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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hope For Audacity

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Ted Rall

Why Obama Is in Trouble

Unless something happens, John McCain will win.

Of course, “unless something happens” is the biggest qualifier in the world, more than adequate to CYA me should Obama prevail. It’s politics. There are almost three months. Odds are something will happen.

Still, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Obama’s electoral handicaps–his racial identification and short resume–should have easily been eclipsed by Bush’s–er, McCain’s well-stocked aviary of albatrosses. McCain was and remains short of money. His campaign organization is a mess. Republican bosses are unenthusiastic, both about his prospects and about the direction he would take his party should he win. He has aligned himself with the most unpopular aspect of the wildly unpopular outgoing administration, the Iraq War. At a time when economically insecure voters are staring down the barrel of a recession-cum-depression, McCain promises more of the same–no help is on the way. And he’s old. Sooo painfully I-don’t-use-the-Internet old.

What is it that has the politerati betting on a McCain Administration? Historical precedent. During most presidential election years, Republicans tend to surge in the last few months of the campaign. For a Democrat to win in November, he must have a comfortable lead in the polls at this stage in the game.

The classic example is 1976, Jimmy Carter led incumbent Gerald Ford by 33 percentage points. Ford was hobbled by Watergate, a recession, and his pardon of Nixon, as well as his dismal performance in the debates, where he claimed that the Soviet Union wasn’t dominating eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Ford closed the lead, losing to Carter by just two points. This follows the pattern, albeit by a wider margin than in most elections.

In recent years, the countervailing example is the 1992 contest between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, the incumbent. After the Democratic National Convention in August, Clinton was only ahead of Bush by a few points. Clinton won, but only because independent Ross Perot, a businessman with libertarian leanings, attracted so many votes from registered Republicans.

Perot ran again in 1996, but was less of a factor. So the old pattern reasserted itself. Clinton led Bob Dole by roughly 20 percent in mid-August, but won by eight. Republicans always close the gap.

It happened again in 2000. In mid-August, Al Gore had an eight-point lead ahead of George W. Bush. Gore won the popular vote by 0.6 percent.

If you’re a Democrat, being ahead isn’t enough. In 2004 John Kerry was ahead in mid-August–but by just two points. Bush was an incumbent with potentially grave weaknesses–he hadn’t found Osama or Iraq’s supposed WMDs, and he was already losing the war–yet the pattern reasserted itself. Bush gained four points, prevailing in the popular vote by 2.4 percent. (I won’t comment on the electoral vote, aside from mentioning that it was stolen in the key state of Ohio.)

If Barack Obama ends up beating John McCain, he will have done so with the smallest August lead for a Democrat in memory–three points, within the statistical margin of error for tracking polls. A columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times argues that’s good news: “Out of the gate,” writes Carol Marin, “the thoroughbred who leads too early and by too great a margin is more often than not the vulnerable one, the one in danger of losing it all to the horse who strategically holds back, waits, and then thunders in the final furlongs to finish first.” Nice metaphor, but presidential campaigns aren’t horse races. They’re boxing matches. The last man standing wins.

If the election were held today, Obama would win. But it won’t be, so he might not. Republicans fight harder than Democrats, so Republicans land more punches. Democrats, at least Democrats of the wimpy post-LBJ variety–need to start ahead in order to eek out a victory.

Unless Obama starts swinging soon, he’s done for. Insiders are tut-tutting over Ohio, an important swing state this year. Given the decade-long recession and voter anger there–not to mention a significant African-American population–Obama ought to be kicking McCain six ways to Sunday. But the two candidates are neck and neck in fundraising. “For McCain to even be competitive is surprising to me,” says Chris Duncan, chairman of the political science department at the University of Dayton. “I don’t think it’s that he’s doing better than expected. I think it’s that Obama is doing worse than he would expect.”

Vincent Hutchings of the University of Michigan wonders if the Obama campaign is counting too much on young voters. “Is he generating enough enthusiasm to excite people who lack a formal education and are disproportionately young, and not likely to vote?” he asks.

As I argued in my 2004 polemic “Wake Up! You’re Liberal: How We Can Take America Back From the Right,” American voters feel besieged. At home, they see prices rising while their salaries get gnawed away by inflation. From a foreign affairs standpoint, they see a world full of terrorists and hostile rivals–Iran, North Korea, Russia, China–out to get them. As a psychologist would say, the fact that there isn’t much truth to this perception doesn’t make it less real.

Americans want their presidents to be a National Daddy–an ornery cuss willing to err on the side of kicking some innocent schlub’s ass to protect them.

Last time around, in 2004, John Kerry repeatedly turned the other jowl as Bush and his proxies pounded him with the now-notorious Swift Boat ads. Of course, whether Kerry’s Vietnam service rose to the level of heroism was debatable. What wasn’t was that Bush weaseled out of going at all. But Kerry never responded. If the guy won’t fight for himself, voters asked themselves, how will he fight for me?

