Dialog International

China is Funding Bush's Iraq War

Der Tagesspiegel has a lengthy excerpt from a new book to be released next week: Der globale Countdown by Harald Schuman and Christiane Grefe.  The book is about the risks inherent in the globalized economy  - risks that are all too apparent in the worldwide crisis spawned by the US real estate meltdown.  The excerpt here, however, is an excellent discussion of how the Bush administration has dramatically raised the stakes - and increased the likelihood of a global meltdown - with its reckless fiscal policy.  Among other things, the Bush administration has relied exclusively on China to fund its disastrous Iraq War. America's trade deficit with China increases the Chinese US dollar reserves by about $1 million per minute - which roughly equals the cost burden of Bush's wars:

De facto finanziert auf diesem Weg ausgerechnet der US-Rivale China Amerikas militärische Abenteuer mit milliardenschweren Billigkrediten für die Bush-Regierung. Die aufgewandten Summen stimmen erstaunlich überein. Die Kriege in Irak und Afghanistan kosteten von 2003 bis Ende 2006 rund 400 Milliarden Dollar amerikanischer Steuergelder. Etwa im gleichen Zeitraum erwarben die Mitarbeiter der Devisenverwaltung am Pekinger Platz der Luftfahrt amerikanische Staatsanleihen und staatliche garantierte Pfandbriefe im Wert von 464 Milliarden Dollar.

(It is ironic that in this way China - America's great rival - is financing America's military adventures with $$billions of cheap loans to the Bush administration. Astonishingly,  expenditures nearly match each other. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US taxpayers from 2003 to 2006 about $400 billion. Over the same period the staff at the State Foreign Exchange Center on Fucheng Road in Beijing acquired US Treasury Bonds in the amount of $464 billion.)

The Bush administration's fiscal policy is leading inexorably to a prolonged period of hyperinflation and the replacement of the US$  by the Euro as a reserve currency.  The final consequence will be a run on America.

An Uncomfortable Silence

Tageszeitung correspondent Bernd Pickert makes a good point in his column Das grosse Schweigen (The great silence).  During the Patreaus hearings this week on Capitol Hill no one brought up the issue of how multiple deployments in the US military were leading to a extreme psychological stress, which, in turn, is played out in how Iraqi civilians are treated (or rather mistreated):

"Dabei würde es sich lohnen, einmal einen Blick auf die Erfahrungen jener insgesamt mehr als 500.000 Soldaten zu werfen, die im Irak stationiert waren - nach fünf Jahren sind sie inzwischen ja recht ausführlich dokumentiert. Was sie über ein systematisch menschenverachtendes Verhalten der Soldaten gegen die Zivilbevölkerung in diesem Krieg ohne Fronten berichten, kann eigentlich nur zu einer Schlussfolgerung führen: die Iraker so bald wie möglich von dieser Besatzung zu befreien." (It would be worthwhile to have  a look at the experiences of the 500,000 or so soldiers who have been stationed in Iraq so far. These have not been sufficiently documented even after five years of war. What they say about the systematically brutal behavior of these soldiers towards the civilian population in this endless war without fronts can only lead to one conclusion: the Iraqis need to be freed of this occupation as soon as possible.)

Read my translation of Pickert's entire piece over at Watching America.

Last month the US military dropped all charges against one of the marines involved in the Haditha Massacre, when 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians - mostly women and children - were killed. The story was barely noticed in the press as President Bush celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.  And earlier in March dozens of veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan testified at the Winter Soldier event in Silver Springs, Maryland.  The event was ignored by the mainstream media outlets in the US, as noted by the Web site FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting):

On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, it is particularly important that the media reverse this silence, and include the voices of the vets who are speaking out about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in national news coverage.

Videos of the testimonies can be found here.  The German press did cover the event, and it was also picked up by bloggers.

Let's face it: we don't consider Iraqi lives as valuable as Americans.  We keep detailed records of every US casualty in Iraq, but no one knows or cares how many Iraqis have been killed or injured as a result of the US-led invasion and occupation.  General Tommy Franks: "We Don't Do Body Counts".

