[cross-posted at NPR Check]

Monday's Morning Edition featured another NPR exclusive on Afghanistan. Mary Louise Kelly was on to explain all about the Two-Clock Theory of War. Opening the report Renee Montagne explains:

"We begin this morning with Afghanistan and a story about two clocks: one ticks in Washington, the other in Kabul. They measure progress in the war. The challenge: they are moving at very different speeds" [notice the bloodless euphemisms - "progress" and "challenge"].

All perspectives in the story are provided by war advocates [Peter Feaver -Bush speech-shaper, warmakers Petraeus, Gates, and Mullen - and Steven Biddle, CFR fellow, who Kelly notes is "part of a team advising General Stanley McChrystal...on his war strategy"].

According to Kelly and all her experts, there are always two clocks in US warmaking: the grown-up, big-boy clock of the presidents, generals, and admirals as they bomb, occupy, kill, and destroy. This serious and mature clock ticks very slowly and takes years to produce progress and - ultimately - victory. Opposed to this is the childish, impatient clock of the American public which whizzes away at double or triple time and leads the uninformed masses to reject the wisdom of the wars that the serious grown-ups are running. Kelly's guest Feaver states that "A longstanding criticism of democracies, but especially the American democracy, is that Americans are impatient. They want to see success sooner than later."

2025: the end of US dominance --
the National Intelligence Council global trends review is out, and contrary to 2004's rosy view of 2020-- still dominated by US and with oil to burn--the new forecast sees things very differently. (pdf link to full report at bottom article)

"... the world is entering an increasingly unstable and unpredictable period in which the advance of western-style democracy is no longer assured, and some states are in danger of being "taken over and run by criminal networks". ..."

Odd, weird, kewl, something else? I guess I don't know.

This is one of those 'posted without comment' thingees, but I think I'll add it to m y Netflix list, just for fun.

I'm not so sure Obama has seized the remote, but in the sofa ruckus he may have luckily hit one of the buttons. There are indications he may be creating broader acceptance of his proposals for Iraq and Afghanistan:

Sen. Barack Obama, on his first and likely only overseas trip as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has remade the campaign's foreign policy playing field, neatly sidestepping Republican charges that he has been naive and wrong on Iraq and moving to a broader, post-Iraq focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In essence, Obama has declared the war in Iraq all but over...

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Ok, Correntians, this is one of these long and substantial posts of mine where one of you shows up in the comments and summarizes the whole thing in 2 lines... making me look like a blabbering fool!

It's been a while since I've done one of these posts on reports - most of the time by IRIN - on the deplorable conditions under which women and girls live in many parts of the world. However, the articles have been piling up in my Newsreader, so, it's time for one. So here we go:  Read more…

Lords in the Rubble
(sung to the tune of Paul Simon's Boy in the Bubble)

It was a blown day
And the press was bleating
And braying on a tv news show
It was a fight night
A gathering of new widows
A psalm at the end of marriage
No choir but ready to go
These are the ways of military blunders
This is the end of it all
The way they hammered hollows in our old soul
The lives they took from us all
The way we went off to a violent invasion
The crying of the mourners who say bye
These are the days of military blunders
And don’t sigh, baby, don’t sigh
Don’t sigh

Like it or not, our next president will have to deal with conflicts all over the world. The nature of warfare has been changing (a lot of ink has been spent on this already) but obviously, this administration did not read the memo.

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five years of war have been worth it
the blood and the bombs and the rot
cities lay buried in rubble
melted metal from our melting pot

arms, hands and legs are buried in bags
children are all blown apart
lives once descended have now fully ended
destruction is our finest art

the poets and hippies are sappy and drippy
they were wrong, right from day one
we dance in the streets among human meat
goddamn, but war is such fun, boys
goddamn, but war is such fun

If you haven't read these, and you like literature, fiction, and the creative use of languages, you're missing out on treasure. From what I'm reading today, I offer this little gem.

...but what [the captured enemy soldier] had said set me thinking of the North, and I found I knew next to nothing about it.

When I had been a boy, scrubbing floors and running errands in the Citadel, the war itself had seemed almost infintely remote. I knew that most of the matrosses who manned the major batteries had taken part in it, but I knew it just as I knew that the sunlight that fell upon my hand had been to the sun. I would be a torturer, and as a torturer I would have no reason to enter the army and no reason to fear that I would be impressed into it. I never expected to see the war at the gates of [the City]...I never expected to leave the City, or even to leave [my own] quarter of the city called the Citadel.

The North...was then inconceivably remote, a place as distant as the most distant galaxy, since both were forever out of reach. Mentally, I confused it with the dying belt of tropical vegetation that lay between our own land and theirs, although I would have distinguished the two without difficulty if [my teaching Master] had asked me to in the classroom.