Obama has already traveled too far down the Path of the Kerry, repeatedly voting for funding a war his entire candidacy is predicated upon opposing, not to mention government spying on U.S. citizens and, most recently, the embarrassingly cheesy spectacle of endorsing offshore oil drilling. I mean, really: Do any right-wing conservatives believe he really means any of this stuff?

If he is to make history by salvaging his campaign from its current neck-and-neck status with McCain, Obama will have to rally the Democrats’ liberal base by throwing them some red meat: immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, socialized medicine and a sweeping credit crisis bailout plan (all interest rates legally reset to prime) would be a start. He’ll also need to beat up McCain (fairly) for agreeing with Bush about just about everything–and pledge to hold the Bushies responsible for their crimes.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Ted Rall Cover Story on Afghanistan

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Ted Rall

For seven years, I’ve been telling you that the war against Afghanistan is every bit as illegal and immoral–and probably less winnable–than the war against Iraq. Now, slowly, people are starting to notice.

Given that I’ve been almost alone as an American opposing the Afghan war, the CityBeat chain of Southern California alternative newsweeklies asked me to take a look at the situation as it stands now. The result is a lengthy cover story in this week’s CityBeat newspapers.

You can find it in Los Angeles CityBeat as well as San Diego CityBeat.

The Bad War: Afghanistan Seven Years Later

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Ted Rall

NATO came to Nurat on July 11th. There were seventy soldiers, 45 of them members of the American troop complement that has occupied Afghanistan since the fall of 2001 and 25 members of Hamid Karzai’s ragtag national army. Because the air isn’t thick enough at that altitude for helicopters to operate reliably, the men had to drag most of their gear up to their new outpost in a high valley on the border of Kunar and Nuristan provinces. There they built their small combat outpost, one of a string of such spartan facilities along the country’s remote eastern frontier with Pakistan’s Tribal Areas.

Residents of the Weygal Valley did not greet them warmly. U.S. forces attached to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), sometimes deploying unmanned Predator planes, had been blowing up local civilians with seemingly reckless abandon. Seventeen Afghans, including doctors, were killed nearby a week before the establishment of the mini base at Nurat. In a country where American attacks on wedding parties are so routine that they have become a cliché, the deaths of 47 people in Nangahar province two days later—including the bride—prompted 150 tribal leaders from Weygal to travel to Kabul to lodge a complaint with President Karzai. Karzai repeatedly postponed the meeting, and they eventually left in disgust. It was July 11th.

Two days later, in the early morning of the 13th, hundreds of Taliban fighters routed the NATO force at Nurat. Nine Americans were killed; 15 more and four Afghans were wounded. The base has since been abandoned. The village is under Taliban control—a state of affairs that the locals, disgusted with NATO’s indiscriminate use of air power, seem to prefer.

The incident at Nurat is but the most recent example of the U.S. military being forced to evacuate a base it had built. Routs have become so commonplace in Afghanistan that official spokespeople have even come up with a new word for the loss of a facility: “disestablished.”

Disestablished—or perhaps more succinctly, “unestablished”—serves as a succinct description of the situation in post-Taliban Afghanistan. The basic components of a viable nation-state—security, infrastructure, cohesive central control—remain unestablished more than six years after the fall of Kandahar to forces of the Northern Alliance, an ad hoc group of warlords armed and funded by Russia, Iran and neighboring states during the Taliban era of the late 1990s, and later found a deeper-pocketed patron in the U.S. after 9/11. “Nation building lite,” the term State Department officials used to brag about the United States’ shoestring commitment to the Karzai regime now looks more like malign neglect.

“It is disappointing,” the Democratic National Committee said in a statement on July 24th, “that John McCain doesn’t recognize that the war in Afghanistan was not only the first major conflict after 9/11, and is in fact a major front in the fight against terrorism. No wonder John McCain doesn’t understand why the American people are looking for new leadership that will bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end so we can direct the resources we need to getting the job done in Afghanistan.”

The truth, as usual, is more complicated. There were two major jihadi training camps in Afghanistan during the late 1990s, but both were closed before 9/11. Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants lived near Kandahar during the late 1990s, but had left by 9/11. On 9/11, Al Qaeda, the training camps and bin Laden were all in Pakistan—the latter in a Pakistani military hospital. The Taliban government would have collapsed without arms and money from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.

Before 2000, Afghanistan was indeed a “major front in the fight against terrorism.” But the U.S. didn’t invade then. When it did go in, and throughout the subsequent occupation, the best moral justification for the war in Afghanistan became: getting warmer.

The “good war”—the war that Barack Obama and other Democrats say we should be fighting, the war represented in countless political memes as “the ball” that Bush “took his eye off” when he became distracted by the war in Iraq, the war which Obama promises to dispatch 10,000 more troops in a new “surge”—has never looked less winnable. (“I don’t think there is any doubt that we were distracted [by the invasion of Iraq] from our efforts to hunt down Al Qaeda and the Taliban,” Obama told CBS News in one of his typical recent iterations.)

“Afghanistan—The Right War,” shouted the cover of Time magazine’s July 28th issue.

