The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations … where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket … where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing.
- Raymond Chandler

American pop culture is certainly not unique in having a love affair with killers. Since the first cave man cracked his neighbor’s head open to control a water hole, eliminating others has been top on the list of problem-solving techniques

Life today has evolved to the point the club has been improved and a young man can sit in an air-conditioned room sipping a Diet Pepsi as he whacks somebody 12,000 miles away. Or else an elite team of tricked-up killers with sophisticated air support can be dropped in at night to do the job.

That’s the state of the art of homicide 2012, America’s dirty little secret.

Retired General Stanley McChrystal and special ops soldiers; at right, a raid in Afghanistan.

Our military is now establishing secret bases all over the world from which to launch these types of homicide assaults specifically focused on leaders of movements we don’t like. The Navy has even developed a fast, twin-hulled catamaran called the littoral combat ship that will deliver these killer teams from the littoral or shallow waters off shore. In the spirit of historic gunboat diplomacy, it’s quite fearsome looking to intimidate the natives.

This kind of projected violence is now going on big time in Yemen, the very poor country on the southern edge of the Arabian peninsula, which is dominated by the super-rich Saudi royal clan, an oily collaboration with which US leaders have had a half-century relationship.

As Jeremy Scahill’s excellent reporting from Yemen makes clear, our drone attacks and support for Yemeni government troops are aggravating poor Yemenis like crazy, driving them into the arms of al Qaeda elements. And, as we should all know by now, once the magic word “al Qaeda” is mentioned all reason and compassion goes out the window and homicide becomes the acceptable problem-solving recourse.

USS Independence, a Littoral Combat Ship to launch helicopters and Special Ops Teams

This new US military doctrine based on sophisticated intelligence and secret homicide raids virtually anywhere is growing at a time our military is linking more and more with local, domestic police agencies. This phenomenon has the potential for serious civil liberties abuse. National borders are fading and life is becoming more and more globalized; burgeoning communications technologies ironically make us less socially cohesive. Add economic, religious and political polarization to the mix and the symbiosis between the military and local police becomes quite scary.

For Americans, the ultimate dark question lurking in all this is: Are death squads within the domestic borders of the United States a possibility? Some will surely see such a question as hysterical — in both senses of the word. But for those who feel it can’t happen here, there’s the lesson of that mythic frog who doesn’t hop out of the pot because the temperature of the water is raised very slowly. For those on the right, there’s also the beloved metaphor of Munich, which says if you appease the initial signs of oppressive force and don’t act against it, you’re certain to be screwed later.

Creeping Militarism and its Tawdry Pop Culture Boosters

Several recent stories suggest how very deep militarism has seeped into the post-9/11, Drug War-obsessed American culture. The Bush Administration’s decision to invade two countries and engage in counter-insurgency wars for ten years is front and center as part of the problem. War has consequences. In the case of Vietnam, it divided the nation.

The first story is about how returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan are employing counter-insurgency tactics on the street in places like Springfield, Massachusetts. The enemy is drug gangs, the domestic suppliers of controlled substances illegally imported from places like South America. “Gang members and drug dealers operate very similarly to insurgents,” Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Cutone told the Times; he was a Green Beret in Iraq.

A second story is summed up in its headline: “U.S. Drug War Inside Honduras Waged Iraq-Style.” To interdict drug shipments from South America headed for the US, the US military has constructed three forward operating bases (or FOBs) in Honduras, one a former CIA airfield from the controversial Contra War days. This kind of military intervention inside Honduras would have been unlikely without the June 2009 military coup that overthrew elected President Manuel Zelaya. The Obama administration, as some may recall, did nothing to prevent or oppose this coup, which there’s little doubt was undertaken with the knowledge of elements in the US government.

Admiral Joseph Kernan, deputy commander of Southern Command, told the Times there are “insidious” parallels between drug traffickers and terror networks. “They operate without regard to borders,” he said. And, of course, so does the military of the United States of America. According to the Times, Admiral Kernan “spent years in Navy SEAL combat units,” the elite unit in the forefront of the new quick-and-lethal special operations doctrine.

The third story recounts the warm reception fired General Stanley McChrystal is getting at Yale, where he has been hired to lecture on leadership. McChrystal, of course, is a proven master at two things: public relations (he was the one-star briefing officer during the Iraq Invasion) and the management of special operations units. He’s arguably the key person in the successful use of killer teams in Anbar Province — known colloquially as “the Salvadoran option” — which developed into the US military’s current special operations doctrine relying on assassin teams and drones to weaken and destabilize enemy leadership. The bin Laden hit was a highly publicized example of this; most examples are top secret.

General McChrystal is famous for a stark and ascetic lifestyle. When reduced to its crude fundamentals, General McChrystal’s leadership expertise amounts to controlling information from the US public and organizing killers. In the 1960s, a man like McChrystal would have faced protests on a college campus. Today, he’s a rock star.

Even the former antiwar candidate President Obama knows how much Americans love a good killer, and, accordingly, he’s bragging about being the man who “took out” Most Wanted Boogieman Osama bin Laden with a SEAL Team, which will go down as one of the nation’s most famous contract hits.

Beyond real political people like General McChrystal and President Obama, Americans’ fascination with killers is clear from just a cursory survey of popular culture. Everywhere, in films, in popular books on the grocery store shelves and in video games, there’s an obsession with hit men, serial killers, psychopaths and government agents with a license to kill; popular killers range from those in an underground, criminal world to those wearing badges and working under the lethal rights granted by national sovereign.

Pop culture secret US killers, precursors of today's post-9/11 hero-assassins

There’s Lawrence Block’s lovable hit man Keller who knocks people off between trips to stamp-collector shops, the swimming pool and other mundane tasks his middle-class readers can identify with. There’s Dexter, the lovable serial killer who offs only scum of the earth we’re glad to see eliminated. And there’s Jake Grafton, Steven Koonts’ CIA agent in The Assassin, and Gabriel Allon, Daniel Silva’s character in The Kill Artist, heroic characters who hunt down al Qaeda demons, one of a hundred others in the popular, post-9/11 secret government killer genre.

The secret US assassin genre has a tawdry pop-culture tradition going back, of course, to James Bond. But more interesting are the links to cheap paperback series about secret national-security-state killers like Mack Bolan (The Executioner), Nick Carter (The Kill Master) and Richard Camellion (The Death Merchant). These paperback titles were churned out by hack writers in the 60s, 70s and 80s by the hundreds, each devoted to some foreign challenge where a secret US killer was needed. In the novel Slaughter in El Salvador, the Death Merchant is sent there “in the middle of a jungle holocaust … to terminate the crazed leaders of each extremist faction,” the right-wing side and the left-wing side — the Death Merchant’s job to save the presumed moderate Salvadoran government. The narrative is as violent and lurid as the politics, of course, is simple-minded and supportive of US foreign policy, in this case supporting the right wing government of El Salvador favored by the Reagan administration. Even deeper in the pop-culture muck out of which much of our current killer genres grow one finds the huge and sordid genre of Men’s Magazines from the 50s and 60s that reduced and re-shaped US xenophobia to sex and violence. Note the “Kidnapped Beauties of the Viet Cong Torture Lair” pictured on the cover on the left.

Mens Magazines from the mid-1960s -- as one commentator summed it up: "blood, sweat and tits."