But of [the North] itself I had no idea. I did not know if it had great cities or none. I did not know if it was mountainous like the northern or eastern parts of our Commonwealth or as level as our pampas. I did have the impression (although I could not be sure it was correct) that is was a single land mass like our South; and most distinct of all, I had the impression of an innumerable people...an inexhaustible swarm that almost became a creature of itself, as a colony of ants does.

...to think of those millions and millions without speech, or confined to parroting proverbial phrases that must surely have long ago lost most of their meaning, was nearly more than the mind could bear. Speaking almost to myself, I said, "It must surely be a trick, or a lie, or a mistake. Such a nation could not exist."

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“We’ve worn handmade peace shirts every Thursday since the first week of school, without fail,” Skylar said.

But what started out as a light-hearted gesture soon started to be taken out of context.

Students started approaching the group members, yelling obscene things at them, said Lauren.

“People just turned on us like that,” she said. “At least 10 boys stood up and yelled things at me at once, and we couldn’t even walk through the halls without a harsh comment being made.”

The heckling began early in the school year, according to group members. They said they were putting small posters promoting peace on friends’ lockers with their permission.

They thought it was OK, because the cheerleaders and football players had signs on theirs. Eventually, though, group members said they were told by the school’s administration they could no longer hang up the posters.

“People tore them down and drew swastikas and ‘white power’ stuff on them,” Lauren said.

Skylar had similar things written on her posters.

“Someone taped an ‘I Love Bush’ sign over my ‘Wage Peace’ sign,” she said. “So I tore it down, threw it away, and the whole commons starting booing. I walk by later and find that someone has completely tore my sign down and placed an ‘I Love America, Because America Loves War’ sign up.”

—Students Wear Confederate Flag Shirts To Oppose Peace-Shirt Group, commondreams.org | sombrero tip to C&L

IT SAYS SOMETHING very revealing that there are young people who think that symbols made immortal by Adolf Hitler are a valid response to a peace sign today. Who see the confederate flag (and it is not being used here to represent "heritage," if you don't mind) as a sane response to a peace symbol. Who feel that White Supremacy is the counter-argument to those who ask to live without war between nations. And maybe those pundits who entertain the notion that the USA is engaged in wars of "Liberation" and such should look to the children, who so often lead the way. When we care to pay attention, that is. Because clearly, the kids are not misled. Not by our equivocating fairNBalanced frenzies. When they go crazy it is because of the binds we provide, a series of traps to which we've often long been blind. But those newer, more naive, less compromised and cluttered minds always suss out the truth behind our apathy-weighted sighs and rationalized diatribes. And they know what these wars are about. No, not about Freedom, or Peace, or Liberty, or Democracy, of course. Those are soundbytes for Fox-Watchers, para-citizens on brain vacation. The wars of our dear United States of America are about that dark desire that moves mobs to cheer a lynching; they are about about colonialism and imperialism and genocidal impulse and an all-too-human lust for dominance and violence and power at any cost.

[Dept. of You-Can't-Make-This-Up]
On the very same day the 5th Munitions Squadron loaded six nuclear warheads on a B-52 for transport out of Minot AFB (don't worry, five showed up in Barksdale) they released this press release:

"Advanced Cruise Missiles carry a W80-1 warhead with a yield of 5 to 150 kilotons" and are being flown over your head right now.

These lyrics were first posted on August 22nd, 2005 over at Mortaljive. Note: the link is to a week's worth of posting.

I repost these words here to mark the passing of time.

++++

A Toast to Noble Causes

Words are funny, they run and hide
They carry poison, they get you high
Marvelous, but better yet
Words are something
We haven't yet destroyed...completely

Just asking.

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"Djibouti's main economic asset is its strategic location.

Courage, it is said, is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of the fear.

Yes I'm scared. There's good reason to be. Even if I don't see them, there are snipers on the roof across the street and several drones on the way. But I insist on truth. I'm gonna fill in some of the blanks here, and I pray you'll look The Beast right in the eye.

The United States government has not formally declared war in over fifty years. The US Constitution confines that responsibility to the Congress. President Bush ignores that (because he prides himself on his ignorance), but screw him, y'know?

And Vice President Cheney, over the past week, has snarled his snarl in support of the President like the rabid bulldog that his truly is. Screw him, too, y'know? I realized that I, nearly sixty and weighing only a hundred-fifty pounds, could take the SOB on and knock him silly in a fair fight. Leave the shot gun home, Dick. You're a damn coward, slinking around in your "undisclosed locations." Come out, come out, wherever you are. You do scare me, but you don't intimidate me. You're out there snarling these days because more and more of the truth is seeping though the cracks and it looks like your game may be lost, the jig may be up, and your and Doubleduh's position may be overrun before 2008. I think these days you're more scared than we are.

