Pacified

By Kathy Kelly

March 30, 2010

If the U.S. public looked long and hard into a mirror reflecting the civilian atrocities that have occurred in Afghanistan, over the past ten months, we would see ourselves as people who have collaborated with and paid for war crimes committed against innocent civilians who meant us no harm.

Two reporters, Jerome Starkey (the Times UK), and David Lindorff, (Counterpunch), have persistently drawn attention to U.S. war crimes committed in Afghanistan. Makers of the film “Rethinking Afghanistan” have steadily provided updates about the suffering endured by Afghan civilians. Here is a short list of atrocities that have occurred in the months since General McChrystal assumed his post in Afghanistan.

December 26th, 2009: US-led forces, (whether soldiers or “security contractors” (mercenaries) is still uncertain), raided a home in Kunar Province and pulled eight young men out of their beds, handcuffed them, and gunned them down execution-style. The Pentagon initially reported that the victims had been running a bomb factory, although distraught villagers were willing to swear that the victims, youngsters, aged 11 – 18, were just seven normal schoolboys and one shepherd boy. Following courageous reporting by Jerome Starkey, the U.S. military carried out its own investigation and on February 24th, 2010, issued an apology, attesting the boys’ innocence.

February 12, 2010: U.S. and Afghan forces raided a home during a party and killed five people, including a local district attorney, a local police commander two pregnant mothers and a teenaged girl engaged to be married. Neither Commander Dawood, shot in the doorway of his home while pleading for calm waving his badge, nor the teenaged Gulalai, died immediately, but the gunmen refused to allow relatives to take them to the hospital. Instead, they forced them to wait for hours barefoot in the winter cold outside.

Despite crowds of witnesses on the scene, the NATO report insisted that the two pregnant women at the party had been found bound and gagged, murdered by the male victims in an honor killing. A March 16, 2010 U.N. report, following on further reporting by Starkey, exposed the deception, to meager American press attention.

Two weeks later: February 21st, 2010: A three-car convoy of Afghans was traveling to the market in Kandahar with plans to proceed from there to a hospital in Kabul where some of the party could be taken for much-needed medical treatment. U.S. forces saw Afghans travelling together and launched an air-to-ground attack on the first car. Women in the second car immediately jumped out waving their scarves, trying desperately to communicate that they were civilians. The U.S. helicopter gunships continued firing on the now unshielded women. 21 people were killed and 13 were wounded.

There was press attention for this atrocity, and U.S. General Stanley McChrystal would issue a videotaped apology for his soldiers’ tragic mistake. Broad consensus among the press accepted this as a gracious gesture, with no consequences for the helicopter crew ever demanded or announced.

Whether having that gunship in the country was a mistake – or a crime – was never raised as a question.

And who would want it raised? Set amidst the horrors of an ongoing eight-year war, how many Americans think twice about these atrocities, hearing them on the news.

So I’m baffled to learn that in Germany, a western, relatively comfortable country, citizens raised a sustained protest when their leaders misled them regarding an atrocity that cost many dozens of civilian lives in Afghanistan.

The air strike was conducted by US planes but called in by German forces. On September 4, 2009, Taleban fighters in Kunduz province had hijacked two trucks filled with petrol, but then gotten stuck in a quagmire where the trucks had sank. Locals, realizing that the trucks carried valuable fuel, had arrived in large numbers to siphon it off, but when a German officer at the nearest NATO station learned that over 100 people had assembled in an area under his supervision, he decided they must be insurgents and a threat to Germans under his command. At his call, a U.S. fighter jet bombed the tankers, incinerating 142 people, dozens of them confirmable as civilians.

On September 6, 2009, Germany’s Defense Minister at the time, Franz Josef Jung, held a press conference in which he defended the attack, playing down the presence of civilians. He wasn’t aware that video footage from a US F15 fighter jet showed that most of the people present were unarmed civilians gathering to fill containers with fuel.

On November 27, 2009, after a steady outcry on the part of the German public, the Defense Minister was withdrawn from his post, (he is now a Labor Minister), and two German military officials, one of them Germany’s top military commander Wolfgang Schneiderhan, were forced to resign.

