William Horberg

Independence Day

Here's to independent thinking and a political discourse that moves us away from certainty and fixed ideas. It's not doing us a whole lot of good.

Happy 4th of July!

william

Where Is This Place?

Maybe some of you have already seen this cellphone video from Tehran up on You Tube? 

A young woman, alone at night on her rooftop, gives a soliloquy to the night and the background sounds of protest and prayer.

It was posted 10 days ago, and the site lists about 140,000 views. 

But it deserves to be seen and read by millions, and maybe even to be taught in school someday, as a timeless poem of human struggle and resistance, sung alongside "We Shall Overcome" or other great anthems of protest. 

What makes it characteristically Iranian is the poetic quality of the speaker in this land of Hafez, whose repetitive question Where Is This Place? takes on the power of incantation and places it in the tradition of great Persian art.

Friday the 19th of June 2009

Tomorrow, Saturday

Tomorrow is a day of destiny

Tonight the cries of Allah-o Akbar

are heard louder and louder than the night before

Where is this place?

Where is this place where every door is closed?

Where is this place where people are simply calling God?

Where is this place where the sound 

of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds 

will get louder and whether the number increases?

It shakes me.

I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place where

so many innocent people are entrapped?

Where is this place where no one comes to our aid?

Where is this place where only with our silence

we are sending our voices to the world?

Where is this place where the young shed blood

and then people go and pray?

Standing on that same blood and pray...

Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?

Where is this place?

You want me to tell you?

This place is Iran.

The homeland of you and me.

This place is Iran.

On Friday June 19, 2009 the place was Iran, but clearly the sentiment here knows no real political or cultural boundary, as it embodies a deeper truth about the human experience that has sadly defined too many places and too many lives with no end in sight.

Pass it along.

william

Iranian Bloggers Speak

From a friend in Iran, a young woman who has been a pioneer blogger there, comes this joint statement from the community of Iranian bloggers who have risked much to bring news of recent events there to the world:

بیانیه‌ی جمعی از وبلاگ‌نویسان درباره‌ی وقایع اخير

۱) ما، گروهی از وبلاگ‌نویسان ایرانی، برخوردهای خشونت‌آمیز و سرکوب‌گرانه‌ی حکومت ایران در مواجهه با راه‌پیمایی‌ها و گردهم‌آیی‌های مسالمت‌آمیز و به‌حق مردم ایران را به شدت محکوم می‌کنیم و از مقامات و مسوولان حکومتی می‌خواهیم تا اصل ۲۷ قانون اساسی جمهوری اسلامی ایران را-که بیان می‌دارد «تشكيل‏ اجتماعات‏ و راه‌ پيمايی‌ها، بدون‏ حمل‏ سلاح‏، به‏ شرط آن‏‌که‏ مخل‏ به‏ مبانی‏ اسلام‏ نباشد، آزاد است»-رعایت کنند.

۲) ما قانون‌ شکنی‌های پیش‌آمده در انتخابات ریاست جمهوری و وقایع غم‌انگیز پس از آن را آفتی بزرگ بر جمهوریت نظام می‌دانیم و با توجه به شواهد و دلایل متعددی که برخی از نامزدهای محترم و دیگران ارائه داده‌اند، تخلف‌های عمده و بی‌سابقه‌ی انتخاباتی را محرز دانسته، خواستار ابطال نتایج و برگزاری‌ِ مجدد انتخابات هستیم.

۳) حرکت‌هایی چون اخراج خبرنگاران خارجی و دستگیری روزنامه‌نگاران داخلی، سانسور اخبار و وارونه جلوه دادن آن‌ها، قطع شبکه‌ی پیام کوتاه و فیلترینگ شدید اینترنت نمی‌تواند صدای مردم ایران را خاموش کند که تاریکی و خفقان ابدی نخواهد بود. ما حکومت ایران را به شفافیت و تعامل دوستانه با مردم آن سرزمین دعوت می‌كنيم، امید داریم در آینده شکاف عظیم بین مردم و حکومت کم‌تر شود.

پنجم تیرماه ۱۳۸۸ خورشیدی
بخشی از جامعه‌ی بزرگ وبلاگ‌نویسان ایرانی

Statement by a group of Iranian bloggers about the Presidential elections and the subsequent events

1) We, a group of Iranian bloggers, strongly condemn the violent and repressive confrontation of Iranian government against Iranian people's legitimate and peaceful demonstrations and ask government officials to comply with Article 27 of the Islamic Republic of Iran's Constitution which emphasizes "Public gatherings and marches may be freely held, provided arms are not carried and that they are not detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam."

