Bush – Hank Kalet

The return of preemptive war

Iran today drew its own line in the sand, promising to “take pre-emptive action against perceived foes if it felt its national interests were threatened,” according to a report in The New York Times.

The Iranian stance, referred to in the story as bellicose (without attribution, as though that was an objective fact, is both a troubling indication of the escalation of tensions between the Persian nation and the West and the obvious fallout of American actions and war theory dating back to the Bush presidency.

Don’t get me wrong. The Iranian regime poses a dangerous threat to the stability of the region and to the world economy. But the war drums have been beating far more loudly here in the United States than in Iran.

What is striking about this, however, is not just the rising tensions, which were expected. It is the rhetoric offered by Mohammed Hejazi, deputy head of the Iranian armed forces:

Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions.

The language easily could have come from the mouth of American officials circa 2002, as we prepared to invade Iraq. During a 2002 commencement speech at West Point, Bush outlined what we now call the Bush Doctrine — a defense of pre-emptive war:

Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.

The similarities should not be underplayed. Critics of the Bush doctrine — myself included — have said since its unveiling that it would give license to other nations acting in the same way. And now, we have the threat of Iran — which is, in many ways, just reacting to the international community’s threats of sanctions and possible military action — using the Bush doctrine to attack Israel.

This only will lead to a further escalation of rhetoric, with Israel thumping its chest and the U.S. and Britain chiming in. How this can be viewed as good for anyone is beyond me, but this is what we have wrought.

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Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
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War is peace, or something like that

Barack Obama is more like George W. Bush than any of his supporters has been willing to admit. The 44th president, like his predecessor, has shown a willingness to break disagreements down into simple, binary equations, especially when it comes to his defense of empire.

“Evil does exist in the world,” he said during his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, echoing his predecessor, radically simplifying the world around us. Evil, he says, justifies our use of extreme force — which is what war is — rather than a smaller-scale attempt to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. The president has opted to reinvigorate the 9/11 meme to justify a wider-scale effort to remake the so-called Afpak border area, even if this war of his (and it is now his war) has nothing to do with 9/11.

The troubling aspect of this — beyond the Afghan escalation — is that he used his Nobel acceptance to hawk his own hawkishness, to defend his own indefensible decision to ratchet up the war. Obama, of course, is not a pacifist and has never claimed to be one. He has, from the beginning, viewed Afghanistan as a war of necessity in the very same way that Bush viewed Iraq.

And like Bush, who purposely conflated Saddam Hussein with Hitler, Obama has done the same with Al Qaeda.

A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Al Qaeda is not Hitler and terrorism is not the same as Nazism. Terrorism is a tool — like a gun or a tank — generally used by the relatively powerless to level the playing field against more powerful nations. It’s use is a symptom that our system is sick, that we have allowed some level of injustice to fester, to create an atmosphere in which violent reaction is viewed as necessary.There is no real difference between Timothy McVeigh and a Middle Eastern suicide bomber, no difference between the America militia movement and Al Qaeda. The extremisms they spout might come from different places, but the violence they unleash ultimately is the same, based on the same mix of grievance and moral certitude.

The president, however, for whatever reason, chooses to ignore this, to conflate the big ideological movements with a small regenerating band of extremists who pose a physical threat to individual security but in no way pose an existential threat to the United States.

He further argued during his speech that “it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world,” as if a world that witnessed dozens of political assassinations and violent uprisings, wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria, the Middle East, a massive arms race and a calamitous international chess game between heavily armed nuclear powers can be called stable.

Obama is just a year older than I am, so I have to imagine he remembers crouching beneath his desk during air raid drills and hearing newscasters reporting on body counts and violence in American streets.

Let’s be clear: There was much to like in his speech — such as his acknowledgement that economic and social justice can prevent the slide into despair that creates the conditions in which violent extremism flourishes and his commitment to working within an international framework of established rules and in cooperation with other nations. But, in the end, his insistence that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace” left me wondering just how much has changed during the last 11 months.

Timing is everything when it comes to the deficit

Truth Dig, in its Ear to the Ground feature, remarks on some recent polls that show Americans concerned about the deficit and questioning whether Barack Obama has it in him to control spending. The danger is that polls like this could create a sort of backward momentum at a time when government intervention in the economy — specifically, government money priming hte pump — is needed and reform of health care and programs to address climate change need to move forward.

With mounting pressure at home and abroad to cut the budget, Obama’s ambitious health care plans could be headed for the rocks. Too bad we already blew a few trillion on wars and banks. We could have used that money for something useful, as it turns out.

Which brings me to an important point: Deficits are not necessarily bad, so long as the deficits and debt are used for productive purposes (schools, health care, mass transit improvements) and not for wars and tax cuts to people who do not need tax cuts. What I’m getting at is that the obsession with deficits that has cropped up now is misplaced and raises a question: Where was this obsession during the Bush years, when the Republican warmonger racked up record deficits?

Bush’s advice to Obama

The Progressive has obtained a copy of the note left by outgoing President George W. Bush for his successor, Barack Obama. Read it here.

Return of the rule of law

President Barack Obama said during his inaugural address Tuesday that

Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations.

Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

Just hours after the speech, the new president took the first step toward reinvigorating the “charter,” bringing back the rule of law and ending the era of expediency:

(T)he administration of the newly inaugurated president, in one of its first actions, instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at Guantanamo — a clear break with the approach of the Bush administration, whose term ended at noon Tuesday.

It’s expected that Obama will follow up by closing Guantanamo:

In Washington, meanwhile, aides to President Obama were preparing an executive order that would begin the process of shutting down a detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay naval base for captured terrorist suspects. According to the Associated Press, the draft executive order calls for closing the detention center within a year. It was not immediately known when Obama would issue such an order.