Author: John Grant

 
The patient, by the name of Israel, walks into the room and instantly bursts into a tirade of arguments conclusively proving his credentials, and says that he is better than everyone else.
 

The opening line of Israel On The Couch: The Psychology of the Peace Process
-By Ofer Grosbard, a clinical psychologist born in Israel, who practices in the US
 
 
Americans have an Israel problem.

Recently I responded to an email propaganda piece on Israel sent out by a friend that listed all the magnificent things Israelis have done in technology and agriculture. The clear implication was that Arabs and Palestinians can’t hold a candle to Israelis when it comes to making the desert bloom. Israelis are clearly superior and, thus, deserve to own what was once called Palestine.

I told the list of people (many of them American Jews) that everything on the list was likely true but that it was a case of making an economic and technological argument in response to a moral question. That is, pointing out how smart and savvy in western ways Israelis are does not address the festering military occupation of Palestinian land and the effective imprisonment of Palestinians.

One member of the list went back-and-forth with me — until a handful of others on the list began to cry out “enough!” Naturally, one person pointed out there were many anti-semites in the world, the suggestion being I must be one of them.

Jerusalem

The problem Americans have with Israel is that the region it exists in is in the midst of a major political sea change, while Israel is frozen in time and holding on to its militarist, right-wing policies of extending settlements in the West Bank. It’s a policy that harks back to the ideas of the British-trained militarist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, which is based on the idea a live-and-let-live policy between Jews and Arabs is impossible and, thus, Jews must militarily control and repress Palestinians. Here’s Jabotinsky:

“Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”

This frame of mind is at the root of the current psychology that keeps Israel frozen in time. By extension, it’s a potentially grave problem for Americans.

 
When we talk about
settling the world’s problems,
we’re barking up the wrong tree.

The world is perfect. It’s a mess.
It has always been a mess.

We are not going to change it.

Our job is to straighten out
our own lives.

– Joseph Campbell
 

I just returned from visiting friends in Maine, a place famous as an August getaway for refugees from the east coast rat-race. Historically, those who got away to Maine were called “rusticators,” since they went to Maine to experience fresh air and the rustic life.

The Institute for Economics & Peace lists Maine number one in its United States Peace Index. They say Maine is the safest state in the union, and they suggest “peacefulness” is good for all economies and would save us hundreds of billions of dollars.

My friends live on the finger of a hand that extends into the sea. Their tidy house is surrounded by forest, and they are a short drive to several picturesque villages with lobster boats moored in their small harbors. While I was there my cell phone didn’t work, I didn’t check my emails and I didn’t read or watch any news for five days.

A Maine village

Then we drove home to our Philadelphia suburb and five days worth of New York Times, plus emails from several hundred people anguishing over one horror or another. Here’s just a partial list of the mess:

After making an effort to cut our addiction, the US is now relying on Saudi Arabian oil more than ever; the Egyptian president fired his armed forces chief and replaced him with a guy who publicly called for the removal of US military power from the Middle East and who said al Qaeda was an “international insurgency movement” motivated by grievances with US policy; young American Jews are flocking to join the Israeli Defense Force as right-wing Israeli leaders threaten to attack Iran before the US election; Syria is in flat-out civil war now spreading into Lebanon with both the US and al Qaeda supporting the same insurgent elements; in Afghanistan, 40 US soldiers are killed when two helicopters fall out of the sky (the Taliban say they shot the copters down, while the Pentagon tells us it was “mechanical difficulties.”)

 
Stop feeding the beast.
– Julieta Castellanos*
 

William Brownfield is a major architect in the current linkage between the failed Drug War and the War On Terror. He may succeed in making it an even greater failure in the future.

Brownfield has been Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement since January 20 of last year. Before that, he was the US ambassador to Colombia; and before that, he was the US ambassador to Venezuela, where he was notorious for taunting President Hugo Chavez.

Mr. Brownfield attended the National War College, and he speaks Spanish with a pronounced Texas accent. He reportedly considers himself a Texan — though, like George W. Bush, he was not born in Texas and has lived much of his life elsewhere. It seems being a “Texan” is a state of mind, especially vis-à-vis Latin America which has been Brownfield’s area of interest. He’s now looking to expand his war-making efforts into Africa.

