Antiwar.com Blog

Last Thursday’s issue of NIN, the foremost Serbian news weekly, carried an interview with Morton Abramowitz, the eminence grise of the Washington foreign policy establishment and founder of the International Crisis Group. Abramowitz has been one of the leaders of the interventionist camp in the Balkans, even to the point of actually advising the KLA delegation at the farcical Rambouillet talks in 1999.
The interview reveals that Abramowitz, and the establishment he represents, live in a dream world not unlike the one inhabited by the Bush regime – with one important difference: they favor the Democrats. So, here is what Abramowitz had to say… Continue reading ““Aggressive” Balkans solutions”

Yet more evidence makes it clearer still that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has had less than a desirable outcome to date for the inhabitants of that country, especially the women. In that benighted country, branding someone a communist is enough to invite a death sentence by the warlords. Especially if you’re an uppity woman, such as Malalai Joya, who continues to defy the Afghan warlords.

Nevertheless, the women of Afghanistan continue to amaze with their fortitude and guts: “I have seen too many sorrows and I have no fear in my soul anymore,” Joya is quoted. “…I’m sleeping in a different house every night and I have cars with blacked out windows following me everywhere.”

Another article spells out reasons for attacking women in a recent bus bombing attack:

Fawzia Mohamadi, 30, a victim of the bombing, said male passers-by shouted as the bus burned. “They were saying, ‘Let them die,'” she said from her hospital bed, where she is recovering from burns to her left leg. “They were shouting, ‘These are women begging for America’s dollars. Don’t help them.’ They were holding up our burning sandals and clothes and shouting.”

Or, succinctly, as the article title puts it: “Use your vote and you’ll die, Taliban tell Afghan women.”

I just had what has to be the most extraordinary day I’ve spent in quite some time.

This requries a little backstory: I just went through a major hassle with my previous bank, somebody stole my check card number and bought some stuff online, I filed a fraud complaint, they called me a liar, the whole thing was just a mess. Today it came to a conclusion, and I withdrew all my money and closed my accounts with that bank.

I checked online, and found another bank with local branches which offered the services I wanted, so I headed over there, money in hand, intent on opening new accounts.

Didn’t happen…

They require ID to open an account. I expected that, I mean, that’s obvious. But apparently, under the USA PATRIOT Act, the amount of ID that bank now requires is so excessive as to make opening an account virtually impossible. They wanted two types of ID.

Driver’s License… I’ve got that, no problem

And another form of “acceptable ID”. They were pretty vague about what was acceptable, but they were quite clear about what was not acceptable, which is to say everything. Social Security Card? No good. Student ID? Not a chance. Car insurance card? That one stopped her for a second. Do you own a car? No… I just have road service for driving other people’s cars. Then the card is no good.

The only things the woman would confirm as actually acceptable secondary ID were:

Proof of Car Ownership

Major Credit Card

Military ID Card

So basically, I’d either need to go buy a car and then prove to them I own it, or join the military, or no banking for me. Major Credit Card struck me as particularly funny. Oh, you mean one of those things banks give you after you have an account with them?

Well, this went on for awhile, and she ultimately said if I could bring in a voter registration card, my cable bill, and a paycheck from my employer, they’d look it over and might be able to help me then. God only knows what happened to my voter registration card.

Ultimately we decided that I just wasn’t a fit customer for that particular bank. The woman gave me something which I consider to be quite an intriguing collectible, a pamphlet entitled:

USA PATRIOT Act
Protecting America
and
Protecting You

I feel safer already, don’t you? The pamphlet describes how the war on terror requires them to collect all sorts of crazy information to prove that I am who I say I am, and how they reserve the right to do pretty much whatever the hell they want.

But the final result is, I walked into a bank with a wad of cash, tried to give it to them, and they said “no”.

The thing that struck me as most interesting is that I could have taken my money over to the gun store and bought a bunch of weapons and ammo, and they wouldn’t have required half as much information about me.

Now, you’d think I’d be mad, but quite honestly the whole situation was so surreal, so unexpected, and so downright entertaining that the smile never left my face the whole time I was there. Even now, I consider the tale more humorous than deleterious. I mean sure, I’m out an hour’s time and I’m still without a bank, but at least I had something interesting to write here.

I hate Michael Moore for making me defend Bush.
I hate Bush for making me defend Michael Moore.
I hate Bush for making me root for Democrats.
I hate Kerry for making me agree with Ralph Nader.
And Edwards. I hate Edwards, too. Mostly because I can’t stand his corny face. And because of his creepy Israel obsession.
I hate the US Military for making me support Islamic fanatics.
I hate Islamic fanatics for making me support Iraq’s newest jackboots.
And I hate Bush again for making me support Saddam!