When it comes to the current killer genre, one of the more interesting examples may be Keith Hayward in Peter Straub’s macabre gem of a bildungsroman novella A Special Place: The Heart of a Dark Matter. Hayward is a very unpleasant character. He starts out as a 12-year-old who likes to kill local cats. His Uncle Till, who likes to kill women with a knife, recognizes his nephew’s talents and trains him in the discipline of killing so he can safely fulfill his potential. As I was reading Straub’s dark little fairy tale I couldn’t help but wonder if Keith Hayward had the discipline to enter the realm of sovereign killing and to become a special ops killer for America. Again, some may see this as a cheap shot aimed at our national heroes of the moment. I’m not sure. One of the consequences of war on a culture is dehumanization, and the psychopath — or his or her more socialized sibling, the sociopath — may be an effective model for coping. In hard times, a conscience can become a burden.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say I’m not a pacifist and when the luxury of personal security is lifted I think I’d agree some people may need killing. (Apologies to my pacifist friends.) If killing is not the issue, the argument shifts from the act of killing to the question who is one killing and why — and what are the consequences. In the case of the US government, when it comes to the combined War On Terror and the Drug War, there’s a clear, on-going history of intervention, invasion and occupation that provokes people to oppose us with violence, which means killing them is only exacerbating the problem and making more enemies to kill later. The process of violence is a vicious cycle with no end, as Martin Luther King so eloquently pointed out before he was assassinated. Military killing doesn’t stop bloodletting. What it does is darken the nation’s soul and invigorate the militarism, which is necessary to keep the nation safe from the perceptions of fear and the consequences of past violence.

It should be noted that when the Englishman D.H. Lawrence describes the American soul as “hard, isolate, stoic and a killer,” he doesn’t include as an American trait a devotion to history. No, history is something too many Americans like to avoid at all costs — unless like “remember the Alamo!” it can be used to mobilize an army for purposes of homicidal revenge. History that digs in and explains the American soul is like a ball and chain. Better to remain ignorant, or as Susan Sontag put it after 9/11: “By all means let’s mourn together, but let’s not be stupid together.” Sadly, the American leaders at the time and the American mob all chose to be stupid.

Add to this volatile cultural stew the polarization of fundamentalist religion and the promotional power of the National Rifle Association and pretty soon you’re back to the wild west where everybody feels they have the need, and the right, to solve their problems lethally. It’s not only your right — it’s your duty — to stand your ground with a .40 caliber Glock.

The Threat of Paramilitary Reality

The anxiety I feel today is exactly what Raymond Chandler alluded to in the epigram at the top, about “a world in which gangsters can rule nations.” The militarization of the police inside the US is a perfect example of this.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 makes it illegal to use Army units within the domestic United States. (The Air Force was added to the act in 1956.) The militarization of police forces, on the other hand, has no such brake.

It’s interesting to look at the issue as a hemisphere problem. In Latin America, the overlap between military and police forces has been notoriously problematic, with many instances of human rights abuses. US military trainers are now being deployed to places like Honduras to train the police and the military; and one of the things they preach is the separation of military and police functions. It’s ironic that those very separations are breaking down here in North America. We’re becoming more like Latin America as they become more like us. The paranoia about our border with Mexico is rising as we witness the use of killing as a tool of power by the Zetas in their war with the Sinaloa Cartel. This is what happens when an absurd Drug War becomes a very dark and baroque failure. The US encouraged right-wing President Felipe Calderon to open the battle six years ago. Now, over 50,000 dead and mutilated bodies later, Mexicans are fed up.

“The Salvador option” was the informal name given to General McChrystal’s Special Operations “death squads” in Anbar Province in Iraq. In El Salvador such units were referred to as “paramilitary.” My dictionary defines “para-“ as “distinct from, but analogous to.” What this means is certain elements feel the law is failing, so they move violence from the public institutions to secret, underground institutions. Violence and killing as a tool trump institutions.

A Lenco Bearcat like the one York County, PA, bought, and a home invasion in the domestic battlespace

Recently, York County, Pennsylvania, purchased a $296,000 up-armored Lenco Bearcat for its SWAT Team; the funds came from cash and property seized from drug dealers. This kind of self-aggrandizing spoils system is notorious in police forces across the nation. The more property confiscated, the more sophisticated military equipment and weapons a department can buy. The problem is, if you buy a tank you naturally want to use it. The more military equipment and training you get, the more you will become a paramilitary unit — “distinct from, but analogous to” a military unit.

There’s also a vast network of associations and training enterprises that reinforce the militarization of local police forces. An article in the Spring issue of the National Tactical Officers Association’s magazine The Tactical Edge specifically addresses the military/police relationship. It’s a review of a book called Field Command by Charles “Sid” Heal.

“The book is a first of its kind,” reviewer John Gnagey writes. “The concepts and principles are taken from tactical texts and military field manuals but are presented in scenarios that commonly confront law enforcement officers.” The book is divided into sections: At the Scene, Understanding and Developing Strategy, Command Staff, Planning and Decision Making and Multi-Dimensional Battlespace.

In the early fifties, I recall my mom literally telling me police officers were my friend. Those days are gone — if they were ever anything more than perception. It’s now an entrenched war of gangs on the streets of America, with the police being the most powerful gang. And police thinkers are using terms like “counter-insurgency” and “battlespace” to talk about policing the streets of America.

Like any civilian caught in the middle of a dangerous warzone, it’s becoming less a matter of right and wrong, and more a matter of prudently choosing sides to cover your ass.

I had first planned to write about the Drug War aspect of President Obama’s summit meeting in Cartagena, since it’s quite amazing when the right-wing president of Colombia publicly lobbies the US president to shift the Drug War from military operations against supply in Latin America to a more social approach against demand in the US. After all, Colombia is the highly militarized US showcase nation in the 40-year Drug War.

“Despite all of the efforts, the immense efforts, the huge costs, we have to recognize that the illicit drug business is prospering,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos told the attending leaders. He even advocated a process of decriminalization, though he recognized this was only a “starting point to begin a discussion that we have been postponing for far too long.”

This is real news.

Colombian President Santos and President Obama, and Hillary Clinton dancing at the Havana nightclub in Cartagena

Our Drug War is a military/police enterprise focused on attacking the supply of drugs coming from Latin America. Santos seems to concede it’s a dismal failure. He also knows the accumulated conditions of that failure are so entrenched in the hemisphere that it’s hard to even begin to discuss a way out.

Barack Obama’s administration is so cowed by entrenched, die-hard drug warriors that it’s doubling down on marijuana busts as local governments across the nation go the other way and ease enforcement of marijuana laws. The Feds are like fundamentalist puritans who see the decriminalization of marijuana as the social equivalent of a “gateway drug” leading to crack-addict Hell. There’s a desperate need for a much more pragmatic approach.

Besides the call from our Latin American neighbors for a more sane, demand-oriented approach to international drug problems, there was an equally consensus-driven call for the US to drop its aggressive and counter-productive 50-year embargo of Cuba.

Here’s the right-wing Santos again on lifting the embargo on Cuba: “There is no justification for that path that has anchored us in a Cold War. … It is the hour to overcome the paralysis produced by ideological stubbornness.” As expected, President Obama remained mired in the “ideological stubbornness” of the Florida Cuban vote.

When it came to approving a labor agreement with Colombia, Obama was in total agreement with the rightist Santos. It did not matter that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka had lobbied hard against the agreement, citing killings of trade unionists and other human rights abuses. Trumka responded by saying, “We regret that the administration has placed commercial interests above the interests of workers and trade unions.”

Back in 1984, I was deported from Honduras for sitting down with union leaders who shared with me and friends a litany of murders and rights abuses against trade unionists. That was during the Contra War. It seems little has changed in 28 years. Capital and profits always trump unions and the human rights of workers.

