Collateral Murder: On Civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan

Several weeks ago, the website known as "wikileaks" released 2007 footage of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter machine-gunning a Reuters reporter (Namir Noor-Eldeen), his cameraman (Saeed Chmagh), as well as the driver of a van that then stopped to help the men. The footage also shows one of the helicopters firing a hellfire missile into an apartment building.

Not surprisingly, the footage has caused somewhat of an uproar in both the American press and within the upper echelons of The Pentagon and U.S. Military intelligence. Immediately following the release of the footage, Defense Secretary Robert Gates released a statement saying "These people can put out anything they want, and they're never held accountable for it. There's no before and there's no after".

What we've seen so far is a concerted effort on the part of U.S. Military representatives (as well as their allies in the press) to discredit the assertion by Wikileaks that the attacks constituted "collateral murder" through the use of "US Bomb strikes on Iraqi Civilians". The claims used to discredit the Wikileaks release fall into three main categories:
1: The people killed were actually insurgents, and can be seen in the footage carrying weapons
2: Wikileaks is unaccountable
3: In the event that Premise #1 is false, this was an isolated incident.
What I'm going to do is examine each of these premises and debunk them. So let's examine the first one.

Premise 1: The dead were insurgents
This is one that has been used by a variety of news sources when discussing the issue, as well as by The Pentagon itself when releasing their own documents concerning the tapes. Following the release of the footage, Fox News criticized wikileaks, noting that although the video slows to identify the Reuters crews, "that at least one man in that group was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a clearly visible weapon that runs nearly two-thirds the length of his body." A subsequent Pentagon publication asserted that a nearby infantry company had been under attack by small-arms fire, and also concluded that at least two members of the group attacked by the helicopter were armed, likely with variations of the AKM or AK-47.

Now there's a few things wrong with this premise. The first is that it can be very clearly seen in the video that Noor-Eldeen was carrying a camera (not, as initially claimed, a weapon), as reported by The Guardian and the German Süddeutsche Zeitung However, even if we are to assume that the premise above is correct, it makes precious little difference with regards to the actions of the crew of the helicopter. We have to keep in mind that this is Iraq we are talking about; everybody and their grandmother owns an AK-47, and since the fall of Saddam Hussein that has been the case. In his account of his time served in Iraq, war resistor Joshua Key notes that "the first seven house raids we conducted all turned up small arms. After that they became so commonplace that we stopped confiscating them; every family had at least one or more weapons in the house". Now, again, even if we are to assume that these were not just your average Iraqis carrying guns, and that they were indeed insurgents, that still does nothing to excuse the actions of the gunship pilots. It is easily identifiable that Noor-Eldeen was carrying a camera, and opening fire on a reporter and his cameraman, and then on the vehicle that stops to help them, cannot be excused no matter the situation with regards to those around them.

Premise 2: Wikileaks is unaccountable
Since it became rather unquestionable that Noor-Eldeen was carrying a camera and not an RPG, those criticizing the footage have looked instead at the origin of the release. This was the line of defense used by Robert Gates himself, who commented that "These people can put out anything they want, and they're never held accountable for it. There's no before and there's no after".
Granted, there may be some truth to this premise. Wikileaks does not operate within the limits and rules of traditional "official" sources. Again, accepting this premise to be true does not change my line of argument. Shortly after the footage was released, a U.S. military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage. we can debate the merits of wikileaks all day long, yet the fact remains that the footage came from somewhere. The footage is confirmed to be authentic, and arguing the value of wikileaks does nothing to change this.

Premise 3: In the event that Premise #1 is false, this was an isolated incident
Once most of those voicing opposition against the footage had been forced to accept Premise #1 as false, they turned into full defensive mode. Essentially, they said "even if an innocent reporter and his cameraman were gunned down, this was an isolated incident. This was a few bad eggs ruining the reputation of the entire U.S. army".
Again, there may be some truth to this line of reasoning. I'm not going to claim for a moment that every single young man who joins the United States Military is a murderous psychopath with a fetish for machine-gunning reporters and children. If that is the case, then why have so many incidents occurred? Let's run through a brief list:
28 April 2003: Fallujah killings, marines open fire on a crowd in Fallujah, killing 17 and injuring more than 70. No charges are laid.
2004 (ongoing through entire year): Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse (torture, rape, sodomy, homicide, general abuse), 11 soldiers convicted, mostly minor charges, charges dropped against an additional three
19 November 2005: Haditha Massacre - 24 men, women and children killed by U.S. Marines, all charges are dropped
16 September 2007: Blackwater incident. Blackwater guards kill 17 civilians in Baghdad, currently, all charges are dropped
Is anyone else noticing a common pattern? First off it seems as if these incidences were not as "isolated" as many have claimed. Indeed, testimony by many former members of the U.S. Army has indicated as much. If we look again at the writings of Josh Key, he records that drill sargeants at Basic Training urged recruits to bayonet dummy-enemies with the slogan "Kill the Sand-Niggers!". We know that hatred of Iraqi civilians was thoroughly ingrained into the minds of new recruits before the Iraq war began, and I know from the experience of acquaintances of mine that this continues to be the case.
Again, even if we accept the premise to be correct, this doesn't change a thing. This is the second pattern in the events above. In every single case, the vast majority (if not all) of the charges have been dropped. I can accept that there are only a handful of clinical psychopaths in the U.S. Army. However, when that small handful commit war crimes and yet are not charged with anything above "dereliction of duty", that is a slap in the face of the entire concept of Rule of Law. We know that the men in the gunship were probably a little bit on the crazy side. When ground support teams reported that two young girls had been hit, one of the gunners callously shot back "Well, it's their fault for bringing kids into a battle". People like this deserve more than a dishonourable discharge and a fine. The U.S. Military undermines what little credibility it has left when it refuses to examine its own ranks and dole out legitimate punishment to those who commit war crimes.

