Bush vs. Global Warming

Mother Nature is one tough bitch, according to the eminent scientist James Lovelock (originator of the “Gaia Hypothesis). It would be hard to argue with Lovelock after witnessing half-a-million Californians fleeing their homes after yet another season of record wildfires out West. The South East, too, is experiencing dramatically irregular weather patterns, with a record drought depleting Georgia’s water supply so much that residents reportedly have about 90 days worth of water left.

Weather wise, things are starting to get biblical, but according to Lovelock’s the worst is yet to come. Six billion people, Lovelock suggests, may end up victims of global warming. Interested readers can evaluate his dire predictions for themselves at: Rolling Stone. Lovelock, incidentally, doesn't think there's much we can do to stop the worst effects of global warming from materializing because we've already passed the tipping point. Don't the 24% of Americans that still support Bush -- and who once that global warming was a giant hoax perpetrated by the Left -- realize that God would not want a incompetent like Bush to president, unless he wanted to destroy the United States.

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Bush's Balloon

Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq, a record number of Americans (one million) are facing foreclosure, and oil is skirting $90 a barrel. With the housing market hitting the skids, gasoline prices accelerating to $4 a gallon, don’t be surprised if the United States hits a recession by this time next year. All I know is that the administration that botched Katrina, screwed up Iraq, has mismanaged America’s financial situation even more. You can’t cut taxes, flush money down the toilet in Iraq, and expand the size of the government by record levels without some sort of reckoning. The air has been leaking out of Bush’s hot-air balloon for some time, but there may be no soft landing for the rest of the country.

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Bush Wins Nobel Prize for War

George W. Bush is the recipient of this year’s Nobel Prize for War. The announcement made by the great-great-great grandson of the Prussian military strategist Carl Phillip Gottfried von Clausewitz, was greeted by jubilation in the White House Bunker. Previous recipients have included Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Benedict Arnold, General George Armstrong Custer, Napoleon, Mussolini, and the character known as Dr. Strangelove.

The prize, including 250,000 rounds of ammo, will be jointly shared by Bush and the private mercenary firm of Blackwater USA. In announcing their decision the Nobel War Prize committee cited the contribution Bush and Blackwater have made to “capitalize on the fog of war to defeat domestic enemies as a prelude to total war.”

Bush, who has not worn military garb since appearing in his specially-tailored Commander-in-Chief flight four years ago, was on hand to receive the award wearing a black ninja suit and wrap around sunglasses. In accepting the honor Bush quoted his favorite military strategist, Sun Tzu, saying: “Throw your soldiers into positions where there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight, if they face the death there is nothing they cannot achieve.” The president then winked and added, “All war is deception.”

In winning the prize, Bush once again stole the limelight from former Vice-President Al Gore who earlier won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in educating the public about global warming. Bush was disdainful of his rival, quoting Orwell’s axiom, “War is Peace,” to buttress his conviction that that the decisions he has made as president – to ignore global warming, scrap the Geneva Conventions, to take the week off during Katrina, and spend billions rebuilding Iraq rather than waste the money at home on pork barrel projects – have been the right ones for the country.

Speaking before audience of foreign policy experts, including Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Michele Malkin, Vice-president Dick Cheney argued that his boss’s award vindicated the administration’s war mongering philosophy. Quoting Machiavelli the VP said, “War can only be postponed to the advantage of others.” “We must strike while the iron is hot,” he continued. “Today we are liberating Iraq, tomorrow the world.”

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George Bush and Torture

George Bush’s declamation that the U.S. doesn’t torture is about as convincing as Richard Nixon’s pathetic claim that he wasn’t a crook. The sad truth is that the Bush administration continues to abuse prisoners, the law, and the trust of the American people. Put simply, the coercive interrogation techniques and the culture of lawlessness the Bush administration has fostered are corroding the soul of the United States. Indeed, the Bush administration has managed to virtually destroy America’s good name, a feat no terrorist group could ever hope to accomplish on its own.

After 9/11 the Bush administration made a conscious decision that the gloves were coming off. Ambassador J. Cofer Black, a CIA veteran, who would later go into business with the private security firm Blackwater, promised Bush shortly after 9/11 that he’d have Osama bin Laden’s head on pike for the president. This promise set the tone; the legal niceties against assassination and torture would be suspended. The United States, which ever since its inception had taken a strong stand against torture, would reverse course.

In the aftermath of 9/11 even liberal commentators, most notably Alan Dershowitz, endorsed what is known as the “ticking time bomb” theory, the notion that it is morally acceptable to torture a terrorist if the information we can get from him will help us find and defuse a nuclear device scheduled to blow up a major city. Abstract thought experiments have their utility, no doubt, but reality rarely presents such neat and simple moral dilemmas. Indeed, the ticking time bomb scenario, though improbable in real-life, lends itself to the kind of melodramatic fantasy that passes for entertainment on TV, where good guys can do terrible things (break the law, torture others, etc) and still remain virtuous.

In TV land, torture never dehumanizes the torturer. Likewise, the rouge cop who breaks the law in order to bring the bad guys to justice is vindicated by the time the final credits run. The moral lessons from the typical formulaic TV plot, however, are about as deep as those found in comic books.

