After the election

We have a pretty good idea of what will happen now that the Republicans are more powerful than ever: more tax benefits for the rich, more hardship for the poor, and more saber rattling and war-making in foreign policy. The voters wanted a change. I am not sure they are going to like the changes they get.

But this is the time to look at what will not change whoever gets elected. A political scientist at Tufts University, Michael Glennon, has recently argued that significant portions of the federal government are in no way under control of elected officials. Leadership in these shadowy agencies is handed down from one person to the other without consultation with the voters or elected members of the executive branch. Their policies are made by officials not elected and most of the time are shrouded in deep secrecy. Voters not only have no control over the national security apparatus and its allies in the military, but most of the time they do not know what policies are being made and executed.

Glennon makes this point impressively. He reminds us that before Obama was elected president in 2008 he promised to close Guantanamo Bay. He opposed the Patriot Act and government spying on civilians. He was a champion of civil liberties. He was an opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But once he was elected Guantanamo Bay remained open. Obama conducted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His administration has continued the surveillance of civilians begun during the previous administration and has been harsh in prosecuting government whistleblowers. This administration has consistently supported government secrecy. It has been hostile to the press and press freedom.

That is not the Barack Obama who campaigned in 2008 and whom we elected. Glennon explains this sudden reversal by arguing that the security apparatus of such agencies as the National Security Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency operate mostly in secrecy. What they do sometimes comes out after it is all done. But elected officials and the voters have no control over their projects – one more bizarre and sinister than the next. Hence Obama's government failed to do what he had promised the voters.

A long time ago Bill Moyers presented a Public Broadcasting Special about this secretive and undemocratic security apparatus. It was created he said when Harry Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947 that created both the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. Very soon these new agencies proved to be a major liability to the U.S.

In 1952 the Iranian people electorate Mohammed Mossadegh to be their Prime Minister. Our government had liked him until he decided that Iranian oil should not be owned by British interests and nationalized the Iranian oil industry. Such a move was anathema to all the capitalists and anti-communists in the United States. The CIA cooked up a plot to have Mossadegh toppled by a popular uprising and the Iranian military. The Shah of Iran returned and began a reign of terror. The CIA helped him to set up his secret police force that arrested people without trial, tortured and killed them.

CIA complicity in the events in Iran were not known at the time. They could not be discussed in our political arena. 60 years later we harvest the bitter fruits of this insane CIA project. That was the beginning of a series of secret interventions in the Middle East that have made us the most unpopular government in that part of the world. The men and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan did not, as we often say, fight for our freedoms. Rather, they harvested the bitter fruits of the CIA intervention in Iran and many other secret manipulations of Middle Eastern policies—policies not motivated by concern for our freedoms or those of peoples in the Mid-East but designed to maintain corporate profits.

Two wars are now winding down. Another one in Syria and Iraq is just beginning. We owe those wars to the secret projects not controlled by our elected government. Voting has become a lot less effective because large portions of foreign policy are made we don't know by nameless “security” planners.

The effects of those secret projects by agencies not elected by us or supervised by our elected representatives, are felt not only in foreign policy but in the price all of us pay for the wars we fight, the losses many families sustain, the returning veterans seriously affected by their service, the moneys blown on weapons and warfare, that are not available to provide needed services to returning veterans, to build new schools, to hire more teachers, to repair roads and bridges and ameliorate the lives of the poorest, the elderly and disabled.

If we want to restore our democracy and peoples' control of the government, we need to dismantle the secretive national security apparatus, including the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency and replace it by agencies solidly under democratic control.

Compromise with Iran

The compromise over the production of nuclear fuel and the sanctions imposed on Iran is encountering considerable criticism in the US. A coalition of conservatives and diehard supporters of Israel is very critical of the compromise the Obama administration has forged with the Iranian government.

Their reason: you cannot trust Iran.

On the one hand, this is clearly true. Some of the critics of the treaty with Iran are survivors of the hostage crisis in 1979 when the Iranian students, backed by their government, held 66 Americans hostage for 444 days. It was a grueling experience for the Americans.

        These days the Iranians are supporting Assad, the brutal dictator of Syria. Their foreign policy is based exclusively on their national interests. They have absolutely no concern for the immense suffering of the Syrian people.

        So yes, you cannot trust the Iranian government. While that's true it is also a completely ridiculous reason for opposing the agreement with Iran.

What government can you trust?

        26 years before the Iranian hostage crisis, the US government and the CIA engineered the overthrow a democratically elected Iranian government. The Prime Minister was threatening to nationalize oil companies in Iran. Concerned about the bottom line of US-based global oil companies, our government managed to engineer a coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh. The US had no concern for the Iranians and their democratic rights. All they (we) cared about was the private profit of oil companies.

        At the time of 9/11, the Taliban had been talking to our government for a while about surrendering Osama bin Laden. Our government cut short those negotiations by invading Afghanistan. Soon after that we invaded Iraq.

        The people in that region of the world have no reason whatsoever to trust us.