William Brownfield up close and speaking in Guatemala with Guatemalan military officials behind him

It’s clear that Mr. Brownfield isn’t one of those striped pants diplomats from foggy bottom determined to keep tempers from reaching the boiling point. He doesn’t seem burdened by doubt, and he seems comfortable strategizing for war.

Regardless of party affiliation, it’s people like Brownfield who have turned the 40-year-old War On Drugs and The Global War On Terror into one all-encompassing, global war against “bad guys,” a category to be defined as the war moves “downrange.” Like grand chefs, these strategists have put the two wars into a National Security State blender and come up with what is The War Without End. American citizens were never asked if they wanted this war. It wasn’t necessary to ask — since Americans are encouraged to get lost in themselves and all the available bread and circus around them. We haven’t kept our eye on the ball and we now find ourselves the unwitting sustainers of an Orwellian state of constant war.

Life is overflowing with metaphorical material. Maneuvering through reality is a constant dialogue and negotiation between what’s inside our heads and what’s going on outside in the chaotic flow of what is. We understand what’s outside by comparing it with what’s inside. This is true whether or not the average anti-intellectual Joe Sixpack or Joe the Plumber recognizes it or not. In fact, those who don’t understand this process are the ones most swayed by metaphor and symbol because they don’t see it working on them.

This dialogue between inside and outside is what it means to be human. It’s also how power is parsed out in all cultures, especially ours. And in America, football is a big player in the process.

For all the above reasons, the just released Freeh Report on the Jerry Sandusky cover-up at Penn State is pretty incredible. In today’s New York Times, stories that started on both the Front Page and the Sports Page jumped to the Business Section. The story touches on a number of sensitive chords. The cable news shows love it.

The Penn State Campus, Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno before the fall

Like nothing we’ve seen lately, it lifts a huge and heavy flat rock to reveal dark, wriggling life underneath. It’s like the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet where an old man watering his lawn in an antiseptic suburban community suddenly suffers a stroke. The hose in his hand falls and becomes kinked, the perfect metaphor for a stroke. His head hits the grass. We begin to hear sounds of teeth crunching and struggle as the camera drops with a macro lens into the grass, to reveal a chaotic, Darwinian world of insects and survival of the fittest.

It’s a powerful metaphor to open a neo-noir film about the underbelly of seemingly ordered American suburban life. It leads to one of Dennis Hopper’s most menacing roles as a petty gangster.

 
Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500.
– Apocalypse Now
 

Over the past ten years, I’ve developed a friendship with Commer Glass, a 67-year-old African American man serving his 37th year of a life-without-parole sentence at Graterford State Prison outside Philadelphia. Glass fought as a 20-year-old combat infantryman in the thick woods west of Pleiku in the famous 1965 battle of the Ia Drang Valley. It was in the Ia Drang that US troops first went mano a mano with the North Vietnamese Army.

An NVA commander described the battle from the Vietnamese point of view this way: The order went down to the North Vietnamese soldiers to get close enough to the Americans to “grab them by their belt buckles.”

It was a horrific battle by anyone’s standards. There was a Mel Gibson movie made from a book about the battle titled We Were Soldiers Once … And Young by retired General Harold Moore and journalist Joseph Galloway.

To me, Glass is a casualty of that battle and of that unfortunate, tragic war just as certain as night follows day and rain makes things wet.

Left to right, Vietnam combat vet & Reverend Dwight Edwards, Commer Glass, Director of the VA Regional Re-entry Program Otis Nash and the author.
 
The story is complicated by a number of things. One, Glass is a black man in prison for first degree murder involving the killing of a woman, and in Pennsylvania, especially in the cover-one’s-ass political climate of Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, he is a hot potato. There are not very many profiles in courage in Pennsylvania when it comes to someone like Glass. It’s much easier — and safer — to just let him rot in Graterford.

 
Vietnam, a story of virtually unmitigated disasters that we have inflicted on ourselves and even more on others.

-Bernard Brodie, 1973
 

The Vietnamese won the Vietnam War by forcing the United States to abandon its intention to militarily sustain an artificially divided Vietnam. The history is clear: It was the United States, not the Vietnamese, who scotched the unifying elections agreed on for 1956 in the Geneva negotiations following the French rout at Dien Bien Phu. Why did the US undermine these elections? As Dwight Eisenhower said in his memoir, because everyone knew Ho Chi Minh was going to win in a landslide of the order of 80% of the population of Vietnam.