So many Afghan provinces have fallen under direct Taliban control that NATO has been forced to offer them legal recognition. June 2008 was the single deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan since bombs started raining on Kabul in October 2001. The month featured two startling developments: a daring Taliban raid on a prison that freed hundreds of prisoners, many of whom to rejoin their comrades in arms, and the incipient full-scale offensive by thousands of Talibs against the city of Kandahar. Four hundred seventy-six Americans, and tens of thousands of Afghans, have died in the war that began in October 2001. Yet America and its allies will almost certainly lose the war in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban is likely to maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008,” confirms a Pentagon analysis, anticipating a summer offensive that some South Asia experts predict could presage the endgame—the return of Taliban rule nationwide next year.

Last week I received a request for an interview by a news affairs radio program in northern California. “As you are probably aware, it is not easy to find an American voice that advocates a US/NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan,” the producer wrote. “For example, I got an e-mail today from a progressive media group with a list of possible speakers, all of whom highlighted the purported reemergent Taliban/al-Qaeda threat.” I declared Afghanistan unwinnable in 2001 and have since authored three books explaining why. To my knowledge, I remain the only syndicated columnist or editorial cartoonist in America who thinks we should get out of Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

How did I know the Afghan War would go bad? Many factors entered my analysis, but two incidents I witnessed in November 2001 crystallized my pessimistic point of view.

The first was the way Afghans of various political and ethnic affiliations treated one of my fellow journalists, a Russian radio correspondent who had served in the Soviet army that occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. They loved him! I asked them why. “We love Russian people,” they’d say. “But you killed them mercilessly,” I’d reply. “Of course,” they’d explain. “They were invaders. Invaders must be killed.” What about Americans? “Of course, Americans too,” they’d say, a little sadly. “After we kill them all, however, they are welcome to come back as tourists and friends.”

The second incident took place on a dirt road in Khanabad, where I noticed a group of Afghan Tajiks, including an old guy with a long beard, weeping quietly in the street. A couple of U.S. soldiers had kicked down a door and were inside a house, presumably searching for weapons.

“During Soviet times, under the Taliban, even during the civil war, no one dared break into a man’s home,” the old man told me. “No one. Even if the Taliban came to execute you, they knocked on the door politely and waited for you to come outside.” I knew we weren’t going to win then and there. Word of the Americans’ treatment of Afghan men—flexicuffing them, grinding their faces into the dirt with their boots, placing bags over their heads—spread quickly. Battles were still raging in Kunduz and Kandahar between the U.S.’s allies and Taliban holdouts, but the Americans had already lost the war for hearts and minds.

What went wrong? How did a war marketed as a defensive police action to bring terrorists to justice (and, as an added bonus, liberate millions of oppressed women) lose its moral imperative so quickly? Why did so many Americans—including millions who would later march in the streets to protest the Iraq War—fail to see that it had been lost?

It is impossible for a citizen of the United States of America to understand what it’s like to live in a place without law and order. In the Land of the Free, rogue policemen harass black drivers, sell drugs, even rape suspects with broomsticks. Our president violates basic civil rights, going so far as to sign off on torture. But even in the most dangerous neighborhoods in the most crime-ridden cities in the U.S., law and order exists. If you shoot someone, a witness will almost certainly call the police, who will come as quickly as possible to take you to jail.

This is not true in Afghanistan. When I was there during the late fall of 2001, my Afghan translator expressed amazement at my suggestion that we meet for dinner at 6 p.m. “That’s after dark,” he said. “We will be killed.” I asked him what the odds were of encountering trouble. “No odds,” he replied. “Death is certain.” Like most Afghans, Jovid had never been outside the confines of a walled compound with reinforced bulletproof doors at night.

Unchallenged street violence makes other issues recede in importance. I watched a boy—he couldn’t have been older than 15—level his AK-47 and fire randomly into a group of women walking across a village square in Kunduz province. Bouncing in the back of a shockless Soviet pick-up truck, my eyes met those of my traveling companions—heavily armed Northern Alliance soldiers, Afghan Tajiks, fellow reporters. No one said a word. There was nothing we could do.

In a place where you can shoot people just for fun, where average life expectancy is 43, you don’t care about racial equality or women’s rights or freedom of the press. The environment is a abstraction. All you dream about is the ability to walk down the street.

One of my colleagues, a Swedish cameraman named Ulf Stromberg, made the mistake of opening his door at about four in the morning. Two kids, probably Northern Alliance soldiers, robbed him of his cash and satellite phone, and shot him to death. I went to the new government’s local office in Taloqan to file a report the next day.

“What for?” he asked.

“When things calm down,” I explained, “you could launch an investigation.”

He let out a grim chuckle and waved me toward the door. “Things don’t calm down here.”

Except, of course, under the Taliban. In early 1994 thirty students (“talibs”) of a one-eyed village priest named Muhammed Omar told him that a local warlord’s militiamen had created a checkpoint, not only to shake down drivers but to rape girls. “How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor?” Omar asked Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai. Ordering his charges to grab 16 guns, Mullah Omar’s avengers executed the mujahedeen rapists, creating a vigilante legend that would eventually lead him to supreme power.