A NY Daily News photo of the “escort” who set the scandal off and US Secret Service agents

It’s quite revealing that while profound historical discussions during the summit focused on reforming the Drug War, lifting the outmoded Cold War embargo of Cuba and violent abuses of trade unionists, that the really big story to come out of Cartagena is that US Secret Service agents and military security officers purchased sex.

And who is thumping the scandal? None other than Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and the greatest War On Terror whore in America. (The verb to whore is defined by the The New Oxford American Dictionary this way: “To debase oneself by doing something for unworthy motives, typically to make money.”)

The heavy breathing soon began. Could any of the ladies contracted from the Pley Club brothel have been al Qaeda agents? How was the President’s safety affected? How much of a black mark was it on the honor of the United States? Whose heads would have to roll?

Reality Versus Distraction

Meanwhile, back in Realityland, Latin America was in the midst of a major, future-oriented economic correction with the dynamic Brazil on the leading edge. The requests for the US to reform its Drug War and to lift the embargo on Cuba were in fact part of that greater dialogue, a dialogue that includes questions about energizing the middle and lower classes into a consumer engine that can lift all economic boats across the continent.

This is a deadly theme in 2012 in America. So it’s not surprising to see a ridiculous scandal pop up to distract Americans from the real issues. As was accomplished following World War Two, the US economy needs to rebuild its working and middle classes, and the only way to do that is to break the cycle of entrenched, right-leaning wealth. It’s a major epochal struggle in Latin America, as it should be in the United States. It was one of the big stories that should have come out of the summit, and instead we get distractions about agents and whores.

It’s a story about high-powered, red-blooded American men in an exotic location erotically fueled by the myth of American Exceptionalism; actually it’s one of the oldest stories in the annals of colonialism and imperialism. And it naturally involves the oldest profession, in this case, savvy Colombian entrepreneurs after top-dollar profits.

The weak link in all this apparently was an inebriated Secret Service agent who didn’t speak enough Spanish to understand the perfectly legal business contract he was engaging in. The 24-year-old woman offering her services to this gentleman is very beautiful, and she emphasized to The New York Times that she was not a prostitute or a whore; she was an “escort.” The marketing line for such expensive escorts is that a client is paying for class and, most important, discretion.

There would have been no scandal if the man had paid his bill. Failure to fulfill a legal contract amounts to theft of services. Thus the wronged woman went to the police, and the police, in turn, did their duty and took up the woman’s case against the US agent. Sex had nothing to do with the scandal; it was a contractual arrangement gone awry. The man might as well have been refusing to pay for a haircut.

One of the themes being voiced in this scandal is that a matter of national and military honor is at stake, that it’s a violation of our “core values.” It’s the same distracting note of concern we hear from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta when soldiers in Afghanistan photograph themselves grinning like geeks holding up the blown apart legs of a suicide bomber. Panetta said what these men did was “not worthy of our core values.”

So exactly what are our “core values” in this scandal? First, it has to be recognized that these so-called core values are generally expressed in the realm of public relations to respond to some embarrassment. It’s a sad fact of our times that our real values are those expressed in the realm of secrecy where most of US foreign and military policy unfolds. Real values are how we really operate — not how we envision ourselves.

Whoring in Vietnam

Back in 1966, I was a red-blooded 19-year-old kid in Vietnam serving my country as a radio direction finder. My job was to locate the enemy, which generally consisted of Vietnamese kids fighting to force me and 500,000 other Americans from their land. I located these young soldiers so Air Force F4 Phantoms could incinerate them into charred corpses.

When I wasn’t hunting Vietnamese radio operators, I spent a lot of time in Pleiku at the many brothel-bars that catered to kids like me engorged with the myth of American Exceptionalism. For me, Vietnamese girls were the most beautiful creatures on Earth. As an American soldier, I was drawing a salary, plus $65-a-month combat pay for being in Vietnam. There were many thousands more just like me.

Money burned a hole in our pockets, and prostitution was everywhere, in bars and in every little laundry beside the road. It was the juicy entrepreneurial receptacle for the arrogant, imperial engine that drove the war itself. Eventually, to control VD, the Fourth Division actually oversaw its own brothel-bars just outside the base camp in Pleiku.

At these bars, one was presented with an assortment of energetic and lovely child-women willing and eager to share their most intimate physical pleasures for five dollars. I was an armed young male propagandized with a sense of superiority suddenly presented with pliant young girls who wanted my money, of which I had more than I knew what to do with.

I’m now, of course, thoroughly ashamed of myself and mention the experience here only to shed a little light on the notion of Americans buying sex in foreign lands. My shame is intricately tied to the war and the fact I was paying a pittance for these girls’ services; they were there only because they were poor and because we were wrecking their country. It wasn’t the prostitution that was shameful or dishonorable; it was the wrecking, the exploitation and the larger, collective shame for the war itself and the massive amounts of killing and destruction it entailed against the Vietnamese people.

This kind of misplaced dishonor is part of the “core values” cited in the Secret Service scandal. Something is wrong when individual sexual peccadilloes become a more serious matter for public shame than collective actions like a disastrous and violent 40-year Drug War, a misguided 50-year embargo of a tiny island nation and encouraging profit-making business while ignoring violence against working people. Add in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the new doctrine of special operations assassination teams and lethal drones and the “scandal” of a few agents paying for consensual sex becomes laughable. Our wars are the real scandal.

Colombia and other Latin American nations have decriminalized prostitution and they now seem inclined to do the same for drugs. This has been the reality in places like Amsterdam for some time. Reasonable people have to wonder when the professed “core values” of American Puritanism will allow the same kinds of reform and evolution to occur in the United States. So far, the forces of obstruction and distraction have the upper hand.

This sort of reform is never easy, and it’s never perfect. But we know criminalization and militarization doesn’t work and that they are extremely costly approaches. In a way, we have become socially addicted to these approaches. Maybe it’s time for the nation to go into rehab and assume a little of the spirit of E. F. Schumacher’s famous book Small Is Beautiful.

To borrow the subtitle of the book, we’d be a whole lot better off if our leaders stopped being such corporate, imperial whores and began to govern “as if people mattered.”

In 2004, Veterans for Peace sponsored Iraq Veterans Against the War, which began with seven members. IVAW is now an independent organization with hundreds of veterans and active duty members, chapters in all 50 states and overseas, and continues gaining members all the time. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are marching in peace demonstrations, speaking out at public events, giving media interviews, organizing active duty soldiers on military bases, and actively helping GI resisters. Anti-war Iraq veterans were featured in a documentary movie, The Ground Truth, and in several other movies about the war. During the Iraq war, over 2,000 active duty troops signed the “Appeal for Redress” calling on Congress to end the war. At the height of the war, the GI Rights Hotline received up to 3,000 calls a month from GIs wanting out of the wars and the military, and an estimated 200-plus soldiers went AWOL in Canada. Courage to Resist helped many service members publicly refuse military orders, including 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who never served a single day in jail. Now a young PFC, Bradley Manning, stands accused of telling the truth by leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents. All of this combined with the civilian peace movement turned the tide of American public opinion against the Iraq war, and eventually led to bringing the bulk of regular troops home. Thousands of mercenaries remain.

What will happen to the young GIs who refused orders to war or directly resisted the military in other ways? In particular, what will life be like for them afterward? What will their lives be like long after these wars are over, and the country and the world moves on?  The experience of the Viet Nam era GI resisters may be very relevant here.

