By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 6, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125564/
It is now a commonplace -- as a lead article in the New York Times's Week in Review pointed out recently -- that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires." Given Barack Obama's call for a greater focus on the Afghan War ("we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq..."), and given indications that a "surge" of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's War."
In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good reason for that -- at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.
In truth, to give "empire" its due you would have to start with a reassessment of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washington's politicians, the Soviet Union, that "evil empire," that colossus of repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened nuclear MADness -- as in "mutually assured destruction" -- simply evaporated, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)
In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-participants still on its feet.
The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its "near abroad," to replace it; ergo, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the planet's "sole superpower." Huzzah!
Masters of the Universe
The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: "hubris." The ancient Greek playwrights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the heights. But that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in those years.
Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to act as if the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans and the Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and two losers in the Cold War, that the weaker superpower had simply left the scene first, while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was inching its way toward the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.
In the 1990s, "globalization" -- the worldwide spread of the Golden Arches, the Swoosh, and Mickey Mouse -- was on all lips in Washington, while the men who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to themselves, as "masters of the universe."
The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand name of the superhero action figures his protagonist's daughter plays with in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. ("On Wall Street he and a few others -- how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe…") As a result, the label initially had something of Wolfe's cheekiness about it. In the post-Cold War world, however, it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.
In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly cratered, Washington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to "discipline" them. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain of whole societies, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry open countries to the deregulatory wonders of "the Washington consensus." (Just imagine how Americans would react if, today, the IMF arrived at our battered doors with a similar menu of must-dos!)
Now, as the planet totters financially, while from Germany to Russia and China, world leaders blame the Bush administration's deregulatory blindness and Wall Street's derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing out of the global economy, it's far more apparent that those titans of finance were actually masters of a flim-flam universe. Retrospectively, it's clearer that, in those post-Cold War years, Wall Street was already heading for the exits, that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative paper tiger. Someday, it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington.
Almost twenty years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out recently:
"Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the U.S. bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's growth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having little use. America's was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme."
Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger rising on Main Street as Americans grasp that those supposed masters of the universe actually hollowed out their world and brought immense suffering down on them. They understand what those former masters of financial firms, who handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses to their employees at the end of 2008, clearly don't. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, still continues to defend his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode for his office, as well as the $4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters under him in a quarter in which his group racked up more than $15 billion in losses, in a year in which his firm's losses reached $27 billion.
At least now, however, no one -- except perhaps Thain himself -- would mistake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the U.S. for a financial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed out economic powerhouse laid low.
As it happens, however, there was another set of all-American "masters of the universe," even if never given that label. I'm speaking of the top officials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and military policy. They, too, came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global domination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a new Rome or imperial Great Britain, but of a kind never before encountered, and that the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Powers had been reduced to solitaire.
For them, the very idea that the U.S. might be the other loser in the Cold War was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them, after all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence, Afghanistan.
Twice in the Same Graveyard
It's here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just a graveyard, but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In November 2001, knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan, the Bush administration invaded anyway -- and with a clear intent to build bases, occupy the country, and install a government of its choice.
When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris remains a weak word. Breathless at the thought of the supposed power of the U.S. military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power realities and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.
Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing short of invincible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn't possibly happen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they conquered, they celebrated, they settled in, and then they invaded again -- this time in Iraq. A trillion dollars in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot more like the Russians.
What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no other superpower to ambush them in Afghanistan, as the U.S. had once done to the Soviet Union. George W. Bush's crew, it turned out, didn't need another superpower, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that Afghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin Laden could muster.
They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for their global actions, but also gave in to it, and it has yet to be dispelled, even now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the planet's "sole superpower" came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the relatively modest moneys a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed, while the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launched a devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on major American landmarks of power -- financial, military, and (except for the crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind, however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida as from the Afghan backlands.
Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked their plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and taken their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing real harm every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, their "caliphate" a joke, and Afghanistan -- for anyone but Afghans -- truly represented the backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go home and, disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our ministrations, do less harm than we're going to do with our prospective surges in the years to come.
The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush's people really wouldn't have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This wasn't atomic science or brain surgery. They needn't have been experts on Central Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-Soviet War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the prophetic November 2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, "Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires," by former CIA station chief in Pakistan Michael Bearden, which concluded: "The United States must proceed with caution -- or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history."
They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback copy of George MacDonald Fraser's rollicking novel Flashman, and followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England's disastrous Afghan War of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a night's reading pleasure, that would have provided any neocon national security manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out of Afghanistan fast.
Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union's Afghan catastrophe. He complained to John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans nor NATO representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the U.S. had repeated "all of our mistakes," which he carefully enumerated. "Now," he added, "they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright."
True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and in the U.S. military, even holdovers like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about the world. Yes, they believe -- and say so -- that we're, at best, in a stalemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it's going to be truly tough sledding, that it probably will take years and years, and that the end result won't be victory. Yes, they want some "new thinking," some actual negotiations with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and above all, they want to "lower expectations."
As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently:
"This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan… If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money."
Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for dead warriors and the Secretary of Defense may have meant an "Asian Eden," but cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial limits to the American role in the world. That's a new note in official Washington, where global military and diplomatic policy have, until now, existed in splendid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the planet.
Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a "multi-polar world," rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the first-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a relatively distant moment when the U.S. will have "reduced dominance," as Global Trends 2025, a futuristic report produced for the new President by the National Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's "top analyst," suggested of the same moment:
"[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… [T]he overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military."
Still, it's a long way from fretting about finances, while calling for more dollars for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be something less than the dominant hegemon on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).
For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the Obama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Back in 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote President Jimmy Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."
In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.
In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a "bleeding wound." Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however, that the bleeding still couldn't be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on its peripheries, went down the tubes.
Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.
After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way.
Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don't expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?
Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125564/
Monday, February 9, 2009
Bonobo Sex and 'Ladyboners': Is Women's Desire Really that Confusing?
By Vanessa Richmond, The Tyee
Posted on February 3, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
The top story of the week has been about the ladyboner.
"What Do Women Want?," an article about new research into female arousal, published in the NYT magazine, has been the most read story for five straight days, lit up the blogosphere and sparked a lightning storm of comments at the NYT and in blogs. Many sites have had to close their comments early, unable to keep up. The deepening financial crisis has been pushed aside.
The very long story, long blog posts, and longer list of letters are all deeply complex, confusing, contradictory, fraught, fascinating and overwhelming. Kind of like the overarching metaphor in the piece, first articulated by Meredith Chivers, a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queens University, and one of the scientists whose work is profiled: "I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest."
I'm thrilled people are trying to understand the ladyboner (blogger slang for female arousal that you won't find in the Times piece); amazed by the dedication of the scientists and the intelligent and nuanced approach of the writer; and delighted that the attempt to shed some light on what makes women's privates work has moved past the suggestion that we get out our lipstick mirrors and take a look "down there." Who wouldn't be?
Women: Nature's Rubik's Cube?
The body of information (sorry) about men's arousal is disproportionately swollen (sorry, again) because most scientists have been male, and most of the cultural focus has been on how to arouse men. And only recently, with a sudden "critical mass" of female scientists, and articles like this, has there been a serious attempt to address the "problem" Freud posed over a century ago: "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"
Bonobo Sex, Yes or No?
There are some fascinating findings but, as I'll get back to in a minute, they all contain some hand wringing. First, some findings about flexosexuality (my term) or heteroflexibility (Slate's term). Meredith Chivers hooked up a plethysmograph (an apparatus that fits over the penis or in the vagina and measures blood flow), and gave subjects a keypad to indicate arousal, then showed men and women, both straight and gay, short clips of bonobo monkeys having sex, of human heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
The men responded the same way genitally and through the keypad. The heterosexual men were aroused by heterosexual or lesbian sex, by the masturbating and exercising women, and were unmoved by the other clips. The gay males were aroused in "the opposite categorical pattern."
But "all was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men ... with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos."
Interesting, but oh so confusing and worrying!
Science Says Men Do Think With It ...
There's more. Men's narrower arousal isn't just due to inhibition, apparently. Chivers' colleague, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University, "took MRI scans of gay and straight men as they were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren't activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey's experiment, didn't appear to be an explanation for men's narrowly focused desires."
And another piece: after the arrival of Viagra in the late '90s, drug companies wanted to find an equivalent drug for women. So they funded research to investigate physiological arousal. In short, researchers found female physiological arousal is pretty straightforward, but is totally separate from cognitive arousal, or lust. "In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that's needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don't aim at the mind ... In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire."
... But Women Don't
The separation of physiological and conscious arousal has also been a finding in rape studies. Chivers argues that genital lubrication is necessary "to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration ... Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring." (On this topic, later on in the piece, scientist Marta Meara adds, "Arousal is not consent." A statement which has proved of particular interest to dozens of commenters and bloggers.)
Next, the article talks about Chivers' findings that "women's system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. "One of the things I think about," she said, "is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process.'" (Which got at least one blogger saying that she knows plenty of women who like to go out and pick up men, not just wait for an invitation).
'Being Desired Is the Orgasm'
Which in some ways is similar to Marta Meana's findings. In the article, Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said, "I consider myself a feminist. But political correctness isn't sexy at all," before declaring that for women, "Being desired is the orgasm."
"'Really, women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic' -- it is dominated by the yearnings of 'self-love,' by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. 'When it comes to desire,' she added, 'women may be far less relational than men.'"
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana sees those systems in a different way from her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the "impetus of value."
Another scientist, Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, finds that above all, female desire is dictated by intimacy and emotional connection, and is malleable. In writing a book, she studied 100 women for 10 years who self-identify as lesbian, bisexual or refuse a label, many of whom change in their orientations. A famous example is Anne Heche, who had "a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man."
Diamond argues that women's desire can't be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. (This assertion drew some blogger ire about the constant stereotyping of male gayness as real, but lesbian orientation as a kind of undergraduate, whimsical interest.)
Diamond's premise of emotionally based arousal is one that Meana rejects. Her research has found many women who report loving a partner very much, but not having any arousal for them.
