I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: A bill proposed by a California state legislator would extend last call to 4 a.m. in some California cities. Do we really need two extra hours of drinking?
Ten Years into the Iraq War, the U.S. Repeats in Syria
The Quagmire Pattern always seems to play out the same way.
There’s a civil war in some country deemed by the CIA to be Of Strategic Importance (i.e., energy reserves, proximity to energy reserves, or potential pipeline route to carry energy reserves).
During this initial stage, a secular socialist dictatorship fights Muslim insurgents who want to create an Islamist theocracy. To build public support – or at least apathetic tolerance – the conflict is cast to and by the media as a struggle between tyrannical torturers and freedom-loving underdogs.
The U.S. must get involved!
If not us, who?
Alternative answers to this question – the European Union, the African Union, the United Nations, or nobody at all – what about self-determination? – are shrugged off. It is as if no one has said a word.
The Pentagon selects a rebel faction to support, typically the most radical (because they’re the most fanatical fighters), and sends them money and weapons and trainers.
It works. The regime falls. Yay!
Civil war ensues. Not so yay.
The craziest religious zealots are poised to prevail in this second stage. Because they’re militant and well-trained (by the U.S.). Suffering from buyers’/backers’ remorse, American policymakers have a change of heart. Pivoting 180 degrees, the U.S. now decides to back the most moderate faction (because they’re the most reasonable/most pro-business) among the former opposition.
Then the quagmire begins.
The trouble for Washington is, the radicals are still fanatical – and the best fighters. Minus outside intervention, they will win. So the U.S. pours in more help to their new moderate allies. More weapons. Bigger weapons. More money. Air support. Trainers. Ground troops. Whatever it takes to win an “honorable peace.” And install a moderate regime before withdrawing.
If they can withdraw.
The moderates, you see, never enjoyed the support of most of their country’s people. They didn’t earn their stripes in the war against the former regime. Because of U.S. help, they never had to up their game militarily. So they’re weak. Putting them in power isn’t enough. If the U.S. leaves, they collapse.
Boy, is the U.S. in a pickle now.
Americans troops are getting offed by a determined radical insurgency. The harder the Americans try to crush the nuts, the stronger and bigger they get (because excessive force by invaders radicalizes moderate – but patriotic – fence sitters). Moreover, their puppet allies are a pain in the ass. Far from being grateful, the stooges resent the fact that the U.S. armed their enemies during the original uprising against the fallen dictatorship. The puppet-puppetmaster relationship is inherently one characterized by mistrust.
Starting with the Carter and Reagan Administrations’ arming of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s and continuing today with the ineffectual and ornery Hamid Karzai, the Quagmire Pattern is how the U.S. intervention unfolded in Afghanistan.
However, the American electorate isn’t told this. They are repeatedly told that abandonment – as opposed to isolationism – is the problem. “The decisive factor in terms of the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaida was the fact that the United States and most of the international community simply walked away and left it to Pakistan and to other more extremist elements to determine Afghanistan’s future in the ’90s,” claims James Dobbins, former U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo in a standard retell of the Abandonment Narrative.
The logical implication, of course, is that the U.S. – er, the “international community” – shouldn’t have left Afghanistan in the early 1990s. We ought to have remained indefinitely. The problem with this argument is that we have been over there for 12 straight years, and have little to show for our efforts. (It also ignores history. The U.S. was involved in the 1996-2001 Afghan civil war. It helped both sides: weapons to the Northern Alliance, tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban.)
The Abandonment Narrative is total bullshit – but it has the force of media propagandizers behind it.
The Quagmire Pattern has played out in Afghanistan. And in Iraq. Again in Libya, where a weak central government propped up by the Obama Administration is sitting on its hands as Islamist militias engage in genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Now the Quagmire Pattern is unfolding again, this time in Syria. When the uprising against the secular socialist government of Bashar al-Assad began two years ago, the U.S. rushed in with money, trainers and indirect arms sales. Jihadis received most of the bang-bang goodies. Now people like Dobbins are arguing in favor of weapons transfers from Pentagon arms depots to the Syrian opposition. And President Obama is considering using sketchy allegations that Assad’s forces used chemical weapons – here we go again with the WMDs – as a pretext for invading Syria with ground troops.