Forty one years ago, I was a soldier in the U. S. Army. I had received orders to Viet Nam, and after much agonized soul searching had decided I wasn’t going to go. I went AWOL for two weeks. I then reported to the Presidio stockade with my lawyer, turned myself in, refused orders, and submitted a limited conscientious objector application (objection to a particular war, not to military service in general or to legitimate military defense of the nation). The Army first pressed three charges against me, for a total of 15 years in prison if convicted. I was prepared to plead guilty to those charges. But the Army instead dropped all the charges, released me from the stockade, and ordered me to report to Oakland Army terminal for shipment to Viet Nam. I escaped and deserted to Canada.

In making this decision, I was haunted by deep fear of all the things the Army, the government, and society said would happen to those who dared to openly defy them. They said people like me would be branded cowards, traitors, that we’d be disgraced and spat upon all our lives. They said we’d be losers, never respected, never trusted, never able to hold down a job, hated by everybody, loved by nobody. They said that without the all powerful Honorable Discharge, we would be held in contempt by all who laid eyes on us, and we would live out our miserable lives in the gutter, on the margins of society, hiding our terrible secret and unable to face anyone with what we had done.

Did this propaganda scare me? Of course it did. But stronger than my fear of disgrace and rejection by society was my refusal to kill and be killed for politician’s lies, the profits of the rich, war crimes repeatedly committed against unarmed civilians, and the invasion, conquest, and exploitation of a small foreign country that never threatened or attacked us. Like thousands of my contemporaries and hundreds of the Iraq and Afghanistan generation, I refused orders to war.

After the Viet Nam war ended, I returned to the U.S., turned myself in to the army again, and got an Undesirable Discharge.

Eventually, I was featured in a very small part in a documentary film about the Viet Nam era GI resistance movement, “Sir! No Sir!” The movie interviewed and told the stories of GIs who had resisted the Viet Nam war in various ways, as well as the role that Jane Fonda played in supporting the GI resistance movement. This led to a personal epiphany about GI resistance.

Holly Near, Jane Fonda, and “Sir! No Sir!” filmmaker, David Zieger. “Sir! No Sir!” fundraising benefit - Feb. 22, 2006, Mill Valley, CA.

The premiere of the film took place on June 19, 2005 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. A fairly large group of vets who were in the film flew down to attend the premiere. This is an email I sent at the time:

“It was amazing to see just how deep and broad the GI anti-war movement really was. Even having been in the middle of the movement, I hadn’t realized just how vast it actually was, I only knew my little corner of it. But contrary to current mainstream propaganda, the GI resistance movement was in fact so widespread that the military was actually close to collapse, according to high ranking military sources of the time. Nixon went to Vietnamization and a US air war because American ground troops had become unreliable. In Chicago during the Democratic convention when Mayor Daley’s cops were attacking and beating the demonstrators, Army troops were sent to Chicago but never used – because their commanders weren’t sure which side the troops would be on. You would have to see the movie to fully appreciate the scope of all this. But you can get a sense of it by checking out the Sir! No Sir! website.

The theatre was said to hold about 600 people, and almost every seat was filled. After the movie was shown, the producer David Zeiger took the stage and called on all the people in the movie who were present to join him. There were about 16 of us, and we all stood up together and started to walk up to the stage. As we did, the audience rose and gave us an enthusiastic standing ovation, including loud applause and cheers. One man shouted, “Heroes!” as the applause accelerated.

We walked to the stage and stood in a line facing the audience. David made some introductory remarks and had us briefly introduce ourselves. There was a question and answer period in which audience members asked about the film and resistance, and different people answered different questions.

After the showing, different people came up to talk to us. Some activists with different projects came up and told us about their projects and exchanged information. One woman urged me and the others to continue speaking out. About 70 people from the movie and the audience went to a local restaurant afterwards for dinner and drinks. Many of the people there were our age, with a few somewhat younger people, perhaps in their thirties or forties. Near the end of the evening I started getting tired, and eventually we all called it a night and left.

A key realization of the night came to me when I was standing on the stage with the other military deserters/resistors. As I looked down the line, the thought that struck me was how well all of us had actually done in life, even in establishment terms. Looking down the line, I realized that all of us were financially secure. Virtually all of us had at least a bachelor’s degree, and about a third of us had a master’s degree. Virtually all of us had professional jobs. Most had homes, families, a middle class lifestyle. The few who didn’t had an alternative lifestyle that they chose, not one that was imposed on them. This from a group of people who had started out in life either as wanted criminals on the run from the FBI, or as convicted felons locked up in prison for years. We had overcome years of formidable personal and institutional hardships to achieve our successes, but there we were, all success stories by anybody’s definition. Beyond material success, all of us were still active trying to make a positive difference in society. We were politically active. We were personally continuing to grow and develop every day. We were all still dedicated to the same fundamental values that prompted our rebellion against the Viet Nam war in the first place. We were all still moving forward in our lives.

It struck me how, in the 60s, the government, the military and “mainstream” society all said that people like us were doomed to be failures, that our lives would be lives of disgrace and desperation, that we’d never be able to get a job, that people would look down on us, that we’d be the outcasts of society, that we’d never be able to look at ourselves in the mirror, and that we’d drown in our own shame. Looking down the line of resistors, I realized that just the opposite was true. The average American has no college degree. The average American is not a professional. The average American is not politically active, and not trying to change the world. We were in fact more, not less, accomplished than the norm. I can’t tell you how proud, and privileged, I felt to be able to stand with these people.

America today is locked in another quagmire like Viet Nam. Our middle class is being eroded by the Republicans’ economic war of the rich against all. Our international prestige is sinking. Our economy and environment are being driven into a tailspin. Yet for us ex-fugitives, our personal lives were going very well. We are actually doing better than the nation!

The next day, I talked about this with a few of the other deserters/resistors, and they all agreed. Our personal lives, despite the many dark times when we didn’t know if we were going to live or die, were now going better than the nation. All of us were more concerned about the fate of the nation than worried about our personal lives. We succeeded because of the very issues and struggles that we choose to face and deal with, that seemed so large and overwhelming at the time. We succeeded because we had to work hard to survive and follow our mandate to make a positive difference in the world. We succeeded because we had fiercely loyal friends who shared our dreams and ideals and we all stood by each other even in the worse of times.

The moral of the story: Don’t believe the nation’s leaders; all they tell you are lies. Believe your own eyes and your own heart, and follow where they lead. If you trust anybody, trust your friends and your loved ones.”

Jane Fonda with Vietnam-era Army resistors: Hal Muskat, Keith Mather, Jane Fonda, & Mike Wong. “Sir! No Sir!” fundraising benefit - Feb. 22, 2006, Mill Valley, CA.

Did our group represent the experience of all GI resisters? There were over 90,000 military deserters during the Viet Nam war and an estimated 500,000 veterans with bad discharges, an unknown number due to various forms of war resistance.* Our group, of course, can’t represent them all. But in my experience in the army and the deserter community in Canada during the war, the people in our group were a fairly typical cross-section.

Since that time, I have met many Iraq war veterans and numerous GI resisters. We have talked, and sometimes they ask me and others of my generation what it was like for us. I look in their eyes and faces, and see reflections of myself and my generation so many decades ago. These are brave men and women, living with pain, fear, doubts, and wrestling with big questions of war and peace, life and death. When I visited Canada, current day military deserters shared their stories, and I felt so proud of them. They are very young, but they had the courage to do what they felt was right.

Today’s GI resisters have a tough road of struggle ahead of them. But if my generation’s experience is any example, they will prevail, they will become successful, and they will grow to become leaders in their time. The very qualities that led them to resist the wars will also lead them to success in life. And that is how it should be.

* Long Time Passing: Viet Nam and the Haunted Generation, by Myra MacPherson. Published by Signet, New American Library, New York, N.Y. 1984. Page 394.