2) We consider the violations in the presidential elections, and their sad consequences a big blow to the democratic principles of the Islamic Republic regime, and observing the mounting evidence of fraud presented by the candidates and others, we believe that election fraud is obvious and we ask for a new election.

3) Actions such as deporting foreign reporters, arresting local journalists, censorship of the news and misrepresenting the facts, cutting off the SMS network and filtering of the internet cannot silence the voices of Iranian people as no darkness and suffocation can go on forever. We invite the Iranian government to honest and friendly interaction with its people and we hope to witness the narrowing of the huge gap between people and the government.

A part of the large community of Iranian bloggers

June 26, 2009

Thanks for your courage in bearing witness and speaking out.

william

In One Paragraph

In last week's issue of The New Yorker, writer Nick Paumgarten writes a trenchant and sobering article about the totality of the financial meltdown. 

In just one paragraph he manages to summarize about as succinctly and completely as I have read anywhere, a description of the crisis and its multiple causes. 

If written in verse, it could be poetic. If put to music, it could be hypnotic.

"This crisis is the culmination of events and trends reaching back, depending on your perspective, four, seven, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, sixty-five, or a hundred and two years. The subprime-mortgage meltdown, the subsequent collapse of the wider real-estate market and then of securities based on real-estate, and of the firms and funds holding those securities, and of the companies selling insurance against the failure of those firms, and, potentially, of the insurers' counterparties, and so on: you could say that all this is merely the finale to a multi-decade saga set on Wall Street and Main Street, in Washington, Riyadh and Tokyo. The causes are technological, mathematical, cultural, demographic, financial, economic, behavioral, legal, and political. Among the dozens of contributors and culprits, real or perceived, are the personal computer, the abandonment of the gold standard, the abandonment of Glass-Steagall, the end of fixed commissions, the ratings agencies, mortgage-backed securities, securitization in general, credit derivatives, credit-default swaps, Wall Street partnerships going public, the League of Nations, Bretton Woods, Basel II, CNBC, the S.E.C., disintermediation, overcompensation, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, Phil Gramm and Jim Leach, Alan Greenspan, black swans, red tape, deregulation, outdated regulation, lax enforcement, government pressure to lower lending standards, predatory lending, mark-to-market accounting, hedge funds, private-equity firms, modern finance theory, risk models, "quants", corporate bonds, the baby boomers, flat-screen televisions, and an indulgent, undereducated populace. All these factors, very few of them mutually exclusive, conspired to make possible skyrocketing leverage, misperceived risk, and spectacular collapse. To tell the story of them all, in the proper context and detail, will require an Edward Gibbons. The fall of Rome, by comparison, was a local event. Much abridged, a few familiar words will do: debt, greed, hubris."

What a list!

Seems to me like the only thing he left out is Cubs' villain Steve Bartman and the curse of "Billy Goat" Sam Sianis!

If you wanted to make a haiku from Paumgarten's reportage, what would yours be?

Here's mine:

Black swans, red tape

Real or perceived

Very few of them mutually exclusive

william

Friends and Enemies

In the summer of 1974 I was working as a doorman at a high-rise apartment building on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago's Gold Coast just north of downtown. 

The most famous tenant of that building happened to be Ray Kroc, the man who started McDonalds, but I hardly ever saw him, let alone got any kind of a tip from that multimillionaire businessman.

It was a union job and I was a member of the Security Employees International Union making a grand total of minimum wage, which at that time I believe was something on the order of $4.25/hr.

A friend of mine who was a grade or two above me in high school had tipped me to this opportunity, and I worked long hours on day shifts, night shifts and swing shifts to save up money over the summer towards my future college tuition.

That summer, my fellow employee was a young man from Iran, let's call him Sanaz, which means "full of grace" in Farsi, and my memory of this fellow was that he was full of wit and sly humor.

At first we were strangers, perhaps a bit suspicious of each other, on the one hand a high school kid reading "Moby Dick" or "Bleak House" when not opening the door or carrying some rich tenants bag of groceries for miserly tip money, and on the other hand a twenty-something immigrant from Tehran fleeing the Savak (secret police) and the corrupt monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the CIA-backed dictator who had been in power for decades after the coup that deposed the democratically elected Iranian leader Mossadegh.

But you know the expression "my enemy's enemy is my friend"? 

The janitor who was our boss was a grizzled old Polish drunk and such a mean prick who despised Jews and Persians equally, that he succeeded where generations of Mid-East leaders have failed, to forge a fast friendship between Sanaz and I.