Henry Hazlitt famously (Well, it’s famous in some circles) wrote that: “The art of economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

This is not as easy as it might seem. The consistent popularity of erroneous economic beliefs and narrow, short-term perspectives seems to indicate an incongruity between a global economy and brains designed for a world of competing hunter-gatherer tribes. If Tribe A lived in a grove of apple trees and Tribe B killed them, the quantity of wealth (apples) remained about the same. But this method doesn’t work with a software design firm.

I’ve previously posted a paragraph by Francis Fukuyama describing the economics behind the decline of colonialism since the industrial revolution: as the percentage of wealth consisting of raw materials decreases, so decreases the benefits of military conquest. (Fukuyama’s final sentences refer to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but they may remind us of another situation: “of course, control over certain natural resources like oil confers potentially great economic benefits. The consequences of this invasion, however, are not likely to make this method of securing resources seem attractive in the future. Given the fact that access to those same resources can be obtained peacefully through a global system of free trade, war makes much less economic sense than it did two or three hundred years ago.”)

This post–Industrial Revolution phenomenon might be part of an ongoing process. From Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond:

…Wars, or threats of war, have played a key role in most, if not all, amalgamations of societies. But wars, even between mere bands, have been a constant fact of human history. Why is it, then, that they evidently began causing amalgamations of societies only within the past 13,000 years? We had already concluded that the formation of complex societies is somehow linked to population pressure, so we should now seek a link between population pressure and the outcome of war. Why should wars tend to cause amalgamations of societies when populations are dense but not when they are sparse? The answer is that the fate of defeated peoples depends on population density, with three possible outcomes:

Where population densities are very low, as is usual in regions occupied by hunter-gatherer bands, survivors of a defeated group need only move farther away from their enemies. That tends to be the result of wars between nomadic bands in New Guinea and the Amazon.

Where population densities are moderate, as in regions occupied by food-producing tribes, no large vacant areas remain to which survivors of a defeated band can flee. But tribal societies without intensive food production have no employment for slaves and do not produce large enough food surpluses to be able to yield much tribute. Hence the victors have no use for survivors of a defeated tribe, unless to take the women in marriage. The defeated men are killed, and their territory may be occupied by the victors.

Where population densities are high, as in regions occupied by states or chiefdoms, the defeated still have nowhere to flee, but the victors now have two options for exploiting them while leaving them alive. Because chiefdoms and state societies have economic specialization, the defeated can be used as slaves, as commonly happened in biblical times. Alternatively, because many such societies have intensive food production systems capable of yielding large surpluses, the victors can leave the defeated in place but deprive them of political autonomy, make them pay regular tribute in food or goods, and amalgamate their society into the victorious state or chiefdom. This has been the usual outcome of battles associated with the founding of states or empires throughout recorded history.

In a speech typical of the kindergarten rhetoric, Jacobin black/white good vs. evil simplistic worldview and bad logic we’ve come to expect from Bush and his court jesters and sycophants, King George served up the same lame justifications for his murderous romp through Iraq, even while making an evasive and weak admission that his casus belli was um….still missing….

“Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq,” Bush said.

Disingenuous to the end, every statement has to be hedged about with sneaky qualifications and larded with euphemisms. “We have not found stockpiles….,” he says, even though they’ve found absolutely squat. “Go into” Iraq is such a nice way to say kill around 13,000 Iraqis and destroy the place in pursuit of a delusion.And, why was he right to “go into” Iraq?

“We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take,” Bush said.

Had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder. WMMs? What’s a weapon of mass murder? A gun? A tank? Jim Jones’ grape Kool-Aid? Notice he admits that there were no so-called WMD and then morphs the argument into WMM. The entire sentence is a lie because anything can be used for mass murder. In Darfur, right now, militiamen armed with swords and rifles and mounted on camels and horses are doing a fine job of mass murdering entire villages.

“…could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them.” Could have? Is there any state in existence that couldn’t have? Is there any evidence at all of Iraqi connections to terrorist attacks on the US? No, there is not, but you won’t learn that in a Dubyanocchio speech.

Saddam refused to open his country to inspections, Bush said.

Oh, right, no one knows about Hans Blix or anything. Does Bush really think everyone has Alzheimer’s or what? The US had to tell the inspectors to leave Iraq before they got bombed along with all the Iraqis doomed to die in the US invasion.

“So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice I will defend America.”

A classic logical fallacy called the False Dilemma. How about instead, we say: “….either take the word of a madman or defend America OR admit that diplomacy and ongoing inspections were better, less costly and bloody options that had worked well for the past ten years and give up the exciting, glorious thrill of being a War President and the, as it turns out, delusionary notion of remaking the Middle East.” Yeah. That’s better.