Dobbins admits that there are “geopolitical risks,” including distracting ourselves from America’s other Big Possible Future War, against Iran. Yet he still wants to arm the Syrian rebels, who include members of Al Qaeda.
There is, he told NPR, “the possibility that the intervention wouldn’t work and that it would look like a failure.”
“Possibility”? Such interventions have never worked.
So why does he still want to give weapons to people who will probably wind up aiming them at American soldiers?
“I think the consequences of not acting and the risks of not acting are even greater.”
In other words: we do what we do because that’s what we do.
That’s how the Quagmire Pattern works.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
Check it out: it’s actress-activist Roseanne Barr holding up one of my cartoons!
Not just a cartoon – but one commissioned especially for her. (Psst—check out the character on the right.) Knowing that Roseanne is a fan, pal Johnny Argent sprung it on her as a birthday gift. Now it hangs somewhere in Ms. Barr’s residence. I didn’t ask where exactly, but does it matter?
Paul Krugman remembers the “strong current of fear” ten years ago when the U.S. invaded Iraq:
It’s hard now to recall the atmosphere of the time, but there was both an overpowering force of conventional wisdom — all the Very Serious People were for war, don’t you know, and if you were against you were by definition flaky — and a strong current of fear. To come out against the war, let alone to suggest that the Bush administration was deliberately misleading the nation into war, looked all too likely to be a career-ending stance. And there were all too few profiles in courage.
Even though most Americans – and the media – supported the war, I took a strong stance against it long before March 2003 and throughout the early years. Here is my cartoon from day one of the war. As you may remember, it caused outrage:
As Krugman describes, I (and other critics) paid a high price for my opposition not only of the Iraq War, but of the Afghanistan War, which was even more popular – broadly supported by Democrats as well. Opposing Bush was career suicide, but what was the choice? Pulling your punches – like so many of my peers did – meant I wouldn’t be doing the work that mattered anyway. Better to get fired for your opinions than to censor yourself.
The New York Times, where I had been the #1 most reprinted cartoonist during the 1990s, stopped running me.
The Washington Post canceled me.
MSNBC.com canceled me.
Men’s Health, which ran my “Testosterone Diaries” comic strip – which had nothing to do with politics – canceled me.
My income plunged. It’s been a hard ten years. As I write this, I have a stack of bills I have no idea how I’m going to pay.
Even though things are starting to turn around, I am nowhere close to the sound financial footing I had before neo-McCarthyism came to America.
In a week or so I am going to roll out my first-ever Ted Rall Fundraiser for people who can and want to support my work. That’s the new model – if you want good political cartoonists to survive, individuals have to support them. In the meantime, of course, please consider donating. (Everyone who donates now gets the same gimmes as those who donate during the official Fundraiser.)
Right now, George Junior is somewhere celebrating his victory over Saddam Hussein. Just where that “somewhere” is, we don’t know. Have fun in your little hidey-hole, Junior, and don’t forget to wipe off the coke-snot.
Susan Stark
I just started doing local and state cartoons for the Harrisburg PA Patriot-News. Here’s my first one.
Hello, central Pennsylvania! Should be fun.
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: As City Controller Wendy Greuel and City Councilman Eric Garcetti vie for black Democrats in South L.A. and white Republicans in the Valley, the race for mayor of Los Angeles is getting sliced ever more thinly by sophisticated demographic modeling.
Why Sheryl Sandberg is Evil
Sheryl Sandberg is the author of a new book that you’ve heard of if you’re connected enough to be reading this, promoted by one of those PR tsunamis that publishers inflict upon the public every year or two in hopes of recouping six- or seven-figure advances: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.