Iraq and Postwar Germany

Quite often apologists for the Iraq War point to American success in postwar Germany as a rationale for the the military occupation of Iraq.  Both Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice often draw parallels to postwar Germany as a reason to stay the course: Democracy  will eventually blossom in Iraq the same way it did in Germany thanks to the American occupation.  And recently Republican presidential candidate John McCain has held out the possibility of America "staying in Iraq for one hundred years" the same way we have had a military presence in Germany for more than half a century.

Now historian David Stafford continues this argument in a piece in the Washington Post: Iraq is a Mess. But Germany Was, Too. Stafford's reasoning, however, it muddled.  He does point out the significant differences between post-invasion Iraq and defeated Germany:

It would be harder to think of two more different societies than Germany in 1945 and contemporary Iraq. The former -- despite Hitler and the Third Reich -- had a long tradition of law, order, constitutional government and civic society to draw on in rebuilding democracy. Nor was it riven by deep-rooted ethnic and sectarian religious tensions that erupted to the surface once the dictator's iron fist was removed. And although Germany certainly had hostile neighbors -- especially to the communist East -- the threat they posed served to create, not crack, political cohesion.

But then he draws parallels between the de-Baathification efforts in Iraq and the American attempt to purge Nazi's from positions of power in Germany.

Critics of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq point to the decisions by L. Paul Bremer, Garner's replacement, to dismiss Baathists from public office and to dissolve the Iraqi army as critical and disastrous turning points that created a vast legion of the unemployed and disaffected. Yet in 1945, the Allies implemented a similarly draconian policy in Germany. They dissolved the Nazi Party, carried out a thorough purge of Nazis in public office and even abolished the ancient state of Prussia, which they believed was at the root of German militarism. Millions of Wehrmacht soldiers languished in prisoner-of-war camps while their families struggled to survive.

But the American occupation forces in Germany were far more pragmatic than the neocon ideologues in charge of Iraq: they quickly changed course and brought former Nazis into the governance structure and economic reconstruction programs.

Ultimately, Stafford concludes, the American occupation of Germany was pretty much a failure several years in, and it was only the economic assistance of the Marshall Plan that finally changed the game and brought some stability:

Even so, despite this willingness to rethink and adjust, occupation policy floundered. Two years after Allied victory, Germany was in desperate straits, facing an economic crisis that threatened to nip democracy in the bud. Only the Marshall Plan, with its massive program of financial aid, saved the country from disaster. Self-government did not come until 1949, and Allied troops remained in West Germany as occupiers until 1955, a full decade after the defeat of the Third Reich.

So, Stafford seems to think, a Marshall Plan for Iraq and a long-term military occupation might  bring stability to the ruined country.  Trouble is, the success of the Marshall Plan has never been duplicated.  President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress - a Marshall Plan for Latin America - was a bust. And the attempts in the 1980s to establish a Marshall Plan for the Third World failed miserably. 

Two key elements are missing in Iraq for a successful Marshall Plan effort.  The first is security.  Tony Judt points out in his great work of history Postwar that the Korean War was an enormous benefit to Europe, since the US invested significant security resources there to prevent a "second front" from opening in the west.  The other missing factor is ownership.  By 1949 Europe had functioning governments everywhere - including Germany - and took complete ownership of the Marshall Plan.  Iraq, on the other hand, has a corrupt, dysfunctional government which lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqi citizens.  Also, the Bush Administration has awarded reconstruction projects to American firms, often under no-bid contracts as a way of rewarding political allies.  I fear reconstruction in Iraq can never succeed as long as the country is occupied by American troops. I wish I could see the success of postwar Germany as a reason to celebrate a hundred-year occupation for Iraq, but I can't.  There are no parallels and Stafford is sadly mistaken.

Bush's War Enters its Sixth Year

Today President Bush will be giving a speech where he will declare the Iraq invasion, launched 5 years ago this evening, "a strategic success" and "well worth the price" in terms of American blood and treasure (no mention, of course, of Iraqi blood and treasure).

Germany opposed the invasion, and we are still feeling the effects of that transatlantic rift, although Angela Merkel has managed to improve relations between America and Germany to a large extent.

