Financiando y armando a los grupos llamados “rebeldes” sirios, que son lo equivalente a la oposición cipaya de Venezuela o Argentina (o de cualquier otra semicolonia) hasta fogonear bien la guerra civil
2. Con la guerra civil en marcha, poniendo en el territorio al “Estado Islámico” o ISIS, un tercer actor para complicar y desestabilizar aún más.

[Today we have in the Middle East a classic scenario of imperialist invasion. The United States and its friends in NATO (in a word, the capitalist West) are setting the table to enter Syria in full force and make a new Iraq or Afghanistan there, in order to later appropriate their natural resources and control the fortune of the peoples. How? With these open plays that are right out of the book:

1. Financing and arming groups called Syrian "rebels," that are the equivalent of the opposition loyal to foreigners of Venezuela or Argentina (or of any other semi-colony) to the point of fomenting civil war
2. With the civil war in progress, set up a third actor in the territory of the "Islamic States" or ISIS to further complicate and destabilize {the situation}.]

LBC particularly calls attention to the way that the ugly consequences of these policies, like today's refugee crisis between the Middle East and Europe, can be used by warmongers as excuses to continue and intensify the very policies that generate the problem in the first place.

This is why, despite the record of some its major figures like Henry Kissinger, I can't give up my fondness for the "realist" school of foreign policy theory. At its best - as in Stephen Walt's work - it emphasizes careful evaluation of the potential negative consequences of foreign policy decisions and the dangers to clear thinking that comes from taking one's side's own propaganda too seriously.

And LBC is also reminding its presumably mainly Argentine readers that a regime-change approach used in one part of the world without effective international criticism and resistance can be used in other parts, as well.