On the flyleaf of a school notebook I’d purchased at a papelaria in Salvador, Bahia, where I was on assignment in Brazil to write a destination piece in 1984, I found the following stanzas from a 19^th century poem by Casimiro de Abreu:

Correi pr’as bandas do sul
Debaixo dum céu de anil
Encontrareis o gigante
Santa Cruz, hoje Brasil;
— É uma terra de amores
Alcatifada de flores
Onde a brisa fala amores
Nas belas tardes de Abril.

It’s a bit of sugared nation-worship for “a land of passions, carpeted with flowers, where the breeze speaks of love on fair April afternoons.”  I suspect it was recited by most Brazilians in their primary school days.

I had already heard those lines in a slightly altered form twenty years before.  It was 1964, in Rio de Janeiro.  I remember waking up on April 1^st and staring out a window at the presence of armed soldiers in the avenue below, a sign that the military overthrow of the Goulart government was well underway.

Michael Uhl, in April 1964, looking out a window on Copacabana Beach, which is shown at right circa 1960s.

A nearby building housing UNE, the National Student Union, would later be burnt out by the Putschists or their supporters.  I had been there several weeks earlier to buy, O Povo Canta (The People Sing), a miniature LP featuring five catchy ballads with social content that UNE had produced in a campaign aimed at conscientizcao - conscious raising – among the country’s abundant urban and rural poor.

In one of those tunes, the Song of Underdevelopment, the satirizing lyricist borrowed Casimiro’s famous lines, except, in his version the gigante mentioned in the poem’s third line, a giant called Brazil, is found to be at rest, and when awakened, revealed to be not a giant, but a dwarf: um pais subdesenvolvido, an underdeveloped Third World country.  It’s really a national question.  The students wanted to know why their country, in its enormity and exceptional natural wealth, had failed since colonial days to match the prestige, prosperity, and power of the real giant who dominated from the north, described in the song with a bitter witticism as o pais amigo – the buddy country.

The "O Povo Canta" album cover

All that student zeal and public questioning around inequality and neo-colonialism would be silenced in the years ahead, driven underground as the military regime tightened its repressive grip, not fully released until the late nineteen eighties when, after a quarter century of popular disgust and organized or passive resistance – not least the “stand with poor” of a significant faction of the Catholic laity, clergy, and heirarchy* - Brazil finally returned to democratic rule.

By some strange coincidence, the very building at the fashionable center of Copacabana Beach from which I initially watched the coup unfold, was where President Joao Goulart – known as Jango – democratically elected and now being unceremoniously deposed – also had a family residence.  I was a guest in the apartment of a Georgetown classmate whose father held the third highest rank in the U.S. Embassy, Political Officer – aka Station Chief – and I was in Rio to spend a year perfecting my Portuguese at the local Jesuit university.

The political stuff, like the U.S. role in Goulart’s overthrow, would add up quick enough by the time I got back from Nam four years later.  In ‘64, politically speaking, I was a sheltered naïf.  But I was also a nineteen year old boy alone on foreign soil, my every pore open to the bossa nova of the world’s most sonically pleasing language, and to the countless fragments of Brazil’s sensuous, exotic otherness which, notwithstanding its romantic idealization, is what gives Casimiro de Abreu’s poem its patina of enduring authenticity.

I continued to study Brazil after that, but from a certain distance, and it was twenty years before I would actually return.  For the fifteen years thereafter I visited frequently, traveling to the country’s most remote corners as a guide book author, telling tourists what to see, where to stay and what to eat.  Although I never tired of being pampered with a five-star room and meal to match, my interest in Brazil far over spilled the confines of the hospitality industry.

With my knowledge of the country and competence in Portuguese I gained access to intellectual and political circles not unlike those I had traveled in at home among New York’s antiwar lefties.  During one visit, when I was carrying credentials from the Nation magazine, I climbed onto the speaker’s platform in Rio with a writer friend and Worker’s Party (PT) militant, and was introduced to the already legendary Luiz Inacio da Silva, nicknamed Lula, at a demonstration for Direitas Ja!, a movement during Brazil’s prolonged period of abertura, the re-democratization phase, demanding presidential elections by direct popular vote versus senatorial appointment.

Since its founding in 1980, I have followed how the PT built it base from modest victories in municipal elections to the governors’ mansions of Brazil’s largest cities, and finally to the presidency itself, which Lula won on his fourth try in 2002.  He was reelected in 2006, and his successor in 2010, Dilma Rousseff, is also a member of the PT, which, as a governing party has now adopted a center-left identity, advocating reform where it once spoke only of complete social transformation.  Let’s face it, capitalism has shown itself to be a more resilient historical force than either Marx or Engels ever imagined.

The PT’s drift toward the center notwithstanding, the reforms in Brazil over the past 25 years have not been insignificant.  The dwarf is finally growing into a giant.  Brazil has undergone enormous development, and now approaches the status of a genuine regional power made possible, not just by its own exertions, but by the measurable decline in hemispheric hegemony of its ole buddy, the giant to the north.  And while the Brazilian middle class has grown miraculously in the same period, the poor and landless are still very much among them.  According to Brazil’s 2010 census, in Rio de Janeiro alone, a city of almost twelve million, a quarter of the inhabitants remain favelados, slum dwellers living under sub-standard conditions where often the most basic services, like sanitation, are missing.

Two faces of Brazil: A jet aircraft manufacturing plant and a favela (slum)

Moreover Rio’s slums are infamous as havens for Brazilian drug gangs.  To make the city safe for the World Cup which Brazil will host in 2014, the hillside shanty towns in the Cidade Maravilhosa – the City of Wonder – are in the process of being pacified, in some cases dismantled, and the drug traffickers driven out.  In the meantime, non-essential services – like satellite television – are rapidly being installed to create an atmosphere of egalitarian normalcy.

This effort to make the country more comfortable for millions of visitors expected to attend the World Cup by inflicting additional depredations on Brazil’s have-nots is an unfolding and important story.  But what interests this writer for the moment is that 2014 also marks the fiftieth year since the military coup, and I have for sometime wondered what public space Brazilians will reserve to commemorate that dark anniversary.

I now have a piece of that answer.  Over the next two years, assuming the government’s plan doesn’t go awry, Brazilians are about to experience their own ‘Never Again’ moment.  The story goes like this:

Before leaving office at the end of 2010, President Lula proposed a new Ministry of Human Rights that would create a Commisao da Verdade – a Truth Commission to hear testimony on abuses by the military regime, the torture, kidnapping and clandestine murder – the “disappearing” – of the opponents, armed or otherwise, to its rule.  A year later, after being approved by the Brazilian Congress, the new president, Dilma Rousseff, gave official sanction to the Truth Commission, presenting it as “a guarantee of the people’s right to Memory and Truth.  We cannot allow [the past] to be corrupted by silence,” she said.  “Learning the truth will be essential to later generations in ensuring that this stain on our country’s history will never again occur.”

Not surprisingly, this call to dig up the past stirred great alarm among Brazil’s current and retired military leadership, who claimed – not without some justification – that the former opponents to the dictatorship, with the tables now turned, were bent on taking their revenge.  In fact, when the proposal for the commission was first presented, it contained language to which the brass had immediately protested, and Lula, to keep the peace in his own coalition and to placate the generals, replaced the offending passages with more “generic language,” less harsh in its characterization of the military regime.