So much for Democracy.

“We can lose longer than you can win,” was how Ho described the Vietnamese strategy against the Americans. Later in the 1980s, a Vietnamese diplomat put it this way to Robert McNamara: “We knew you would leave because you could leave. We lived here; we couldn’t leave.”

The Vietnam War was finally over in 1975 when the North prevailed over the US proxy formulation known as South Vietnam, which then disappeared as a “nation,” as many thousands of our betrayed Vietnamese allies fled in small boats or were subjected to unpleasant internment camps and frontier development projects deep in the hostile jungles.

In a word, the Vietnam War was a debacle for everyone involved.

Now, we learn the United States government is planning a 13-year propaganda project to clean up the image of the Vietnam War in the minds of Americans. It’s called The Vietnam War Commemoration Project. President Obama officially launched the project on Memorial Day with a speech at the Vietnam Wall in Washington. The Project was established by Section 598 of the 604-page National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2008. It budgets $5 million a year.

.

“Some have called this war era a scar on our country,” Obama told the specially invited Vietnam veteran crowd at The Wall. “But here’s what I say. As any wound heals, the tissue around it becomes tougher, becomes stronger than before. And in this sense, finally, we might begin to see the true legacy of Vietnam. Because of Vietnam and our veterans, we now use American power smarter, we honor our military more, we take care of our veterans better. Because of the hard lessons of Vietnam, because of you, America is even stronger than before.”

Vietnam toughened us up, made us better human beings. I would submit the President is wrong on that score, that there are profound lessons we have failed to learn.

“No, Charlotte, I’m the jury now. I sentence you to death.”
The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step.
“How c-could you?” she gasped.
“It was easy.”
– Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury
 

The news that Barack Obama — a Constitutional scholar and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize — has taken personal charge of lethal US drone hits in Yemen and Pakistan is one of those stories that takes time to sink in.

The New York Times stresses how serious the issue has become. “With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.” It’s no longer a cool video-game experiment; it’s the beginning of robot warfare, and, if history is a lesson, it will have unanticipated consequences and our enemies will learn to counter the weapon with imaginative weapons of their own, including drones. We should expect to be surprised and blindsided. Martin Luther King spoke of it as a futile rising cycle of violence.

Exactly how many non-combatants and innocent people are being killed is the big question. There’s no way to know. One, there’s a pathological level of secrecy in our militarized government and, two, we can’t believe a word the government says anyway.

The President’s counterterrorism adviser John Bennan, for example, makes the preposterous claim that “not a single non-combatant has been killed in a year of strikes.” The Times interviewed former intelligence officials familiar with the issue and they “expressed disbelief.” It recalls the days during the Vietnam War when all Vietnamese corpses were VC.

We know of entire families killed in Yemen, as reported by Jeremy Scahill. And Britain’s Sunday Times reports since Obama began the campaign, 300 to 500 civilians have been killed, more than 60 of them kids.

Back in the sixties, during Operation Rolling Thunder, Lyndon Johnson took personal charge of targeting for the aerial bombing of North Vietnam. And George W. Bush was notorious for the little check-off list squirreled away in his desk drawer of men he wanted whacked. So the idea of a US President personally overseeing hits like a gang boss is not that novel. What’s new is the means of killing and the fact Mr. Obama is so lawyerly about it.

A US drone and an angry man protesting US drones on the street in Sanaa, Yemen

We’re told it’s a matter of the President manning-up and taking responsibility for a morally gray activity. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. It’s lonely at the top. He’s reportedly reading up on Just War Theory and other international legal precedents. But Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo and Harriet Miers set the tone for this a decade ago, when all a President had to do was dial up the OLS, the Office of Legal Sophistry.

“You want language saying it’s legal to whack somebody? No problema! We’ll send it right up.” Since it was coming from the White House, who in government was going to question it? Clarence Thomas?

 
If all else fails, lower your standards.

This has been my philosophy for years. My wife likes to joke it’s how she picked me; instead of prince charming, I’m “prince somewhat-charming.” So you can imagine how delighted I am that the United States of America and its NATO military allies have decided to apply that philosophy to US foreign policy in Afghanistan.