We can therefore draw several conclusions
1: Innocent people were killed in the incident
2: The accountability of wikileaks is irrelevant to the larger question of the U.S. Army's actions
3: The United States Military has failed to wash its hands of the blood of hundreds of thousands - perhaps over 1 million - Iraqi civilians who have died since the March 2003 invasion.
4: Assuming that Bush and his cohorts will not be tried for their role in the war, the next best way to wash America's hands of at least some of the blood it has is to ensure that those who have committed war crimes in Iraq are given punishments befitting of the crime, not a slap on the wrist and a dishonourable discharge.

Resurrected

At the beginning of March, it looked as though Obama's healthcare reform - as well as his presidency - were on life-support with the situation going downhill. Scott Brown had broken the supermajority in the senate with his election to the senate seat of Ted Kennedy (a seat held by Democrats since the mid-1950's), momentum on healthcare reform in both the House and Senate had slowed to a crawl, and many of Obama's initial hopes for healthcare - a Public Option, a medicare buy-in, bipartisan support - had slipped away as Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) threatened to filibuster the bill. The conservative punditocracy had proclaimed that Obama's presidency was dead.

Last sunday, that all changed.

On Sunday, after a mind-numbing ten hours of debate, the House of Representatives passed the Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act 220-211. The debate was inspiring, infuriating, and stupidly repetitive all at the same time. Democrats repeated the same old mantra of "healthcare for America's families and children", while the Republicans resorted to their Limbaugh-like scare tactics once again. One Representative claimed that the bill was "the first step in turning America into a socialist utopia", while another asserted that "a little bit of freedom dies today", while many proclaimed it "unconstitutional". Outside, hundreds of furious protesters chanted "kill the bill", hurling N-bombs at African-American members of congress and screaming gay slurs at Barney Frank (D-Ma.), the first openly-gay member of congress. Following its passage, multiple members of congress received FBI and Secret Service protection, while Twitter has been awash with death threats against Democrats and members of Obama's presidential staff.

At the same time, however, the most sweeping healthcare reform in decades has been passed by both the House and the Senate. Yes, it is flawed. Yes, it is a colossal paycheck to the insurance industry. Yes, it fall far short of the kind of reform needed to truly fix the United States healthcare system. But at the same time, it is a start. The first civil rights legislation in a generation happened in 1957. the Voting Rights Act didn't come until eight years later in 1965. Yes, the healthcare reform bill tackles many of the insurance issues - notably preconditions and payment limits - that should have been dealt with decades ago. The only real difficulty is that it is - ultimately - health insurance reform, not healthcare reform.

What we have witnessed, however, is one of the most extraordinary rebirths of a presidency in history. Since Sunday, Obama has gone from being the aloof and detached compromiser back to the tough-talking, no-nonsense semi-populist he was on the campaign trail. In the past week, the Senate has passed more sweeping reforms than in the previous year before that. Healthcare reform is passed, a $40 billion student loan reform passed earlier this evening, and Chris Dodd's banking overhaul is on the senate floor and preparing to be debated. The Democrats are energized, with multiple new-versions of health reform still being debated - and rapidly at that. Gone is the one-year long slugging match, the insanity of the townhall meetings and racist white people screaming "Obama=Hitler!" (they've moved onto "Obama=Stalin!"), the Democrats unwilling to grow the pair necessary to pass serious reform. Campaign donations have been flowing in, not only to Democrat congressmen/women seeking reelection, but to progressive candidates fighting "Blue Dog Democrats" in red states like Arkansas.

Simultaneously, the Republican Party seems to be in a state of absolute dismay and chaos. For months, Fox News and other right-wing outlets goaded libertarians and ultraconservatives into a frenzied bloodbath of hatred, assuring them that the healthcare bill didn't have a chance in hell of passing, and that the Obama presidency was as good as dead. On Monday morning, the shock of reality hit them full force. Many Republicans have called for states to sue the federal government (the Attorney General in Georgia is likely to be impeached because he has refused to do so), while others have blamed our favourite specters: ACORN, the liberal media, and accused Obama of being a Kenyan Witch Doctor etc. All the while, the Republicans have dug in their heels and continued to define themselves as what one Massacheusetts Democrat Rep termed the "party of nope". Republican politicians have continued to embrace the far-right tea party movement
Fortunately, not all conservatives have done so. David Frum, the former speechwriter for Dubya, immediately wrote that healthcare was a modern-day battle of Waterloo...for the Republicans. On Monday, he wrote on his website FrumForum:
"We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?"

On Wednesday, he was interviewed by ABC about the role of Fox News in the framework of the GOP. His response illustrated an astute understanding of the Republican Party he once embraced but now criticizes for its embrace of lunacy.