Scanning the German press, there are quite a few commemorative efforts on both the war and Germany's decision to break with its strongest alliance partner:  Zeit, Die Welt, Der Spiegel. The best  - most infuriating - presentation can be found in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.  The Munich daily goes through Colin Powell's PowerPoint presentation to the UN on Februrary 5, 2003, which outlined the case for war (based on completely fraudulent information):  The Long Nose of Colin Powell. Also in the Sueddeutsche is an interview with Gunter Pleuger, Germany's ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the war.  Pleuger speaks about his impressions of Powell's presentation and the knowledge that it was based on lies:

Pleuger:"Das war alles sehr gespenstisch. Die meisten im Saal wussten, dass das, was Colin Powell da vortrug, nicht der Realität entsprach. Aber wir haben uns damals nicht vorstellen können, dass Colin Powell bewusst die Unwahrheit sagen würde." ("It was all very surreal.  Most of us in the UN auditorium knew that what Powell was presenting had no basis in reality.  But we couldn't imagine that Colin Powell would deliberately present falsehoods.")

Plueger then speaks about the enormous pressure that the US brought to bear on him and the other diplomats at the UN to go along with the Bush invasion.  In the end, the UN refused to vote approval for the invasion, and then suffered the vilification of the US.  But in retrospect the UN acted honorably:

Pleuger: "Schauen Sie sich die Welt doch an. Heute können wir sagen, dass die Entscheidung des Sicherheitsrates völlig richtig war, gegen diesen Krieg zu sein. Die Mehrheit der Staaten und die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung selbst in den Koalitionsstaaten waren gegen diesen Krieg. Mehr als die Hälfte der Amerikaner ist heute auch dieser Auffassung." ( Just look at the world. Today we can say that the Security Council was correct in opposing this war. The majority of the nations, and the majority of the people in the Coaltion countries, were against the war. Today more than half of all Americans share this opinion.)

We can now see that the Bush War has led to the Bush Recession (Wars are never good for the economy in the long run).

Today I grieve for the four thousand American troops killed, the tens of thousands who return home with permanent physical and emotional scars, the thousands of families across the country who have been destroyed by an unnecessary war, the deaths of untold tens of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of over 4 million from their homes.  How many more anniversaries of this nightmare will we have to endure?

Ken Burns' Mega-Documentary The War Comes to German Television

I have to confess that like most Americans I am a sucker for Ken Burns' films. The soothing voice of the omniscient narrator, the zooming and panning across still photographs with the plaintive piano or violin as the background music - the frank sentimentality of the narrative - lulls me into a sense of shared national heritage. It is a pleasant place to be, even though historians find the absence of context and analysis appalling.  For a nation that suffers from historical amnesia, the non-historian Ken Burns is the closest thing we have to a national historian.

What is good about a Burns film is that he goes to original sources and shows history "from the bottom up".  This was particularly effective in his Civil War documentary, as the narrator read from (remarkably eloquent) letters from soldiers and their families.  What was also admirable about that documentary was the acknowledgment of shared sacrifice on both sides of the conflict: at no point did Burns vilify the Confederacy.

Unfortunately this balance is totally missing from The War, which is a frank celebration of the American triumph of good over evil in the Good War. There is zero analysis of the origin of World War II or how America got into it. Rather, war is presented as something that is an immutable aspect of human behavior.  This from the very first episode: the narrator tells us"The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power".  The first episode is titled "The Necessary War", so everything that comes afterward is legitimized.  The firebombing of German cities, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - these aspects of the Good War are not questioned: the destructive brutality (and the film does not shirk from showing this, at least) is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of "The Necessary War". 

Still, The War contains some compelling film footage.  I also thought the focus on the war experience from the perspective of four medium-sized American cities - both on the battlefield and the home front - was effective. Ken Burns also does an excellent job on in conveying the terrible price of war, the pervasiveness of death.  This war was fought before PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) was a known affliction, but it is clear from the letters from the front and the eyewitness accounts of the living survivors that it affected many of the soldiers.

The War will be broadcast on the German TV network ARTE starting this Wednesday for seven consecutive weeks.

I found only one review so far in the German press: Silke Lührman  writes about the  Burns' documentary  in the völkisch weekly Junge Freiheit.  Lührman's tone in her review is predictably sarcastic, but she does have one great line at the end of the piece:

"Geschichte, wie sie Sieger schreiben? Mag sein, aber sicher auch Balsam auf der wunden Seele einer angeschlagenen Supermacht, die demnächst in das sechste Jahr eines unnötigen Krieges geht."(History from the pespective of the victor?  Perhaps, but it (The War) is also a balm for the wounded soul of a beleaguered superpower, which shortly will be entering the sixth year of an unnecessary war.)