'Core of Sexual Desire Is Deeply un-PC'
In short, the article reports that the core of sexual desire is deeply un-PC. Straight, bi and lesbian women are aroused by women and men; whereas, straight men are only aroused by women and gay men are only aroused by men. Many women get aroused during rape, but "arousal is not consent." There's a difference between physiological and cognitive arousal. Women's arousal might be based on receptivity, emotion or on narcissism. Or it might be none of the above. Got it?
A producer once told me that every good story is a mystery story. Complexity and contradiction are good things; they're what make us human, they're what keep us interested.
In fact, until I read this article, I'd always believed men's arousal was complex and mysterious, too. I've read articles claiming that women's historical preoccupation with fashion is actually based on satisfying the male genetic appetite for variety and promiscuity: that on some level, different outfits and hairstyles work to give men the sense of being with more than one partner. Or that by watching strippers or porn, men are more able to stay faithful in a monogamous relationship because it satisfies their genetic programming to seek as many partners as possible.
True? No idea. Also, haven't we all read countless articles about homo-eroticism in male sporting culture -- tight uniforms, skin-on-skin, sweat, bum pats? I'm not saying any of this is true, but it's entertaining to contemplate the possibilities, isn't it? And don't possibilities like this do more justice to men than suggesting they either like men or women?
So, by all means let's investigate, research and probe (intellectually), but worry less when the results are complex or seemingly contradictory. How about we suspend our desire for total clarity, in favor of paying more attention to and enjoying women's (and men's) sexually omnivorous and often mysterious desires?
But the metaphor of darkness, which permeates the well-researched article, many of the blog posts, and most of the comments, is itself, frankly, what's well-intentioned but sexist. The article reports that most research into sex used to take the premise that men and women were extremely similar; whereas, now research on differences are what gets funded. Fine. But the current research, or at least the way this article presents it, seems to consider men's arousal to be simple, clear and straightforward, and women's as opposite, unusual, other, "a problem," worrying and abnormal.
© 2009 The Tyee All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
Posted on February 3, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
The top story of the week has been about the ladyboner.
"What Do Women Want?," an article about new research into female arousal, published in the NYT magazine, has been the most read story for five straight days, lit up the blogosphere and sparked a lightning storm of comments at the NYT and in blogs. Many sites have had to close their comments early, unable to keep up. The deepening financial crisis has been pushed aside.
The very long story, long blog posts, and longer list of letters are all deeply complex, confusing, contradictory, fraught, fascinating and overwhelming. Kind of like the overarching metaphor in the piece, first articulated by Meredith Chivers, a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queens University, and one of the scientists whose work is profiled: "I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest."
I'm thrilled people are trying to understand the ladyboner (blogger slang for female arousal that you won't find in the Times piece); amazed by the dedication of the scientists and the intelligent and nuanced approach of the writer; and delighted that the attempt to shed some light on what makes women's privates work has moved past the suggestion that we get out our lipstick mirrors and take a look "down there." Who wouldn't be?
Women: Nature's Rubik's Cube?
The body of information (sorry) about men's arousal is disproportionately swollen (sorry, again) because most scientists have been male, and most of the cultural focus has been on how to arouse men. And only recently, with a sudden "critical mass" of female scientists, and articles like this, has there been a serious attempt to address the "problem" Freud posed over a century ago: "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"
Bonobo Sex, Yes or No?
There are some fascinating findings but, as I'll get back to in a minute, they all contain some hand wringing. First, some findings about flexosexuality (my term) or heteroflexibility (Slate's term). Meredith Chivers hooked up a plethysmograph (an apparatus that fits over the penis or in the vagina and measures blood flow), and gave subjects a keypad to indicate arousal, then showed men and women, both straight and gay, short clips of bonobo monkeys having sex, of human heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
The men responded the same way genitally and through the keypad. The heterosexual men were aroused by heterosexual or lesbian sex, by the masturbating and exercising women, and were unmoved by the other clips. The gay males were aroused in "the opposite categorical pattern."
But "all was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men ... with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos."
Interesting, but oh so confusing and worrying!
Science Says Men Do Think With It ...
There's more. Men's narrower arousal isn't just due to inhibition, apparently. Chivers' colleague, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University, "took MRI scans of gay and straight men as they were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren't activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey's experiment, didn't appear to be an explanation for men's narrowly focused desires."
And another piece: after the arrival of Viagra in the late '90s, drug companies wanted to find an equivalent drug for women. So they funded research to investigate physiological arousal. In short, researchers found female physiological arousal is pretty straightforward, but is totally separate from cognitive arousal, or lust. "In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that's needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don't aim at the mind ... In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire."
... But Women Don't
The separation of physiological and conscious arousal has also been a finding in rape studies. Chivers argues that genital lubrication is necessary "to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration ... Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring." (On this topic, later on in the piece, scientist Marta Meara adds, "Arousal is not consent." A statement which has proved of particular interest to dozens of commenters and bloggers.)
Next, the article talks about Chivers' findings that "women's system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. "One of the things I think about," she said, "is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process.'" (Which got at least one blogger saying that she knows plenty of women who like to go out and pick up men, not just wait for an invitation).
'Being Desired Is the Orgasm'
Which in some ways is similar to Marta Meana's findings. In the article, Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said, "I consider myself a feminist. But political correctness isn't sexy at all," before declaring that for women, "Being desired is the orgasm."
"'Really, women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic' -- it is dominated by the yearnings of 'self-love,' by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. 'When it comes to desire,' she added, 'women may be far less relational than men.'"
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana sees those systems in a different way from her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the "impetus of value."
Another scientist, Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, finds that above all, female desire is dictated by intimacy and emotional connection, and is malleable. In writing a book, she studied 100 women for 10 years who self-identify as lesbian, bisexual or refuse a label, many of whom change in their orientations. A famous example is Anne Heche, who had "a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man."
Diamond argues that women's desire can't be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. (This assertion drew some blogger ire about the constant stereotyping of male gayness as real, but lesbian orientation as a kind of undergraduate, whimsical interest.)
Diamond's premise of emotionally based arousal is one that Meana rejects. Her research has found many women who report loving a partner very much, but not having any arousal for them.
'Core of Sexual Desire Is Deeply un-PC'
In short, the article reports that the core of sexual desire is deeply un-PC. Straight, bi and lesbian women are aroused by women and men; whereas, straight men are only aroused by women and gay men are only aroused by men. Many women get aroused during rape, but "arousal is not consent." There's a difference between physiological and cognitive arousal. Women's arousal might be based on receptivity, emotion or on narcissism. Or it might be none of the above. Got it?
A producer once told me that every good story is a mystery story. Complexity and contradiction are good things; they're what make us human, they're what keep us interested.
In fact, until I read this article, I'd always believed men's arousal was complex and mysterious, too. I've read articles claiming that women's historical preoccupation with fashion is actually based on satisfying the male genetic appetite for variety and promiscuity: that on some level, different outfits and hairstyles work to give men the sense of being with more than one partner. Or that by watching strippers or porn, men are more able to stay faithful in a monogamous relationship because it satisfies their genetic programming to seek as many partners as possible.
True? No idea. Also, haven't we all read countless articles about homo-eroticism in male sporting culture -- tight uniforms, skin-on-skin, sweat, bum pats? I'm not saying any of this is true, but it's entertaining to contemplate the possibilities, isn't it? And don't possibilities like this do more justice to men than suggesting they either like men or women?
So, by all means let's investigate, research and probe (intellectually), but worry less when the results are complex or seemingly contradictory. How about we suspend our desire for total clarity, in favor of paying more attention to and enjoying women's (and men's) sexually omnivorous and often mysterious desires?
But the metaphor of darkness, which permeates the well-researched article, many of the blog posts, and most of the comments, is itself, frankly, what's well-intentioned but sexist. The article reports that most research into sex used to take the premise that men and women were extremely similar; whereas, now research on differences are what gets funded. Fine. But the current research, or at least the way this article presents it, seems to consider men's arousal to be simple, clear and straightforward, and women's as opposite, unusual, other, "a problem," worrying and abnormal.
© 2009 The Tyee All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125140/
The CIA's Bizarre Plan to Win Hearts and Hard-ons in Afghanistan
By Jim Hightower, JimHightower.com
Posted on February 7, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125567/
You've gotta love the CIA for always giving it the old college try. The "it" can be highly questionable, even criminal, but the agency's operatives keep trying all sorts of dandy, innovative tricks to do whatever the it is.
Take the plan years ago to assassinate Fidel Castro by getting him to light up an exploding cigar. Obviously, it fizzled, but the gambit did show a sense of humor. Or, was it stupidity? Whichever.
Every now and then, however, one of the CIA's tricks works. In Afghanistan, for example, agents have been trying to lure tribal patriarchs to stop protecting Taliban commanders and Islamist terrorists in their regions. They've tried offering cash, cars, jewelry, etc. - all with little success.
Then, last year, a CIA officer reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a big one. He was wooing a 60-something-year-old chieftain in Southern Afghanistan who was suffering an embarrassing decline in something essential for a guy who has four - count 'em, four - younger wives: a firm sexual drive. "Take one of these," said the agent, "you'll love it." What he offered was four Viagra pills. Hey, if Bob Dole likes them, why not a needy senior in a remote Afghan village?
Indeed, the blue pills turned out to be golden. Four days later, the CIA agent returned to the village, and the old tribal leader was wreathed in a big grin that only sex can induce. "You are a great man," he exulted! And, while the chieftain had never before taken sides in the American offensive, suddenly he was a spewing fountain of information about the Taliban's movements in his area. All he requested in exchange was more of those blue pills.
Who says America's leaders have no rational policy in this complex and dangerous region? The CIA plans to lift us to victory - one libido at a time!
"Little Blue Pills Among the Ways CIA Wins Friends in Afghanistan," www.washingtonpost.com, December 26, 2008.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.
© 2009 JimHightower.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125567/
Posted on February 7, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125567/
You've gotta love the CIA for always giving it the old college try. The "it" can be highly questionable, even criminal, but the agency's operatives keep trying all sorts of dandy, innovative tricks to do whatever the it is.
Take the plan years ago to assassinate Fidel Castro by getting him to light up an exploding cigar. Obviously, it fizzled, but the gambit did show a sense of humor. Or, was it stupidity? Whichever.
