I didn't anticipate yesterday's email would find a writer so immersed in the same subject. While the Pentagon Review is still in mind or on hand, here is his response. Peter Attwood's essays provide the critical historical parallels for understanding and a spur for opposition. Just click them on. Thank you, Peter.
I've added a broad look at another aspect of this train, one that can unite sufficient sectors of our society to turn things around. The original article uses Vietnam as valuable historical percedent, but was too long for this mailing. Click on the Mother Jones site for the complete version. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Attwood To: Ed Pearl Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 9:54 AM Subject: Re: Pentagon review: America's Long War You're absolutely right about this. You're exaggerating nothing. The most precise model, as I've argued for several years, is the Japanese parliamentary system of the 1920s turning into a hollow shell as the militarists and the Kwantung Army took things into their own hands behind the parliamentary facade without officially doing away with it. The process of privatizing American militarism and freeing it from all constitutional restraint, in the manner of Japan's Kwantung Army, had gone far in Clinton's reign, as Chalmers Johnson documented in "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" five years ago. My own, in late September 2001, may also interest you, and explains why I've been working on this ever since. These things are not necessarily fated, but they are if we don't pay attention: http://home.earthlink.net/%7Eattwoods/to_arabs_muslims_Sept2001.html Why the US empire is so precisely following the Japanese path, as well as that of Hitler and Milosevic, with a government so like 18th century Britain and an attitude toward its "allies" so like their wooden-headed governments of the 1760s I argue below: http://home.earthlink.net/~attwoods/antichrist10.html The excerpt on Japan: America and Imperial Japan Remember the "China Incident" - Japan's endless war in China in the 1930s? Consider Foreign Minister Matsuoka in 1937, explaining that Japan was fighting for two goals, to prevent Asia from falling completely under white man's domination, and to prevent the spread of Communism in China: "No treasure trove is in her eyes - only sacrifices upon sacrifices. No one realizes this more than she does. But her very life depends on it, as do those of her neighbors as well. The all-absorbing question before Japan today is: Can she bear the cross?" History shows that this assertion of purity was complete nonsense, but I have no doubt that Matsuoka was sincere. To live with themselves, oppressors and robbers must bewitch themselves with the nobility of their undertakings, just as Jesus said, "They rob widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers." Now Bush and his people talk just like Matsuoka, and American foreign policy is more and more driven by narrow military thinking, as happened to Japan in the 1930s. Just as Japan looted Asia in the 1930s, the new American militarists openly plunder even their own citizens - never mind Iraqis and other foreigners. Haven't we in California been ripped off by Dick Cheney and his friends at Enron just as they are doing to the Iraqi people, putting the Iraqi economy up for sale contrary to the Hague Convention? To this day Cheney is stonewalling Congress about the energy swindle, just as the Bush administration is stonewalling Congress about 9/11. Like Japan in China, today's American militarists keep winning in Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia, and elsewhere, killing and dispossessing many thousands - and yet final victory eludes them as they antagonize the whole world. The Japanese drive for empire and conquest was in fact driven by weakness, the fear of being starved for oil and other raw materials, and by an exaggerated fear of Communism and instability in China. The American drive for empire is driven by the same cowardly fear of not being in control of everything - fearing hostile ideology and instability, and fearing to be cut off from raw materials, notably petroleum. In the same way that Japanese parliamentary politics gradually gave way under this endless war to a militarized, though ostensibly civilian, dictatorship, the US is reaping at home the oppression it sows abroad. Already the American press is completely cowed, afraid to show America the truth about its behavior in Iraq that the rest of the world sees every day. It will be interesting to see in coming years how flagrantly the American empire will act to seize Canada's water to solve its own impending water crisis, especially as global warming increases the pressure. My coworker came by my desk to crow about the parade of American tanks in Tikrit, because now the Iraqis would know the Americans mean business - and what a triumph it was that the Americans had Iraqi civil defense guys in their parade. Yes, I reminded him, and they've been blowing up the houses of people they suspect of fighting against them, just like the Israelis in their occupation. "It's not like Israel at all! It's not an occupation, it's a liberation! You know that!" was his response. In vain did I point out that how he wants to see it will not determine how others see it, and how it actually is. He is a Christian Zionist who considers himself a born again Christian, although welcoming hard truth, as Jesus taught, is no part of his religion - much the contrary. My point here is that his mentality is that of the ideologues running this show - like that of the Japanese militarists, Stalinists as documented in Solzhenitsyn, and other fanatics of that type. Being idolaters who worship their own "wisdom," they define reality by their view of the world, rather than letting their view of the world be disciplined by truth as real life teaches it. They will keep on doing astonishingly stupid things, because fanatical ideology makes drunk. Imitating imperial Japan, the