You can read my translation of the entire review over at Watching America.

The Myth of "The Good War"

Americans are taught from an early age that "we" won WWII - The Good War - which pitted good against evil. Not only did American soldiers beat the evil Nazis, they rescued western civilization and brought Democracy to Europe.  Nothing could be further from the truth, according to British historian Norman Davies.  In a lecture delivered the other day at Harvard University, Davies exploded some of the myths of The Good War:

Among the Davies so-called myths:

That D-Day was big and decisive. (About 80 percent of German forces were lost on the Eastern Front, he said, where the biggest battles raged.)

That the West triumphed over the Third Reich. (Germany was all but defeated by the Soviets well before the Allies landed troops on the continent, he contended.)

In fact, asserted Davies, it was the Red Army that played the decisive role in defeating Germany, “and they were in the service of an evil tyranny.”

As for the myth that the war liberated Europe, said Davies: Most of Europe went from being under Hitler’s boot to being under Stalin’s.

Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other nations at the crossroads of combat were gobbled up by the Soviets in 1944 and early 1945, while the Red Army idled outside Berlin waiting for the Allies to creep toward the Rhine.

Winning a war means defeating an enemy, collapsing its economy, destroying its political structure — then replacing it with another. By those terms, Davies averred, the Soviets won the war in Europe.

Militarily, the Allies contributed less than the Soviets to the defeat of Germany, he said. Politically, they failed to restore democracy to most of Europe.

Will Americans ever revisit their own history? Unlikely, since that would also surface some uncomfortable questions about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the firebombing of German cities, targeting civilians.

Bush and Benedict XVI: Opportunity Missed

When Pope Benedict XVI met with President Bush last week at the Vatican, he missed an opportunity to condemn the Iraq War as "unjust" under the Christian doctrine of Just War.  After his meeting with the pope Bush was almost gloating:

"Speaking later to reporters, Bush said the pontiff was worried that Christians in Iraq were being "mistreated by the Muslim majority."The Vatican has been critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but both sides said they did not dwell on those differences Saturday. "We didn't talk about just war," the president said at a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi."

This was very unfortunate in several respects.  First, Pope Benedict has been very open in his criticism of the US-led invasion of Iraq and its catastrophic aftermath.  In his Easter address this year, Benedict spoke lamented that "nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees." Second, Benedict could have used the occasion his meeting with Bush to instruct Christians everywhere on the meaning of "Just War" from a Christian perspective, and how the Iraq Invasion fails the "Just War" test in several respects.  This is all the more important since President Bush has often justified his use of violence in messianic Christian terms, even hinting to reporter Bob Woodward that he had consulted with God on the necessity for launching a unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Bush's Iraq invasion at the minimum fails the "Last Resort" requirement:  Force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted. And, to most sane observers who have watched with horror the death toll on Iraqi civilians caused by the invasion, Bush's war fails the Proportionality Test: The overall destruction expected from the use of force must be outweighed by the good to be achieved , as well as the Minimun Force Test: This principle is meant to limit excessive and unnecessary death and destruction.

But I sometimes have to question whether Benedict XVI even believes in "Just War".  Last July, just as the war in Lebanon was breaking out and Condoleezza Rice was celebrating the violence as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East", Pope Benedict spoke extemporaneously about How to Be A Force for Peace in the World.  Here is an excerpt:

"The Lord has triumphed upon the cross. He did not triumph with a new empire, with a power greater than the others and capable of destroying them; he triumphed, not in a human way, as we would imagine, with an empire more powerful than the other. He triumphed with a love capable of reaching even to death. This is God’s new way of winning: he does not oppose violence with a stronger form of violence. He opposes violence with its exact opposite: love to the very end, his cross. This is God’s humble way of winning: with his love – and this is the only way it is possible – he puts a limit on violence. This is a way of winning that seems very slow to us, but it is the real way to overcome evil, to overcome violence, and we must entrust ourselves to this divine way of winning."