Every now and then, however, one of the CIA's tricks works. In Afghanistan, for example, agents have been trying to lure tribal patriarchs to stop protecting Taliban commanders and Islamist terrorists in their regions. They've tried offering cash, cars, jewelry, etc. - all with little success.
Then, last year, a CIA officer reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out a big one. He was wooing a 60-something-year-old chieftain in Southern Afghanistan who was suffering an embarrassing decline in something essential for a guy who has four - count 'em, four - younger wives: a firm sexual drive. "Take one of these," said the agent, "you'll love it." What he offered was four Viagra pills. Hey, if Bob Dole likes them, why not a needy senior in a remote Afghan village?
Indeed, the blue pills turned out to be golden. Four days later, the CIA agent returned to the village, and the old tribal leader was wreathed in a big grin that only sex can induce. "You are a great man," he exulted! And, while the chieftain had never before taken sides in the American offensive, suddenly he was a spewing fountain of information about the Taliban's movements in his area. All he requested in exchange was more of those blue pills.
Who says America's leaders have no rational policy in this complex and dangerous region? The CIA plans to lift us to victory - one libido at a time!
"Little Blue Pills Among the Ways CIA Wins Friends in Afghanistan," www.washingtonpost.com, December 26, 2008.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.
© 2009 JimHightower.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125567/
America Is Completely Broke, And Here We Are Funding Fantasy Wars at the Pentagon
By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 3, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/124881/
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment -- and that's to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.
A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.
Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.
Double Crisis at the Pentagon
This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the Armed Forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.
Recently, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began to advocate nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense spending to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of goods and services produced by the economy). This would, of course, mean simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP. Such a policy is clearly designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which has gone on for decades.
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.
Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.
That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."
The Air Force and the Army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the Navy, with its eleven large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S. Lind has written, "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy." Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the Navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance… Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of blue waters."
In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least twenty years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral."
As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one for one basis." There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness," a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities," and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.
Failed Reform Efforts
There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system. These included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task Force and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance Responsibility initiative of the Air Force, and the Capabilities-Based Acquisition approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this century.
Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He also added the following observations:
"Launching into major developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems… Costs, schedules, and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset… There are more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD [the Department of Defense] can possibly afford in the long term…
"By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field."
The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns.
Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).
However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven one thing over the last decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget and acquisition programs."
Gunning for the Air Force
President Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The Air Force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the Air Force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minutemen ICBM warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United States.
As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008, "Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months," mainly over Gates's frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the Air Force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that "any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with China." It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that, despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve -- or the political backing -- to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter."
More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress will appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancellation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games," of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering."
It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are de rigueur practices of our military-industrial complex.
Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order. Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)
Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.
Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber, which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)
Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.
For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and -- at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers -- it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.
Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog." It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force's hot-shot self-image.
Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.
Using the F-22 to Fight the F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is cancelled. Threats are also made -- and put into effect -- to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not cancelled.
Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 -- the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either or them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built."
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter -- that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar -- but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the U.S. ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires" going back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, President Obama's approach to the Bush administration's Afghan War remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.
Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the Air Force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.
Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed Martin.
Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that… ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994."
The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.
According to Pierre M. Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T. Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War." Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.
It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
The Fighter Mafia
Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense power games." For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, "The program is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va., and Groton, Conn., naval shipyards in business."
I have, however, concentrated on the Air Force because the collapse of internal controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there -- and because the Air Force has a history of conflict over going along with politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Secretary of Defense Gates as deserving of emulation by the other services. The pointed attack Gates launched on bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times.
On April 21, 2008, the Secretary of Defense caused a storm of controversy by giving a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an Air Force officer who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple of generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.
Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the Air Force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never lost even though he was continuously challenged.
Last April, Gates said, in part:
"As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the Air Force adapt to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent conflict.
"Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps Commandant [General Charles C. Krulak] and a Secretary of Defense [Dick Cheney] for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War….
"In accomplishing all these things, Boyd -- a brilliant, eccentric, and stubborn character -- had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote: 'One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something -- something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do'… We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we do business make sense."
Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and "the reformers he inspired," a group within Air Force headquarters who came to be called the "Fighter Mafia," that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the Air Force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's corps focused on careerist standards.
Unless Secretary Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of the Obama administration to see which way the Air Force and the rest of the American defense establishment evolves.
Despite Gates's praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, National Defense. The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."
As Fallows then observed (pp. 64-65):
"The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. 'Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement' within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service….
"The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of forty and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072."
Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense. As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration will face such critical -- and difficult -- decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's potential economic death spiral, click here. Don't miss TomDispatch's two-part excerpt of the graphic novel version of Waltz with Bashir.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/124881/
Posted on February 3, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/124881/
Like much of the rest of the world, Americans know that the U.S. automotive industry is in the grips of what may be a fatal decline. Unless it receives emergency financing and undergoes significant reform, it is undoubtedly headed for the graveyard in which many American industries are already buried, including those that made televisions and other consumer electronics, many types of scientific and medical equipment, machine tools, textiles, and much earth-moving equipment -- and that's to name only the most obvious candidates. They all lost their competitiveness to newly emerging economies that were able to outpace them in innovative design, price, quality, service, and fuel economy, among other things.
A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex. That crisis has its roots in the corrupt and deceitful practices that have long characterized the high command of the Armed Forces, civilian executives of the armaments industries, and Congressional opportunists and criminals looking for pork-barrel projects, defense installations for their districts, or even bribes for votes.
Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable. Even if present fiscal constraints no longer existed, we would still have misspent too much of our tax revenues on too few, overly expensive, overly complex weapons systems that leave us ill-prepared to defend the country in a real military emergency. We face a double crisis at the Pentagon: we can no longer afford the pretense of being the Earth's sole superpower, and we cannot afford to perpetuate a system in which the military-industrial complex makes its fortune off inferior, poorly designed weapons.
Double Crisis at the Pentagon
This self-destructive system of bloated budgets and purchases of the wrong weapons has persisted for so long thanks to the aura of invincibility surrounding the Armed Forces and a mistaken belief that jobs in the arms industry are as valuable to the economy as jobs in the civilian sector.
Recently, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen began to advocate nothing less than protecting the Pentagon budget by pegging defense spending to a fixed percentage of gross domestic product (GDP, the total value of goods and services produced by the economy). This would, of course, mean simply throwing out serious strategic analysis of what is actually needed for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP. Such a policy is clearly designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which has gone on for decades.
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.
Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.
That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."
The Air Force and the Army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the Navy, with its eleven large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S. Lind has written, "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy." Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the Navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance… Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of blue waters."
In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least twenty years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral."
As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one for one basis." There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness," a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities," and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.
Failed Reform Efforts
There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system. These included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task Force and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance Responsibility initiative of the Air Force, and the Capabilities-Based Acquisition approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this century.
Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He also added the following observations:
"Launching into major developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems… Costs, schedules, and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset… There are more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD [the Department of Defense] can possibly afford in the long term…
"By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field."
The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns.
Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).
However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven one thing over the last decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget and acquisition programs."
Gunning for the Air Force
President Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The Air Force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the Air Force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minutemen ICBM warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United States.
As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008, "Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months," mainly over Gates's frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the Air Force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that "any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with China." It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that, despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve -- or the political backing -- to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter."
More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress will appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancellation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games," of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering."
It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are de rigueur practices of our military-industrial complex.
Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order. Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)
Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.
Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber, which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)
Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.
For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and -- at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers -- it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.
Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog." It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force's hot-shot self-image.
Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.
Using the F-22 to Fight the F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is cancelled. Threats are also made -- and put into effect -- to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not cancelled.
Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 -- the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either or them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built."
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter -- that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar -- but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the U.S. ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires" going back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, President Obama's approach to the Bush administration's Afghan War remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.
Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the Air Force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.
Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed Martin.
Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that… ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994."
The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.
According to Pierre M. Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T. Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War." Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.
It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
The Fighter Mafia
Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense power games." For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, "The program is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va., and Groton, Conn., naval shipyards in business."
I have, however, concentrated on the Air Force because the collapse of internal controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there -- and because the Air Force has a history of conflict over going along with politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Secretary of Defense Gates as deserving of emulation by the other services. The pointed attack Gates launched on bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times.
On April 21, 2008, the Secretary of Defense caused a storm of controversy by giving a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an Air Force officer who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple of generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.
Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the Air Force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never lost even though he was continuously challenged.
Last April, Gates said, in part:
"As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the Air Force adapt to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent conflict.
"Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps Commandant [General Charles C. Krulak] and a Secretary of Defense [Dick Cheney] for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War….
"In accomplishing all these things, Boyd -- a brilliant, eccentric, and stubborn character -- had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote: 'One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something -- something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do'… We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we do business make sense."
Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and "the reformers he inspired," a group within Air Force headquarters who came to be called the "Fighter Mafia," that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the Air Force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's corps focused on careerist standards.
Unless Secretary Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of the Obama administration to see which way the Air Force and the rest of the American defense establishment evolves.
Despite Gates's praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, National Defense. The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."
As Fallows then observed (pp. 64-65):
"The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. 'Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement' within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service….
"The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of forty and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072."
Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense. As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration will face such critical -- and difficult -- decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's potential economic death spiral, click here. Don't miss TomDispatch's two-part excerpt of the graphic novel version of Waltz with Bashir.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/124881/
The Imperialist Propaganda of Hitchens and Friends
By Richard Seymour, Verso
Posted on February 9, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/121618/
The following is an excerpt from "The Liberal Defense of Murder" by Richard Seymour. Published by Verso, 2008.
It will be recalled that the predictions of a cakewalk towards a jubilant, free Iraq were not solely the product of the Bush administration. What has sometimes been called the 'pro-war Left' --in fact, a loose coalition of liberals, former radicals and ex-socialists -- has shocked and awed former colleagues and comrades, with bold and strident claims about the great works that American military power could achieve in Iraq, and elsewhere. It has been of great service to the Bush administration that, in addition to the shock troops of Christian fundamentalists, Israel sympathizers and neoconservatives, it could boast the support of many prominent liberal intellectuals, some of whom still claim an affiliation to the Left. (A number of them even claim to represent the authentic Left against the 'pseudo-Left'.