I felt uneasy and sad when I realized that my first response to this story was a feeling of curiosity as to how the public of another country could manage to raise such a furor over deaths of people in faraway Afghanistan. How odd to have grown up wondering how anyone could ever have been an uninvolved bystander allowing Nazi atrocities to develop and to find myself, four decades later, puzzling over how German people or any country’s citizenship could exercise so much control over their governance.

Today, in the US, attacks on civilians are frequently discussed in terms of the “war for hearts and minds.”.

Close to ten months ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters at a June 12, 2009 press conference in Brussels that General Stanley McChrystal “would work to minimize Afghan civilian casualties, a source of growing public anger within Afghanistan.”

"Every civilian casualty -- however caused -- is a defeat for us,” Gates continued, “and a setback for the Afghan government."

On March 23rd, 2010, McChrystal was interviewed by the Daily Telegraph. "Your security comes from the people," he said. "You don't need to be secured away from the people. You need to be secured by the people. So as you win their support, it's in their interests to secure you, …. This can mean patrolling without armored vehicles or even flak jackets. It means accepting greater short-term risk – and higher casualties – in the hope of winning a "battle of perceptions and perspectives" that will result in longer-term security."

And on March 2nd, 2010, he told Gail McCabe "What we're trying to do now is to increase their confidence in us and their confidence in their government. But you can't do that through smoke and mirrors, you have to do that through real things you do - because they've been through thirty-one years of war now, they've seen so much, they're not going to be beguiled by a message.”

We’re obliged as Americans to ask ourselves whether we will be guided by a message such as McChrystal's or by evidence. Americans have not been through thirty-one years of war, and we have managed to see very little of the consequences of decades of warmaking in Afghanistan.

According to a March 3, 2010 Save the Children report, “The world is ignoring the daily deaths of more than 850 Afghan children from treatable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia, focusing on fighting the insurgency rather than providing humanitarian aid.” The report notes that a quarter of all children born in the country die before the age of five, while nearly 60 percent of children are malnourished and suffer physical or mental problems. The UN Human Development Index in 2009 says that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, second only to Niger in sub-Saharan Africa.

The proposed US defense budget will cost the U.S. public two billion dollars per day. President Obama’s administration is seeking a 33 billion dollar supplemental to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most U.S. people are aware of Taleban atrocities, and many may believe the U.S. troops are in Afghanistan to protect Afghan villagers from Taleban human rights abuses. At least the mainstream news media in Germany and the UK will air stories of atrocities. The U.S. people are disadvantaged inasmuch as the media and the Pentagon attempt to pacify us, winning our hearts and minds to bankroll ongoing warfare and troop escalation in Afghanistan. Yet it isn’t very difficult to pacify U.S. people. We’re easily distracted from the war, and when we do note that an atrocity has happened, we seem more likely to respond with a shrug of dismay than with a sustained protest.

At the Winter Soldier hearings, future presidential hopeful John Kerry movingly asked Congress how it could ask a soldier “To be the last man to die for a mistake,” while contemporary polls showed less prominent Americans far more willing to call the Vietnam war an evil – a crime – a sin – than “a mistake.” The purpose of that war, as of Obama’s favored war in Afghanistan, was to pacify dangerous populations – to make them peaceful, to win the battle of hearts and minds.

Afghan civilian deaths no longer occur at the rate seen in the war’s first few months, in which the civilian toll of our September 11 attacks, pretext for the war then as it is now, was so rapidly exceeded.

But every week we hear – if we are listening very carefully to the news, if we are still reading that final paragraph on page A16 – or if we are following the work of brave souls like Jerome Starkey - of tragic mistakes. We are used to tragic mistakes. Attacking a country militarily means planning for countless tragic mistakes.

Some of us still let ourselves believe that the war can do some good in Afghanistan, that our leaders’ motives for escalating the war, however dominated by strategic economic concerns and geopolitical rivalries, still in some small part include the interests of the Afghan people.

There are others who know where this war will lead and know that our leaders know, and have simply become too fatigued, too drained of frightened tears by this long decade of nightmare, to hold those leaders accountable anymore for moral choices.

It’s worthwhile to wonder, how did we become this pacified?

But far more important is our collective effort to approach the mirror, to stay in front of it, unflinching, and see the consequences of our mistaken acquiescence to the tragic mistakes of war, and then work, work hard, to correct our mistakes and nonviolently resist collaboration with war crimes.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence and helps promote the Peaceable Assembly Campaign, a Voices project to end U.S. funding for war and occupation.