The Pashtun-dominated Taliban were brutal and capricious rulers. They were particularly hard on areas dominated by other ethnic groups such as Uzbeks, Tajiks and the Hazara. Fun—music, movies, kites, even keeping pigeons—was banned. Women whose burqas revealed a patch of skin were beaten by the roving thugs of the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice (an idea suggested by the Taliban’s Saudi allies). And they took hammers to artifacts in the national museum. But, if nothing else—mostly, it was nothing else—the Taliban delivered law and order. Justice was sure, swift, extreme, and effective. Violent crime plummeted. For the first time since the Soviet invasion in 1979, it became possible to drive the length of Afghanistan without encountering a single militia checkpoint, much less a robber.

When the Taliban left, anarchy returned.

Pentagon experts estimated that invading and occupying Afghanistan with sufficient troop density to provide street-level law and order would have required between 400,000 and 500,000 soldiers, the same number General Shinseki famously wanted for Iraq. (Afghanistan has about the same population and square mileage as Iraq, but with far more challenging, extremely mountainous terrain.)

Instead, a few thousand CIA operatives and Special Forces units parachuted into northern Afghanistan, doled out millions of dollars in cash to figures who controlled private armies, like Ishmail Khan of Herat, Tajik General Muhammad Atta (not the 9/11 hijacker) and Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, based near Mazar-e-Sharif. U.S. airstrikes “softened” Taliban positions (as of 9/11, only about 300 Al Qaeda fighters were left in all of Afghanistan), allowing America’s newly-purchased allies to walk in. To Western eyes, it was a brilliant strategy. The Taliban melted away into the mountains. The Northern Alliance took power in Kabul. But it set the stage for three catastrophic problems.

First, the Taliban weren’t really defeated. Adhering to the classic guerilla tactics that Afghans had employed in their wars against Great Britain and the USSR, they laid low, waiting to regroup while studying their adversaries. Second, the occupation was so thin that Afghans in much of the country could go weeks or months without catching a glimpse of an American soldier. Throughout the first year of the occupation, with the war against the Taliban deemed “won” by an arrogant and triumphalist Bush Administration, only 8,000 U.S. forces were deployed—the majority holed up at Bagram airbase near Kabul, by far the safest city in the country. I asked a Pentagon spokesperson why they were there rather than quelling the violence in places like Jalalabad and Helmand province, where warlord militiamen were making many Afghans nostalgic for the Taliban. “Because they’re safer there,” she explained. Which brings us to the third disastrous outcome of the American strategy: allowing the warlords to rule each area under their control as medieval fiefs.

Balkanization worked out well for the residents of Herat, where Khan’s access to Turkmenistan’s electrical grid and control of lucrative customs posts at the Turkmen and Iranian borders brought in enough cash to build Afghanistan’s own Wally World, complete with paved streets, uniformed police officers and working traffic signals. General Dostum’s Mazar turned ugly, beginning with his systemic weekend-long massacre of 10,000 Taliban POWs, under the supervision of U.S. Special Forces. Outside the “Mayor of Kabul”‘s limited control, Afghanistan returned to the warlordism, and a low-grade version of the civil war that reduced it to rubble between 1992 and 1996.

Karzai tried to buy off the warlords by offering them cabinet posts, only to lose whatever credibility he might have once enjoyed. “I watched the Taliban stone rapists,” a woman told me. “Now the rapists in the government.”

“In a move that foreshadowed America’s trouble in Iraq,” The New York Times reported in 2007,” [Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration’s handpicked president, for a large international force.” Today there are 53,000 forces under NATO and U.S. command fighting in Afghanistan. But even Obama’s proposal for an additional 10,000 wouldn’t get troop strength anywhere near the magic half a million. With the economy in shambles and the military stretched in Iraq and at foreign bases around the world—UC San Diego professor Chalmers Johnson counts more than 500,000 full-time service personnel stationed overseas besides Iraq—we simply can’t afford a full-fledged “flood the field” strategy.

Others complain about the slow—a less charitable reading would be non-existent—pace of construction projects in the world’s poorest country. Only about $3.4 billion a year has been allocated for Afghan reconstruction, less than half of the budget for Iraq—which was in far better shape. Moreover, no one knows what happened to the money. Five years into the occupation, the Times reported that not even a single building had been erected in Afghanistan thanks to U.S. foreign aid.

“The international community has spent many billions of dollars toward the nation’s reconstruction,” writes Nancy Hatch Dupree, director of the American Center at Kabul University. “Yet not much progress can be seen. Poor management and lack of coordination among aid agencies are the major reasons for this dismal record.”

Only one highway had been paved—a road to service a pipeline to carry Kazakh oil and Turkmen gas from Herat to Kandahar. A military advisor said: “I could count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of U.S. government agricultural experts” in Afghanistan, a nation whose economy is 80 percent farming.