Some of these commentators are close to Washington or to figures who have been prominent in the Bush administration. Some have helped formulate policy, as when Kanan Makiya was called upon to help devise plans for the 'New Iraq'. And they have all performed a role of advocacy for the Bush administration and supportive governments.
To put it briefly, they have helped to screen the war-makers from articulate criticism. They have taken threat-exaggeration out of White House press briefings (where it would be regarded cynically), and the moral exaltation of American military power out of the realm of the Pentagon (where it might result in laughter). This coalition is historically far from unique, in many ways resembling the Cold War intelligentsia who pioneered 'CIA socialism'. And it plays a traditional role in castigating dissent among the intelligentsia, while the arguments of the pro-war Left reach wider audiences through journals, newspaper columns, television slots and so on. As well as acting as conduits for the distribution of policy justiications, the liberal pro-war intellectuals help frame arguments for policy-makers in terms more palatable to potentially hostile audiences. The arguments themselves are antique, and have not improved with age. They are symptomatic of the hegemony of what Jean Bricmont calls the 'interventionist ethic'. If it were not for certain widely held assumptions about the remedial power of conquest, originating in the age of European empires, their arguments would make no sense to anyone.
Disaster Triumphant
Many of the current batch of liberal advocates of empire have a history on the Left, often abandoned at some point after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For all but recalcitrant Stalinists, the human prospect following the collapse of the Russian superpower in 1989 was supposed to be a promising one. Fukuyama's sighting of an 'end' to history was, notwithstanding his own dyspepsia, touted as a prospectus for universal accord. The one true model for society had been revealed by no less an authority than History, and that model enjoined free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. As Gregory Elliott observes, 'the locomotive of history had terminated not at the Finland Station, but at a hypermarket. All roads lead to Disneyland?' There were some outstanding problems, of course: in place of Stalinist dictatorships emerged new particularisms of a religious or national sort that, while hardly systemic threats, clearly posed problems for the 'New World Order' that Bush the Elder had vaunted. It was in the course of engagement with these problems that former left-wingers decided at various points to pitch in their lot with what the French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine had referred to as the American 'hyperpower'. The occasion for apostasy varied, but key moments were Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, and the attacks on the World Trade Center. In the absence of states purportedly bearing the historical mission of the proletariat, many former Marxists, including anti-Stalinists, either made peace with centrist liberalism or morphed into their neoconservative opposites. American military power was now an ally of progress rather than its enemy.
As the profile of political Islam has risen under the impress of 'al Qaeda', a modish concern of pro-war intellectuals has been the chastisement of religion, and especially Islam, as a source of reaction and irrationalism. Similarly, the gurus of spiritualism, New Age mysticism, Western Buddhism and 'postmodernism' have been berated as agents of the Counter-Enlightenment. Predictably, anti-imperialism has been incriminated by association with the enemies of progress. For figures such as Christopher Hitchens, the 'war on terror' is an urgent contest between the forces of secular humanism and Enlightenment, and those of medieval terror. To oppose it is to give succor to an implacable enemy. Sadly, as Adorno and Horkheimer observed at an incomparably graver moment, Enlightenment of this kind 'radiates disaster triumphant'. Nowhere has the brochure for humanist imperialism less resembled the practice than at the frontiers of the 'war on terror', whose bloody outcomes include violence of genocidal proportions in Iraq, and whose motifs include the resurrection of modes of torture abandoned by the enlightened despots of the eighteenth century, the mercenary armies of nineteenth-century imperialism, the ethnic cleansing and aerial bombardment of the twentieth century, and an unprecedented complex of global gulags. 'Progress' of this kind belongs in the annals of discredited ideas, along with Manifest Destiny, the civilizing mission, Lebensraum and the 'master race'. It happens to share its origins with all of these.
The Strange Death of Irony
We were to hear a great deal after 9/11 that the response of the antiwar Left was 'delinquent', 'self-hating' and lacking in sympathy for its victims. The correlate to this supposed indifference was the claim by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson that the attacks were punishment from God for having allowed homosexual intercourse and abortions to take place. According to Paul Berman, the 'left-wing Falwells' called for the U.S. government to stop 'trying to preserve the Jewish state' and allow 'Saddam Hussein to resume his massacres (thus eliminating America's other putative sins)'. Rejecting the thesis of divine violence thus, somehow, implies the innocence of the American state. At the least, this petulant outburst conflates a critique of the American state's foreign policy with an assault on cosmopolitan liberalism. The irony is that Berman could have found no surer supporters of Israel or American policy towards Saddam than Falwell or Robertson, while they are as robustly critical of the Left for undermining America as he is.
As the historian of ideas Corey Robin points out, Robertson and Falwell were not the only ones to think that 9/11 terminated a period of decadence. Mainstream pundits, such as David Brooks of the New York Times, made similar noises without the religious cues. Perhaps one should have seen it coming. In 2000, Robin had interviewed a pair of disillusioned neoconservatives, irate at what they saw as Clinton's paucity of global ambition. Irving Kristol had reviled the 'business culture' of conservatism, lamenting the lack of an 'imperial role'. For William F. Buckley Jr, the emphasis on the market had become 'rather boring ... like sex'. The sighs of relief after 9/11 were palpable. 'What I dread now,' George Packer wrote, 'is a return to the normality we're all supposed to seek.' 'This week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream', added Frank Rich. For William Kristol and Robert Kagan, neoconservatives affiliated to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the 1990s had been 'a squandered decade', and there should be no 'return to normalcy'. Lewis Libby, then a Pentagon advisor and now a convicted perjurer, complained of a lax political culture that made Americans appear morally weak and slow to defend themselves. The attacks on Washington and New York offered an opportunity for the moral resuscitation of the American empire, providing the Bush administration with a rationale for an audacious and aggressive project. Or, as then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice claimed, they 'clarified' America's role.
On the day that the attack on Afghanistan began, former New York Times editor James Atlas told the paper's readers that 'our great American empire seems bound to crumble at some point' and that 'the end of Western civilization has become a possibility against which the need to fight terrorism is being framed, as Roosevelt and Churchill framed the need to fight Hitler'. The alarming ease with which 'Western civilization' is conflated with the American empire is matched only by the implication that nineteen hijackers from a small transnational network of jihadis represent a civilizational challenge, an existential threat comparable with the Third Reich. But this has been precisely the argument of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists: there is an 'extraordinary threat', hence the need for 'extraordinary responses'. Failure to recognize this bodes ill for 'civilization'.
Copyright Verso, 2008.
© 2009 Verso All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/121618/
Posted on February 9, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/121618/
The following is an excerpt from "The Liberal Defense of Murder" by Richard Seymour. Published by Verso, 2008.
It will be recalled that the predictions of a cakewalk towards a jubilant, free Iraq were not solely the product of the Bush administration. What has sometimes been called the 'pro-war Left' --in fact, a loose coalition of liberals, former radicals and ex-socialists -- has shocked and awed former colleagues and comrades, with bold and strident claims about the great works that American military power could achieve in Iraq, and elsewhere. It has been of great service to the Bush administration that, in addition to the shock troops of Christian fundamentalists, Israel sympathizers and neoconservatives, it could boast the support of many prominent liberal intellectuals, some of whom still claim an affiliation to the Left. (A number of them even claim to represent the authentic Left against the 'pseudo-Left'.
Some of these commentators are close to Washington or to figures who have been prominent in the Bush administration. Some have helped formulate policy, as when Kanan Makiya was called upon to help devise plans for the 'New Iraq'. And they have all performed a role of advocacy for the Bush administration and supportive governments.
To put it briefly, they have helped to screen the war-makers from articulate criticism. They have taken threat-exaggeration out of White House press briefings (where it would be regarded cynically), and the moral exaltation of American military power out of the realm of the Pentagon (where it might result in laughter). This coalition is historically far from unique, in many ways resembling the Cold War intelligentsia who pioneered 'CIA socialism'. And it plays a traditional role in castigating dissent among the intelligentsia, while the arguments of the pro-war Left reach wider audiences through journals, newspaper columns, television slots and so on. As well as acting as conduits for the distribution of policy justiications, the liberal pro-war intellectuals help frame arguments for policy-makers in terms more palatable to potentially hostile audiences. The arguments themselves are antique, and have not improved with age. They are symptomatic of the hegemony of what Jean Bricmont calls the 'interventionist ethic'. If it were not for certain widely held assumptions about the remedial power of conquest, originating in the age of European empires, their arguments would make no sense to anyone.
Disaster Triumphant
Many of the current batch of liberal advocates of empire have a history on the Left, often abandoned at some point after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For all but recalcitrant Stalinists, the human prospect following the collapse of the Russian superpower in 1989 was supposed to be a promising one. Fukuyama's sighting of an 'end' to history was, notwithstanding his own dyspepsia, touted as a prospectus for universal accord. The one true model for society had been revealed by no less an authority than History, and that model enjoined free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. As Gregory Elliott observes, 'the locomotive of history had terminated not at the Finland Station, but at a hypermarket. All roads lead to Disneyland?' There were some outstanding problems, of course: in place of Stalinist dictatorships emerged new particularisms of a religious or national sort that, while hardly systemic threats, clearly posed problems for the 'New World Order' that Bush the Elder had vaunted. It was in the course of engagement with these problems that former left-wingers decided at various points to pitch in their lot with what the French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine had referred to as the American 'hyperpower'. The occasion for apostasy varied, but key moments were Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, and the attacks on the World Trade Center. In the absence of states purportedly bearing the historical mission of the proletariat, many former Marxists, including anti-Stalinists, either made peace with centrist liberalism or morphed into their neoconservative opposites. American military power was now an ally of progress rather than its enemy.
