Antiwar.com Blog

Continuing yesterday’s theme, Cecily Kaiser, a children’s book editor, talks about her experience:

I was on the subway, on my way to work, when the first plane hit the tower on Sept 11th, 2001. When I emerged on Houston Street and walked two blocks down Broadway to my office, I noticed a plume of gray smoke in the otherwise cloudless sky – when I stopped to look up, one other guy on the street joined my gaze. Otherwise, the bustle of Broadway at 9am continued unfazed. The elevator up stopped on several floors, and from each escaped surreal gasps, screams, or sobs. I reached the penthouse café just after the second plane hit, and saw the burst of fire and ash out our two-story southern exposure. I witnessed the first building fall from within these windows; afterwards, we were evacuated. Most of us simply began walking uptown. One stranger among us was wearing a walkman and announced when the second tower fell – we all stopped, turned to look, and kept on walking.

Following the immediate aftermath, what I ultimately feared most was the way in which the blame would be placed. Vulnerability is a dangerous emotion – one that can prompt irrational decisions and mindless reactions. Ironically, it is that very emotion that provoked both our country’s response to the attacks, and the attacks themselves. In today’s globalized society, the first order of business should have been to maintain the worldwide unification that the attacks initially prompted, as well as local togetherness. Instead, the U.S. government chose to scapegoat whomever best suited their own political and financial interests, both internationally and domestically. Racial profiling suddenly became politically correct; my turban-wearing Sikh friend was unsafe in his own suburban D.C. neighborhood. Not only did our government enter an unjust war, but they caused one in every school, workplace, and neighborhood in our own country.

I am opposed to the decisions made by the Bush administration post-9/11, and know that their choices have brought unnecessary hardship to people within our country and without. They have failed to represent their citizens, and succeeded only in blind isolationism and idiocy. Thankfully, there are also intelligent, rational, hard-working agents within our government who serve to keep us safe. Or at least I need to tell myself that.

The date has been set, or at least the timeframe. Tony Blair will step down as Prime Minister of Britain within a year. This of course opens the door for Blair’s longtime rival and longtime successor Gordon Brown, with whom Blair was rumored to have engaged in a shouting match just prior to his surprise announcement.

Blair’s allies are scrambling to find a challenger for the “good of the party”. Those who read my last posting can probably see where I’m going with this. That challenger is Home Secretary John Reid, and his expert handling of last month’s “crisis” is the justification.

But who is Gordon Brown, anyway?

Surely, while Dr. Reid has been neatly groomed as the perfect challenger many questions remain, especially for those of us on the other side of the Atlantic. Who is Gordon Brown, why is the Blairite faction so determined to present a challenger to him, and what would a Prime Minister Brown mean in international affairs?

Gordon Brown has been Tony Blair’s strongest rival in the Labour Party for a decade now, and has been the Chancellor of the Exchequer from the day Blair took office. From that time, Brown has been considered the heir apparent, and from that time, Blair’s supporters have sniped at him and sought an alternative.

But why is that? A cursory glance at their respective positions reveal no glaring differences in policy. The biggest differences appear to be personal. Brown’s public condemnation of Oxford admissions policy made him a lot of enemies, particularly those close to the Oxford-educated Blair, and Blair’s support for the Euro may well have rubbed the Chancellor the wrong way, but their similarities as public advocates of “Third Way”-style New Labour would seem to make them allies, albeit reluctant ones.

What would Gordon Brown’s foreign policy be?

The $64,000 question, especially for most readers of this site, is what (if any) foreign policy changes would we see under a Brown Premiership. The answer, unfortunately, is far from clear.

For a politician who has spent decades at the forefront of policy decisions, Brown has been surprisingly tight-lipped about exactly where he stands on many issues, particularly those involving foreign affairs.