"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party."

Unsurprisingly, Frum has since been fired from his post at the American Enterprise Institute. Similarly to the Republican Party, a mass uproar from the Fox News base that provides financial support for the AEI likely played a significant role.

By digging in their heels, the Republicans have virtually sealed their fate. By continuing to invoke obscure senate rules regarding committee work and blocking unemployment benefits, they have continued to render themselves irrelevant. Strom Thurmond's 24-hour filibuster of a civil rights bill in 1957 did nothing to help the Republican Party; it set in motion the machinery that gave Lydon Johnson a Supermajority in the Senate and virtually crushed the Republican Party in the congress.

Keith Olbermann offered the most stinging critique of the Republican Party's methodology:
"You will be the Flat-Earthers, the Isolationists, the Segregationists, the John Birchers. Stop. Certainly you must recognize the future is with the humane, the inclusive, the diverse-- it is with America. Not the America of 1910, but the America of 2010. Discard this dangerous, separatist, elitist, backward-looking rhetoric, and you will be welcomed back into the political discourse of this nation. Continue with it, and you will destroy yourselves and whatever righteous causes you actually believe in, and on the way you will damage this country in ways and manners untold."

Either way, what we have witnessed in the last week goes beyond a recovery. Obama's presidency has been resurrected.

Real Remembrance

The following is the keynote address I gave at Henry Wisewood's Remembrance Day Assembly today:

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We’ve been told they fought for their country. We’ve been told they fought for duty, for honour, for glory. We’ve been told that they fought for freedom, for justice, for equality, for liberty. At least, that’s what we’ve been told. Over and over again, we’ve been fed the ancient proverb which Wilfred Owen so aptly called “that old and evil lie”: It is sweet and dutiful to die for one’s fatherland. What I’m going to attempt to do today is remind everyone here of the lessons that we need to remember, yet have largely forgotten.
The two world wars that plagued the century before this one were catastrophic. The First World War claimed some 20,000,000 souls, while the Second destroyed an estimated 55,000,000. In both conflicts, the majority of the dead fit into two categories: the young, and the innocent.
In July 2007 I knelt at the grave of the youngest soldier to perish in the First World War, aged fourteen. He was younger than any of us in this building, and yet his life was torn apart in the hellfire of war and conflict. On that same trip – a battlefield tour of northwestern Europe – I stood within the Menin Gate, the colossal war memorial in the town of Ypres. On the Belgium-France border, the town of Ypres was 99% destroyed by the end of the First World War. The town has been impressively rebuilt, and yet the reminders of that terrible conflict are there still. For on the Menin Gate are the names of 60,000 British Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies have no known grave within the Ypres Salient. On the walls of Tyne Cott Cemetary – containing some 12,000 graves – are another 40,000 names from the same sector of the war.
300km to the southwest is the town of Beaumont Hamel, part of the massive offensive that began on 1 July 1916 along the Somme River. It was in Beaumont Hamel that the 800 soldiers of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment assembled in their front lines, with confidence running high. After three months of continual artillery bombardment, it was felt by many that rifles were unnecessary, as the Germans would have died in their trenches.
110 paces from the front lines of the RNR is a marker known as “The Danger Tree”. It marks the farthest that the regiment got. In 110 paces, every single officer and 658 ranked men were killed, most cut down by withering German machine-gun fire. It was but the beginning of one of the bloodiest days in human history, with Anglo-French forces taking a combined 64,000 casualties. In total, the Battle of the Somme would claim 1,100,000 lives. The approximate ratio comes to one man dead for every inch of ground gained.
Between the two sites of Ypres and The Somme lies Vimy Ridge, the site of Canada’s triumph in the First World War. Yet even the colossal Vimy Memorial serves as a sobering reminder of the horror of the First World War. In two attempts to capture the ridge before 1917, the French lost 150,000 men. 10,000 Canadians were killed or wounded in the struggle to capture the ridge. Of Canada’s population of 6,000,000, some 600,000 fought overseas. There are 1500 people in this room at the moment. If this was 1914-1918, 150 of you are going to war. 15 of you will be blown to bits, shot, poisoned, gassed, bombarded, buried alive, or sliced apart by machine-gun fire. Thirty of you will suffer similar fates, only you will survive. None of you will ever forget the horrors that you will witness.
Opposite Vimy Ridge lies Notre Dame de Lorette, one of two French National War Memorials (the other situated at the site of the orgy of death that was Verdun). Within the walls of the site are over 40,000 graves. Of these, only half are marked, since the grave-workers could only find bits of those they were supposed to bury. Standing at the southern end of the basilica on the site, you can see nothing but endless rows of white crosses, stretching outwards for what seems an eternity.
It is often said that war showcases the best and worst of humanity. Two experiences within my travels have put that into focus. This past summer, I toured the extermination camp of Buchenwald, in which nearly 57,000 – ranging from Jews to socialists to Soviet POWs– were mercilessly butchered by the SS. It is impossible to remain emotionally stable as you stand in the basement of the crematorium, staring upwards in horror at the hooks from which some 1,100 were hanged until death. When you close your eyes, you can nearly see the bodies writhing in agony in the last moments of their life, sense the stench of death around you, and feel to your core a silence so appalling that it overwhelms you within seconds. The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust illustrate one of the darkest hours in humanity’s history; where some committed acts that were inhuman and monstrous, and many stood idly by, saying and doing nothing.
Contrast this with an experience I had on the last day of June 2007, standing at the foot of the grave of Noelle Godfrey Chavasse, a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps and the only man in the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth to win two Victoria Crosses – the highest award for bravery in the Commonwealth – in the same war. His first VC was awarded in 1916, when – despite being hit by shell splinters at Mametz – he crawled to within 25 yards of the German front lines, braving sniper fire and artillery the entire time, to rescue three soldiers who had been wounded and trapped there. His second VC was awarded during the Battle of Paschendaele a year later. He is recorded to have been severely wounded while carrying a soldier back to the medical stations. Despite this, he continued for a further two days – largely without food – to go back into no-man’s-land to recover wounded soldiers. He subsequently died of his wounds, and is now buried in a cemetery outside of Ypres.
Yet even this story of incredible courage and bravery has an edge of despair to it. What is sad isn’t that Noelle Chavasse was brave enough to sacrifice his life to save someone else’s, but that it was required of him in the first place. He didn’t start the First World War. Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States, once remarked that “Older men declare war. But it is the young that must fight and die”. The average German before the Second World War likely did not want to slaughter 20% of the Polish population, or bomb London to pieces, or turn the ancient city of Leningrad into one massive graveyard. Yet those in power had an ardent desire to do so, and so those who were poor, or those looking for a direction in which to live their life, or those conscripted into service by their untouchable overlords, were marched into the hellfire of the Eastern Front, to kill and be killed.
The number of men who returned from the First World War shell-shocked and psychologically destroyed numbers in the millions. The lives needlessly thrown away by the power-trips of older tyrants destroyed the flower of two successive generations. Standing in the basement of Buchenwald’s crematorium, or in the necropolis and the ossuary of Notre Dame de Lorrette’s Basilica, or within the Menin Gate brings home the harsh truth about war: That war is not about winning and losing; it is not about victory and it is not about defeat, or about heroism and cowardice. It is about death…and the infliction of death. War represents, in the words of veteran war correspondent Dr. Robert Fisk, “the complete and total failure of humanity and the human spirit”.
Many would argue that war is sometimes a necessary evil. No matter how true that may be, it is still evil. Did we have to fight World War II? Yes, we had to stop Hitler. He was a mass-murdering psychopath who would have killed every racial minority on the planet if given the chance. But…did we have to drop two atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Japan after Hitler’s suicide and the collapse of Nazi Germany to do that? Did we have to firebomb the city of Dresden and kill 100,000 people, most of them non-combatants? Did we have to intern thousands upon thousands of Japanese-Canadians, depriving them of their livelihood, humanity, citizenship and dignity?
Yet these facts are often left out of the narrative. We are told that the First World War was about values and democracy. It didn’t start because of idealism. It began because a young man named Galvo Princip assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in a city called Sarajevo in what is now Bosnia. Most of the pointless slaughter of the next four years was just that: pointless. Those who fought that war figured that out a long time ago. Harry Patch, the last British WWI vet, died this past summer. Yet before he died, he was interviewed on the 90th anniversary of the end of the war, and he was asked whether the deaths of 20,000,000 young men and civilians was worth anything. He responded eloquently: “War is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings. Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.”
If those who survived the bloodbaths of Passchendaele and The Somme have figured this out, why haven’t we? Why do we repeat the same old mantra of liberty and idealism? It’s not that there aren’t things worth fighting for, it’s that wars are never started for the reasons we’d like to believe. The First was about power and politics, the Second about territory and fanaticism. The proxy-wars of the Cold War were about power and resources; our current wars are about power and resources. War is seen as a means to an end, rather than what it really is: a sickening evil that has plagued humanity for all but about 253 of its 9,000 years of recorded history.
When he was interviewed on 11 November 2008, Harry Patch also revealed that his attendance of Remembrance Day ceremonies was infrequent. He said that he viewed them as “just show business”, as a façade for what has been demonstrated to be our incapability to figure out not so much what we are remembering, but why we are remembering it. We do the memories of those who died no service by kidding ourselves about the nature of their deaths.
The line we most often hear is that those who fought in World War II fought for our freedom. This is true if you grew up in Holland, or France, or Britain, or Poland or Russia. That is not true here. The German Empire never would have reached Canada in 1918; the Nazis would have been eventually crushed by the overwhelming Red Tide of 700 divisions – each 18,000 men strong – pouring out of the Soviet Union. At first glance, it often appears that there is no reason to remember.
But here’s why we have to remember the sacrifice of previous generations: We have to learn from it. If our generation, or our children’s generation, embarks on a bloody – and likely apocalyptic – war with the rest of humanity, then their deaths will have been for nothing. If we simply repeat the mistakes of previous generations over and over again – as history suggests we are doomed to do – then the victims of the first two world wars will have died in a pointless exercise in humanity’s instinctual desire to annihilate itself.
If, on the other hand, we resolve to make the Second World War the Last World War, then we have made the deaths of the nearly 100,000,000 in the two conflicts worth something. To truly make the sacrifice of previous generations for something, we must ensure that our generation and future generations never go through the hell that they did. Thank you.