Leftist President Joao Goulart, deposed by the military in an April 1964 coup; and current President Dilma Rousseff

From the start, Lula, and then Dilma, has repeatedly ensured the Brazilian armed forces and public that the commission would have no power to impose punishment, because of the Amnesty Law of 1979.  That official act of forgetting its crimes had been engineered by the Putschists to immunize themselves against future prosecutions, but it also established a status quo that allowed clandestine militants to resurface without facing criminal charges, and exiles, like Paulo Freire, to come home.  What makes the military nervous today is a new political debate about whether the amnesty only covers political crimes, and not unsolved common crimes involving kidnapping and disappearing of bodies, so the generals aren’t buying the presidential reassurances.

And, in fact, were the aggressive behaviors exhibited by Brazil’s right wing flag officers – mostly elderly but still on the reserve lists – over the course of this policy debate to have occurred within the U.S. military establishment, the average American would have just cause to wonder if a Pentagon coup were not immediately in the offing.  The U.S. military as a political force is hardly powerless, but its members have yet to contest, while in uniform or institutionally, for state power.  When General MacArthur, a military mandarin by our standards who wielded unprecedented power, shot off his mouth toward the end of the Korean War, you’ll recall Harry Truman canned him the next day for insubordination.

Now, I don’t pretend to possess any deep insight into the complex social and political struggles being played out in Brazil these days; I’m just getting back to speed on the Brazil beat, so to speak, over the past six months.  But from what I’ve been reading lately about what these generals are saying, and how they at times directly defy the elected leadership, suggests strongly to me that Brazil’s armed forces are not yet fully reconciled to the constitutional realities of civilian control.  And that means, as one Brazilian friend wrote me recently, that the country’s “democracy is fragile, and needs to be exercised daily.”

Part of that exercise also protects the generals’ right to speak.  But the brass haven’t contented themselves with insubordinate speech alone.  They’ve circulated a defiant manifesto in their own ranks, told a Defense Minister – who eventually resigned over the commission controversy – not to show his face on their doorstep, and then the very-much-active-duty chiefs of the various services refused to show for the ceremony when Dilma signed the Truth Commission into law.

In the audience that day were several of Dilma’s former cell mates from her three years of imprisonment.  Dilma was a member of the VAR-Palmares, the Armed Revolutionary Vanguard, to which the word Palmares was appended to honor a sizable stronghold of escaped slaves who resisted their Portuguese masters in 17^th century Brazil.  The guerrilla Dilma Rousseff, dubbed by her captors the Joan of Arc of the armed resistance, was subjected to torture – “electric shock and beatings” – during the first twenty-two days of her confinement, according to her own accounts.

Guerrilla Dilma Rousseff in 60s arrest photo, and General Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva, her current detractor

One of Dilma’s main detractors is retired General Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva, now in the reserves, but whose service dates from the seventies, and who provocatively questions Dilma’s claim to having been tortured.  In a rambling interview with a reporter from O Globo that chases its tail over seven printed pages, Rocha Paiva doggedly stays on message, demanding over and over that the Truth Commission must also hear about “the crimes of the terrorists,” not just those of the ruling juntas.  The reporter points out that the military “held all the power,” and that many who resisted, like Dilma, were already punished.  Moreover, and of great concern to their survivors, the fates of hundreds of disappeared victims, and the whereabouts of their remains, has never been revealed.  Whatever arguments the reporter pitches the wily old martinet to justify the full and long overdue airing of the victims’ stories, is parried by Rocha Paiva with his insistence on accountability for “both sides.”  That the general himself remains unrepentant about the past is best illustrated in this interview by his outlandish claim that the dictatorship was prolonged for ten years because of the resistance.

In the face of such intimidating push back from the country’s proud, patriarchal and powerful military, it is encouraging to see how firmly President Dilma is committed to the work of the commission, set to begin this April following the presidential appointments of a bi-partisan panel of seven distinguished – and presumably disinterested – members, who will attend to this work of historical atonement for the next two years.  That’s enough time, the Minister of Human Rights, Maria do Rosario points out, “to get back a report while Dilma’s government is still in office,” political capital, perhaps, for when Dilma runs for a second term.

The overall direction of the Truth Commission is in the hands of Maria do Rosario, and very good hands indeed it would appear, at least for those who favor sowing humiliation among former thugs and tyrants, and making them eat crow in public. The minister held a press conference earlier this month to lay out the commission’s “responsibilities,” and spoke unambiguously about one priority in particular, as if to rebut directly the polemic of adversaries like General Rocha Paiva.  “We have to disabuse the public of the notion, that there were two sides,” she explained, a view that retains some grip “on popular fantasy, and has an impact on public opinion.”  And while this question may remain a source of contention from the right, Minister do Rosario expressed confidence that the majority of Brazilian are strongly behind the government’s focus on the crimes of the regime alone.

Like so many of the heavies in the PT, Maria do Rosario, who has held a variety of public offices over two decades, cut her political teeth in Rio Grande do Sol – Joao Goulart’s home state on Brazil’s southern border with Uruguay.  Dilma also made her mark there in the public energy field, but neither of them has been with Lula and the PT from the start.  Dilma, when she abandoned armed struggle after prison, and until fairly recently, played a leadership role in a rival party of populist and progressive social democrats dating from the Goulart era.  Maria do Rosario, born two years after the ‘64 coup, was first elected to the Porto Alegre city council on the ticket of the Brazilian Communist Party.  Many militants-turned-politicians in Brazil, whether from principle or pragmatism, have “migrated” to the PT over the years.  And many, like Lula’s successor and her minister, were politicized through involvement with various tendencies of the Marxist left, which in Brazil, as in much of South America, remains a viable intellectual and political tradition.

In the face of such incendiary resumes, there has been criticism from sectors beyond the grumpy friends of former dictators, neo-liberals, for example, that the resistance to the generals never intended to restore democracy, but to create a soviet-style socialist state.  Of course, Brazilian militants in those years were hardly alone in supporting socialism as their political objective.  Throughout the West the entire generation of 68er and New Leftists in a kaleidoscope of bickering tendencies, Leninist or otherwise, was heavily influenced by the political tools and ideology of the October Revolution.  At the same time I can’t recall a single committed radical I knew from that era who would have been keen to live his life in one of the Workers’ Paradises as then constituted, with Cuba as the possible exception.  What the Brazilian resistance did play a strong, perhaps decisive, role in accomplishing was the defeat of a demonstrably evil military regime, while helping to replace it with the democratic Brazil that exists today.  A luta continua.

*For an eyewtiness account of the emergence of the base communities from which a Theology of Liberation was codified, see my interview with Patrick Hughes, an Irish missionary priest who worked in Brazil from 1963-73 -  www.veteranscholar.com under Essays.

While the leadership of America is mud-wrestling with itself in the election “silly season,” the nation is watching the wheels come off its military occupation of Afghanistan. It feels like that special effects TV ad for a new SUV in which, as the SUV speeds forward, thousands of its parts magically come flinging loose until we see nothing but the truck chassis speeding ahead.

In Afghanistan, we’re down to that truck chassis. And its wheels are now coming loose. Once again, US leaders have reached a crisis endpoint in yet another counter-insurgency commitment. Once again our leaders insist on “victory” when that kind of end is impossible.

Images of colonialism, empire and imperialism

The story began just over a century ago. Smart, moderate historians like Andrew Bacevich (Washington Rules and The Short American Century: A Postmortem); Chalmers Johnson (The Blowback Trilogy and Dismantling The Empire: America’s Last Best Hope) and others have made the imperial master narrative clear. In a nutshell, the expansionist militarist energy that began with the Spanish American War — the so-called American Century — is over. Or at least we’re climbing down the mountain we ascended so gloriously during the last century. The empire that was launched with great bully, outward-rushing enthusiasm by Teddy Roosevelt and others is now circling its wagons.