I remember Sanaz, while vacuuming the lobby, would hold his hand up to his throat and pretend to be choking, and then cackle gleefully. I thought he was stark raving mad, until he told me he was imitating the Shah, who had been caught recently when some tear gas, fired at demonstrators holding a rally against an appearance he was making in the United States, had been blown back by the wind in his direction.

He taught me to repeat along with him while he was dusting the furniture or windex-ing the glass of the revolving doors, "Shah's Troops Out of Oman...Shah's Troops Out of Oman..." until it became a hypnotic chant to ward off the long hours and dull boredom of the job.

I knew next to nothing about the history of Iran in the 20th century at that time, but working with him made me curious about his country and aware of the storm clouds that seemed to be gathering there, which famously erupted in the Islamic Revolution that finally deposed the Shah in 1979. The subsequent hostage-taking by the revolutionary students who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and the "October Surprise" of their release, were key events that ultimately contributed to the downfall of the Carter presidency and the election of Ronald Reagan and the onset of our own conservative revolution that has wrought so much damage at home.

I thought about all of these long ago events recently, as I am hoping to participate in a delegation that is going to Iran next month, one of the first artistic exchanges between the United States and that country since we ended diplomatic relations almost thirty years ago.

The ensuing decades have been fraught with misunderstanding, hostility, enormous tensions and fear on both sides, with various proxy wars being waged by our respective governments. In the embargo and silence that have persisted for a generation or more, much like the ongoing crisis and complete failure of policy in our relationship with Cuba, there is still a sense that no matter how screwed up the politicians and leaders are, the people of our countries harbor warm feelings for each other. 

One thing is for sure, it is the people of these countries, especially the artists, who are the best chance for mutual understanding, and for a new paradigm that is so desperately needed. Much like my memory of my relationship with my co-worker and friend Sanaz, full of grace, that summer years ago when I was a doorman.

william

Oh Happy Day

I was flying back from Sundance yesterday, so I only caught the inauguration on the television at the gate at the airport. Even still, it was quite exciting, as a crowd of people stood and watched, old, young, black, white, asian, rich, poor, conservative, eccentric, and not too many kept a dry eye through the proceedings.

At the moment that Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the group burst out in applause. 

Obama's powerful speech itself was occasionally drowned out by the tannoy's voice over the airport loudspeakers making their rote announcements about security and gate changes, which was frustrating, as we were all hanging on every inspirational word.

But as usual, it is Miss Natalie who has the Last Word and defines the exuberant spirit of an amazing day as she came home from school with her own drawing to share.

Thanks, Natalie.

I hope the world you inherit will be a slightly better place because of the big step forward we all took as a nation today!

william

The Presidents

There have been eight American presidents sworn in to take the oath of office since the Jewel Food Store on Broadway in Chicago put out this collection of 35 White Men as a promotional giveaway in the early 1960's.

Today, our 44th president, and our first person of color, becomes the next Jewel in the crown. Something that must have been totally unimaginable when these plastic figures and carved styrofoam columns were being fashioned and shipped out to the kids of America.

Amazing.

(Not to inject a note of dissent to this otherwise glorious day of celebration, but when are we going to find someone to revise the consensus discourse of our historical narrative that has every commentator across the political spectrum left or right, giving a free pass and adding to the hagiography of Ronald Reagan, who for me, and I suspect others, as the vanguard of the conservative takeover of government and the real architect of supply-side economics and deregulation, not to mention Star Wars and the uber-propagandanda of "morning in America" and Iran-Contra, is the real Worst President Ever, and the author of much that is so terribly wrong in the world we now live in ?).

"We are the change we have been waiting for."

william

White Privilege

My sister, Marguerite Horberg, sent the essay below to me. She has a blog called Porto Luz after her new progressive cultural organization and I encourage you to check it out.

I have heard Tim Wise on the radio a few times (KPFK, of course) and he is always a powerful and cogent critic against racism, however masked it may be.

This is Your Nation on White Privilege
By Tim Wise
9/13/08

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help. White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

`White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fu ckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fu ckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug. White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately
disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your
state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child
labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and
everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black
pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give
one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced. White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a "light" burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are
losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined,
unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Well, it is certainly one of them.

william

The Power of Myths

Joan Didion has long been one of my favorite writers, and favorite people (I had the pleasure of meeting her several times years ago when I was working for director Sydney Pollack). She wrote an important book called "Political Fictions" a few years back, a brilliant analysis and critique of the broad narratives that we are told and buy into, and how these agreed upon stories are so hard to shake that even when confronted with abundant and contradictory facts, they bounce off, such is the power of narrative on the conscious and subconscious mind.