“I said from the get-go that we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough soldiers,” said Robert Finn, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003. By 2005 it became statistically more dangerous for a U.S. soldier to serve in Afghanistan than Iraq. “I’m saying the same thing six years later,” said Finn.

The Democratic narrative, picked up by Barack Obama in his presidential bid, has 51 percent of Americans still convinced that that the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. A recent ABC News-Washington Post poll finds that 44 percent of the public thinks things are going well there—down from 70 percent in 2002, but still significantly more than the views of journalists, military experts and scholars who follow Afghanistan and Central Asia carefully. Their conventional wisdom is that forced withdrawal is imminent, anywhere from two to five years away—leading to surprising attempts to issue blame.

“Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is not doing as much as he should to build an effective administration,” The Economist argued recently. “And George Bush is not doing as much as he could to twist Mr Karzai’s arm.” Karzai has faults, but they pale next to his weaknesses—direct control of about 10 percent of his nation’s territory, an empty treasury and a powerful, comparatively well-funded neighbor—Pakistan—that arms and funds the resurgent Taliban. If Afghanistan falls out of the U.S. orbit, it won’t be Karzai’s fault.

In the final analysis, the outcome of the current effort to tame the Hindu Kush may come down to the possibility that colonialism is dead. Throughout the 20th century, no nation has ever successfully occupied another one. It may have taken time, not to mention bloodshed, for citizens of a nation-state to force out invaders. In the end, however, occupying armies have always been forced to withdraw.

© 2008 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: It’s the Torture, Stupid

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Ted Rall

Restoring Human Rights Must Be Next Prez’s Top Priority

Both major presidential candidates have promised to roll back the Bush Administration’s torture archipelago. Both say they’ll close Guantánamo, abolish legalized torture, and respect the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Obama also pledges to eliminate “extraordinary rendition,” in which the CIA kidnaps people and flies them to other countries to be tortured, and says he will investigate Bush Administration officials for possible prosecution for war crimes.

If followed by other meaningful changes in behavior–withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq and foreswearing preemptive warfare–restoring the rule of law and respecting the rights of “enemy combatants” can start America’s long, slow climb back to moral parity in the community of nations. But there are worrisome signs that Barack Obama and John McCain’s commitment to moral renewal is less than rock-solid.

McCain, who claimed to have been tortured as a POW in North Vietnam, says a lot of the right things. “We do not torture people,” he said in a 2007 Republican debate. “It’s not about the terrorists; it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are.” He used his Vietnam experience against fellow Republicans, bullying Congress into passing a law banning torture against detainees held by the military.

Bush signed McCain’s bill in late 2005, saying it “is to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture, whether it be here at home or abroad.”

Days later, however, Bush issued a secret “signing statement” declaring that he would ignore the Detainee Treatment Act. NYU law professor David Golove, an expert on executive power, said: “The signing statement is saying ‘I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it’s important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me.”

McCain, who says as president he would veto a bill rather than issue a signing statement negating its contents, was no doubt angry about Bush’s perfidy. But, fearful of alienating Bush and the GOP leadership as he geared up for his ’08 presidential campaign, he remained silent.

In February of this year, McCain backtracked still further from his anti-torture position, voting against legislation that would have blocked the CIA from subjecting inmates in its secret prisons to waterboarding, hooding, putting duct tape across their eyes, stripping them naked, rape, beatings, burning, subjecting them to hypothermia, mock executions, and other “harsh interrogation techniques.”

“The CIA should have the ability to use additional techniques,” he argued. He refused to explain why the CIA ought to be allowed to torture while the DOD should adhere to international standards of civilized behavior.

The U.S. continues to torture.

Unlike McCain, Obama remains a critic of officially sanctioned torture. “We’ll reject torture–without exception or equivocation,” Obama says. He would also end “the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.”

The trouble is, Obama isn’t laying the groundwork for stopping torture or closing Guantánamo or other U.S. gulags in his stump speeches. He talks a lot about energy policy, healthcare, jobs and the economy–and withdrawing troops from Iraq so they join the war against Afghanistan instead. If he becomes president, people will expect him to do those things. Without a sustained focus on human rights issues, however, any moves he makes will seem to come out of the blue–and face stronger pushback from Republicans anxious to bash him as weak on national security.

Why doesn’t Obama emphasize Bush’s war crimes? Maybe he’s trying to play the Great Uniter, or maybe he knows that many Americans don’t give a rat’s ass about the pain inflicted against people they’ll never meet in places they’ve never heard of. Who knows? All we know for sure is that, day after day, Obama fails to talk about what is arguably the worst crime of the corrupt Bush Administration.

Of course, renouncing torture isn’t enough. Those who authorized it must be held to account. However, it doesn’t seem likely that they will.

Asked in April whether he would prosecute Bush Administration officials for authorizing torture, Obama delivered his now-familiar duck-and-cover: say the right thing, then weasel out of it. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” he said.

But not for at least four years: “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems to solve.”