In 1899, Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem “Recessional” about the “white man’s burden.” At the time, we were “liberating” the Philippines from the Spanish and becoming embroiled in a nasty counter-insurgency war with Philippine nationalists in which water boarding was regularly employed against uncooperative Filipinos. Here’s Kipling:

Take up the White Man’s burden -
Send forth the best ye breed -
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild -
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

His theme was the passing of the baton of empire and imperialism from Britain to the United States. America was high on Manifest Destiny and bursting at the seams to bring light to the benighted peoples of the world and to remake the world in its own exceptional image.

Being on the downside of empire is less invigorating. As economic realities become squeezed, it becomes harder and harder to sustain the notion that we’re covering the world with our beneficence. Instead, what we’re doing is covering our ass trying to hold on to what we got.

Former colonial hearts of darkness like China, India and Brazil are evolving into burgeoning capitalist giants who insist on being seen as peers or competitors and no longer as backward subjects (“half devil and half child”) for manipulation and exploitation. Latin America is feeling pride and independence vis-à-vis the US. Places like Iran with a history of US bullying become thorns in our side. While places like Israel that are dependent on US imperial might become frightening problems.

As we watch the wheels come off our mission in Afghanistan, it’s clear forward motion there is gravely impaired; so the mission shifts to figuring out how to retrieve that wheel-less truck chassis and the far-flung parts without recognizing the obvious.

This leaves us with a classic imperial question: Exactly how does a great empire remove an occupying army without seeming to be in retreat? An American legislator from the Vietnam era whose name I can’t recall answered that question with what is still the best pragmatic answer: “Ships and planes.” Bite the bullet and just do it.

The list of complaints about the US occupation in Afghanistan is long: Despite demands they be stopped, there’s the persistent drone and Special Operations night raids. There’s the video of laughing soldiers pissing on Afghan corpses. There’s those clueless Americans blithely burning Korans in a base dump. There’s the happy-go-lucky sniper unit that photographed themselves with a Nazi SS flag. And let’s not forget the killing of 26 Pakistani border guards.

The administration of Our Man in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, is hopelessly corrupt and caught between being a US puppet dependent on US support and efforts to survive as a centralized leader in a traditionally fragmented Islamic society that disdains the US occupation. Playing to anti-American sentiment, he’s now asking us to leave.

And now there’s a major, front burner disaster to deal with.  A 38-year-old father of two on his fourth combat tour got drunk and decided he had to single-handedly massacre 16 Afghan civilians for no apparent reason. After days of not doing so, the military has identified the man as Staff Sergeant Robert Bales. John Henry Browne, Bales’ lawyer, is telling the public his client is a good family man who joined the service in the days following 9/11, is a “decorated” soldier and was wounded twice during his Iraq tours.

After his arrest, Bales was quickly flown to Kuwait. When Kuwait raised a hot potato alarm, Bales was immediately flown to the United States, where he is now in the prison at Leavenworth. The secrecy and rapid movement out of Afghanistan is, of course, meant to assure the military absolute control of Bales’ story. It’s also to trump any Afghan sovereignty demand that Bales be tried in Afghanistan for killing Afghans. Since the killings weren’t mission-related at all, the Afghan government has a good argument for trying the man in an Afghan court.

I won’t speculate on Bales’ personal motives, but that doesn’t stop the use of his story as metaphor. The fact is, symbolically, one could not have scripted a more compelling narrative to emphasize the problems surrounding our occupation of Afghanistan.

One thing Americans should understand, from an ordinary Afghan point of view there’s not that much difference between Sergeant Bales’ actions and a secret Special Operations night raid. Such confusion may seem ridiculous to US military personnel and other American apologists for the war who will point out there’s a big difference between planning an officially sanctioned and patriotically-applauded assassination mission into a village and a lone gunman running amok in a village.

Sure. But from an Afghan point of view, the difference amounts to a nuance. Dead is dead.

From a US antiwar point of view, Sergeant Bales’ sense of a personal war and the addled mission he undertook cries out to be considered as a lens through which to examine our mostly secret occupation of Afghanistan. It’s why I’m writing about Bales here, and it’s why the military wants so badly to control his story. In a world more and more ruled by the power of violence and killing as a change agent, Sergeant Bales is narrative dynamite.

In Vietnam, it was clear the wheels were coming off when US soldiers began “fragging” their officers in the war zone. Now we hear that those managing the recent visit of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to Afghanistan made soldiers disarm before entering the room where Panetta was to speak to them. Frustration levels in Afghanistan must be running at a fever pitch. Panetta has a talent as a humble US lighting rod for trips like this; a more apt description might be as the officially-designated US Apologizer.

Somebody’s got to eat crow for the debacle in Afghanistan. It’s either eat crow in negotiations as we plan a graceful exit; stop talking altogether and just leave; or, the tough-guy approach, reenter Afghanistan with guns blasting.

Defense Secretary Panetta, Afghan President Karzai and Panetta’s sad eyebrow brother, Eeyore

Counter-insurgency expert William R. Polk still sums up the difficulties of counter-insurgency best when he declares counter-insurgency war always devolves into some form of indiscriminate killing of civilians. In the same spirit, he says the only truly successful counter-insurgency campaign in history was the Romans, who employed a doctrine of scorched earth. That is, kill anything and everything in your path, and those left alive tend to pay fealty to you.

We’ll have to wait to see what the US military’s narrative line about Sergeant Bales is going to be. But one interesting narrative possibility is to see his actions as a mad, “acting out” episode akin to Rambo going back to Vietnam to fictionally accomplish victory when it was impossible in the real world.

I can see him now: Sylvester Stallone, shirt off, pectorals greased up and tears in his eyes, sneering to his captain on the radio: “They wanna tie our hands behind our backs. It ain’t fair!”

If the bastards won’t bend and comply to our beneficent will, then it’s time to gun them down without mercy. We hear this throwaway attitude all the time from war apologists. Killing is the only way to deal with people who won’t recognize we’re trying to help them. It’s how successful counter-insurgency campaigns were handled in the past. Do what needs to be done. Separate the men from the boys.

Newt Gingrich was asked what we should do with those who oppose us. “Kill them!” was his quick answer. The newly elected senator from Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, is also hanging tough on staying-the-course in Afghanistan. I mention Blumenthal only because he’s the guy who suggested numerous times in public that he had served in Vietnam when he had only served in the Marine reserves in Washington DC. (Personally, I believe the world would be better off today if more of us in the US military had, like Blumenthal, worked in America on things like Toys For Tots and other forms of outreach to the poor.)

Military PR about winning aside, it’s pretty clear the Afghanistan occupation is on the rocks. We killed bin Laden and our favorite boogieman al Qaeda has been a non-factor in Afghanistan for years. Any justification for occupation is gone. Our problem is Afghan men and women connected with the Taliban and other insurgent groups who want US soldiers and lethal drones out of their land. At some point, it must be seen as that simple.

The real hurdle is fear and the fact we cannot leave a mission like Afghanistan unless we can do it telling ourselves we remain the greatest beneficent power in the history of mankind. Since we live in an absurd Catch 22 world, no one actually has to believe the US line. The issue is power. Do we have the world-class bullshitter chops to convince people we’re doing ABC while in their hearts they know we’re doing XYZ.

As the wheels keep flying off, this sleight of mind game becomes more challenging, driving the secrecy levels higher and the public relations into even greater realms of absurdity.

We desperately need some kind of truth dialogue in this nation, something that is anathema to our capitalist marketing reality. The last thing we need is another election ruled by higher and higher piles of money and a National Security State consensus that got us into the mess we’re in in the first place.