Joan did not write this article, which was published online at The Nation magazine, but it speaks loudly to the dominant political narratives of today, that so trap and define us. Unfortunately, articles like this tend to only preach to the choir (especially when the choir are certainly the only ones seeking out information from a source like The Nation), but I hope by reprinting it here it might get repeated and further disseminated and slip into an open door out there in someone's mind.

Ten National Security Myths

This article appeared in the October 6, 2008 edition of The Nation.
September 17, 2008

The Iraq War is a testament to the great damage a foreign policy based on myths, lies and distortions can do to our nation's security and well-being. As the election draws near, a new set of myths and fallacies as misleading as those that led the Senate to support George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq have become embedded in our foreign policy discourse. Many of them are being perpetuated by the very same political forces that peddled the myth of mushroom clouds coming from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Others are the product of muddled thinking on the part of both Republicans and Democrats. If left unchallenged, these myths and fallacies could influence the outcome of the election and shape policy in the next administration. In this special feature, put together by Nation editors with Sherle Schwenninger, a frequent Nation contributor and director of the Global Economic Policy Program at the New America Foundation, we dissect ten of them and offer what we believe is a more accurate depiction of what is at stake for the United States and the world.

Myth 1. It's a dangerous world. We face an array of serious national security threats that require an experienced Commander in Chief.
John McCain's supporters have repeated this refrain over and over, replete with 3 am imagery, to call attention to his presumed national security credentials and to cast doubt on Barack Obama's readiness to be Commander in Chief. Obama has on occasion challenged the politics of fear, but many of his supporters have too readily conceded that it is a dangerous world.

The world is more dangerous than it would have been had the Bush administration not invaded Iraq, spurned Iran's diplomatic overtures in 2003 and unnecessarily antagonized Russia by expanding NATO and withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But the world is far less dangerous than it has been in previous election years--certainly less dangerous than in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected, or in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was voted into office. Seven years after the 9/11 attacks, it is evident that Al Qaeda lacks the capacity to pose a systemic threat to America. Since 9/11 there have been no major terrorist attacks against US targets outside the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for "great power" conflict, China, India, Brazil and Russia are all stakeholders in the current international system and would prefer to work with the United States rather than challenge it militarily. Iran is too weak economically and militarily to pose a threat to the United States or to US allies in the Middle East and is years away from obtaining nuclear weapons. The stability of nuclear Pakistan and oil-rich Saudi Arabia remains a concern, but both countries have proved to be more resilient--and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, more capable of reform--than their critics have allowed.

This is not to say that the United States does not face major international challenges. These challenges relate to the economic rise of China and India, the transfer of huge amounts of our wealth to petrodollar states, the vulnerabilities that come with the complex interdependence of industrial production and financial systems created by globalization, and the incipient struggle over resources, particularly oil and water. But the skills and resources needed to meet these challenges are not the warrior instincts highlighted in McCain's Commander in Chief ads. When the phone rings at 3 am, it will more likely be a call warning that an international deal to rescue an American bank that is "too big to fail" has collapsed, and that the Treasury and Fed will have to step in, than a call about a terrorist attack on American soil or missiles being fired on an American ship. The nerves and judgment of a good crisis-management team may indeed be in high demand in the next administration, but not those that the catchphrase "It's a dangerous world" brings to mind.

Myth 2. The surge has worked. To withdraw from Iraq now would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and embolden Islamic extremists.

This is McCain's main talking point on Iraq, and his supporters have used the "success" of the surge to cast doubt on Obama's judgment. Civilian and military casualties in Iraq have indeed declined since the deployment of additional US forces. But to say the surge worked is misleading in three ways. First, it confuses the temporary surge of US forces in 2007-08 with a number of other factors that reduced violence. As US officials in Iraq have admitted, the decision by Sunni groups to rein in Al Qaeda-oriented extremists, along with the US military's decision to pay former Sunni insurgents who joined the Awakening Councils--both of which began well before the surge--deserves much of the credit for the decline in violence. So does the decision by Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr to order his militia to stand down during this period.

Second, the surge has had an ugly flip side. To reduce the violence, the US military built concrete walls to separate Sunnis and Shiites, which facilitated ethnic cleansing by both sides but especially by Shiite militias against Sunni residents of Baghdad. The drop-off in violence reflects the fact that ethnic cleansing led to the internal partition of Iraqi cities and regions, reducing the opportunity for sectarian killing.