Steve Burns: Cheer up, progressives, you're more powerful than you thought!

I'm not sure which prankster is responsible for this, but somehow I got added to an email list for subscribers to the right-wing magazine The American Spectator. When the emails first started arriving, I resisted the temptation to send them directly off to my spam folder and decided to take a peek inside.

And boy, am I glad I did, because my weekly trips into the Bizarro world of right-wing "thought" have left me feeling - to use an oft-abused word - "empowered."

After all, what lefty wouldn't feel a few inches taller after reading an editorial entitled Beware the Emboldened Left?

And, as someone who has no fondness for the for-profit insurance industry, how could I not be cheered by Spectator columnist William Tucker's prediction that the result of "Obamacare" will be "insurance company bankruptcies"? (Somehow, Wall Street failed to get the news.)

Of course, it's easy to dismiss all of this as a Glenn Beckian paranoid fantasy of the sort that places the now-bankrupt ACORN at the center of a George-Soros-funded plan for Marxist revolution.

But, as much as it pains me to say it, I think the Spectator might be on to something. For example, there's columnist Philip Klein's prediction that, "Once he signs the comprehensive health care bill into law this week, Obama will ...complete the third major wave of entitlement expansion in America."

I'm assuming waves one and two were Social Security and Medicaid, respectively (unfortunately, the Spectator doesn't provide translation for outsiders like me, who are deaf to its dog-whistle politics.)

While the Spectator's facts may be shaky, their fear is real enough. Specifically, their greatest fear is of a government "entitlement" that, once established, can never be taken away. Any political movement largely comprised of elderly folks, some of whom show up at rallies with "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" signs, must understand this point all too well.

Yes, I know, those of us who will soon be forced to buy insurance from for-profit insurers aren't exactly feeling "entitled" at the moment.

Perhaps a better word than "entitlement" is "expectation." Whatever else it has accomplished with its kinda-sorta reform, the Obama administration has succeeded in creating the expectation among tens of millions of Americans that the government is somehow going to help them get insurance. Those expectations have been further raised by the dishonest rhetoric that Obama himself has used to sell the bill, saying just last week in Iowa, "32 million people are going to have health insurance because of this legislation." Please note that it's "going to have", not "going to be forced to buy." The gap between that rhetoric and the reality millions of Americans are going to be facing come 2014 is an organizing opportunity big enough to drive an ambulance full of pro-single-payer doctors through.

What the Spectator sees that you and I usually don't see is a relentless march toward the expansion of government spending and government services, and if you confine your view purely to Social Security and Medicare, it's hard to argue with that point of view. Although the U.S. military now consumes roughly half of all government discretionary spending, spending on Social Security and Medicare push the military down to about a quarter of total spending. The fact that we taxpayers are spending more to help people than to kill people must be a never-ending annoyance to the folks at the Spectator.

Furthermore, there's the growing acceptance of fundamental progressive ideas that the Spectator's columnists have to contend with. No question is more central to our national political debates that this one: When people run into serious problems, should they be left to fend for themselves, or should they get a helping hand from the government? Oddly enough, "Leave 'em to die in the gutter!" doesn't appear to be the basis of a winning political platform.

Now mix in a general sense of cultural besiegement, as they observe the growing weakness of some of their favorite "wedge issues", witness a new spirit of tolerance among evangelical youth, and watch record-breaking crowds flock to a film that argues for the right of indigenous people to violently resist imperialism, and you start to see why someone on the right might see progressivism as a relentless - and even unstoppable - force, even if few progressives see it that way.

So why don't more progressives see ourselves as powerful? I think it's because we don't compare our power to the waning power of conservatives, but instead choose to measure ourselves against our true - and strongest - opponents, the corporations. Given corporate ownership of all three branches of government, progressive victories in the court of public opinion don't translate into progressive victories in public policy.

In fact, a good short summary of today's zeitgest might be: "An increasingly progressive public held in check by corporate power." All real political battles today are between progressive forces and corporate forces, with corporations usually winning. Conservatives aren't even in the game any more.