Memo to Barack: This isn’t about prosecuting Republicans. It’s about prosecuting torturers.

“Prosecution of any officials, if it were to occur, would probably not occur during Obama’s first term,” Slate reports, citing Obama campaign insiders. “Instead, we may well see a Congressionally empowered commission that would seek testimony from witnesses in search of the truth about what occurred. Though some witnesses might be offered immunity in exchange for testimony, the question of whether anybody would be prosecuted would be deferred to a later date–meaning Obama’s second term, if such is forthcoming.”

First would come a South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” where the truth would come out. But the torturers would get off scot-free.
“The commission would focus strictly on detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, or the practice of spiriting detainees to a third country for abusive interrogations. The panel would focus strictly on these abuses, leaving out any other allegedly illegal activities during the Bush Administration, such as domestic spying,” says Slate. Second–well, there might not be a second. Even if there is, shortsighted Americans’ appetite for justice and accountability will probably have been diluted by the time 2013 rolls around.

Mainline media liberals, in conjunction with Obama supporters, are even going so far as to suggest that Bush issue his torturers with a blanket pardon in exchange for their testimony at Obama’s toothless commission.

Regardless of who wins in November, we will get a president who’s better on torture and other human rights issues than George W. Bush. At least their words sound nice. But real change and moral redemption will only begin if we–Democrats, Republicans and everyone else–demand the next president stands by his pretty promises.

Until they start taking taking torture, Gitmo and human rights seriously, neither Obama nor McCain should be able to appear in public without facing questions and heckling about these issues.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: News Does Not Want To Be Free

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Ted Rall

Three Cures for Ailing Newspapers

“I feel I’m being catapulted into another world, a world I don’t really understand,” Denis Finley told the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Finley, editor of the Virginian-Pilot, isn’t the only newspaper executive who can’t come up with a plan for the future. “Only 5 percent of [newspaper editors and publishers],” finds Pew’s latest analysis of the nation’s 1217 daily newspapers, “said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now.”

Newspapers are in trouble. More people read them than ever, but most of them read them online, for free. Unfortunately online advertising rates are too low to make up for declining print circulation. A reader of The New York Times‘ print edition generates about 170 times as much revenue as someone who surfs NYTimes.com. (This is because print readers spend 47 minutes with the paper. Online browsers visit the paper’s website a mere seven minutes–some of which they might not even be sitting in front of their computers.)

Newspaper executives don’t know what to do. Papers are closing foreign bureaus and laying off thousands of reporters. No matter how many employees they fire, however, they can’t slash or burn their way to profitability–there just isn’t enough budget to cut in a future where income has dropped to 1/170th.

“Newspapers,” writes San Jose State University business professor Joel West, “face two structural problems and have been unable to fix either one.” One is the Web in general, which offers advertisers more, finely targeted access to readers. The other is news on the Web, which is free on sites like Google and Yahoo (which compile AP and other wire service stories), as well as the newspaper websites themselves.

“OK,” argues West, “The New York Times or the big city daily has better news, but how much better? If it’s $20/month (or even $10 or merely requires a login) will readers bother? Most won’t. As with other commodities, better loses to ‘good enough.'”

But it doesn’t have to. If publishers take three audacious but absolutely essential steps, the print newspaper industry can save itself. All three of my suggestions are predicated on the simplest principle of capitalism: scarcity increases demand.

Newspapers have made news free and plentiful, which is why they’re going broke.

First: newspapers should go offline. If the last decade has proven anything, it’s that you can’t charge for a product–in this case, news–that you give away. So stop! All the members of the Newspaper Association of America should shut down their websites. At the very least, papers ought to charge online readers twice as much as for print subscriptions–searchability must be worth something. Want news? Buy a “dead tree” newspaper.

Second, copyright every article in the newspaper.

“The majority of bloggers and Internet addicts, like the endless rows of talking heads on television, do not report,” notes the invaluable Chris Hedges. “They are largely parasites who cling to traditional news outlets…They rarely pick up the phone, much less go out and find a story. Nearly all reporting–I would guess at least 80 percent–is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole.” And a lot of unfulfilled demand one can charge for.

Newsgathering requires extensive infrastructure. Beat reporters, freelancers, editors, stringers, fact-checkers, and travel cost a lot of money. (A week in rural Afghanistan costs at least $10,000.) Why shouldn’t newspapers–the main newsgathering organizations in the United States–be compensated for those expenses?

Every newspaper article should enjoy an individual, aggressively enforced, copyright. Radio and TV outlets that currently lift their news reports out of newspapers–without forking over a cent–would have to hire reporters or pay papers a royalty. Paying newspapers for usage, even at a high rate, would probably be cheaper.

Step three on the road back to fiscal viability: cut off the wire services. Nowadays an article written for a local paper can get picked up by a wire service, which sells it for a ridiculously low reprint fee to other papers and websites like Google. At bare minimum, newspapers that originate stories ought to require wires to charge would-be reprinters the thousands of dollars each piece is worth. Better yet, don’t post them in the first place.