Obscurity and irrelevance

The last several weeks have been very interesting indeed. But perhaps the most interesting part about it has been watching the United States' Minority Party's reaction to all of it.

Let us begin with the Olympics. The bids for the 2016 Summer Olympics came in several weeks ago, with four cities in the running: Tokyo, Madrid, Rio de Janiero, and Chicago. The day before the votes were cast by the IOC, Barack Obama decided to go and lobby the IOC on behalf of his city of residence. He delivered the usual rousing speech. Despite another impressive oration from the President of the United States (POTUS), the International Olympic Committee responded by ejecting Chicago from the votes in the first round. In the end, the 2016 Summer Olympics went to Samba City: Rio de Janiero. In the words of Bill Maher, "you should have seen it. They were samba-ing in the streets, their breasts were hanging out; and then they found out they'd won the Olympics bid and oh man..."
The response to all of this from the Republican Party was particularly whinging. In a nutshell: They're glad Obama lost the Olympics bid. They're glad to see him fail, they're glad to see a cut in the flesh of the Democrat's Kronos. At long last, they said to themselves, Obama has been shown to be vulnerable. This is where we can hit home at him. The airwaves were flooded with shouts of jubilation and euphoria. The Republicans finally seemed to believe they had defeated him.

Enter Norway, my favourite country in the world. Besides contributing heavily to the UN's budget, effectively running UNICEF, and providing the ultimate argument in favour of democratic socialism, Norway is also responsible for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee for the remaining awards is Swedish, whereas the committee for the Peace Prize is voted on by the Norwegian government. The current government - headed by the Labour Party's Jens Stoltenberg - has a bit of a leftist hint to it (the governing coalition is aptly termed "The Red-Green Block"). Two weeks ago, the committee - including one former Conservative MP, two former Labour MPs, one former Socialist Left MP, and one former Progress MP - awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Hussein Obama. He was awarded it "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" and his work towards "fostering a new climate" in international relations.
I'm not going to go into whether or not Obama deserved the peace prize; enough people have done so with reasoned arguments both for and against. What I instead want to focus on is the Republican reaction to the awarding of the Peace Prize to Barack Obama. The reaction ranged from amusing to frightening. Here's a sampler of some of the most extreme and the most astute:
Senator John McCain: "I think Americans are always pleased when their president is recognized by something on this order".
Rush Limbaugh: "Something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn't deserve the award...The Nobel gang just suicide-bombed themselves"
William Kristol: "He's liberalism's Gorbachev. He's destined to lose in 2012...I've done as much for peace"
Glenn Beck suggested the prize should go to the Tea Party protestors. He said "an extraordinarily powerful global progressive movement is behind this"
Erick Erickson: "He was picked to meet the Nobel Committee's Affirmative Action Quota"
John Bolton suggested he should turn it down.
Andy McCarthy: "Barack Obama [won] the Yassir Arafat Prize"
Brian Kilmeade wondered whether Obama had delayed troop increases to get the award.
While several have made remarks that are clearly offensive, perhaps the most insane of the reactions comes from the chairman of the RNC: Michael Steele: "the Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control." Wow. You have to be pretty firmly disconnected from reality in order to blame Obama's win on the Democrats' "international leftist allies". Yes, the Norwegian Nobel Committee leans to the left. Yes, most of the world leans to the left. No, that does not make America the one smart guy in the room. What it means is that the United States has finally started down the long road to catching up with the rest of the world. Yes, the prize may be a little bit premature; but I find Michael Steele's reaction - simply put - to be completely and utterly pathetic.

Indeed, the reaction of the GOP to these two events has shown the increasing disconnect from the rest of the world that the party faces. It is very clear that the world does not side with the criminal policies of George W. Bush and his ilk. It is very clear that most of the world values dialogue and peace, two things that Mr. Bush so utterly lacked and Mr. Obama has demonstrated to possess. But what is perhaps more clear is how completely disconnected from the realities of the United States the Republican Party has become.
To begin, let us take a look at the Tea Party protesters and those like them, the supposed "grass-roots" of the Republican Party. I mentioned several posts ago a frightening set of figures demonstrating how utterly ignorant most Americans are of the rest of the world, and indeed of their own country. Simply through their use of idiocy during their protests ("keep your government hands off my medicare!" comes to mind), we can pretty clearly conclude that most of this ignorant rabble are the ones patrolling the town halls with hitler=obama signs and guns (don't even start me. I've already ranted twice about that, I'm not doing so again).
But even that does not go nearly as far as to simply look at the nature of the Congressional Caucuses within the US Capitol. Let us look first at the Congressional Black Caucus.
Number of Members: 44 (1 Senate, 43 House of Representatives)
Number of Democrats: 44
Number of Republicans: 0