This increasingly common struggle between progressive ideals and corporate power often manifests itself in messy compromises along the lines of, "OK, we'll provide you with more services, but our corporate funders have to get first bid on the contracts." That's the formula that produced the Obama health care plan, although it's Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, who should probably get credit for originating the formula with the 2003 establishment of Medicare Advantage, a prescription-drug benefit administered by for-profit insurers (Why didn't that count as the "third major wave of entitlement expansion in America"? Sorry, but you'll have to ask Spectator columnist Philip Klein that question.) The fate of Medicare Advantage, which is on its way to becoming a government-administered program after for-profit insurers reaped a bit too much profit at taxpayer expense, gives some hope that corporate contracts are temporary, but entitlements are forever.

Why, I can hardly wait for next week's installment of The American Spectator, so I can read where our mighty and unstoppable progressive movement is headed next.

Steve Burns: Mapping a path to single-payer

For those of us who want to see the U.S. enact a single-payer health care system, the past year has been a frustrating and even humiliating experience. Denied a seat at the table as health care "reform" was discussed and completely ignored by the media, we then had to endure the painful sight of one of our strongest champions, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, reduced to a broken man, as he abandoned his demand for even a public option, single-payer's weak-tea substitute. Joining Kucinich were 77 House Democrats who had all pledged to withhold their vote for any bill lacking a public option; all folded in the end.

So this probably isn't the best time for a single-payer advocate to look for the bright side, and it seems even more of a delusional exercise to try to lay out a path from the Rube Goldberg contraption cooked up by House and Senate Democrats towards a sensible system of health care delivery.

But let's try, nonetheless. How do we get to single payer from here?

First, let's start by recognizing one of our strongest allies in the push for single payer, the insurance industry itself. If we can count on anything, we can count on the greed and short-sightedness of the health insurance industry to do a large part of our work for us.

Imagine you're an insurance company CEO, and you've just been handed tens of millions of new compulsory customers, all forced to buy your defective products. And, thanks to the small army of lobbyists you enlisted, you've completely escaped any meaningful cost controls. How would you respond to this situation? "Wait a minute..." you say, "People have to buy my product, no matter how much I raise the price, and there's no limit on how far I can raise the price?" The 40% premium hikes we saw earlier this year are just a small taste of things to come.

Of course, the price of health insurance has been increasing at far beyond the rate of inflation for decades now (more than doubling in the past ten years), but the difference now is that the government is on the hook for those price increases in a way it was not before. Under the new legislation, costs to individuals forced to buy private insurance are capped at a percentage of income, and real incomes aren't going to increase any time soon, so that leaves the feds picking up a larger and larger share of premium costs.

So we can expect the federal costs of this "reform" to skyrocket, as insurance CEO's do what they do best - raise their prices and profits through the roof. This will inevitably set up a tension in the House and Senate between fiscal conservatives, opposed to these rapidly escalating costs, and corporatists, both liberal and conservative, who want to keep shoveling taxpayer money into the for-profit insurance industry.

Whenever you're facing the overwhelming power of a corrupt government-corporate "partnership" (as we increasingly are these days), it's important to look for a wedge issue that can split the partnership apart, and get the cronies fighting among themselves. Escalating federal costs - tied to escalating insurance-industry profits - are that wedge.

But squabbles among corporate elites and government elites aren't enough. We need a strong, broadly-based popular movement to hammer the wedge in further. Where will that movement come from?

Here, I'm sorry to say, some patience is required. Over the past year, there has been enormous opposition to the Obama bill, both from people like me on the left, and from the entire Republican party on the right. But, as we all know, this opposition alone wasn't enough to prevail. One key reason was that the opposition was ideologically based, and therefore easily divided along ideological lines. A "movement" that requires me to work with Glenn Beck is obviously never going to get anywhere.

How do we build a stronger and broader movement against mandatory for-profit insurance? Here, it's important to recognize two points:

1) Whenever we're talking about a bill that has not yet become law, opposition will inevitably form along ideological lines, because arguments pro and con will be based on predictions about what may happen in the future, which are in turn dependent on our assumptions about how the world works, which are naturally dependent on one's ideology.

2) The number of people involved in an ideologically-based movement will always be much smaller than the number of people who join in a self-interest-based movement, especially in a depoliticized nation like the United States. The vast majority of Americans -- who listen to neither Glenn Beck nor Amy Goodman -- tend to take a "wait and see" approach to legislation, a position they're encouraged to take by our media, which provides virtually no useful information about a bill until the bill is passed. Our government and media elites treat us as spectators rather than participants in the process of governing, and most Americans accept the spectator role, whether reluctantly or willingly, until their own personal interests are directly threatened.