There are a couple of problems with my prescription. First, my suggestions only work if every paper follows them. Aside from the cat-herding organizational hurdles, accusations of collusion and price-fixing might bring down the wrath of government officials assigned to enforcing anti-trust laws. Second and perhaps more daunting, the “information wants to be free” mantra, once the cry of wacko libertarians, has become state religion.

“Free” doesn’t mean anything, and it obviously hasn’t worked. But it’s hard to purge a brain of a meme, no matter how moronic.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

The Truth is Still Out There

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Ted Rall

posted by Susan Stark

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here as a guest blogger, but I just wanted to remind everyone to go see the new “X-Files” movie coming out.

Many of the critics are panning the movie, because what they are describing is that it’s more about Mulder and Scully than any supernatural plot.

But it’s a tad unfair to criticize Chris Carter, the creator of the series, for not putting enough supernatural in the movie. The Bush presidency has been nothing but one eight-year long X-File, and it’s hard for Mr. Carter to top that. You have to remember that the “X-Files” was basically a 90s series.

I did not get into 90s culture very well. I didn’t care for grunge rock, and I didn’t have enough computer literacy to start a dot-com. But the “X-Files” is a stunning exception. Mulder and Scully were a welcome presence in my home for many years, and it would be inexcusable for me not to go and pay them a visit after six years of not seeing them.

No matter what the critics say.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Recession, Year 8

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Ted Rall

Bickering Over Terminology Delays Real Action

There’s a debate in the media about the recession. On the right are those who say that the economy has never been better. Not so fast, says the official left: we’ve (just) started a recession.

Phil Gramm, McCain’s former economic advisor, leads the School of Sunny Optimism. “This is a mental recession,” said Gramm. “We may have a recession, we haven’t had one yet. We have sort of become a nation of whiners.” Given his day job, you have to admire his attitude. UBS Investment Bank, which employs Gramm as its vice chairman, was recently forced to write off $38 billion in bad debts because of its exposure to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, wiping out all its profits since 2004.

Economists are mildly pessimistic. In April, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke conceded that a recession was possible. Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group, believes that unemployment and other data for the first quarter of 2008 marks the official start of a recession. “It is now very clear that the fat lady has sung for the economic expansion. The country has slipped into a recession,” he said, articulating the mainstream view that we’re about to embark on a bumpy ride.

Recession? We’ve been in a recession since 2000.

Forget the experts. They think telling the grisly truth about the state of the U.S. economy could make things even worse–and they’re probably right. But Americans know the truth.

Every major indicator–jobs, wages and cost of living–has trended downward since the dot-com crash of 2000. Since then it has nearly impossible to sell a home, find a job, or get a raise. Rising inflation is tightening the squeeze. Whoever becomes president next year will inherit an economy beginning its ninth year in a downward spiral.

The official inflation rate of two to three percent is a lie, and it has been for years. Presidents Reagan and Clinton ordered the Bureau of Labor Standards to change the way it calculates the Consumer Price Index. Previously they compared the prices of the same items from one year to the next. Now, in order to cheat senior citizens out of cost-of-living increases on their Social Security payments, the government uses a “substitutions” analysis. “The consumer price index assumes that if prices get too high, consumers will start buying cheaper products,” reports The San Diego Union-Tribune. For instance, if steak gets too expensive, they will switch to ground beef.”

Steve Reed, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Standards, freely concedes that the change makes inflation looks lower than it is. He also admits its motivation: “Even if the CPI was one percentage point higher, it could cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars.”

John Williams, an economic consultant who publishes the monthly newsletter “Shadow Government Statistics,” calculates that “inflation is actually running at an annualized rate of 9.95 percent.” Inflation has been rising since 2002.

The U.S. economy must create 150,000 new jobs a month (1.8 million annually) just to keep up with population growth. Anything less represents a net jobs loss.

The Clinton years saw the creation of 236,500 new jobs per month–a net increase of more than 8 million over eight years. As of 2007, the Bush era saw just 70,000 jobs per month–a net loss of more than 7 million. Bush has brought us back to 1992, when his father lost over his own recession.

Among those who still have jobs, they’re not getting raises that keep up with Williams’ inflation rate. Median household income, adjusted for the government’s lowball inflation rate, is down since 2001.

Even white-collar workers, traditionally insulated by advanced degrees, are getting slammed by the eight-year-long recession.

“Wage stagnation, long the bane of blue-collar workers, is now hitting people with bachelor’s degrees for the first time in 30 years,” reported The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “Earnings for workers with four-year degrees fell 5.2 percent from 2000 to 2004 when adjusted for inflation, according to White House economists… [people with master’s and other advanced degrees] have found that their inflation-adjusted wages were essentially flat between 2000 and 2004.” There’s no reason to believe that this trend has reversed.

It takes two consecutive quarterly drops in the GDP, say economists, to make a recession official. But, as with porn, Americans know a recession when they see one. And this one is eight years old.