Third, the surge has not created the conditions for political reconciliation or a stable Iraq, which, after all, was its main purpose. The "success" of the surge was based on Sunni repression of jihadi extremists, ethnic cleansing and separation walls, not compromise. The Shiite-led government seems no more willing to compromise on key issues than it was before the surge. Indeed, the Maliki administration is now targeting Sunni leaders of the Awakening movement, threatening to undo the fragile progress that has been made. Thus the surge has emboldened the government to consolidate its sectarian gains and buck the wishes of its American supporters, even to the point of demanding a timetable for the end of the occupation.

Myth 3. We cannot allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists. We therefore must redouble our military efforts there or face another terrorist attack.

Since Barack Obama and John McCain both support sending more troops to Afghanistan, the election may create a bipartisan consensus for increasing the US military commitment to "winning" the "right" war. But such a consensus would be based on several mistaken notions.

First, the United States and its NATO allies are losing the war in Afghanistan not because we have had too few military forces but because our military presence, along with the corruption of the Hamid Karzai government, has gradually turned the Afghan population against us, swelling the ranks of Taliban recruits. American airstrikes have repeatedly killed innocent civilians. Sending thousands of additional troops will not secure a democratic and stable Afghanistan, because the country is not only deeply divided but also fiercely resistant to outside forces. Indeed, more troops may only engender more anti-American resistance and cause groups in neighboring Pakistan to step up their support for the Taliban in order to stop what they see as a US effort to advance US and Indian interests in the region. As the British and the Soviets discovered before us, Afghanistan can easily become a trap for any great power seeking to establish control of the country.

Second, securing Afghanistan is not necessary to US security and may actually undermine our goal of defeating Al Qaeda. It makes no sense to commit more troops and money to a war in Afghanistan that cannot be won when Al Qaeda can operate relatively freely in parts of Pakistan. The key to the defeat of Al Qaeda and its protectors lies with the Pakistani government and its ability to establish control over its remote territory. Major groups within Pakistan's military and intelligence services are reluctant to take action against the extremists for fear it would help the United States and India consolidate control over Afghanistan. Expanding the war in Afghanistan may only further destabilize Pakistan by deepening divisions within that country, especially if Washington persists with its new policy of extending American military operations into Pakistan. The best way to get Pakistan to take action against Al Qaeda is for the United States to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, encourage the Karzai government to negotiate with the Taliban to end the civil war and redirect US military efforts toward economic assistance, which would strengthen the popular appeal of the Pakistani and Afghan governments.

Third, even if remnants of Al Qaeda's leadership are still there, the value of Afghanistan and Pakistan as an Al Qaeda safe haven is greatly exaggerated. Pakistan's tribal areas are of limited use in training extremists to blend into US society or learn how to fly airplanes or make explosives (most of the planning for the 9/11 attacks took place in Hamburg and Florida, not Afghanistan). Nor is this remote and isolated area the best location from which to direct an effective terror campaign or recruit new members. That is why Al Qaeda is a decentralized network whose leaders in Pakistan can offer at most moral support and encouragement. American safety thus depends not on eliminating faraway safe havens for Al Qaeda but on common-sense counterterrorist and national security measures--extensive intelligence cooperation, expert police work, effective border control and the occasional surgical use of special forces.

Myth 4. Iran is responsible for much of the violence against US forces in Iraq; by using its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, it threatens to dominate the Middle East.

Iran has been able to increase its influence in the region not because of its strengths but because of Washington's blunders, most notably its illegal invasion of Iraq, which brought to power a pro-Iranian Shiite government, and its policy of isolating Hezbollah and Hamas, which has opened the door for Tehran to forge a closer alliance with both groups. Although strong enough to make any military action against its territory costly, Iran has a very modest ability to project military power and therefore poses little threat to its neighbors. Its economy is overly dependent on high oil prices and is so badly managed that it depends on imported gas and other distillates. And its Islamic system of government has very limited ideological appeal in the predominantly Sunni Middle East, as evidenced by the failure of its earlier effort to export revolution. In recent years it has made progress in its uranium-enrichment program, but experts agree that it is years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

Iran has tried to make the occupation of Iraq as difficult as possible for US forces, but it has not been the major cause of violence against US troops. Most of these attacks have come from Sunni insurgents, who are deeply hostile to Iran. Even though Tehran has helped supply some Shiite militias hostile to the US occupation, Iran does not want to do anything that would destabilize the current Shiite-led government, with which it has very close relations. Like it or not, both Tehran and Washington back the current Shiite-dominated government in Iraq.