In short, no strong popular movement until self-interest begins to bite. And the bite won't come until 2016 (remember, I said some patience is required). Around 2016, millions of Americans will be receiving letters from their favorite government agency, the IRS, notifying them that they must either spend thousands of dollars out-of-pocket to buy insurance from insanely profitable - and insanely unpopular - for-profit insurers, or pay a fine to the IRS and get nothing in return (the bill actually sets the start date for the individual mandate at 2014, but serious fines for non-participation don't really kick in until 2016.)

How will those millions of Americans respond? Some will respond ideologically, of course, and we will surely see a populist movement on the right based on civil disobedience and non-participation in the hated Obama plan.

The right-wing populists will win the bulk of the media attention (as they always do) but the response of most Americans to the insurance mandate will be based on rational calculations of self-interest rather than ideology. Most of those facing the mandate will compare the costs and benefits, and if their need for insurance is great enough, and their ability to pay is great enough, they will enroll. Many will even be grateful for the opportunity to buy insurance that they could not afford previously.

The opportunity to build a broad popular movement against mandatory for-profit insurance comes not from the ideologues, but from the millions of Americans who will not be able to pay the cost demanded for private insurance. Think about any working-class family you know. Do they have $1500 to $8600 socked away in a savings account, waiting to be handed over to Humana or WellPoint? Of course not. Rather, millions of American families are just one major car repair bill away from insolvency. These people will disobey the mandate, not because they're being told to do so by Glenn Beck, but because they simply cannot pay.

The key question will be whether those who cannot pay view their actions through a lens of individual failure -- the failure to earn enough to participate in the for-profit insurance market -- or as a political act and a collective act. Will they join with others who also cannot pay, and organize into a political force? Clearly, single-payer advocates have a role to play here.

The challenge for single-payer advocates like me will be that an opposition movement built of those who cannot pay will not, at first, be based on a desire to completely remake the system. Rather, it will form around a demand to make federal subsidies more generous, so that everyone can participate in the system. This is a demand we should heartily endorse, knowing that any changes that increase the federal share of premium costs will further drive in the wedge between Congressional corporatists and Congressional fiscal conservatives. Our short term goal should be to make the system more expensive, so that pressure in Congress to reduce costs by cutting private insurers out will increase.

But what is the chance that, even facing rapidly escalating costs, Congress would ever choose to cut their insurance-industry cronies off from the public feeding trough? Ironically, the health "reform" bill itself contains two small seeds of hope.

The first is in cuts to the Medicare Advantage system, first established under President Clinton and later expanded by President Bush, which provided government subsidies to for-profit insurers to offer supplemental coverage to those on Medicare. The entirely predictable outcome of this plan was that private insurers profited at public expense, until the Obama administration saw a ripe opportunity for cost savings with which to fund the President's larger health care plan. In fact, the bulk of cuts in Medicare in the Obama plan come from cuts to for-profit Medicare Advantage providers, which could lead to a shifting of these services out of the for-profit sector and back into the public sector.

The second seed of hope buried within the bill's 2000 pages has nothing to do with health care. It's in changes to the federal student loan program that would have the federal government lend directly to students, cutting for-profit bankers out of the very profitable (for them) student loan market. This common-sense change was helped along by several high-profile scandals in which bankers "partnered" with colleges and universities to steer students into high-cost, high-profit loan packages. As with Medicare advantage, and as I expect to be the case with mandatory insurance, the CEO's proved to be their own worst enemies - and our best allies.

Clearly, none of this is going to happen quickly. It will be six years before the individual mandate begins to take hold in a serious way, and a falling-out between corporate-government "partners" over escalating costs won't happen soon, either (It was nearly seven years between the Bush administration's massive expansion of Medicare Advantage in 2003 and the Obama administration's cuts to the program in 2010.) But, for those of us who demand single-payer, long-term struggle is nothing new. Our parents and grandparents joined in this struggle in 1948, and our children may be part of the struggle in 2020. Now is not the time to give up hope.

Steve Burns is Program Director of Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.