They’re calling their version “Afghanistan Good Enough.”

The notion of lowering ones standards to get out of a human mess is, of course, not my idea. The idea resides in the Pragmatic wing of philosophy and shares something with the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer, which is attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, who stole it from the Greek slave and stoic philosopher Epictetus, who probably borrowed it from some poor slob in chains breaking stones in a quarry in Asia Minor.

Here’s how Alcoholics Anonymous phrased the idea:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

The point is, if you’re struggling with a monkey on your back — whether it’s an addiction to booze or keeping up with the Myth of American Exceptionalism — your life will be more serene and you will be more content with yourself if you drop the unrealistic expectations you’ve set for yourself or that someone else has set for you.

President Obama in a NATO mood in Chicago and soldiers in Afghanistan

So after ten years of trying to control Afghanistan militarily, US/NATO war planners have lowered their standards and, with the help of their top-of-the-line, multi-billion-dollar public relations wing, they came up with the stirring slogan “Afghanistan Good Enough.”

 
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.
– D.H. Lawrence

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations … where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket … where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing.
– Raymond Chandler
 
 
American pop culture is certainly not unique in having a love affair with killers. Since the first cave man cracked his neighbor’s head open to control a water hole, eliminating others has been top on the list of problem-solving techniques.

Life today has evolved to the point the club has been improved and a young man can sit in an air-conditioned room sipping a Diet Pepsi as he whacks somebody 12,000 miles away. Or else an elite team of tricked-up killers with sophisticated air support can be dropped in at night to do the job.

That’s the state of the art of homicide 2012, America’s dirty little secret.

Retired General Stanley McChrystal and special ops soldiers; at right, a raid in Afghanistan.

Our military is now establishing secret bases all over the world from which to launch these types of homicide assaults specifically focused on leaders of movements we don’t like. The Navy has even developed a fast, twin-hulled catamaran called the littoral combat ship that will deliver these killer teams from the littoral or shallow waters off shore. In the spirit of historic gunboat diplomacy, it’s quite fearsome looking to intimidate the natives.

This kind of projected violence is now going on big time in Yemen, the very poor country on the southern edge of the Arabian peninsula, which is dominated by the super-rich Saudi royal clan, an oily collaboration with which US leaders have had a half-century relationship.

As Jeremy Scahill’s excellent reporting from Yemen makes clear, our drone attacks and support for Yemeni government troops are aggravating poor Yemenis like crazy, driving them into the arms of al Qaeda elements. And, as we should all know by now, once the magic word “al Qaeda” is mentioned all reason and compassion goes out the window and homicide becomes the acceptable problem-solving recourse.

Whore: (verb) To debase oneself by doing something for unworthy motives, typically to make money.
-The New Oxford American Dictionary
 

It’s a challenge to make adult sense of the absurdities coming out of Colombia right now.

I had first planned to write about the Drug War aspect of President Obama’s summit meeting in Cartagena, since it’s quite amazing when the right-wing president of Colombia publicly lobbies the US president to shift the Drug War from military operations against supply in Latin America to a more social approach against demand in the US. After all, Colombia is the highly militarized US showcase nation in the 40-year Drug War.

“Despite all of the efforts, the immense efforts, the huge costs, we have to recognize that the illicit drug business is prospering,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos told the attending leaders. He even advocated a process of decriminalization, though he recognized this was only a “starting point to begin a discussion that we have been postponing for far too long.”

This is real news.

Colombian President Santos and President Obama, and Hillary Clinton dancing at the Havana nightclub in Cartagena

Our Drug War is a military/police enterprise focused on attacking the supply of drugs coming from Latin America. Santos seems to concede it’s a dismal failure. He also knows the accumulated conditions of that failure are so entrenched in the hemisphere that it’s hard to even begin to discuss a way out.

Barack Obama’s administration is so cowed by entrenched, die-hard drug warriors that it’s doubling down on marijuana busts as local governments across the nation go the other way and ease enforcement of marijuana laws. The Feds are like fundamentalist puritans who see the decriminalization of marijuana as the social equivalent of a “gateway drug” leading to crack-addict Hell. There’s a desperate need for a much more pragmatic approach.