News, Music, Movies, Books and More
Amazon - Now...
Amazon - Now...
Three important articles
Hersh writes that the Bush administration ultimately wants “regime change” in Iran, and that officials believe they may have “little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons” in a confrontation with Iran. Nuclear weapons? Nukes have not been used since 1945, and some aggressive rhetoric from an Iranian president hardly compares with the magnitude of World War II.
The article notes the wide array of problems with this military approach, including “that bombing Iran could provoke ‘a chain reaction’ of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world.”
A European intelligence official tells Hersh that an American attack “would alienate ordinary Iranians, including those who might be sympathetic to the U.S. ‘Iran is no longer living in the Stone Age, and the young people there have access to U.S. movies and books, and they love it,’ he said. A smarter move, he said, would be a “charm offensive” to marginalize the mullahs.
One thing is crystal clear after reading Hersh’s article: The Bush administration is woefully ill-equipped to deal logically and effectively with Iran.
-- George Packer’s recent New Yorker article on Iraq serves as an update of his excellent 2005 book, “The Assassins’ Gate.” Packer identifies the successes and failures of U.S. operations in Iraq. Needless to say, there are a lot more of the latter.
Packer profiles U.S. military commanders in different parts of Iraq who are using different strategies to deal with insurgents. Those who are trying harder to understand the Iraqi people and work with them are having more success than those with a hard-ass, get-tough approach. He notes that the Bush administration and military leaders have only recently begun to formulate and distribute a coherent postwar strategy. And now that there are some successes worth talking about, the new attitude is that we’re getting out of Iraq pretty soon anyway, so it’s too late.
The underlying theme of Packer’s article is that the Sunnis and Shiites are angrily, violently divided and it will be next to impossible to bring them together to form a workable government. One of Packer’s sources seriously argues that the only solution is to split Iraq into three countries, with the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds each having their own.
Packer is the most astute chronicler of Iraq that I know of. If you want to feel a lot more comfortable having a detailed discussion about Iraq, read Packer’s “The Assassins’ Gate.” Then look up this follow-up article.
-- In the latest issue of The Progressive, Howard Zinn explains why Americans were so willing to believe Bush’s lies about Iraq. He makes a convincing case for, among other things, a complete overhaul of history education in America.
“We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.”
“If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives.”
“The deeply ingrained belief – no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general – that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception.”
“Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world.”
Zinn questions what this moral superiority is based on. He notes that our quality of life is more perception than reality, citing mediocre health rankings worldwide, widespread poverty and a high prison population.
Also: “We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size.”
“A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world,” Zinn concludes.