12 answers to questions no one is bothering to ask
By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

Can there be any question that, since the invasion of 2003, Iraq has been unraveling? And here’s the curious thing: Despite a lack of decent information and analysis on crucial aspects of the Iraqi catastrophe, despite the way much of the Iraq story fell off newspaper front pages and out of the TV news in the last year, despite so many reports on the “success” of the President’s surge strategy, Americans sense this perfectly well. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 56% of Americans “say the United States should withdraw its military forces to avoid further casualties” and this has, as the Post notes, been a majority position since January 2007, the month that the surge was first announced. Imagine what might happen if the American public knew more about the actual state of affairs in Iraq – and of thinking in Washington. So, here, in an attempt to unravel the situation in ever-unraveling Iraq are twelve answers to questions which should be asked far more often in this country:

1. Yes, the war has morphed into the U.S. military’s worst Iraq nightmare: Few now remember, but before George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, top administration and Pentagon officials had a single overriding nightmare – not chemical, but urban, warfare. Saddam Hussein, they feared, would lure American forces into “Fortress Baghdad,” as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld labeled it. There, they would find themselves fighting block by block, especially in the warren of streets that make up the Iraqi capital’s poorest districts.

When American forces actually entered Baghdad in early April 2003, however, even Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard units had put away their weapons and gone home. It took five years but, as of now, American troops are indeed fighting in the warren of streets in Sadr City, the Shiite slum of two and a half million in eastern Baghdad largely controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia. The U.S. military, in fact, recently experienced its worst week of 2008 in terms of casualties, mainly in and around Baghdad. So, mission accomplished – the worst fear of 2003 has now been realized.

2. No, there was never an exit strategy from Iraq because the Bush administration never intended to leave – and still doesn’t: Critics of the war have regularly gone after the Bush administration for its lack of planning, including its lack of an “exit strategy.” In this, they miss the point. The Bush administration arrived in Iraq with four mega-bases on the drawing boards. These were meant to undergird a future American garrisoning of that country and were to house at least 30,000 American troops, as well as U.S. air power, for the indefinite future. The term used for such places wasn’t “permanent base,” but the more charming and euphemistic “enduring camp.” (In fact, as we learned recently, the Bush administration refuses to define any American base on foreign soil anywhere on the planet, including ones in Japan for over 60 years, as permanent.) Those four monster bases in Iraq (and many others) were soon being built at the cost of multibillions and are, even today, being significantly upgraded. In October 2007, for instance, National Public Radio’s defense correspondent Guy Raz visited Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, which houses about 40,000 American troops, contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees, and described it as “one giant construction project, with new roads, sidewalks, and structures going up across this 16-square-mile fortress in the center of Iraq, all with an eye toward the next few decades.”

These mega-bases, like “Camp Cupcake” (al-Asad Air Base), nicknamed for its amenities, are small town-sized with massive facilities, including PXs, fast-food outlets, and the latest in communications. They have largely been ignored by the American media and so have played no part in the debate about Iraq in this country, but they are the most striking on-the-ground evidence of the plans of an administration that simply never expected to leave. To this day, despite the endless talk about drawdowns and withdrawals, that hasn’t changed. In fact, the latest news about secret negotiations for a future Status of Forces Agreement on the American presence in that country indicates that U.S. officials are calling for “an open-ended military presence” and “no limits on numbers of U.S. forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term U.S. security agreements with other countries.”

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By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch.com

I still don’t know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion’s young ladies. The house was great – if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets – a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, “No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you.” He was an imposing man who’d made a lot of money.

He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, “So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.”

I replied, “Several, actually.”

He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”

They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”

So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book – with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

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Diann Rust-Tierney
Executive Director
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

As I write this today, the cherry blossoms are fading, but the machinery of death is lumbering along with renewed authority and conviction.

This morning, the Supreme Court ruled in Baze v. Rees that lethal injection posed no risk of unnecessary pain and suffering for the more than 3,200 who still face execution. It is ironic that while this decision was being announced, just a few blocks away people of faith in Washington, DC welcomed Pope Benedict XVI, who shares our belief that capital punishment is an affront to humanity and has no place in modern society.

At the same time that the Baze decision was being announced, the Supreme Court heard arguments on a second death penalty case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which challenges that state’s law that expands the death penalty to crimes other than murder.

Today we are reminded just how far we have to go in our fight to achieve abolition.

Those of us in the anti-death penalty movement know we have a tough, but lifesaving, task ahead. To end the death penalty we have to overturn capital punishment state by state.  I’d like to tell you what NCADP is doing to get us closer to abolition and why.