The reality, most counterterrorism experts agree, is that individuals being tortured will tell their torturers anything they think they want to hear, thus making it virtually impossible to disentangle solid information from bad. There is evidence that the invasion of Iraq was predicated on false confessions obtained by torture that linked al-Qaeda to Saddam.

The ticking tomb bomb theory is jury rigged in favor of a pro-active course of action. On one side of the scale is enemy combatant whose depravity and guilt are not in doubt, on the other side rests a major metropolitan city with millions of innocent people. But let’s make the scenario more realistic: imagine ten terror suspects, out of which only one holds the crucial information, with the rest of the bunch including at least one completely innocent individual? Would it still be morally acceptable to torture all ten suspects even if we only had 10% percent chance of getting our hands on the right info in time to avert a mushroom cloud?

I assume most of us would find it acceptable to allow a single innocent individual to suffer unjustified torture if in the process we somehow managed to ensure a 10% percent chance of saving millions of people versus a 0% chance if no torture took place. However, modifying the ticking time bomb experiment in this way shows how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope when it comes to torture.

Is it acceptable, for instance, to sacrifice 1,500 Iraqis a month if we stand a fifty-fifty chance of building a better Middle East within the next twenty years, thus reducing the chances of another 9/11? The question seems positively perverse the more you think about it. But the Bush administration has more or less taken a hypothetical query like that and made it official policy. According to the administration’s moral calculus 600,000 dead and 4 million displaced Iraqis are counterbalanced by a hypothetical future where America will be safer because we defused a powder keg in the Middle East. This is a rather messy version of the ticking time bomb experiment. And the line between those we’ve tortured and those we’ve saved is even more convoluted.

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Onward Christian Soldiers

Apologists for the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq have long claimed that the invasion was a way of “draining the swamp,” so to speak, in the Middle East. The “swamp” metaphor, of course, is a close cousin to their “flypaper” theory, which holds that hordes of terrorists will be drawn to Iraq by America’s presence where they can be exterminated en masse. Ironically, Iraq has become a magnet for another specimen associated with swamplands – Blackwater USA, the mercenary outfit whose headquarters is situated along what is known as the Great Dismal Swamp in the foothills of North Carolina.

Blackwater, which has garnered headlines recently for allegedly massacring unarmed Iraqi civilians in a series of unprovoked attacks, exists at the intersection of a number of troubling trends: the privatization of warfare, the incestuous connection between Republican political donors and public officials, and the hijacking of U.S. foreign policy by right-wing Christian extremists. No firm exemplifies this axis-of-ills more than Blackwater.

Blackwater was founded in 1996 by Erik Prince, a reclusive former Navy Seal. The hyper-wealthy Prince is a devout Christian with ties to many right-wing organizations dedicated to promoting a libertarian and socially conservative agenda. Such groups militantly oppose abortion, homosexual marriage, and secular character of American society. They believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that America’s law and culture must reflect our Biblical heritage. Citizens like Prince have funneled vast sums to conservative Republican candidates in the hopes of bringing about a cultural revolution in the United States.

Blackwater amounts to a private army, which includes 20,000 elite troops, twenty aircraft, and a state of the art military base. And the war on terror has literally been a godsend for the company. For instance, by some estimates Blackwater has received close to $1 billion dollars in government contracts, making it essentially “the fifth branch of the U.S military.” Business for Blackwater certainly picked up after 9/11, but the invasion of Iraq was a mother lode for the company. As the Times of London noted, “In Iraq, the postwar business boom is not oil. It is security.” And as the security situation in Iraq worsened, Blackwater’s profit potential exploded.

The invasion of Iraq provided enormous profit opportunities for firms like Blackwater, but many right-wing groups saw the idea of spreading democracy in Iraq as an opportunity to promote Christian teachings and values in the Muslim world, which they believed would be an antidote Islamic extremism. Christianity and capitalism could cure the ills of the Middle East.
Blackwater embodies the idea that one can serve God and mammon. A deeper problem, however, is that democracy and private mercenary armies are incompatible. Put simply, the expansion of for-profit armies erodes democracy (in so far as private interest and the public good are severed). For instance, when the profit incentive for going to war is great, then democratic checks and balances become a nuisance that the military-industrial-security-disaster complex will seek to circumvent and dismantle.

The run up to the war in Iraq is a case in point. That is, if a real democratic debate had taken place regarding the threat posed by Saddam, with the facts, evidence, and arguments weighed and deliberately and honestly, then the United States probably never would have invaded Iraq. But with billions of dollars at stake, then war profiteers had an enormous incentive to manipulate the political process to achieve the outcome they desired. When you add ideological fervor to the profit motive, then making a killing in Iraq can even seem morally justified.