Not a single Republican. Not a single one. All Democrats. There is not a single Black Republican in the entirety of Congress. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is of a similar makeup, with 23 Democrats and 1 Independent. The Republican counterpart - the Congressional Hispanic Conference - has 11 Republicans. In three racial caucuses spanning two large racial minorities, there are 67 Democrats, 11 Republicans, and 1 Independent. Something has happened here; something that is indicative of America as a whole.
Let us look even further. Last week, Al Franken succeeded in passing an amendment that prevents contracted defense companies from having "no lawsuit" clauses for their employees, after a female employee of KBR was gang-raped repeatedly, and then denied the right to sue by a clause in her contract. The vote was 70-30 in the Senate. All thirty against were Republicans. In the words of the outraged Jon Stewart: "I understand we're a divided country, some disagreements on health care. How is ANYONE against this?"
Let's take a look. The pictures of the thirty senators against were posted on a website mocking their stance:
http://www.republicansforrape.org/legislators/

Notice anything?
Relatively monotonous on the skin colour, isn't it? This is because the Republican Party is no longer a party that represents racial minorities, if indeed it ever was. It is a party that is increasingly made up solely of old white men, a party that is increasingly disconnected from the growing racial minorities in America. These minorities will not be so for long. The Hispanic population is growing at an astronomical rate. It is predicted that by 2020, the primary first language of the citizens of Denver (which, ten years ago, was about as white as frightened milk) will be Spanish. The percentage of the vote that is made up by the current Caucasian Republican base will dwindle and dwindle until the GOP fades into obscurity and irrelevance.

Not that that's a bad thing.

Have we fallen this far?

I swore several weeks ago - in relation to the healthcare debate - that American politics couldn't get any worse. How wrong I was! Yesterday, several thousand descended upon Washington DC to protest the Obama administration. Not anything specific, just the administration itself. It was billed by Fox News as "The 9/12 Project", a phantom invention of Glenn Beck's several years ago. Now, the idea of the 9/12 Project sounds noble at first: to recreate the unity and togetherness that all Americans felt with one another the day after 9/11/2001. These days, however, it has become a sick partisan spectacle for anyone who hates Barack HUSSEIN Obama and all that he stands for.
Yesterday, the fury of this lunatic fringe was on full display for the entire world to see. The signs present ranged from amusing ("Now Look! Nice people forced to protest! We came unarmed...this time!) to disgusting. Here's a list of a few of the captions on posters seen at the event:
"Nazi Pelosi: You keep your fascism, I'll keep my Freedom!"
"Impeach the Muslim Marxist"
"Oust the Marxist Usurper...His Czars and thugs! Honduras did it!"
"President Obama's Healthcare Czar"
"Parasite-in-Chief"
"Obama Lies...Grandma Dies"
"Remember 9/11...Impeach the Muslim Terrorist!"
"I've Changed" (Obama with Hitlerstache)
"Joe my Hero! Joe Wilson...Truth Czar"
"Bury Obamacare with Kennedy"
The last one is particularly sickening, because it seeks to turn the death of Ted Kennedy into a partisan attack. How would the Republicans have reacted if we had carried signs saying "Privatization of Soc-Sec dies with Reagan"? They would have lost their collective minds, and rightly so. To turn someone's death into an attack method is inherently wrong.
What is more disturbing, however, is that this hatred of Obama is something uniquely new. The right hated Bill Clinton. They did everything in their power - from sex scandals to land deals - to attempt to throw him out of office. But the vitriol and rhetoric never even came close to the levels now exhibited towards President Obama. No, what is behind this is something inherently deeper, and inherently worse. The call of "marxist" has been used many times, on every president from Theodore Roosevelt onward who wanted to institute healthcare for all citizens. What hasn't been used before are the accusations of being a Muslim. This is something that is inherently unique to President Obama.
The reason for it all is something far worse; something far more disturbing than anything else. It can be attributed to the disgusting caricatures of his opponent, the fact that everyone at the Tea-bagger rallies is uni-ethnic. It has something to do with his middle name, which has something to do with something else.
It is because he is black.
It is because there are some people in the United States who feel that black people don't deserve to drink from the same water fountain as them, much less be the president of their country. It is because half of the American deep south still thinks it's the year 1861, and that slavery should still be legal. A simple glance at the groups and organizations organizing these mob-rallies (Neo-confederate groups, secessionist groups, right-wing blowhards) confirms my suspicion. Those who protest president Obama are - by and large - nothing more than angry, delusional, racist white people.
Some will say "there you go Cam! Playing the race card that democrats love to play". Let me simply say this in response: I don't see any hispanics screaming for the death of the Muslim Marxist. I don't see any Arabs demanding the right to "hunt Obama" on private ranches. I don't see any African-Americans (with the exception of a few delusionals like Michael Steele) accusing him of socialism. I don't see any Asians calling for his birth certificate to be examined. It is all white people. All angry, angry, angry (and very racist) white people.
Have we fallen this far? Have we collapsed so much as a people that this sort of lunacy flies as legitimate? Have we all been so traumatized by the rantings of Bush, Reagan, Beck, and Gingrich that we actually believe this idiocy? Is this what we are?
These lunatics make me ashamed. Thank the Lord that I do not live in the same country or subscribe to the same political ideology as them. I am ashamed enough to have the same skin colour as them, to subscribe to a faith of the same name as theirs. A month ago, Beck said that Obama has "a deep seated hatred of white people". If he does, then so do I. If he does, then so do all who want these nutcases to fail. If Obama hates white people - having watched the last two months of protests - I can't say as I blame him.

"Vasa vana plurimum sonant" - The empty pots make the most noise.