A new Harris poll confirms what we’ve all believed to be true – support for the death penalty in the United States is weakening. Fifty-two percent of Americans say the death penalty is no deterrent to murder. An astonishing 95% of those polled are convinced innocent people have already been convicted of murder. These figures are supported by earlier polls that indicate that three-quarters of Americans believe that an innocent person has already been executed in this country. Fifty-eight percent of recent respondents said they would oppose the death penalty based upon the knowledge that innocent people are sometimes convicted of murder.  

While the poll numbers are encouraging, we must do more to build the constituency for death penalty abolition across the nation. The stronger our movement is in America’s towns, cities and states, the more we can shape the public opinion that influences state legislators. Ultimately, they will respond if the voters say enough costly, state-sponsored killing is enough. And then we can rightly declare, “Mission accomplished.”

Most NCADP affiliates are small, headed by a few highly committed activists leading anywhere from a dozen to several thousand members. NCADP provides training, materials and advice that helps them build their membership, educate state legislators and encourage local citizens to shout out, “No!” to the death penalty.

Our immediate goal is to reduce the number of states with the death penalty from today’s 36. NCADP is uniquely experienced in waging these state battles – our staff includes veterans of the historic death penalty abolition victory in New Jersey as well as individuals who fought successfully to prevent capital punishment from being reintroduced in Wisconsin.

By Louisa Pyle
RH Reality Check

As recently as six or seven years ago, abortion was included in my medical school’s curriculum, but no longer. The comprehensive curriculum I naively expected that would provide medical students with the knowledge to meet the common needs of their female patients simply does not exist. At a party last weekend I asked a few second years, four twenty-three-year-old men, to report back to me if they hear the “A” word at any time this semester. They gleefully dubbed themselves the “Medical Student Moles for Choice.” Abortion is a shadow that wisps in and out of medicine, much like the quiet shadow of abortion in many women’s lives, not addressed directly, not discussed in coffee shops or over family dinner.

Medical school is, in many ways, a language school. Someone told me once that a medical student learns over 20,000 new words in their first two years of school, and in addition to the new vocabulary, I soon became capable of saying things over dinner that one should never say. “Rectum” no longer induces giggles and “vagina” is boring, not sexy or empowering. And yet, the word “abortion” is still said with a pause, a nod, a little quieter than the rest of the sentence. I’m happy when we talk about it at all: for me, the problem is the deafening silence. That a procedure more common than an appendectomy would never be named: In the halls of science and healthcare, that to me is an abomination.

At one time at my medical school, a state institution of strong reputation in the Deep South, the physician responsible for the classroom teaching in women’s reproductive health, “Dr. L,” included a full hour lecture on the medicine and science of abortion care in the OB/Gyn curriculum. She included her own stories of patients, the hooks on which we medical students hang all this physiology and chemistry in our overtaxed memories.

Even so, the students of this relatively conservative locale responded with powerfully reproachful marks on the course feedback forms. As student feedback influences not only the next year’s teaching of any course but also the tenure and performance assessment of the teachers, physicians, themselves, Dr. L. was forced to remove the lecture. During the following few years, including my turn with her, she managed to sneak in ten minutes on abortion safety when discussing contraception. “Abortion is safe,” was the message I heard, “but if you have a problem with it, you better be sure you know how to offer your patients appropriate birth control.”

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By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

“John Adams,” that entertaining and instructive TV mini-series based on David McCullough’s biography, is a reminder that, in some respects, nations are created as much from rancor and ego as they are from hope and goodwill.

In the television version of the irascible Mr. Adams’s saga, democracy triumphs. Still, while watching it, I can’t help but be a little depressed by the thought that while the Founding Fathers sought to build a government of laws rather than men and were crafting such worthy documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the current administration’s legacy to history will be a series of documents that chose to subvert the very Constitution that Adams, Jefferson, and the others battled so hard to create.

These documents reveal themselves slowly and reluctantly, as if to acknowledge that those who wrote them know deep in their souls what they have done is wrong and antithetical to the ways of a republic.

The latest to ooze its way to the surface, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act suit by the ACLU, is the March 14, 2003, memo written by John Yoo, former deputy in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an acolyte of David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff and former Cheney legal counsel.

Contrary to claims the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons were contrived by subordinates on the ground – i.e., “hicks with sticks” – Yoo’s 81-page memo rationalizes motive and establishes the bar for virtually every human rights violation that has taken place in the name of fighting the global war on terrorism.

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