Firms like Blackwater represent and ominous development for self-government and the separation of church and state. The existence of private armies controlled by a single individual (or loyal to a religious ideology) is a throwback to the feudal era. Despite Blackwater’s perfect record of safeguarding every American diplomat it has contracted to protect, the firm has greatly compounded America’s efforts in Iraq with its heavy-handed and that have alienated ordinary Iraqis. “Ye shall know them by their fruits” is a tenet that the Christian soldiers at Blackwater have failed to live up

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Bush's Strategic Stupidity

George Bush’s tenure is turning out to be a tragedy for the United States. Most Americans, by now, are at least dimly aware that Bush is leading the country in the wrong direction, but only as small percentage recognizes how this accidental president has tipped the United States towards a precipitous and probably irreversible decline. Put simply, through a mix of arrogance and obtuseness, Bush has managed to enmesh the United States in a series of vicious cycles that are steadily eroding America’s vitality. If the present tends continue, historians will almost certainly correlate Bush’s ascension to the White House with America’s 21st century decline.

A vicious cycle is a self-defeating pattern where bad habits lead to deleterious outcomes, which tend to reinforce bad habits that lead to even worse outcomes. For instance, imagine a drunk who drinks because he is poor; the more he drinks the poorer he gets, which leads him to drink even more, which only worsens his condition. The United States, courtesy George W. Bush, is enacting similar self-defeating behaviors on a number of fronts.

America’s energy habits are at the heart of several interrelated vicious cycles: 1) global warming, 2) terrorism, and 3) Iraq. For example, America’s voracious appetite for fossil fuels is spewing carbon into the atmosphere, which causes the planet to heat up, which is increasing the potential for ecological catastrophes, which will ultimately threaten the prosperity, stability, and future of civilization itself.

The high demand for fossil fuels has another consequence: high oil prices mean more money for jihadists and anti-American forces. Indeed, as Thomas Friedman notes in what he calls the First Law of Petro-politics: the higher the price of oil, the slower the pace of reform in the Middle East. This is because mullahs, clerics, and dictators flush with petro-dollars can afford to forgo economic development and thwart political and cultural reforms.

The West’s need for cheap oil, of course, is a large reason for America’s presence in Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was supposed to break the back of OPEC, thus driving down the price of oil to the $15-$20 region, which would have rescued America’s ailing automakers (which can’t sell as many gas guzzlers when oil is expensive). Instead, the botched occupation in Iraq has helped drive oil prices to new highs (and high oil prices benefit American adversaries like Iran).
So, the Bush administration overacted to a threat that didn’t exist (Saddam’s alleged WMD) and failed to act to a real and growing threat (global warming). And the steps it has taken have only compounded the challenges America faces. Most ironically, however, the United States is mortgaging its future by borrowing money from China so that we can continue to buy oil from the Middle East, which only increases the blowback we’ll face from terrorism and global warming. In other words, we are burdening future generations with debt that pays for the foolish and selfish choices the Bush administration is making today.

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Target Iran?

According to an investigative report by Seymour Hersh, “Shifting Targets, published in the New Yorker, the Bush administration is preparing surgical military operations against Iran. As Hersh sees it, Bush/Cheney (rather than admit their own ineptness) have decided to blame Iran for the lack of progress in Iraq. And they are determined to hit Iran hard in order to dissuade Iran from seeking to extend its influence in Iraq.

Hersh makes it clear that the U.S. is already a proxy war against Iran in Iraq. Further, Bush & Cheney believe that a combination of air power and Special Forces ground operations could decapitate and discredit the most radical elements in the Republican Guard. Unfortunately, the same wishful-thinking (and the failure to imagine the worst-case scenarios) that characterized the fiasco in Iraq are being repeated in the run up to a confrontation with Iran. The Bush administration never talks about the lessons of Iraq, which is why they seem destined to repeat their errors on an even grander scale.

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Blackwater Blues

Machiavelli disdained mercenaries, which should tell you something. And so did America’s Founding Fathers. But for a variety of political and economic reasons the Bush administration has increasingly come to rely on a privatized form of warfare. The war in Iraq has been profitable for many American companies, most notably the North Carolina based firm of Blackwater USA . But in more ways than not these firms have undermined America’s efforts in Iraq. Indeed, private security firms like Blackwater have been implicated in numerous incidents – the torture and abuse of prisoners, unprovoked shootings, and even the sale of weaponry to insurgents – that have greatly complicated America’s situation in Iraq.

The recent shootout out involving Blackwater security personnel is a case in point. Eleven Iraqi civilians were killed, including a mother and her infant daughter, after Blackwater employees opened fire on an Iraqi vehicle that failed to stop when ordered. The incident grew so heated that U.S. troops founded themselves in the middle of an armed standoff between Blackwater and the Iraqi Army while one Blackwater employee threatened to shoot another. In short, Blackwater had somehow managed to tick off every faction imaginable, except their stockholders.

Blackwater is proving to be divisive in many other ways; Blackwater personnel tend to make ten times what ordinary grunts make, engendering tremendous resentment among U.S. troops. Further, firms like Blackwater operate largely outside Iraqi and U.S. law, which means that they are almost entirely unaccountable (hence they are deeply resented by the Iraqi government).
The United States has 160,000 private contactors in Iraq, and 50,000 fit in the category of being mercenaries. Perversely, it is in their financial interests that Iraq remains the kind of place where their services are needed. Firms like Blackwater will continue to make a killing so long as the carnage continues.

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