Commentators have focused too much attention on the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has little influence over foreign affairs. Iran is not ideologically wedded to an anti-American position. It supported the Bush administration's 2001 overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and in 2003 it made a diplomatic overture to Washington, which put on the table such sensitive issues as Iran's support for anti-Israeli militant groups and a de facto acceptance of Israel's right to exist, in return for the normalization of US-Iranian relations. By virtue of its size and power, Iran wants to play a larger role in regional relations, and it sees Washington's policy of isolating and punishing it as an obstacle to this goal. Change American policy to engage Iran, and the rationale for some of its anti-American policies would disappear while pressure within Iran for a different regional approach would increase.

Myth 5. To talk to the leaders of "rogue" states like Iran and Cuba without conditions legitimizes their position and weakens American leverage.

McCain has attacked Obama for saying that he would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea without conditions. Although Obama later qualified his position, his willingness to engage US adversaries and use bilateral and multilateral diplomacy offers a clear alternative to McCain's almost unconditional hostility to any kind of diplomacy.

McCain's position of refusing to meet with such leaders without conditions ignores a long, albeit uneven, bipartisan tradition of direct negotiations with our enemies, a tradition that runs from Kennedy to Nixon to Reagan. It also ignores the abysmal record of trying to isolate "rogue" states with the goal of regime change. The Castro brothers in Cuba have outlasted nine, soon to be ten, US presidents. And more than seven years of refusing to talk with Tehran has only left Iran stronger and closer to a nuclear bomb. By contrast, the Bush administration's decision to participate directly in the six-power talks and to drop earlier conditions led to the successful agreement with North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program.

As our experience with North Korea makes clear, however, to talk or not to talk misses the main point. The key question is not whether the president will meet with other leaders, "rogue" or not, but whether the United States will use diplomacy effectively to achieve US objectives. In many cases that diplomacy will not be head-to-head meetings with other leaders but good-faith participation in multilateral forums such as the six-power talks. In most cases, the United States will have far more to gain by participating without conditions than by creating conditions to avoid negotiations.

Myth 6. Vladimir Putin's Russia is an authoritarian state pursuing an anti-American agenda aimed at reconstituting the Soviet Union in the form of a new Russian empire.

McCain has seized on the crisis in Georgia to advance this alarmist view and to push his policy of ejecting Russia from the G-8 and expanding NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine. Obama initially took a more nuanced position toward the crisis but has recently joined McCain in promising NATO membership to Georgia. McCain's characterization of Russia is wrong for two reasons.

First, Russia's foreign policy has not been anti-American. Moscow has cooperated with Washington on a number of important international issues, from assisting NATO against the Taliban in Afghanistan and supporting Washington's counterterrorism efforts, to joining the coalition to curb Iran's nuclear enrichment program.

Second, what McCain sees as a pattern of intimidation to re-establish the Russian empire more objective analysts see as a great power protecting its legitimate interests in the face of US provocations. These provocations started during the Clinton administration and have increased under Bush, with the expansion of NATO to Russia's border and abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. They have continued with the promise of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine and the decision to deploy a missile defense system in Central Europe. Yet Moscow has responded for the most part in a measured and defensive way, its most forceful move being the recent military actions in Georgia to protect South Ossetia. When the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, sent forces into South Ossetia in violation of an earlier agreement, Russia responded much as the United States did when it intervened in 1999 against Serbia over Kosovo. Russian military actions in Georgia may have been disproportionate, but not as disproportionate as Washington's extensive bombing of Serbia proper.

Despite the souring of the earlier cooperative relationship with the Bush administration, Russia has made it clear that it would still prefer a strategic partnership that would reduce nuclear weapons, contain Islamist extremism and expand the world's oil and gas supplies. But it has also made it clear that this partnership must be based on mutual interests and compromise, not simply on Russian acquiescence in American dictates.

Myth 7. Because the American military is stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must increase the size of our conventional armed forces.

Both presidential candidates have come out with proposals to increase conventional forces. But these proposals are based on mistaken notions of the utility of military power and which military missions we must pursue to protect national security and contribute to world order.

The long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have indeed ground down the military and limited our ability to respond to other potential threats. But the problem is not that we spend too little or have too few forces. After all, the military budget, now almost $600 billion, is almost as large as the combined military budgets of the rest of the world. We outspend China by a factor of ten to one, Russia by sixteen to one and Iran by almost ninety times. Rather, the problem lies with the Bush administration's military missions and its forward-based strategy. In addition to the traditional missions of deterrence and defense of sea lanes, national security strategy now calls for the use of force to effect regime change and to fight counterinsurgency wars. It also envisions expansion of American military bases throughout much of the greater Middle East.