As the profile of political Islam has risen under the impress of 'al Qaeda', a modish concern of pro-war intellectuals has been the chastisement of religion, and especially Islam, as a source of reaction and irrationalism. Similarly, the gurus of spiritualism, New Age mysticism, Western Buddhism and 'postmodernism' have been berated as agents of the Counter-Enlightenment. Predictably, anti-imperialism has been incriminated by association with the enemies of progress. For figures such as Christopher Hitchens, the 'war on terror' is an urgent contest between the forces of secular humanism and Enlightenment, and those of medieval terror. To oppose it is to give succor to an implacable enemy. Sadly, as Adorno and Horkheimer observed at an incomparably graver moment, Enlightenment of this kind 'radiates disaster triumphant'. Nowhere has the brochure for humanist imperialism less resembled the practice than at the frontiers of the 'war on terror', whose bloody outcomes include violence of genocidal proportions in Iraq, and whose motifs include the resurrection of modes of torture abandoned by the enlightened despots of the eighteenth century, the mercenary armies of nineteenth-century imperialism, the ethnic cleansing and aerial bombardment of the twentieth century, and an unprecedented complex of global gulags. 'Progress' of this kind belongs in the annals of discredited ideas, along with Manifest Destiny, the civilizing mission, Lebensraum and the 'master race'. It happens to share its origins with all of these.
The Strange Death of Irony
We were to hear a great deal after 9/11 that the response of the antiwar Left was 'delinquent', 'self-hating' and lacking in sympathy for its victims. The correlate to this supposed indifference was the claim by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson that the attacks were punishment from God for having allowed homosexual intercourse and abortions to take place. According to Paul Berman, the 'left-wing Falwells' called for the U.S. government to stop 'trying to preserve the Jewish state' and allow 'Saddam Hussein to resume his massacres (thus eliminating America's other putative sins)'. Rejecting the thesis of divine violence thus, somehow, implies the innocence of the American state. At the least, this petulant outburst conflates a critique of the American state's foreign policy with an assault on cosmopolitan liberalism. The irony is that Berman could have found no surer supporters of Israel or American policy towards Saddam than Falwell or Robertson, while they are as robustly critical of the Left for undermining America as he is.
As the historian of ideas Corey Robin points out, Robertson and Falwell were not the only ones to think that 9/11 terminated a period of decadence. Mainstream pundits, such as David Brooks of the New York Times, made similar noises without the religious cues. Perhaps one should have seen it coming. In 2000, Robin had interviewed a pair of disillusioned neoconservatives, irate at what they saw as Clinton's paucity of global ambition. Irving Kristol had reviled the 'business culture' of conservatism, lamenting the lack of an 'imperial role'. For William F. Buckley Jr, the emphasis on the market had become 'rather boring ... like sex'. The sighs of relief after 9/11 were palpable. 'What I dread now,' George Packer wrote, 'is a return to the normality we're all supposed to seek.' 'This week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream', added Frank Rich. For William Kristol and Robert Kagan, neoconservatives affiliated to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the 1990s had been 'a squandered decade', and there should be no 'return to normalcy'. Lewis Libby, then a Pentagon advisor and now a convicted perjurer, complained of a lax political culture that made Americans appear morally weak and slow to defend themselves. The attacks on Washington and New York offered an opportunity for the moral resuscitation of the American empire, providing the Bush administration with a rationale for an audacious and aggressive project. Or, as then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice claimed, they 'clarified' America's role.
On the day that the attack on Afghanistan began, former New York Times editor James Atlas told the paper's readers that 'our great American empire seems bound to crumble at some point' and that 'the end of Western civilization has become a possibility against which the need to fight terrorism is being framed, as Roosevelt and Churchill framed the need to fight Hitler'. The alarming ease with which 'Western civilization' is conflated with the American empire is matched only by the implication that nineteen hijackers from a small transnational network of jihadis represent a civilizational challenge, an existential threat comparable with the Third Reich. But this has been precisely the argument of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists: there is an 'extraordinary threat', hence the need for 'extraordinary responses'. Failure to recognize this bodes ill for 'civilization'.
Copyright Verso, 2008.
© 2009 Verso All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/121618/
Guantanamo on the Brink: Death Looms for Inmates Amid Hunger Strikes and Beatings
By Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, Independent UK
Posted on February 9, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125947/
Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley, an American military lawyer, will step through the grand entrance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London today and demand the release of her client -- a British resident who claims he was repeatedly tortured at the behest of US intelligence officials -- from Guantanamo Bay. Bradley will also request the disclosure of 42 secret documents that allegedly chronicle not only how Binyam Mohamed was tortured, but may also corroborate claims that Britain was complicit in his treatment.
But first, Bradley, a US military attorney for 20 years, will reveal that Mohamed, 31, is dying in his Guantanamo cell and that conditions inside the Cuban prison camp have deteriorated badly since Barack Obama took office. Fifty of its 260 detainees are on hunger strike and, say witnesses, are being strapped to chairs and force-fed, with those who resist being beaten. At least 20 are described as being so unhealthy they are on a "critical list", according to Bradley.
Mohamed, who is suffering dramatic weight loss after a month-long hunger strike, has told Bradley, 45, that he is "very scared" of being attacked by guards, after witnessing a savage beating for a detainee who refused to be strapped down and have a feeding tube forced into his mouth. It is the first account Bradley has personally received of a detainee being physically assaulted in Guantanamo.
Bradley recently met Mohamed in Camp Delta's sparse visiting room and was shaken by his account of the state of affairs inside the notorious prison.
She said: "At least 50 people are on hunger strike, with 20 on the critical list, according to Binyam. The JTF [the Joint Task Force running Guantanamo] are not commenting because they do not want the public to know what is going on.
"Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell. Swat teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten. Binyam has seen this and has not witnessed this before. Guantanamo Bay is in the grip of a mass hunger strike and the numbers are growing; things are worsening.
"It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and force-feed them for a two- or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, 'I don't want to be beat, injured or killed.' Given his health situation, one good blow could be fatal," said Bradley.
"Binyam is continuing to lose weight and he is going to get worse. He has been told he is about to be released, but psychologically and physically he is declining."
It is conceivable that Mohamed himself may shortly return to London, heralding yet another political embarrassment for Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who already faces a tumultuous week over claims that he was keen to suppress evidence of torture.
On Tuesday, the unprecedented dispute between Miliband and the judiciary is set to reignite when High Court judges Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones decide whether to reopen the case which Mohamed believes substantiates his torture claims.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a little-publicised court case into the treatment of Mohamed will open. American civil liberties lawyers are hoping to shine a light on the defence firm that allegedly carried out the practice of "rendition" on behalf of the CIA. Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary, helped to arrange rendition flights for several terror suspects, including Mohamed, to nations where they claim they were tortured.
The case was originally dismissed after the Bush administration asserted "state secrets privilege", indicating that it would endanger national security -- the same argument used by Miliband. However, Obama has repeatedly stressed his willingness to be less secretive than his predecessor and a similar decision would lead to claims that the current administration is bent on suppressing evidence of torture.
Closer to home, the Observer has found evidence suggesting a broader unwillingness by Britain to confront the US over its war on terror program. The Attorney General says it is "actively considering" possible criminal wrongdoings against MI5 and the CIA, but sources claim the government's senior lawyer has failed, after almost four months of looking into the issue, to request material from the US that may substantiate allegations of MI5 complicity in Mohamed's torture.
Suspicion is also growing that some sections of the US intelligence community would prefer Binyam did die inside Guantanamo. Silenced forever, only the sparse language of his diary would be left to recount his torture claims and interviewees with an MI5 officer, known only as Witness B. Such a scenario would also deny Mohamed the chance to personally sue the US, and possibly British authorities, over his treatment.
But if Mohamed survives to come back to London, his experiences of the past six years promise a harrowing journey through the dark underbelly of the war on terror. For Miliband, the questions concerning Britain's role may have only just begun.
© 2009 Independent UK All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125947/
Posted on February 9, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125947/
Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley, an American military lawyer, will step through the grand entrance of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London today and demand the release of her client -- a British resident who claims he was repeatedly tortured at the behest of US intelligence officials -- from Guantanamo Bay. Bradley will also request the disclosure of 42 secret documents that allegedly chronicle not only how Binyam Mohamed was tortured, but may also corroborate claims that Britain was complicit in his treatment.
But first, Bradley, a US military attorney for 20 years, will reveal that Mohamed, 31, is dying in his Guantanamo cell and that conditions inside the Cuban prison camp have deteriorated badly since Barack Obama took office. Fifty of its 260 detainees are on hunger strike and, say witnesses, are being strapped to chairs and force-fed, with those who resist being beaten. At least 20 are described as being so unhealthy they are on a "critical list", according to Bradley.
Mohamed, who is suffering dramatic weight loss after a month-long hunger strike, has told Bradley, 45, that he is "very scared" of being attacked by guards, after witnessing a savage beating for a detainee who refused to be strapped down and have a feeding tube forced into his mouth. It is the first account Bradley has personally received of a detainee being physically assaulted in Guantanamo.
Bradley recently met Mohamed in Camp Delta's sparse visiting room and was shaken by his account of the state of affairs inside the notorious prison.
She said: "At least 50 people are on hunger strike, with 20 on the critical list, according to Binyam. The JTF [the Joint Task Force running Guantanamo] are not commenting because they do not want the public to know what is going on.
"Binyam has witnessed people being forcibly extracted from their cell. Swat teams in police gear come in and take the person out; if they resist, they are force-fed and then beaten. Binyam has seen this and has not witnessed this before. Guantanamo Bay is in the grip of a mass hunger strike and the numbers are growing; things are worsening.
"It is so bad that there are not enough chairs to strap them down and force-feed them for a two- or three-hour period to digest food through a feeding tube. Because there are not enough chairs the guards are having to force-feed them in shifts. After Binyam saw a nearby inmate being beaten it scared him and he decided he was not going to resist. He thought, 'I don't want to be beat, injured or killed.' Given his health situation, one good blow could be fatal," said Bradley.
"Binyam is continuing to lose weight and he is going to get worse. He has been told he is about to be released, but psychologically and physically he is declining."
It is conceivable that Mohamed himself may shortly return to London, heralding yet another political embarrassment for Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who already faces a tumultuous week over claims that he was keen to suppress evidence of torture.
On Tuesday, the unprecedented dispute between Miliband and the judiciary is set to reignite when High Court judges Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones decide whether to reopen the case which Mohamed believes substantiates his torture claims.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a little-publicised court case into the treatment of Mohamed will open. American civil liberties lawyers are hoping to shine a light on the defence firm that allegedly carried out the practice of "rendition" on behalf of the CIA. Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary, helped to arrange rendition flights for several terror suspects, including Mohamed, to nations where they claim they were tortured.