Though publicly he’s echoed Blair and Reid in their call for 90 day detentions, and touted his generous funding of the war on terror, there has been some speculation that he is increasingly annoyed at the havoc the high cost of wars is playing on his budget, and some have insinuated that this was a none-too-subtle attempt to convince those responsible for appointing a new Labour Party leader that his Premiership would not be a radical change.

One interesting rhetorical difference between Brown and Reid can be found in their domestic anti-terror policy, however. While last month Reid caused a minor stir in his insistence that freedoms would have to be curbed in the name of defeating terror. Brown, in an interview with the BBC last May, insisted that “you can have security without interfering in a deleterious way with people’s civil liberties”. What that means in actual policy differences is anyone’s guess, though it’s a good bet that Brown will be less eager to ditch Britain’s international human rights obligations.

This is much more speculative, but in the question of Gordon Brown’s foreign policy, we must not forget to mention former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

In early April, Seymour Hersh’s article broke on the Pentagon’s plans to attack Iran, potentially including the use of tactical nuclear weapons in such an attack. A couple of days later, Straw responded publicly, rejecting Hersh’s claims, citing the lack of actual evidence against Iran, and suggesting that a preemptive nuclear attack against Iran based on what amounted to unsubstantiated suspicion would be “nuts”. Straw reiterated this several times, and less than a month later he was fired.

Why this happened is still the subject of plenty of intense speculation. Well-connected neocon economist Irwin Stelzer even claimed that the White House got Straw fired because he had a high percentage of Muslims in his district, and that led them to question where his true loyalties lay. That sounds pretty far-fetched, but the more popular theories are little better.

Early reports suggest that Straw had been cozying up to Brown as the apparent next Prime Minister in an effort to secure a spot in his cabinet, and that this didn’t sit well with Blair and his allies. Another popular theory is that the White House indeed got him fired, but rather for his opposition to attacking Iran.

Can we infer anything from this? Is Jack Straw’s vociferous objections to a preemptive nuking of Iran indicative of Gordon Brown’s potential policy? Prospect Magazine and others certainly seem to think that a Brown Premiership would be less interventionist than Blair’s. Of course their reasoning is not that Gordon would have any moral objections to starting a huge war without evidence, but rather that he would object to spending billions on such an escapade. Still, whatever the reason, the common belief is that Gordon Brown, while far from an antiwar candidate, would be somewhat less hawkish than, say, John Reid.

If joining the US on its various foreign adventures has become the defining policy of the Blair administration, perhaps the threat of a less willing Prime Minister is what worries Blair’s allies so. And perhaps that is the real reason the Blairite faction is forever seeking the “Stop Brown” candidate.

Yes, I know, you already knew that, but I have to complain about the President’s speech Monday night.

There was a bunch of Roosevelt-invoking garbage in there, obviously, but there’s one particular lie that Bush will not stop telling the people of this country, which, due to its total absurdity, is beginning to chap my Texas hide.

So let’s get this straight once and for all: If America leaves Iraq, the chances that al Qaeda will take over and use the oil money to build a giant al Qaeda Caliphate to take over the world are LESS THAN NOTHING.

The Sunni foreign fighter “al Qaeda types” in Iraq have NEVER made up more than a few percentage points worth of the insurgency. If the U.S. government leaves now, with the current government in place, the dominant force in that country will be Iran, not al Qaeda.

Even if the country splits into three, the new Sunni state will be dominated by people from there: Either the former Baathists or the local religious leaders will rise to the top. The idea that some Saudis and Egyptians – in exile on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border – could come and dominate the locals (who have held their own against the U.S. Army for over three years) is, in the words of incomparable investigative reporter, Robert Dreyfuss, “utterly stupid.” And there are no oil wells under the Sunni triangle anyway – it’s all near Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the south.

Besides, everyone knows that the invasion and occupation are radicalizing people who had nothing to do with al Qaeda before 9/11. Well, at least, that’s according to the former CIA director, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, former CIA agents, the FBI, the RIIA, the Saudis and the Israelis. So any strengthening of the Terroristsâ„¢ since then is all Bush’s fault in the first place.