OK, citizen, turn off "24" or "The Unit" or whatever the hell you're watching with the Miller Lite in your fist, and give me just a few minutes. Treat this like a commercial . . . I know you can do it. It might sting a little bit, because "the truth will set you free, but first it'll drive you crazy." You can take it, right? You're not a coward, right? . . .

More at P!

This is part of the P! series on "Waging Peace". Part 6 will explore the forces of peace available and building in the US and around the globe.

Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here; Part 3 is here; Part 4 is
here.

There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for . . .

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent . . .

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary. -- Mohandas Ghandi

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. -- Dwight Eisenhower

War does not end strife - it sows it. War does not end hatred - it feeds it. For those who argue war is a necessary evil, I say you are half right. War is evil (where strife, there every evil work: Bible, James 3:16). But it is not necessary. War cannot be a necessary evil, because non-violence is a necessary good. The two cannot co-exist. -- Congressman John Lewis

Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. -- Hermann Göring

A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend. -- J. William Fulbright

Waging war to produce peace is a fantastic and ultimate contradiction in terms. At its most essential and spiritual levels, victory does not exist. It is at best a fleeting illusion.

The author Chalmers Johnson (Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire), among many others, has more than convincingly shown how war only seeds more war by, at least, creating resentment and the roots of revenge; by dividing peoples and nations arbitrarily with imposed new borders; by seeing and implementing short-term "strategic solutions" that ignore and/or create longer-term disastrous consequences.

Much of humanity shrugs, claiming that war is inevitable and "a fact of human nature." I absolutely reject that belief. It is not so "black and white". I do believe that humans do carry a tendency to resort to violence, but at the same time ontologically wish and hope for peace. In this context, it is possible to nurture the spirit of peace and starve the appetite for war. Where I am called "naive" in believing this, I wear the appellation proudly as a badge of honor. I say that those who promote war as a solution for anything are ignorant morons.

I submit that "victory" in war is always at the cost of thousands, perhaps millions, of souls, the elimination of nations and cultures, the laying waste of the earth, the expenditure of wealth and resources that could otherwise be used to construct and defend peace, elevating the lives and security of all peoples. Peace without war is by contrast cheap, in some cases free. It is certain that the maintenance of peace is always less costly than the waging of war.

Göring's quote, above, is perfectly true. War and the conditions of war are manufactured by the few, who imagine that they have something to gain for themselves (power and riches). These few generally do not reveal the true motivation for war, but sell war to the many by lies, deceit, and fear. The few rarely actually fight. The waging of war is the task of the many.

On February 6, 2007 Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced in the US House H.R. 808 [PDF], which would establish a cabinet-level US Department of Peace and Nonviolence.

In the "Findings" section of the legislation, we find:

Most people, particularly those in the Blogosphere, don’t know or don’t care to know – it’s about to be on. Compton is about to look like Rio; Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Long Beach, Detroit – all those deeply impoverished areas, urban and rural; black, brown, yellow and white, are about to explode. France, Rio, Mexico. This is here in America, all the immigrants from America’s proxy wars in Latin America, the veterans of the drug war, they are all here getting hungrier by the day.

Just Because It's An Old Idea Doesn't Mean It's A Bad Idea One of the characteristics of the illness I call "americanism" is the tendency to pay attention to style and hype rather than truth.

If you thought the US military was way too big, and a danger to its own country and the rest of the world, how would you go about reducing it, or at least its effectiveness in imposing imperialism? It was by all measures and estimations the most indominable force ever assembled...but now?

President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the "stressed" U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.

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-The cost of equipping an infantry soldier tripled, from $7000 in 1999 to $24,000 today.
-The cost of Humvee's went from $32,000 in 2001 to a breathtaking $225,000 each today.
-The cost of training, feeding and housing Army recruits went from $75,000 per soldier in 2001 to $120,000 today. (The Army uses private contractors, largely Halliburton's Kellogg, Root & Brown, to provide most non-training services, such as food service and base maintenance.)

"Wartime president."

Those words have an amazing power over the American mind it seems. Along with the myth that *we* only go to war for good causes, and invariably in self-defense, we buy into the myth that we must cede greater power than is usually considered to be the norm to The Leader in such times. Because all our experience from childhood on seems to confirm that when you have a big job to do, you need one person to direct things, and for everybody else to do what that person says, or else everybody just runs around higgledy-piggledy or Keystone Kopsishly, getting in each other's way, whacking each other's heads with long boards, trying to go through narrow doorways three abreast, and the like.

Obviously, because of my training I'm really intrigued by this. Poetry and Assyriology, what a combination. Think a bit on what he's suggesting. It's deeper than it may seem at first glance.