The lesson we should draw from our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we need more conventional forces but that the missions of regime change and counterinsurgency are--in addition to being illegal, in the case of the former, and unethical--not essential to US interests and cannot be achieved at acceptable cost. Furthermore, we should have learned from the stationing of forces in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s that positioning US troops in or near Muslim countries can fuel radical movements that create new threats to US security. The better course of action would be to wind down the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce America's heavy footprint in the Islamic world, thereby freeing resources for more urgent domestic and international needs.

Myth 8. A League of Democracies would create a global coalition for peace and freedom and would enable the United States and its democratic allies to intervene to solve humanitarian and other crises when the UN Security Council is paralyzed.

The creation of a League of Democracies is one of the central pillars of McCain's foreign policy. Several leading Obama advisers, including former Clinton National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution, also support the idea. Despite its bipartisan appeal, the notion has several insuperable problems.

First, many leading democracies would be reluctant to join such a league because it would exclude China and Russia and undermine the UN. And after their difficult experience with the Bush administration over Iraq, many of these same countries would not welcome another high-profile US initiative that seeks to tie democracy promotion to Washington's national security agenda.

Second, a League of Democracies would be no more effective than other organizations in solving humanitarian problems like those in Burma and Darfur or in preventing nuclear proliferation. Large, newly developed democracies like Brazil, India, Mexico, Indonesia and South Africa are as protective of national sovereignty as China and Russia, in some cases more so, and are unlikely to support US-led interventions. And a League of Democracies would weaken more inclusive organizations, like the UN Security Council, thereby making it more difficult to solve the many international conflicts that would require China's and Russia's cooperation.

Third, the promotion of a League of Democracies would be polarizing and would create a global divide between a group of self-selected democracies and more authoritarian governments. This would reverse a twenty-year process of integrating China and Russia into the international system and reducing great power conflicts. It would also likely provoke efforts by China and Russia to strengthen organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as geopolitical alliances to counterbalance the West.

The best way to advance peace and security is to breathe new life into the UN by reforming the Security Council to better reflect today's realities. In particular, that means enlarging the council to include emerging powers like India and Brazil. We need a more inclusive global forum that enables major--and minor--powers to deal with common problems, not a less inclusive new organization that through exclusion would make common action more difficult.

Myth 9. Globalization has strengthened the economy, and we cannot avoid it by hiding behind protectionist walls.

Free-trade Republicans associated with McCain and neoliberal Democrats seeking to influence Obama's economic policies regularly trot out this notion to tar, as "protectionists" and "defeatists," progressives who question current trade and investment policies. They go on to argue that American prosperity depends on embracing free trade and globalization.

But the global integration of the past decade has not benefited the US economy. This is most evident in the erosion of America's tradable goods sector, as reflected by the large trade deficit and by the loss of millions of middle-class manufacturing jobs. It is also evident in the decline in family incomes over the past seven years despite rising worker productivity and by the increase in income and wealth inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s.

The problem is not with the idea of global economic integration per se but with the policies that have been pursued in its name. These policies have shortchanged investment at home by catering to the interests of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street and have indulged in the unfair trade practices of neo-mercantilist economies, which suppress workers' wages and thus the basic needs of their populations.

The pattern of economic growth these policies produced is undesirable as well as unsustainable. It is not sustainable because it was too dependent on debt-financed consumption and a series of asset bubbles in the United States, which in part were caused by the oversaving and underconsumption of production-oriented economies like China's and Japan's. With the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles, US consumers are no longer in a position to be the main driver of world economic growth. Other large economies will have to do more to provide their own demand.

Thus the nature of global economic integration will change, and with it the structure and rules of the global economy. The goal must not be to preserve free trade as it was practiced over the past decade or so but to create a global system of trade and finance built on rising wages and growing middle classes in developed and developing economies. Above all, American prosperity depends not on preserving globalization and free trade but on improving the quality of our infrastructure, enhancing the skills of our workers, strengthening our institutions of science and research, and reforming our financial system to serve the real economy.

Myth 10. The world needs American leadership.

The call for the United States to lead the world is a staple of both political campaigns. Yet understandably, much of the rest of the world is more skeptical, if not outright resistant, to Washington's global leadership than at any time since the end of World War II. What has passed as leadership in recent years too often has been swollen rhetoric about American greatness and pious dictates about how other countries should organize their economic and political systems, not leadership to solve common problems. Indeed, on issues where American leadership has been most needed, like resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reducing nuclear weapons or halting global climate change, Washington has been largely absent or downright obstructionist.