The case was originally dismissed after the Bush administration asserted "state secrets privilege", indicating that it would endanger national security -- the same argument used by Miliband. However, Obama has repeatedly stressed his willingness to be less secretive than his predecessor and a similar decision would lead to claims that the current administration is bent on suppressing evidence of torture.
Closer to home, the Observer has found evidence suggesting a broader unwillingness by Britain to confront the US over its war on terror program. The Attorney General says it is "actively considering" possible criminal wrongdoings against MI5 and the CIA, but sources claim the government's senior lawyer has failed, after almost four months of looking into the issue, to request material from the US that may substantiate allegations of MI5 complicity in Mohamed's torture.
Suspicion is also growing that some sections of the US intelligence community would prefer Binyam did die inside Guantanamo. Silenced forever, only the sparse language of his diary would be left to recount his torture claims and interviewees with an MI5 officer, known only as Witness B. Such a scenario would also deny Mohamed the chance to personally sue the US, and possibly British authorities, over his treatment.
But if Mohamed survives to come back to London, his experiences of the past six years promise a harrowing journey through the dark underbelly of the war on terror. For Miliband, the questions concerning Britain's role may have only just begun.
© 2009 Independent UK All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125947/
Iraq's Gravedigging Industry Is at 100% Full Employment
By Dahr Jamail, IPS News
Posted on February 6, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125484/
BAGHDAD, Feb 5 (IPS) -- Amidst the soaring unemployment in Iraq, the gravediggers have been busy. So busy that officials have no record of the number of graves dug; of the real death toll, that is.
"I've been working here four years," a gravedigger who gave his name as Ali told IPS at the largest cemetery in Baghdad, a sprawling expanse in the Abu Ghraib section of the capital city. "In 2006 and some of 2007, we buried 40- 50 people daily. This went on for one-and-a-half years.
"Twenty-five percent of these were from violence, and another 70 percent were killed by the Mehdi Army (the militia of Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr)." Only a few appeared to have died from natural causes.
"Most of the dead were never logged by anyone," Ali said, "because we didn't check death certificates, we just tried to get the bodies into the ground as quickly as possible."
An Iraqi Army checkpoint was set up outside the vast cemetery a year ago.
"We opened this checkpoint because people were burying the dead and no information was being given to anyone," a soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told IPS.
"Most of this (lack of reporting the dead), we found, happened during 2006," the soldier added. "Anyone could be buried here, and nobody would know about it."
Not far, in the Al-Adhamiya area of Baghdad, what used to be a park is now a cemetery with more than 5,000 graves. According to the manager, most of the dead are never counted.
"Most of the bodies buried here are never reported in the media," Abu Ayad Nasir Walid, 45, manager of the cemetery told IPS. He has been the manager here since the park was converted into a cemetery amidst the bloodletting from sectarian violence in early 2006.
"I have the name here of the first martyr buried," Walid said, pointing to a tombstone. "Gaith Al-Samarai, buried on 21 May 2006, he was the sheikh of the Al-Hurria mosque."
Latif produced the cemetery logbook. "As of this hour, exactly, there are 5,500 bodies in this place. I log their names in my book, but we've never had anyone come from the government to ask how many people are here. Nobody in the media nor the Ministry of Health seems to be interested."
Such graveyards, and there are many, raise questions about the real death toll in Iraq.
The last serious study, by a group of doctors in the U.S. and Iraq, was published in the British peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on Oct. 11, 2006.
The study said about 655,000 Iraqis (2.5 percent of the population) had been killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation. The research was carried out on the ground by doctors moving from house to house, questioning families, and examining death certificates.
Homes were surveyed in 47 separated clusters across Iraq. The Lancet says the study, carried out by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in the U.S., has been validated by four independent experts.
The worst of the violence followed the Feb. 22, 2006 bombing of the Al- Askari shrine in Samarra. The bombing of one of the most sacred Shia mosques in the world sparked sectarian violence that lasted months, with sometimes more than 300 killed in a day.
"During that time we buried 30-40 bodies daily," Sehel Abud Al-Latif, a gravedigger at the Al-Adhamiya cemetery told IPS. "Often we had to work through the night, otherwise the bodies would just remain outside."
Some estimates of the death toll have been considerably lower than that of The Lancet. The group Iraq Body Count (IBC), which describes itself as an "ongoing human security project," estimates the number to be 98,850 as of the time of this writing.
The group says on the methodology: "Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere."
IBC adds that figures are included from "incident-based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues and other documentary data-gathering agencies."
The website adds, however, that "IBC's main sources are information gathering and publishing agencies, principally the commercial news media who provide web access to their reports." Also, the IBC only records violent deaths, and only those of civilians.
The unofficial cemeteries around Iraq hold their own additions to the numbers doing the rounds. And no one knows what these add up to.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reports from Iraq.
© 2009 IPS News All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125484/
Posted on February 6, 2009, Printed on February 9, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/125484/
BAGHDAD, Feb 5 (IPS) -- Amidst the soaring unemployment in Iraq, the gravediggers have been busy. So busy that officials have no record of the number of graves dug; of the real death toll, that is.
"I've been working here four years," a gravedigger who gave his name as Ali told IPS at the largest cemetery in Baghdad, a sprawling expanse in the Abu Ghraib section of the capital city. "In 2006 and some of 2007, we buried 40- 50 people daily. This went on for one-and-a-half years.
"Twenty-five percent of these were from violence, and another 70 percent were killed by the Mehdi Army (the militia of Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr)." Only a few appeared to have died from natural causes.
"Most of the dead were never logged by anyone," Ali said, "because we didn't check death certificates, we just tried to get the bodies into the ground as quickly as possible."
An Iraqi Army checkpoint was set up outside the vast cemetery a year ago.
"We opened this checkpoint because people were burying the dead and no information was being given to anyone," a soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told IPS.
"Most of this (lack of reporting the dead), we found, happened during 2006," the soldier added. "Anyone could be buried here, and nobody would know about it."
Not far, in the Al-Adhamiya area of Baghdad, what used to be a park is now a cemetery with more than 5,000 graves. According to the manager, most of the dead are never counted.
"Most of the bodies buried here are never reported in the media," Abu Ayad Nasir Walid, 45, manager of the cemetery told IPS. He has been the manager here since the park was converted into a cemetery amidst the bloodletting from sectarian violence in early 2006.
"I have the name here of the first martyr buried," Walid said, pointing to a tombstone. "Gaith Al-Samarai, buried on 21 May 2006, he was the sheikh of the Al-Hurria mosque."
Latif produced the cemetery logbook. "As of this hour, exactly, there are 5,500 bodies in this place. I log their names in my book, but we've never had anyone come from the government to ask how many people are here. Nobody in the media nor the Ministry of Health seems to be interested."
Such graveyards, and there are many, raise questions about the real death toll in Iraq.
The last serious study, by a group of doctors in the U.S. and Iraq, was published in the British peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on Oct. 11, 2006.
The study said about 655,000 Iraqis (2.5 percent of the population) had been killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation. The research was carried out on the ground by doctors moving from house to house, questioning families, and examining death certificates.
Homes were surveyed in 47 separated clusters across Iraq. The Lancet says the study, carried out by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in the U.S., has been validated by four independent experts.
The worst of the violence followed the Feb. 22, 2006 bombing of the Al- Askari shrine in Samarra. The bombing of one of the most sacred Shia mosques in the world sparked sectarian violence that lasted months, with sometimes more than 300 killed in a day.
"During that time we buried 30-40 bodies daily," Sehel Abud Al-Latif, a gravedigger at the Al-Adhamiya cemetery told IPS. "Often we had to work through the night, otherwise the bodies would just remain outside."
Some estimates of the death toll have been considerably lower than that of The Lancet. The group Iraq Body Count (IBC), which describes itself as an "ongoing human security project," estimates the number to be 98,850 as of the time of this writing.
The group says on the methodology: "Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere."
IBC adds that figures are included from "incident-based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues and other documentary data-gathering agencies."
The website adds, however, that "IBC's main sources are information gathering and publishing agencies, principally the commercial news media who provide web access to their reports." Also, the IBC only records violent deaths, and only those of civilians.
The unofficial cemeteries around Iraq hold their own additions to the numbers doing the rounds. And no one knows what these add up to.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reports from Iraq.
© 2009 IPS News All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/125484/
EPA reconsidering California's car emissions waiver
Fri Feb 6, 2009 10:36pm EST
By Tom Doggett
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday it would reconsider California's request for the authority to cut greenhouse gas emissions by new cars and trucks to combat global warming.
The Bush administration had denied the state's request, but President Barack Obama asked EPA to take another look at the issue.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson signed a notice on Friday officially reopening the comment period on California's waiver request. The notice will be published in the Federal Register of government regulations.
"EPA has now set in motion an impartial review of the California waiver decision," Jackson said. "It is imperative that we get this decision right, and base it on the best available science and a thorough understanding of the law."
The EPA will take public comment for 60 days through April 6 on the state's request. The agency will also hold a public hearing in Washington on March 5 on the issue.
The agency said the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the authority to allow California to adopt its own emissions standards for motor vehicles due to the seriousness of the state's air pollution challenges.
"EPA believes that there are significant issues regarding the agency's denial of the waiver. The denial was a substantial departure from EPA's long-standing interpretation of the Clean Air Act's waiver provisions," the agency said.
Automakers are against California's plan to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2016 because it would result in a de facto increase in automobile fuel efficiency, which currently is set by the federal government.
Manufacturers prefer a single fuel efficiency regulation approved by Congress and administered by the Transportation Department that is based on vehicle criteria -- not emissions.
The current proposal under consideration by transportation planners seeks to raise average fuel efficiency of the fleet by 40 percent by 2020. The California law would exceed that mandate years sooner.
(Reporting by Tom Doggett; additional reporting by John Crawley; editing by Jim Marshall)
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE51549X20090207
By Tom Doggett
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday it would reconsider California's request for the authority to cut greenhouse gas emissions by new cars and trucks to combat global warming.