She is also the chief operating officer of Facebook.
“Lean In,” we are told, is More Than Just a Book. It is a social movement. A way of life.
A happening.
“She is someone who works at Facebook,” moons Garance Franke-Ruta in The Atlantic. “Who leads Facebook. Who helped invent the Facebook we know today. Hers is a Facebook feminism.”
Yuck.
Comparing herself to Betty “The Feminine Mystique” Friedan, Sandberg wants her book to inspire “Lean In Circles” where women would meet to plot how to climb the corporate ladder and achieve gender parity in the boardroom. At their creepy gatherings, women will learn how to act more boldly, aggressively – more like men. Her idea of how men act, anyway.
Franke-Ruta again: “Sandberg is an unapologetic capitalist and senior manager who began her career in Washington, DC. She says she’s interested in seeing more women in leadership posts in corporate America and in the highest ranks of government. That means more women at the top, more women in positions of power, and more women who have the training and experience to lead within institutions actually getting a shot at doing – or daring to do – it.”
Visions of armies of women in beige blouses and dark safe corporate jackets marching through the streets of suburban office parks, chanting quotes from and waving copies of Sandberg’s manifesto, fill her dreams.
I think Sandberg is one of the most insufferable fools in the world of business. Which is saying something. But I don’t hate her for the same reasons as people like Maureen Dowd.
In the New York Times, columnist Dowd sums up Sandberg as a “PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots.” Such Dowdian snark, though cruel, is fair. Sandberg, after all, uttered a comment whose revealing immodesty would make Donald Trump blush: “I always thought I would run a social movement.”
Memo to SS: You don’t “run” a social movement. Lead it, maybe. If you’re lucky.
The Paper of Record asks the six- or seven-figure question:
“Even her advisers acknowledge the awkwardness of a woman with double Harvard degrees, dual stock riches (from Facebook and Google, where she also worked), a 9,000-square-foot house and a small army of household help urging less fortunate women to look inward and work harder. Will more earthbound women, struggling with cash flow and child care, embrace the advice of a Silicon Valley executive whose book acknowledgments include thanks to her wealth adviser and Oprah Winfrey?”
Oh, and her husband quit his job to mind the homestead. That’s convenient.
Still, Dowd et al’s argument that Sandberg’s wealth denies her the standing to issue advice to working women leaves me cold. It doesn’t matter who or what she is; either her ideas are smart and/or good for society or they’re not. A doctor who tells you to diet and exercise is giving you good advice even if she’s fat and smokes. Hell, I’m a dude yet I think I know better than Sandberg what’s better for women. For all I know, and many women agree, she gives good advice to ambitious women trying to climb the corporate ladder.
What grates about Sandberg, I think, is less the fact that a person born at mile 25 thinks she won the marathon because she worked so hard, than her failed attempt to elevate a self-help book to the level of politics.
Sandberg doesn’t know about politics. She doesn’t even know about identity politics.
Politics – debate and discussion about how we should live our lives and how to solve our problems after we have identified them – is hard. Very few people – including most politicians and elected officials – undertake the lifetime of thinking and research, or possess the magic of inspiration, it takes to come up with a transformative vision for an alternative future. The U.S. is tragically devoid of brilliant public intellectuals – our best and brightest political minds are ruthlessly censored and marginalized.
That’s real politics.
Then there’s identity politics.
Identity politics, the struggle by women, gays, ethnic minorities and so on against their privileged rivals in the economy and society, is a dead end. It’s tokenism. At best, movements based on identity politics grant special privileges to a tiny subset of traditionally oppressed demographic groups. Meanwhile, the overall hierarchical class structure remains intact.
It was moving, for example, to watch African-Americans celebrate the election of Barack Obama. Four and a half years later, however, not only can we see that the status of blacks remains the same as 2008 – harassed, arrested, shot and imprisoned at disproportionately high rates, discriminated against in the workplace, deprived of access to a high-quality education, their lifespans shortened by disease and poverty – Obama himself, supposed symbol of progress, doesn’t even talk about racial problems, much less try to fix them.