Should it bother anyone that the only excuse for continuing this bloody occupation is a ridiculous falsehood?

Here‘s where I wrote about it last year, and here‘s a great article by Tom Porteous on the same subject.

(praise/ridicule welcome over at Stress)

The Globalist website posted an article of mine on how the media and intellectuals subvert American democracy.  Here’s the lead of the piece –

Why is it that in the United States, the vast majority of government abuses and failures either never show up on the  intellectual radar screen, or are merely one or two blips — and then forever gone?

One reason is that many intellectuals have long disdained the specific details of government policies.

The more coercive government becomes, the more tactless it is to admit that government coerces. Looking at the actual details of government policy is left to the auditors and accountants, the congressional staffers — or perhaps the interns.

The politically correct attitude looks beyond the government’s past failings and current botches — and focuses instead on the idea of government……..

Full text of the article is at the Globalist website  and on my blog  – http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/09/11/how-the-us-media-helps-subvert-us-democracy/ = where comments & condemnations are always welcome
 

I asked some family and friends who I knew witnessed the attacks on 9/11/2001 or who were severely affected by them if they could give me a brief write-up of their experiences that day; where they place blame, or what they think of blame placed; and what they think of the government’s response since. I expect the answers to come trickling in over the week, but here is one now.

Dr. Mario Rizzo, Professor of Economics at New York University, offers these comments:

I was in my apartment on the edge of Soho when I heard a very low-flying plane go over my building. And then I heard the sound of a large impact. So I went outside and looked at the Towers where I saw that the plane had apparently hit one of the buildings. I did not actually see the first plane hit, however. I kept looking. Before long I saw the second plane hit the other Tower. Obviously, at this point, I realized it was no accident. I then went to my nearby office to check the internet news sources. From my office on Mercer Street I saw each of the Towers collapse. I then took a xanax to calm myself. For some reason, I had no thought that anything more would happen.

I stayed out in the streets all day and saw large numbers of people walking up from the Wall Street and other lower Manhattan areas. The day was incredibly beautiful and since the winds were blowing the smoke in a direction away from downtown Manhattan it was hard to fathom that anything was wrong. But obviously it was. The juxtaposition of the beauty of the day and these events was so awfully strange. During the whole day, people seemed remarkably friendly and some sort of “collective spirit” was present. This lasted for quite a number of weeks, it seemed. There soon developed a memorial spot for the dead, wounded and missing in Union Square Park. There were pathetic signs all over the city for weeks with pictures of people who went “missing” on 9/11.

In the first instance the moral blame must go to the people who hijacked the planes – presumably, the associates of Osama bin Laden (after all, he did take credit). But in another, political sense, blame must be assigned to the ignorant and immoral US foreign policy that has alienated, with good cause, so many people in the Islamic world. The U.S. government’s “approval” of the recent Israeli bombing of Lebanon is one example that these policies are not simply in the past.

It is hard to know what counts as the government’s response: the attack on Afghanistan, the baseless invasion of Iraq, holding of prisoners without due process of law, previously-secret prisons in countries where the US can plausibly deny that it (or Bush) had any role in torturing prisoners, periodic threat-level rises with dubious justification, etc? Well, almost all of this has been counterproductive both politically and militarily. Unfortunately, the government’s policies have been managed by people who are quite ignorant and quite immoral. What worse combination of traits can there be?

———-

Stay tuned for the next installment.

One of the few conservative magazines worth reading, The New American, reports that Henry Kissinger told an Italian reporter in 1972 that the war in Vietnam had “been a useless war.” I think if I was one of the 58,000 soldiers killed or one of the 304,000 soldiers wounded or one of the 75,000 soldiers disabled (23,000 totally disabled) in that “useless war” that I would be quite upset at Kissinger and the government that was responsible for that crime.

When will we hear Bush or Rumsfeld admit that the war in Iraq is likewise a “useless war”? Probably not until after a few thousand more American soldiers die for a lie.