        Can you trust the US government? Shortly after the head of the National Security Agency denied in Congress that his agency was conducting surveillance of the phone conversations of US citizens, Edward Snowden revealed documents that showed the head of the NSA to be a liar. The US government did not discipline him for lying to Congress, let alone to all American citizens. Our government condones its agency heads lying to the public.

        You have known for many years that our government has meddled in the internal affairs of many foreign countries. We now know that they do not hesitate to extend surveillance over US citizens in spite of all constitutional protections.

        Conservatives in the US are critical of the accord with Iran because, they say, you cannot trust Iran. Iranian conservatives are critical of the accord because, they say, you cannot trust America.

        They are both right.

         But the criticisms of the Iranian accords are silly.

Shooting ourselves in the foot

In business, there is considerable advantage in bringing a new commodity to market. After a while the competition will succeed in producing similar or better products. But for a while the company that has a new gadget will profit substantially. Just look at Apple.

This same thing seems to be true with respect to weapons. The United States was the first country to have a functioning atomic weapon. For a number of years that gave us a significant advantage in world politics. But in the case of weapons, the short term advantage gained by finding new ways of killing and destroying is far outweighed by the long term damage done by new weapons systems.

David Sanger, who writes for the New York Times, recently published a book – Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power – in which he points out that a new kind of warfare is now being conducted by our government. Its chief weapons are drones and, more recently, computer viruses. Everyone knows about the drones. Not everyone knows that the US government succeeded in infecting Iran's computers with viruses that blew up a significant number of centrifuges producing weapons grade uranium. Some terribly clever people here, and in Israel, have discovered a way of interfering with the production of weapons of other countries.

Once again we are the first to be able to wield this new form of causing mayhem. At the moment that clearly gives us an advantage. But when it comes to armaments, being the first to use a new weapon is in fact a very bad idea.

The conflict with Iran illustrates this forcefully. When we succeeded in building an atomic bomb some people thought that we needed to use it, even though many people believe today that Japan was about to surrender even before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost 70 years later, many countries have atomic weapons, even such precarious states as Pakistan. Others are trying to build atom bombs, as for instance North Korea and Iran. Our eagerness to be the first to use this new weapons has cost us untold billions trying to protect ourselves from other countries that now have nuclear weapons. It has contributed significantly to make the world a whole lot less safe. It has now made an Iranian nuclear program a real threat.

No country ever can monopolize a new form of destruction. If one country has a new weapon, all the other countries will try to get them also. It will not be long before other countries will fly drones perhaps against targets in the United States. Other countries have technically ingenious computer people who will figure out how to infect computer systems in our country.

What will happen next? Will your computer blow up in your face? Will children die when their Xbox explodes? Will atomic power plants explode because some enemy managed to infect its computer control program with a virus?

It is clearly a mistake to introduce new weapons. The worry about Iran's nuclear program is the best example of that. Had we kept the atomic secrets to ourselves, would Pakistan be armed with nuclear weapons? Would we now have to unleash new ways of warfare on the Iranians in order to slow down their program of becoming a nuclear power? 

Instead of learning from past mistakes, our government has chosen to unleash a new weapons system. All of us will pay the price for this latest, short-sighted policy.

More War ?

More War?

US naval vessels, including the gigantic nuclear powered aircraft carrier George Washington have joined South Korean military forces in a joint naval exercise off the coast of that country. North Korea has responded by threatening  “sacred war” and nuclear retaliation.

This massive show of force is a response to the March sinking of a South Korean naval vessel near a disputed region in the oceans off the Koreas. Originally it was unclear whether a mine sank the warship, or an explosion.  Then a panel of international experts decided that the boat was sunk by a North Korean torpedo.

Why would North Korea want to sink a South Korean naval vessel? Since the 1960s there have been a series of attacks on South Korean Presidents, on airliners bound for Seoul, South Korea, or on South Korean naval vessels by North Koreans. A bitter enmity exists between the two countries.

So now we are doing war-games near the coast of North Korea and that country is talking nuclear war.

At the same time, there is more talk about Iran and its nuclear weapons program. Some people are seriously talking about attacking Iran. Iran is seriously talking about defending itself against such attacks.

Has the whole world gone mad?

We have been involved in two wars for seven years. The end--let alone victory--is not in sight. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on these wars while we do not have enough money to pay unemployment to those left jobless by the economic crisis. We don’t have enough money to pay for our schools, for health care, or even, in some communities, to to turn on the street lamps. We are broke and we owe $ 4 trillion to other nations.
The US casualties in these wars have been high, so have been the casualties for some of our allies. Estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq alone range from 100,000 to 800,000. Damages to houses, streets, water and sewer installations, to schools and mosques have been enormous.

Two wars, poorly if at all justified, causing damages that will not be repaired for decades. Many of these damages--the human lives taken prematurely; the lives of the survivors marked indelibly--will never be repaired.

And still we talk more war?

Wake up, America!