United States has gone to war against Iraq and the Muslim world to defeat political Islam. They have instead strengthened it by their atrocities against the Iraqi people, just as Japan went to war in North China to stop Communism, and thereby brought the Communists to power by their atrocities against the Chinese people. Like the Japanese in North China, the Americans have set up puppet governments through which to work their imperial will, but are America's Afghan and Iraqi "governments" any more credible than Japan's Manchukuo? New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus wrote of the Japanese just before Pearl Harbor: As members of a divine family state, in which religion and patriotism merge, they do not merely say, "My country right or wrong!" but they are convinced with all the fervor of religious faith that their country is right, whatever mistakes individual statesmen may make. Is this not just how Americans think of their own country, especially American Christians, who can only think this way by rejecting everything that Jesus and the prophets teach about the nations of this world? America defeated imperial Japan, but did not take care to confront its own vulnerability to the Japanese imperial mindset. Imperial Japan was defeated, but the Japanese imperial spirit found a comfortable home in a land full of pride. *** http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/03/cost_of_iraq_war.html The Real Cost of the Iraq War Commentary: Finding the tipping point for Vietnam -- and for Iraq By Mark Engler February 23, 2006 In the center of the www.CostOfWar.com home page, an upward-racing ticker, presented in a large, red font, keeps a steady tally of the money spent for the U.S. war in Iraq. Every time I visit, it takes a moment to sort through the counter's decimal places and make sense of it. The hundreds of dollars fly by too quickly to track. The thousands change a little faster than once a second. As I write, the ticker reads $239,302,273,144. It is worth staring at the site for a while to see the vast sums accumulate. Yet this exercise in wartime accounting quickly becomes unsatisfying. First of all, few Americans have any frame of reference for evaluating a number like $239 billion. The National Priorities Project, the organization hosting the counter, attempts to remedy this by allowing visitors to compare war costs with expenditures on pre-school, health care, and public housing, noting, for example, that this much money could provide basic immunizations for every child born worldwide in the next 79 years. Even then, the incomprehensibly large number ticking away on screen turns out to be no measure at all of what we will eventually pay for the war. Depending on what estimate you use, it could be off by almost a factor of ten. After all, it lacks a place for the trillions. So how much will the war cost? The question occasionally appears in the media, never a new issue, never a settled one either. Still, there are some certainties about the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. One is that it keeps going up. The President has now submitted a "guns over butter" budget to Congress that increases Pentagon spending to $440 billion, while taking away funds from social services at home and development assistance abroad. One of the great curiosities of this huge sum is that it does not include funding for the wars we are actually fighting. Those are appropriated separately -- this year, the White House will reportedly be asking for another $120 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly equal to what it spent in 2005. Another certainty of wartime accounting is that the cost of the war in Iraq will remain far higher than the Bush administration wants anyone to think. It's already stratospherically beyond the initial estimate of $50-60 billion used to sell its war to the public. That number was meant to conjure memories of the previous Gulf War -- Operation Desert Storm -- an engagement Americans recall as swift and relatively painless, in part because an array of allies helped pay for it. The U.S. ponied up only $7 billion for that conflict. The administration's other magic trick was taking Larry Lindsey, the White House economic advisor who publicly suggested in late 2002 that a military return to Iraq would cost closer to $100-200 billion, and making him disappear. In the years since Baghdad fell, several analysts have sought better estimates for the war's true cost. In August 2005, Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver at the Institute for Policy Studies issued a paper predicting that the total cost could reach $700 billion at the then-current spending level of $5.6 billion per month. Like the CostOfWar.com tally, this figure included only direct expenditures. Last month, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes released a report that took a wider view. Hinting at the human cost of the occupation -- which, of course, requires its own ghastly page in the ledger of wartime accounting -- the report factored in the government-assigned "value of statistical life" for troops killed in combat. (It did not include the loss of Iraqi lives.) It tallied items such as the costs of health care for wounded veterans, increased recruitment spending for a hard-up Pentagon, and the opportunity costs of more productive public investments that might have been made if funds had not been diverted overseas. Following Congressional Budget Office predictions for troop deployment, the report considers the possibilities of full U.S. withdrawal by 2010 to 2015. All told, the two economists put the cost to the U.S. at between $1 trillion (their most "conservative" estimate) and $2.2 trillion (their "moderate" one). Sixty billion, 239 billion, 2.2 trillion dollars. The more such figures swirl, the more necessary it is to change the question. The real matter at hand is not, "How much will it cost?" but, "When does it start to matter?" 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