The Question we Still can't sk

On 20 August 2009, the man known as "The Lockerbie Bomber" - Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi - was released from his Scottish Prison on compassion grounds. Accused of blowing up Pan-Am Flight 103 in 1988, he was sentenced to life imprisonment before being released in August when determined to be in the final stages of Prostate Cancer. When he returned home to Libya, he received a comparitively warm welcome from the government of Colonel Gadaffi.
Naturally, everyone in the United States and Britain in government has been "outraged" by the treatment shown to Megrahi upon his return. Obama was "disturbed", Jack Straw was "disgusted"; the list of supposed outrages goes on. At first glance, the collective western press's head exploded. There were a few newspapers that did not subscribe to this madness: The Guardian (to a lesser extent), The Independent; to name the two most prominent ones.
Unfortunately, something else happened in what quickly became a reexamination of Pan-Am Flight 103's destruction. We (being the western press) stopped asking the question that has to be asked, yet it seems is not allowed by the British and American governments to be asked. And that, of course, is Why. Why did those who blew up the Pan Am jumbo jet do so? The German police reports in the subsequent investigation (so far not mentioned by every journalist not named Robert Fisk) clearly reveal that the perpetrators of the bombing had more connections to Lebanon, Damascus and Tehran than they did to Tripoli. The bomb-bag was physically put onto the baggage carousel by the Lebanese handler of the passenger whose suitcase it was. Though Gadaffi was almost definitely responsible for the bombing of French UTA flight 772 over Chad in 1989, it is less likely that he was involved in Lockerbie.
In order to truly understand why Lockerbie happened, we need to look to events on the eastern end of the Islamic world the year before. On 3 July 1988, IranAir Flight 655 was shot down by the USS Vincennes while flying from Tehran to Dubai. The Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time, and Flight 655 was within Iranian airspace. When the crew of the vessel returned to the United States, the reaction of the American government was relatively similar to that of Gadaffi's Libya this past month. The air-warfare coordinator of the ship was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal, while the ship's captain was given the Legion of Merit.
The bombing of Lockerbie was not an act of state terrorism by the Libyan government; it was a vengeance operation. It was an act of revenge for the destruction of IranAir 655, in which all 290 passengers and crew on board were killed. Though this does not excuse the appalling nature of the crime of Lockerbie, we need to appreciate history not so much to excuse what happened, as to understand why it happened.
It would be bad enough if Lockerbie was an isolated incident in terms of the Why question. The unfortunate thing, however, is that it is not. We need only look at the first international Crime Against Humanity of this decade: 9/11. On the eighth anniversary of the attack - this Friday - many among us will still assume that those who committed the atrocities hated us for our freedom and wealth. In the aftermath of September 11, all that western media asked was "how?" (box-cutters, aircraft, tall buildings) and "who?" (was it Bin-Laden? were Hussein or Arafat involved?). The question that no one would ask - but the question that has to be asked - is why 9/11 happened. The unfortunate thing is that those in charge do not want those questions asked, because the asking of those questions opens up a door to the discussion of a whole thread of issues that could get very ugly: The nature of America's relationship with Israel and 'Palestine', American war crimes in Iraq and Iran, American military hegemony in the region, support for corrupt despots like Mubarek and Musharref, and the demonization of the world's 1 billion Muslims. These are not issues that those in power want us to ask, because it puts a great deal of blame on those who wield power - or have wielded power in the past.
Last spring, following the Iranian president's remarks about Zionism being "equal to racism", a letter of mine appeared in The Calgary Herald pointing out the same thing: we have refused to ask why people do what they do, or why whole societies do what they do. Until we understand why events like Lockerbie and 9/11 happened, we stand no chance of ever preventing them from happening again. It is unfortunate that those in power (both in government and in media) are too comfortable to realize this and speak honestly about the events of the past. If we don't ask why, we don't learn from it. And if we don't learn from it, we are likely to repeat it. One 9/11 was bad enough. one Lockerbie was bad enough. But unless we understand why they happened, more of them will occur.

Reductio ad Hitlerum: The power of ignorance, idiocy, and fear

WARNING: this post will be very long (sources in brackets)

On Tuesday, 11 August, Democratic Congressman David Scott of Georgia awoke to find the image of a Nazi Swastika spraypainted on the sign outside his office in Smyrna, Georgia. According to The Guardian, this came less than a week after a heated exchange in a "town hall" meeting that he had participated in.
Nor is David Scott the only one. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, William Kostnic paraded outside of the hall in which Obama was due to speak, sporting a 9mm pistol on his thigh, and carrying a placard bearing the words "it is time to water the tree of liberty" (an obvious reference to the Jefferson quote "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"). One protester was heard to shout at the President of the United States (POTUS) "One day God is going to stand before you and judge you!". A protest placard of the infamous LaRouche Political Action Committee sports a picture of Obama with a Hitler-stache superimposed onto him.
What is the issue? Is it abortion? Is it torture? Is it whether Obama should implement a 100% tax rate? Is it gun control?