The Bush administration had denied the state's request, but President Barack Obama asked EPA to take another look at the issue.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson signed a notice on Friday officially reopening the comment period on California's waiver request. The notice will be published in the Federal Register of government regulations.
"EPA has now set in motion an impartial review of the California waiver decision," Jackson said. "It is imperative that we get this decision right, and base it on the best available science and a thorough understanding of the law."
The EPA will take public comment for 60 days through April 6 on the state's request. The agency will also hold a public hearing in Washington on March 5 on the issue.
The agency said the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the authority to allow California to adopt its own emissions standards for motor vehicles due to the seriousness of the state's air pollution challenges.
"EPA believes that there are significant issues regarding the agency's denial of the waiver. The denial was a substantial departure from EPA's long-standing interpretation of the Clean Air Act's waiver provisions," the agency said.
Automakers are against California's plan to cut emissions by 30 percent by 2016 because it would result in a de facto increase in automobile fuel efficiency, which currently is set by the federal government.
Manufacturers prefer a single fuel efficiency regulation approved by Congress and administered by the Transportation Department that is based on vehicle criteria -- not emissions.
The current proposal under consideration by transportation planners seeks to raise average fuel efficiency of the fleet by 40 percent by 2020. The California law would exceed that mandate years sooner.
(Reporting by Tom Doggett; additional reporting by John Crawley; editing by Jim Marshall)
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE51549X20090207
China drought deprives millions of drinking water
Sat Feb 7, 2009 4:46am EST
By Andrew Torchia
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Millions of people and cattle in north China face shortages of drinking water because of a severe drought, the government said on Saturday, promising to speed up disbursement of billions of dollars of subsidies to farmers.
State television quoted disaster relief officials as saying 4.4 million people and 2.1 million cattle lacked adequate drinking water. Official media have described the drought as north China's worst in half a century.
The Ministry of Finance said it would accelerate disbursement of 86.7 billion yuan ($12.7 billion) of annual subsidies for farmers to assist grain production and minimize the impact of the drought on rural incomes.
The government is particularly anxious to avoid a drop in rural incomes because of the threat of social unrest as millions of migrant workers, laid off from urban jobs during China's economic slump, return to the countryside.
Instead of distributing the farm subsidies evenly over this year as it did in the past, the finance ministry said it was immediately disbursing the entire 15.1 billion yuan earmarked to supplement the incomes of grain farmers.
It is also immediately disbursing part of a 71.6 billion yuan sum earmarked to aid capital spending by farmers. The ministry called on provincial governments to deliver that money into the hands of farmers in the worst-hit areas within a month.
However, meteorological officials said there were signs that better rainfall in coming weeks would ease the crisis. Rainfall is forecast for the next 10 days, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the China Meteorological Administration as saying.
Xiao Ziniu, director of China's National Climate Center, was quoted as saying most of north China's wheat belt was expected to receive slightly less than or nearly normal rainfall in March.
Xiao said earlier in the week that losses in China's winter wheat fields could be limited to just 2.5 percent if farmers moved quickly enough to irrigate their fields.
The drought is hitting eight provinces which contain about half of China's wheat-growing areas. As of Friday, 10.7 million hectares of wheat-growing fields had been affected in those provinces, the Ministry of Agriculture said.
Of that area, 4.5 million hectares were seriously damaged and 420,000 hectares suffered destruction of wheat shoots, the ministry said. Just over half of the total affected area had been irrigated so far.
($1 = 6.83 yuan)
(Additional reporting by Edmund Klamann; Editing by Sugita Katyal)
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE5160UL20090207
By Andrew Torchia
SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Millions of people and cattle in north China face shortages of drinking water because of a severe drought, the government said on Saturday, promising to speed up disbursement of billions of dollars of subsidies to farmers.
State television quoted disaster relief officials as saying 4.4 million people and 2.1 million cattle lacked adequate drinking water. Official media have described the drought as north China's worst in half a century.
The Ministry of Finance said it would accelerate disbursement of 86.7 billion yuan ($12.7 billion) of annual subsidies for farmers to assist grain production and minimize the impact of the drought on rural incomes.
The government is particularly anxious to avoid a drop in rural incomes because of the threat of social unrest as millions of migrant workers, laid off from urban jobs during China's economic slump, return to the countryside.
Instead of distributing the farm subsidies evenly over this year as it did in the past, the finance ministry said it was immediately disbursing the entire 15.1 billion yuan earmarked to supplement the incomes of grain farmers.
It is also immediately disbursing part of a 71.6 billion yuan sum earmarked to aid capital spending by farmers. The ministry called on provincial governments to deliver that money into the hands of farmers in the worst-hit areas within a month.
However, meteorological officials said there were signs that better rainfall in coming weeks would ease the crisis. Rainfall is forecast for the next 10 days, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the China Meteorological Administration as saying.
Xiao Ziniu, director of China's National Climate Center, was quoted as saying most of north China's wheat belt was expected to receive slightly less than or nearly normal rainfall in March.
Xiao said earlier in the week that losses in China's winter wheat fields could be limited to just 2.5 percent if farmers moved quickly enough to irrigate their fields.
The drought is hitting eight provinces which contain about half of China's wheat-growing areas. As of Friday, 10.7 million hectares of wheat-growing fields had been affected in those provinces, the Ministry of Agriculture said.
Of that area, 4.5 million hectares were seriously damaged and 420,000 hectares suffered destruction of wheat shoots, the ministry said. Just over half of the total affected area had been irrigated so far.
($1 = 6.83 yuan)
(Additional reporting by Edmund Klamann; Editing by Sugita Katyal)
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE5160UL20090207
Russia signals new optimism on ties with U.S
Sun Feb 8, 2009 11:12am EST
By Noah Barkin and David Brunnstrom
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Russia on Sunday welcomed a pledge by the United States "to press the reset button" on relations with Moscow, in a sign the former Cold War rivals could repair relations under President Barack Obama.
Vice President Joe Biden, in a speech at a security conference in Munich, said on Saturday it was time to end a dangerous drift in ties and work with Moscow.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, speaking at a news conference in Munich after meeting Biden on Sunday, said the United States had sent a strong signal about its willingness to cooperate.
"It is obvious the new U.S. administration has a very strong desire to change and that inspires optimism," Ivanov said.
Relations between Russia and the United States have grown increasingly strained in recent years.
Russia's brief war with Georgia last year and its recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were condemned by the United States.
Moscow responded angrily to former President George W. Bush's plans to deploy parts of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic as defense against perceived threats from countries hostile to Washington, chiefly Iran.
It also bristled at Bush's push to bring Russia's neighbors Georgia and Ukraine into the NATO alliance.
Obama promised a more pragmatic and less ideological foreign policy, fanning expectations of a thaw in relations with Russia.
CONCILIATORY COMMENTS
Asked whether Russia would take concrete steps to respond to Washington's overtures, Ivanov was cautious, saying: "It is not an oriental bazaar and we do not trade the way people do in a bazaar."
In some of the most conciliatory comments from Russia for some time, he indicated Moscow was prepared to discuss missile threats with Washington and renewed an offer to use existing Russian radar stations in a future defense system.
Ivanov reaffirmed that, if the United States scrapped plans to deploy the shield in central Europe, Russia would not follow through on a threat to put its own nuclear missiles near the Polish border.
He said he believed the United States was ready to start negotiations soon on disarmament and welcomed Obama's pledge to talk to Iran about its nuclear program.
"We welcome any steps aimed at a political settlement of the Iranian nuclear program," Ivanov said.
Russia holds a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and is an important player in Western efforts to curb Iran's nuclear program.
In his Saturday speech to the annual gathering of world leaders and defense experts, Biden acknowledged that Washington and Moscow would not agree on everything.
"But the United States and Russia can disagree and still work together where our interests coincide and they coincide in many places."
Until now, Moscow has sent contradictory signals about the kind of relationship it wants with Obama's administration.
Last week, the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan said it would close down a U.S. air base on its territory that supplies U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan.
The surprise move coincided with an announcement that Kyrgyzstan would receive more than $2 billion in aid and credit from Russia, raising questions about whether Moscow might have played a role in the decision to close the base.
Ivanov denied that was the case.
(Reporting by Noah Barkin, David Brunnstrom, Ross Colvin and Kerstin Gehmlich; editing by Andrew Dobbie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5170HF20090208
By Noah Barkin and David Brunnstrom
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Russia on Sunday welcomed a pledge by the United States "to press the reset button" on relations with Moscow, in a sign the former Cold War rivals could repair relations under President Barack Obama.
Vice President Joe Biden, in a speech at a security conference in Munich, said on Saturday it was time to end a dangerous drift in ties and work with Moscow.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, speaking at a news conference in Munich after meeting Biden on Sunday, said the United States had sent a strong signal about its willingness to cooperate.
"It is obvious the new U.S. administration has a very strong desire to change and that inspires optimism," Ivanov said.
Relations between Russia and the United States have grown increasingly strained in recent years.
Russia's brief war with Georgia last year and its recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were condemned by the United States.
Moscow responded angrily to former President George W. Bush's plans to deploy parts of a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic as defense against perceived threats from countries hostile to Washington, chiefly Iran.
It also bristled at Bush's push to bring Russia's neighbors Georgia and Ukraine into the NATO alliance.
Obama promised a more pragmatic and less ideological foreign policy, fanning expectations of a thaw in relations with Russia.
CONCILIATORY COMMENTS
Asked whether Russia would take concrete steps to respond to Washington's overtures, Ivanov was cautious, saying: "It is not an oriental bazaar and we do not trade the way people do in a bazaar."
In some of the most conciliatory comments from Russia for some time, he indicated Moscow was prepared to discuss missile threats with Washington and renewed an offer to use existing Russian radar stations in a future defense system.
Ivanov reaffirmed that, if the United States scrapped plans to deploy the shield in central Europe, Russia would not follow through on a threat to put its own nuclear missiles near the Polish border.
He said he believed the United States was ready to start negotiations soon on disarmament and welcomed Obama's pledge to talk to Iran about its nuclear program.
"We welcome any steps aimed at a political settlement of the Iranian nuclear program," Ivanov said.