These words go beyond "Just War" in their rejection of violence; too bad he did not challenge President Bush by repeating them in his presence.

Memorial Day 2007

This Memorial Day weekend finds Americans filled with sorrow and anger over a war that apparently has no end: sorrow for the thousands of wasted young lives, anger about the destroyed families across the land. The huge drop in support for President Bush's disasterous war policy has alarmed officials within the administration and within the Pentagon.  Their response? Control the message; prevent images of the cost of war in Iraq from reaching the American people:

"Many of the journalists who are in Iraq have been backed into fortified corners, rarely venturing out to see what soldiers confront. And the remaining journalists who are embedded with the troops in Iraq — the number dropped to 92 in May from 126 in April — are risking more and more for less and less. Since last year, the military’s embedding rules require that journalists obtain a signed consent from a wounded soldier before the image can be published. Images that put a face on the dead, that make them identifiable, are simply prohibited.

If Joseph Heller were still around, he might appreciate the bureaucratic elegance of paragraph 11(a) of IAW Change 3, DoD Directive 5122.5:

“Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without the service member’s prior written consent.”

Add to the restraints on journalists in Iraq the military restrictions on the use of blogs, MySpace, FaceBook and Flickr, and you control the volume of bad news from seeping out of Iraq.  And some segments of the American "News" media are playing along with self-censorship:

What's more important: Iraq or Anna Nicole Smith?

Depends on which network you're watching.

According to PEJ's first quarter News Coverage Index, "MSNBC and CNN were much more consumed with the war in Iraq than was Fox."

But not all of the news about the war is negative. The Boston Globe reports today on the surge in profits for the makers of military gravestones:

Another stretch of steady business has unfolded in recent years at Granite Industries, one of a handful of suppliers of veterans' headstones for national cemeteries. The latest upswing [...]reflects mounting losses in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The company turns out more than 100 gravestones for veterans every day, at a sprawling plant at the end of a woodsy, gravel-tossed road, close by a slender branch of the Winooski River. Its 50 workers say they take pride in crafting the veterans' markers.

How Wrong They Were

Historian Gustav Seibt has written an interesting essay on German intellectuals who supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The origianal essay (in German) is unfortunately behind the firewall at Sueddeutsche Zeitung, but an English translation is avaialable at Sign and Sight.  Seibt lists the German intellectual hawks:

Nobody should take pleasure in the fact that authors like Wolf Biermann and György Konrad, essayists like Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl-Otto Hondrich, "liberal hawks" like Paul Berman and Michael Ignatieff, and even considered observers like Ralph Dahrendorf and Herfried Münkler were wrong on so many counts. In fact, many of those named, and Konrad and Gumbrecht in particular, should be credited for admitting their mistakes.

He goes on to point out the intellectual arrogance that resulted in these thinkers projecting their own fantasies on a Middle East that they understood little or not at all:

First and foremost was an attempt to draw broad historical analogies. The fall of Saddam, a desirable enough goal, was compared directly with the fight against Hitler, the democratisation of Iraq with the democratisation of West Germany and Japan after the Second World War and the chance for democratic change throughout the entire Middle East was compared with the end of the East bloc and the quick establishment of civilian democracies afterwards. But virtually nobody had anything to say about the actual domestic situation in Iraq today.

Then the historian Seibt makes a depressing analogy to the situation in 1914, where nearly every writer and intellectual enthusasically (euphorically) welcomed the war.  Have intellectuals learned nothing from history?

The comparison with 1914 is all the more depressing because in 2003, we see again the syndrome of a "Literatentum" – a term coined by Max Weber during the First World War, referring to the phenomena of a body of literature that used critical, aesthetic, definitely non-expert, uninformed superstructures to justify risky decisions in matters of war. A lot was at stake in the First World War as well: culture and civilisation, politics and music, the German spirit and the Western anti-spirit and vice versa – and the "war goals" of an obviously unrealistic, in fact insane blueprint.

Of course, being wrong on the Iraq War turned out to be a good career move for intellectuals and writers in Germany and the United States.  Most have lucrative contracts with newspapers and publishing houses. Intellectuals who opposed the war from the beginning and were completely correct in their predictions of disaster are still viewed with suspicion by the established media outlets.