Nope. It's an issue that the entirety of the western world (and, indeed, large portions of the developing world) view as being about as controversial as votes for women: universal healthcare. Every other member of the OECD and the G20 has universal, government-funded healthcare policies in place for their citizens. The United States, however, is the exception to this rule. Approximately 45,000,000 American citizens (and that doesn't include illegal immigrants) are without health insurance, either through their employers, the government, or their own private plans. Even worse, those who are covered by the massive health insurance industry often find themselves denied essential care, or forced to hand over their life savings because of health tragedies. The horror stories concerning the American system number in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. An entire saga exceeding the size and complexity of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could be written solely about how messed up the American system is. In a 2000 examination of national healthcare systems, the United States ranks 37th, behind France (1st), Italy (2nd), Spain (7th), Japan (10th), Norway (11th), Portugal (12th), Britain (18th), Sweden (23rd), Cyprus (24th!), Germany (25th), Saudi Arabia (26th!!!) Morocco (29th!!), Canada (30th), and Chile (33rd). The United States ranks well below the OECD averages in terms of life-expectancy, infant mortality, and yet ranks well above the averages in terms of per-capita spending on healthcare.

With all that in mind, the need for reform is relatively easy to see. The unfortunate part is that it has been well over thirty years since the formation of Medicare and Medicaid by Lyndon Johnson, and yet still there are people without healthcare coverage, nearly 1/6th of the population of the United States. Why is this? Simply put, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance lobbies have been so effective at putting out endless propaganda - enough to make even Stalin's Pravda envious - sputtering forth all sorts of bullshit arguments against "evil"(Sarah Palin), "Orwellian"(The Independent, The Guardian), socialized medicine and universal healthcare.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Obama's attempt to push through healthcare reform - however feeble it may be - has been an uphill slugging match against the powers that be. We've heard all the familiar arguments from the pharmaceutical lobby and the nuthouse that most people refer to as the Republican Party. We've heard that it will prevent you and your doctor from making healthcare decisions yourselves. Ironic, given that currently their made by insurance-industry bureaucrats whose goal is to finance their fourth 100-foot luxury yacht. We've heard that it will increase wait-times. This may well be true, but you won't be shelling out your entire savings account for retirement in exchange for an "experimental" or "unnecessary" cancer treatment. We've heard that it will decrease the quality of care that you receive. Again, ironic, given that the highest quality healthcare systems in the world (Britain's NHS, France, and Norway) are all heavily socialized. We've heard the same old words of "government control"(The Globe & Mail), "socialism"(The National Post), "costs"(The New York Times), "government debt" (though we seem to have no problem owing $4,000,000,000,000 to China at the moment), and all the other bullshit arguments that have been dragged out by everyone against health-reform from Richard Nixon to Newt Gingrich.

And then we've heard some things we haven't heard before. We've heard about these bizarre "death panels" that are supposedly in place to determine whether you live or die once you hit 65. From Chuck Grassley to Sarah Palin, this myth has been perpetuated by the Republican party and its supporters. We've heard cancer-survivors at the town-hall meeting of former Republican Arlen Specter perpetuate this myth (CNN), only to be verbally beaten down by the ever resolute and cool-headed Specter. We've heard these myths perpetuated by the usual blowhards of right-wing lunacy: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Rielly, and others like them. The fact of the matter is that the bills in Congress contain no such "death panels". No universal healthcare system in the developed world contains such "death panels". It is - as the British say - bollocks. We've seen signs from the same LaRouche movement that "Hitler approves Obama's healthcare plan"(The Guardian). Last week, Rush Limbaugh commented that Obama's healthcare logo was "right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook" (The Guardian). Apart from the obvious call of Reductio ad Hitlerum, whereby the first side to make a comparison involving Adolf Hitler automatically forfeits the debate; such comparisons are obscene and ludicrous. Every major organization dedicated to monitoring real Neo-Nazism, from the ADL to Southern Poverty Law Center, has condemned the remarks as "[a] frightening display of bigotry and ignorance that should not be tolerated by a democratic society."(ADL Press release).
Why has the debate been allowed to reach such hysterical levels? How has a debate that was supposed to be about healthcare rights morphed into comparisons of Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler? Simple answer: Because the American public is - by and large - ignorant, stupid, and extraordinarily prone to the tactics of fear.

Don't believe me? Let me throw some numbers out there for you. Today, 34% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks. 1/3rd of the Republican Party believes that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, a majority of American citizens cannot name a single branch of government, explain what the Bill of Rights. 24% cannot name the country that America fought in 1776. 60% don't know what the FDA (Food & Drug Administration) does. 42% think that Christianity is older than Judaism. 20% of American schoolchildren are incapable of finding the United States on a map. The ignorance within the United States is astounding.
It is this ignorance and stupidity that the propagandists of the far-right prey upon with their comparisons to Hitler, their mentioning of the "death panels", their attacks on the NHS, their bashing of France and Norway, the use of the word "socialism" and "socialized medicine" to terrify the population. The numbers of far-right militias and terrorist groups are on the rise, the ridiculous "tea parties" choke the airwaves with insane pronouncements, and the propaganda campaign against Barack Obama goes on.

It is time America rose above this fear. It is time they rose above their ignorance, their apathy, their idiocy, and their ability to be easily duped by flashy tv ads run by Humana and the US Chamber of Commerce. It's time to make sure that no country in the western world does not have universal healthcare. More importantly, it's time to see the Glenn Becks and Sarah Palins for what they really are in the scheme of this debate: lunatics and liars.