Russia holds a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and is an important player in Western efforts to curb Iran's nuclear program.
In his Saturday speech to the annual gathering of world leaders and defense experts, Biden acknowledged that Washington and Moscow would not agree on everything.
"But the United States and Russia can disagree and still work together where our interests coincide and they coincide in many places."
Until now, Moscow has sent contradictory signals about the kind of relationship it wants with Obama's administration.
Last week, the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan said it would close down a U.S. air base on its territory that supplies U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan.
The surprise move coincided with an announcement that Kyrgyzstan would receive more than $2 billion in aid and credit from Russia, raising questions about whether Moscow might have played a role in the decision to close the base.
Ivanov denied that was the case.
(Reporting by Noah Barkin, David Brunnstrom, Ross Colvin and Kerstin Gehmlich; editing by Andrew Dobbie)
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE5170HF20090208
Kyrgyzstan stalls U.S. airbase closure vote
Mon Feb 9, 2009 7:14am EST
By Olga Dzyubenko
BISHKEK (Reuters) - Kyrgyzstan effectively delayed a parliamentary vote on the closure of a U.S. airbase Monday by submitting additional paperwork to the chamber, buying time for more negotiations with the United States.
Kyrgyzstan said last week its decision to shut Manas, a key staging post for U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, was final, but has yet to send Washington a formal eviction note.
Parliament is dominated by a pro-presidential political party and its actions usually reflect the will of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev's administration.
"We (recommend) the government also submit other draft laws related to the closure," said Leila Sadykova, head of the parliamentary defense committee which formally approved the government's decision to shut down the base Monday.
"We recommend that all these agreements be considered by parliament together," she said, referring to its broader international package of agreements that includes a clause on the U.S. use of Manas. Such a review is certain to delay the vote by at least several days.
The United States says negotiations are still continuing, but Kyrgyzstan, which needs parliamentary approval to go ahead with the decision, has denied that.
Kyrgyz officials Monday refused to comment on whether talks were continuing.
Bakiyev said on February 3 that Manas would be shut, just after Russia promised him more than $2 billion in aid and credit, roughly equivalent to half of Kyrgyzstan's entire economy.
That led some U.S. officials to believe that Russia, uneasy with the presence of U.S. troops in Central Asia, had pressured the tiny Muslim nation to do so. Moscow strongly denies that.
Myrza Kaparov, the Kyrgyz government envoy to the assembly, said the government would clarify its position as soon as Wednesday but said final voting may not take place until next week.
Closing Manas would pose a challenge for new U.S. President Barack Obama who plans to send additional troops to Afghanistan to boost NATO efforts to defeat Taliban insurgents.
It also leaves the United States scrambling to find alternative ways of delivering supplies to its troops in Afghanistan, a crucial task at a time when its main supply route in Pakistan is under pressure from militants.
Observers said delays in parliament, however technical, most likely signaled that talks were continuing behind closed doors.
"I don't think it (parliament voting) will happen any time over the next few days," said Iskhak Masaliyev, a Kyrgyz member of parliament. "There must be political reasons to this."
A spokesman for Manas, tucked away in the snowy foothills on the Tien Shan mountains, said the base continued to operate as usual. "We are waiting for the government's decision," he said. "It's all still up in the air."
(Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Mon Feb 9, 2009 7:14am EST
By Olga Dzyubenko
BISHKEK (Reuters) - Kyrgyzstan effectively delayed a parliamentary vote on the closure of a U.S. airbase Monday by submitting additional paperwork to the chamber, buying time for more negotiations with the United States.
Kyrgyzstan said last week its decision to shut Manas, a key staging post for U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, was final, but has yet to send Washington a formal eviction note.
Parliament is dominated by a pro-presidential political party and its actions usually reflect the will of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev's administration.
"We (recommend) the government also submit other draft laws related to the closure," said Leila Sadykova, head of the parliamentary defense committee which formally approved the government's decision to shut down the base Monday.
"We recommend that all these agreements be considered by parliament together," she said, referring to its broader international package of agreements that includes a clause on the U.S. use of Manas. Such a review is certain to delay the vote by at least several days.
The United States says negotiations are still continuing, but Kyrgyzstan, which needs parliamentary approval to go ahead with the decision, has denied that.
Kyrgyz officials Monday refused to comment on whether talks were continuing.
Bakiyev said on February 3 that Manas would be shut, just after Russia promised him more than $2 billion in aid and credit, roughly equivalent to half of Kyrgyzstan's entire economy.
That led some U.S. officials to believe that Russia, uneasy with the presence of U.S. troops in Central Asia, had pressured the tiny Muslim nation to do so. Moscow strongly denies that.
Myrza Kaparov, the Kyrgyz government envoy to the assembly, said the government would clarify its position as soon as Wednesday but said final voting may not take place until next week.
Closing Manas would pose a challenge for new U.S. President Barack Obama who plans to send additional troops to Afghanistan to boost NATO efforts to defeat Taliban insurgents.
It also leaves the United States scrambling to find alternative ways of delivering supplies to its troops in Afghanistan, a crucial task at a time when its main supply route in Pakistan is under pressure from militants.
Observers said delays in parliament, however technical, most likely signaled that talks were continuing behind closed doors.
"I don't think it (parliament voting) will happen any time over the next few days," said Iskhak Masaliyev, a Kyrgyz member of parliament. "There must be political reasons to this."
A spokesman for Manas, tucked away in the snowy foothills on the Tien Shan mountains, said the base continued to operate as usual. "We are waiting for the government's decision," he said. "It's all still up in the air."
(Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Louise Ireland)
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE51833G20090209
By Olga Dzyubenko
BISHKEK (Reuters) - Kyrgyzstan effectively delayed a parliamentary vote on the closure of a U.S. airbase Monday by submitting additional paperwork to the chamber, buying time for more negotiations with the United States.
Kyrgyzstan said last week its decision to shut Manas, a key staging post for U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, was final, but has yet to send Washington a formal eviction note.
Parliament is dominated by a pro-presidential political party and its actions usually reflect the will of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev's administration.
"We (recommend) the government also submit other draft laws related to the closure," said Leila Sadykova, head of the parliamentary defense committee which formally approved the government's decision to shut down the base Monday.
"We recommend that all these agreements be considered by parliament together," she said, referring to its broader international package of agreements that includes a clause on the U.S. use of Manas. Such a review is certain to delay the vote by at least several days.
The United States says negotiations are still continuing, but Kyrgyzstan, which needs parliamentary approval to go ahead with the decision, has denied that.
Kyrgyz officials Monday refused to comment on whether talks were continuing.
Bakiyev said on February 3 that Manas would be shut, just after Russia promised him more than $2 billion in aid and credit, roughly equivalent to half of Kyrgyzstan's entire economy.
That led some U.S. officials to believe that Russia, uneasy with the presence of U.S. troops in Central Asia, had pressured the tiny Muslim nation to do so. Moscow strongly denies that.
Myrza Kaparov, the Kyrgyz government envoy to the assembly, said the government would clarify its position as soon as Wednesday but said final voting may not take place until next week.
Closing Manas would pose a challenge for new U.S. President Barack Obama who plans to send additional troops to Afghanistan to boost NATO efforts to defeat Taliban insurgents.
It also leaves the United States scrambling to find alternative ways of delivering supplies to its troops in Afghanistan, a crucial task at a time when its main supply route in Pakistan is under pressure from militants.
Observers said delays in parliament, however technical, most likely signaled that talks were continuing behind closed doors.
"I don't think it (parliament voting) will happen any time over the next few days," said Iskhak Masaliyev, a Kyrgyz member of parliament. "There must be political reasons to this."
A spokesman for Manas, tucked away in the snowy foothills on the Tien Shan mountains, said the base continued to operate as usual. "We are waiting for the government's decision," he said. "It's all still up in the air."
(Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Mon Feb 9, 2009 7:14am EST
By Olga Dzyubenko
BISHKEK (Reuters) - Kyrgyzstan effectively delayed a parliamentary vote on the closure of a U.S. airbase Monday by submitting additional paperwork to the chamber, buying time for more negotiations with the United States.
Kyrgyzstan said last week its decision to shut Manas, a key staging post for U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, was final, but has yet to send Washington a formal eviction note.
Parliament is dominated by a pro-presidential political party and its actions usually reflect the will of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev's administration.
"We (recommend) the government also submit other draft laws related to the closure," said Leila Sadykova, head of the parliamentary defense committee which formally approved the government's decision to shut down the base Monday.
"We recommend that all these agreements be considered by parliament together," she said, referring to its broader international package of agreements that includes a clause on the U.S. use of Manas. Such a review is certain to delay the vote by at least several days.
The United States says negotiations are still continuing, but Kyrgyzstan, which needs parliamentary approval to go ahead with the decision, has denied that.
Kyrgyz officials Monday refused to comment on whether talks were continuing.
Bakiyev said on February 3 that Manas would be shut, just after Russia promised him more than $2 billion in aid and credit, roughly equivalent to half of Kyrgyzstan's entire economy.
That led some U.S. officials to believe that Russia, uneasy with the presence of U.S. troops in Central Asia, had pressured the tiny Muslim nation to do so. Moscow strongly denies that.
Myrza Kaparov, the Kyrgyz government envoy to the assembly, said the government would clarify its position as soon as Wednesday but said final voting may not take place until next week.
Closing Manas would pose a challenge for new U.S. President Barack Obama who plans to send additional troops to Afghanistan to boost NATO efforts to defeat Taliban insurgents.
It also leaves the United States scrambling to find alternative ways of delivering supplies to its troops in Afghanistan, a crucial task at a time when its main supply route in Pakistan is under pressure from militants.
Observers said delays in parliament, however technical, most likely signaled that talks were continuing behind closed doors.
"I don't think it (parliament voting) will happen any time over the next few days," said Iskhak Masaliyev, a Kyrgyz member of parliament. "There must be political reasons to this."
A spokesman for Manas, tucked away in the snowy foothills on the Tien Shan mountains, said the base continued to operate as usual. "We are waiting for the government's decision," he said. "It's all still up in the air."
(Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Louise Ireland)
http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE51833G20090209
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