There are only two real questions. The first is whether Russian president Dmitri Medvedev is right. The U.S., he said recently, is in “essentially a depression.” The second is whether John McCain, Barack Obama, or anyone else is willing to do something meaningful about it.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: War Zero

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Ted Rall

Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War

Every presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we’re being asked to swallow in 2008.

On the left–OK, not–we have Barack Obama. “The best orator of his generation!” says Ed Rendell, the Democratic power broker who has a day job as governor of Pennsylvania. “The best orator since Cicero!” Republican strategist Mary Matalin swoons. No doubt, Obama reads a mean speech. Take his Teleprompter away, though, and the dude is as lost as George Bush at a semiotics class. Forced to answer reporters’ questions off the cuff, Obama is so afraid of messing up that he…carefully…spaces…each…word…apart…
so…he…can…see…them…
coming…wayyy…in…advance.

Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero, and (b) said heroism increases his credibility on national security issues. “A Vietnam hero and national security pro,” The New York Times calls him in a typical media blandishment.

John McCain fought in Vietnam. There was nothing noble, much less heroic, about fighting in that war.

Some Americans may be suffering another of the periodic attacks of national amnesia that prevent us from honestly assessing our place in the world and its history, but others recall the truth about Vietnam: it was a disastrous, unjustifiable mess that anyone with an ounce of sense was against at the time.

Between one and two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were sent to their deaths by a succession of presidents and Congresses–fed to the flames of greed, hubris, and stupidity. The event used to justify starting the war–the Tonkin Gulf “incident”–never happened. The Vietnam War’s ideological foundation, the mantra cited to keep it going, was disproved after we lost. No Southeast Asian “dominos” fell to communism. To the contrary, the effect of the U.S. withdrawal was increased stability. When genocide broke out in neighboring Cambodia in the late 1970s, it was not the U.S., but a unified Vietnamese army–the evil communists–who stopped it.

Not even General Wesley Clark, shot four times in Vietnam, is allowed to question the McCain-as-war-hero narrative. “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” he argued. The Obama campaign, which sells its surrogates down the river with alarming regularity, promptly hung the former NATO commander out to dry: “Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain’s service, and of course he rejects yesterday’s statement by General Clark.”

Even in an article criticizing the media for repeatedly framing McCain as a war hero, the liberal website Media Matters concedes: “McCain is, after all, a war hero; everybody agrees about that.”

Not everyone.

I was 12 when the last U.S. occupation troops fled Saigon. I remember how I–and most Americans–felt at the time.

We were relieved.

By the end of Nixon’s first term most people had turned against the war. Gallup polls taken in 1971 found that about 70 percent of Americans thought sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. Some believed it was immoral; others considered it unwinnable.

Since then, the political center has shifted right. We’ve seen the Reagan Revolution, Clinton’s Democratic centrism, and Bush’s post-9/11 flirtation with neo-McCarthyite fascism. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans–including Republicans–still think we should never have fought the Vietnam War.

“After the war’s 1975 conclusion,” Michael Tomasky wrote in The American Prospect in 2004, “Gallup has asked the question (“Did the U.S. make a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?”) five times, in 1985, 1990, 1993, 1995, and 2000. All five times…respondents were consistent in calling the war a mistake by a margin of more than 2 to 1: by 74 percent to 22 percent in 1990, for example, and by 69 percent to 24 percent in 2000.”

Moreover, Tomasky continued, “vast majorities continue to call the war ‘unjust.'” Even in 2004, after 9/11, 62 percent considered the war unjust. Only 33 percent still thought it was morally justified.

Vietnam was an illegal, undeclared war of aggression. Can those who fought in that immoral war really be heroes? This question appeared settled after Reagan visited a cemetery for Nazi soldiers, including members of the SS, at Bitburg, West Germany in 1985. “Those young men,” claimed Reagan, “are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

Americans didn’t buy it. Reagan’s poll numbers, typically between 60 and 65 percent at the time, plunged to 41 percent after the visit. Those who fight for an evil cause receive no praise.

So why is the McCain-as-war-hero myth so hard to unravel? By most accounts, John McCain demonstrated courage as a P.O.W., most notably by refusing his captors’ offer of early release. But that doesn’t make him a hero.

Hell, McCain isn’t even a victim.

At a time when more than a fourth of all combat troops in Vietnam were forcibly drafted (the actual victims), McCain volunteered to drop napalm on “gooks” (his term, not mine). He could have waited to see if his number came up in the draft lottery. Like Bush, he could have used family connections to weasel out of it. Finally, he could have joined the 100,000 draft-eligible males–true heroes, to a man–who went to Canada rather than kill people in a war that was plainly wrong.

When McCain was shot down during his 23rd bombing sortie, he was happily shooting up a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a major city. Vietnamese locals beat him when they pulled him out of a local lake; yeah, that must have sucked. But I can’t help think of what would have happened to Mohammed Atta had he somehow wound up alive on a lower Manhattan street on 9/11. How long would he have lasted?

Maybe he would have made it. I don’t know. But I do know this: no one would ever have considered him a war hero.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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