Everyone’s goal ought to be to liberate humanity from oppression. Identity politics distract from this struggle. They liberate no one.
What Sandberg advocates is even less worthwhile than identity politics.
Sandberg wants rat-race politics. Men, she argues, act like a bunch of testosterone-fueled jerks at work. She wants women to beat them at their own game.
“When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women,” writes Sandberg. “When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less…The solution is making sure everyone is aware of the penalty women pay for success. Recently at Facebook, a manager received feedback that a woman who reported to him was ‘too aggressive.’ Before including this in her review, he decided to dig deeper. He went back to the people who gave the feedback and asked what aggressive actions she had taken. After they answered, he asked point-blank, ‘If a man had done those same things, would you have considered him too aggressive?’ They each said no. By showing both men and women how female colleagues are held to different standards, we can start changing attitudes today.”
Man, I sure wouldn’t want to work at Facebook. It’s a lot more fun to work in an organization where no one – men or women – comes on too strong. Where people work as a team.
“Lean In” fails because Sandberg wants to accelerate the “race to the bottom” behavior that has become standard in American business and politics. She is not the solution to a problem.
She is a problem.
What we need to do is create a society in which everyone – men and women, gays and straights, whites and blacks, and so on – enjoys equal access to the good things in life. Whether like me you have concluded that capitalism, the idea that we are all created unequal, is evil and irredeemable, or you’d prefer to reform the system to make it more humane, replacing male assholes with female assholes gets us nowhere.
Rather than tell American women (or men) what to do, Sandberg would do better to consider her own role in making the United States a worse place to live.
She’s worse than a garden-variety “an unapologetic capitalist.” The virtual antithesis of Google’s “don’t be evil,” the company where she works has become one of the most culturally and economically destructive businesses in America by monetizing the death of a nation’s right to privacy. (This is worth, by one calculation, about $130 per user.) Facebook is so unaccountable that it doesn’t even provide a phone number for customer service. Now it’s emulating the reprehensible Arianna Huffington, attempting to accelerate the aggregation of what’s left of journalism outlets so essential to the health of civic life and democracy with its latest redesign of its News Feed.
Facebook is the face of the New Economy. It sucks $5 billion a year out of the U.S. economy, yet it puts almost nothing back in. It employs fewer than 4,000 Americans. (By way of comparison, GM—which generates less than twice as much as Facebook—employs more than 200,000 workers.)
Even if Sandberg is successful with her Lean In Circles, she will have accomplished the same thing as Facebook. She will have made a tiny privileged of elites richer—and 99% of America poorer.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. His book “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan” will be released in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
I am disgusted by a widely-publicized TV ad being aired by the Freedom to Marry Coalition, which is pushing for legalization of gay marriage.
“Freedom…that’s what I fought for as a marine,” says a young veteran who fought against the people of Iraq, using his warrior cred—and his Republicanism—to argue for the right of gays and lesbians to marry.
Personally, I’d rather that gays and lesbians lead the way to a better life for everybody—by urging straights to stop getting married and abandon the trap of monogamism, which causes untold misery and reinforces outmoded systems of patriarchy, hierarchy and capitalism. It is disturbing to watch homosexuals fight for the right for their own enslavement, much as it is sad to see women and gays struggle for the “right” to murder Iraqis, Afghans and other Muslims in their homelands by serving in the military.
Perhaps these arguments are too forward-looking.
But nobody should be OK with using the deaths of innocent Iraqis to promote gay rights.
Gay people are oppressed. So are Iraqis under U.S. occupation. Occupation by war criminals like the vet in this ad. How many Iraqis did he shoot at? Kill?
The people of Iraq need our support against the U.S. occupation. Oppressed peoples should support one another. This is a shameful ad.