On these issues, American leadership will still be required in the period ahead. But to say that the world needs our leadership ignores the fact that much of the rest of the planet--China, India, Russia, South Korea, the countries of Latin America, even our European allies--has become accustomed to a world in which the United States has been preoccupied with Iraq and in which the rest has had more freedom to shape the politics and economies of their regions. And much of the world has done just fine without American leadership.

Neither campaign has grasped the central lesson of the Bush era: the world does not need strong US leadership so much as it needs constructive US participation as a great power. On a whole range of global issues, from climate change to stopping North Korea's nuclear program--even on the question of a peace between Israel and Syria--other powers and new coalitions of transnational NGOs and intergovernmental agencies have become leaders and have an ownership stake. They would welcome the United States to the fold, but they would not cede all leadership to Washington. Indeed, they understand that there will be clear limits to American power and leadership in the years ahead, as the United States digests the cost of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The challenge for the next administration, then, is not how to restore American leadership but how to share these responsibilities in an increasingly multipolar world, and thus free up the energy and resources needed to rebuild American society.

Copyright © 2008 The Nation

william

"We are the change we have been waiting for"

I did not set this site up to be a political blog. There are so many of them around, and so many excellent ones that are much more informed, smarter, more analytical, with more resources, information and wider constituencies than I.

Here are a few I read:

The Daily Kos
Truthout
Talking Points Memo
A Tiny Revolution
Counterpunch

But it is hard to be alive in America today and not have your waking moments consumed with deep anxieties about the future. We are at a crossroads, and if ever there was a time to speak up and act out on what you value, it is certainly now.

So here is my political shout out of the day to all those who might be listening here:

DON'T DESPAIR. ORGANIZE.

It's hard to walk around these days without being surrounded by the consensus that seems to be building around the inevitability of a McPalin victory. Of course this is what the MSM and the Republicans want us to feel. Propagandizing fear has lead to lethargy for too long.

Remember, THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN THERE ARE OF THEM. MAYBE NOT BY MUCH, BUT WE ARE THE MAJORITY. This election is going to come down to voter turnout, and the ability to combat the sophisticated Republican techniques of voter suppression and disenfranchisement.

I encourage those of you who can, to join me and sign up for training to go out and get on the ground in swing states with the Obama campaign. We're probably all maxed out on donations, and this is the something else we can do.

The letter below tells you how and where to sign up.

This feels like a street fight for the last dim hope we have as a nation. Let's get in the streets and fight.
Information is below. Please send this to anyone else you know who will mobilize.

I have my issues with some of Obama's policy decisions and how he is campaigning. And I am deeply cynical about so much of our political two-party system and the corpocracy we live in.

But let's face it people, the alternative is just too bleak.

ACT NOW. DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN. DON'T STAND ON THE SIDELINES THIS TIME. DON'T LET THEM BRAINWASH YOU INTO FEELING HOPELESS, OR DISTRACTED FROM THE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTER.

Almost a century ago, Ernest Hemingway wrote a poem (not something he was famous for) called "The Age Demanded" about World War I, but the last line of it has resonance today.

"In the end the age was handed, the sort of shit the age demanded."

We get the government and the politics we deserve.

But we don't want to end up with the government and the country that THEY deserve.

Dear William --

The Obama campaign is back on the ground in California and opening offices across the state. Just last week, we launched both our Southern and Northern California headquarters.

With less than eight weeks to go before Election Day, November 4th, we're gearing up and expanding rapidly for the general election.

Right now, the biggest way you can help Barack in California is to sign up for Camp Obama.

At Camp Obama, you'll have the opportunity to learn the basic organizing principles of this movement and become a Deputy Field Organizer in a neighboring battleground state. It's a fantastic opportunity to take a leadership role in this campaign, and I encourage you to apply today.

Apply for a spot at a California Camp Obama session near you:

http://ca.barackobama.com/campobamaCA

En Espanol:

http://ca.barackobama.com/CAlatinoscampo

Supporters like you are building a powerful grassroots organization in California, but we have a lot of work to do.

As we open more regional offices throughout the state in the coming days and weeks, we'll need supporters like you to volunteer your time, passion, and energy.

Sign up now to get involved, spread Barack's message, and build this movement for change:

http://ca.barackobama.com/CAsignup

Thanks,

Mitchell

Mitchell Schwartz
California State Director
Obama for America