We need to get those ships and planes ready. If one must see leaving Afghanistan sooner rather than later as “cutting and running,” so be it. The point is to get out of Afghanistan and leave the Afghans alone — for our own sake. So we can get on with what we need to do here at home.

Let’s tell stories how our young men and women gave ‘em hell over there. Let’s have parades with flags and stirring martial music. And while we’re at it, let’s provide our soldiers the best in Traumatic Brain Injury care and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder counseling. And, yes, education and jobs to keep their families together.

The point is to cut the bullshit and bring our soldiers home. Let the corrupt Hamid Karzai and his cronies fend for themselves. If they cannot survive, then it’s time to let Afghans decide in their own way who they want to govern them. As the quality of leadership in America makes clear, even our system is a long, long way from perfect. And the corruption in Kabul is far less sophisticated than is the corruption in Washington DC.

Israel preemptively starting a war with Iran would be bad enough, but the assumption that the United States will be part of that war should be very disturbing to Americans — who are just getting over one misguided, costly war in Iraq and are still involved in another in Afghanistan.

In an election year with such cynicism about government in the air, one might think more Americans would question the propaganda for war that AIPAC represents and that sadly goes so hand-in-hand with the uncritical pandering too many American politicians and mainstream journalists engage in.

Most Americans are sheep when it comes to criticizing Israel. A tax-paying American has to be a particularly willful contrarian — be willing to be called “unpatriotic,” an “antisemite” or a “terrorist” — just to raise even a reasonable question in the face of this PR juggernaut for Israel.

A Teheran rally and Israeli F-15s

President Obama is to speak Sunday before the AIPAC meeting, and he has scheduled meetings with both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Peres told a New York Times reporter, while the prime minister rules, his role as president of Israel “is to charm.” He then lectured the reporter and Americans that we needed to be tough and establish “red lines” that Israel approves of.

“We need a total and clear commitment that the catastrophe of Iran will not create an impossible situation,” he said, ignoring what many see as the catastrophe of Israel’s dogged implacability. “If the White House was not resolute, Israel might have to go it alone,” Peres said. In his meeting, Netanyahu will also push the red lines on Obama, emphasizing the need for US resoluteness in face of Iran hardening the defenses of its nuclear plants. Then, Netanyahu will go over and report to the AIPAC convention.

But here’s the catch: Implied in such Israeli bravado is the sure knowledge that if and when Israel does “go it alone,” its military will be inadequate to the task, Iran will respond and the United States will be drawn in.

It all seems such an internalized delusional process dependent on metaphors from World War Two projected on Iran as a society of insane, suicidal monsters intent on initiating a new holocaust. Reality does not bear that out. While they may not be our friends, the leaders of Iran are not fools. For example, can anyone explain why Iran’s leaders would do such a suicidal thing as drop a nuke on Israel?

Americans Need to Take a New, Pragmatic Approach

American citizens need to think for themselves and re-evaluate US policy in the Middle East. It’s the only sane, pragmatic way to live. The world is changing and our policies need to change with it. To allow the Israeli right to intimidate or shame the United States into a more and more apocalyptic and untenable position in the Middle East is simply nuts. Even sanctions tend to backfire. The US needs to stop letting the tail wag the dog.

Why, for example, is it so very important to slow Iran from designing a nuclear weapon by preemptively bombing the nation, which will only exacerbate the already intense animosity that exists between Israel and Iran? Does Israel think there will be no serious consequences to such an attack?

In the already uncertain and volatile regional climate of the Arab Spring upheavals, does throwing gasoline on a Middle Eastern fire seem like a smart idea? It’s narcissistic madness to perceive oneself more secure with an infuriated Iran that feels nationally violated than with an Iran that has nuclear weapons and is willing to talk. But that would take some Israeli humility, which is in short supply these days.

Last week in Geneva at a nuclear disarmament conference, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akhbar Salehi said Iran wants to open talks about nuclear weapons. “We do not see any glory, pride or power in the nuclear weapons — quite the opposite,” he said. He added, “The production, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegitimate, futile, harmful, dangerous and prohibited as a great sin.”

If the Iranian foreign minister is serious, only one thing stands in the way of talks with Iran on these issues: The nuclear weapons Israel and other nations critical of Iran have in their arsenals. That’s the real hurdle.

No one knows whether or not Iran is actually intent on making a bomb. The CIA says they are not, or at least they are only figuring out how to make one. The International Atomic Energy Agency isn’t sure; and they’re peeved right now because Iran wouldn’t let their team snoop around a military facility. (As if Israel would have no problem allowing such a team to search their bases.)

It feels like a nuclear poker game with bluffs like Saddam Hussein played with George Bush. Better to bluff and let The Big Boys looming over you think you’re insane and armed with an atomic bomb. It’s an updated, asymmetrical version of the old MAD game from the Nixon years: Mutually Assured Destruction.

Alan Dershowitz, Point Man

It’s easy to see Alan Dershowitz as the point man for Israeli madness in the United States. He’s a brilliant appeals lawyer with Harvard cred stamped all over him. So it should surprise no one that he popped up this week in two full-page ads in The New York Times — ads that run $139,104 apiece.

New York Times ads, left, against The Center For American Progress and Media Matters and, right, for the MEK

The March 1st ad featured a wolf with a sheep mask and slammed the Center For American Progress and Media Matters for “bigotry” and “anti-Israel extremism.” Their crimes? Staffers at these non-profits had referred, in some cases in Tweets, to people as “Israeli firsters.” Someone had suggested a US senator had more fealty to AIPAC than to his constituents. Another, that AIPAC was pushing the US toward war with Iran. And someone said Israeli treatment of Palestinians shared something with American treatment of blacks in the segregated South.

Not exactly laudatory comments, but in the current go-for-the-jugular style of Washington politics they’re quite restrained. And, one could legitimately argue, true. Still, the hardball courtroom advocate Dershowitz was outraged. To call someone an “Israeli firster,” as M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters had done, was to summon up the ghosts of anti-Jewish pogroms.

“When you accuse Jews of dual loyalty, you invoke a canard that goes back hundreds of years and falls into the category of anti-semitism,” Dershowitz told Fox News. He wanted the anti-semite Rosenberg fired — even though, or maybe because, Rosenberg had once worked for AIPAC.

Left to right, M.J. Rosenberg, Tel Aviv, Teheran, and Alan Dershowitz

The second ad featuring Dershowitz ran the next day on March 2nd and was in support of Mojahedin-e-Khalq, the Iranian group known by the acronym MEK. It’s also called The People’s Mujahedin of Iran. MEK started out with the Iranian Revolution but then went rogue and became an ally of Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. MEK members killed a number of Americans back in 1979. It was designated by the US a “terrorist organization” in 1997.

MEK founder and leader Massoud Rajavi fled Iraq when the US invaded and empowered Shiites linked with Iran. Currently Massoud’s wife, Maryam, is the public face of MEK. Some say MEK is run like a cult; it’s apparently run with an iron fist. Its base 40 miles from Baghdad was attacked in 2009 by Maliki forces, and the US has been negotiating for their fair treatment. Some 400 MEK members were moved to a former US base, what is referenced in the ad as “Camp Liberty.”

Dershowitz and a host of US political figures like former Pennsylvania Governors Tom Ridge and Ed Rendell speak in support of MEK, which is well financed by someone. Many supporters are paid speaker fees in the range of $10,000 an appearance. In conjunction with all this, there is a heavily-funded push now in Washington to have Hillary Clinton’s State Department lift — or de-list — the terrorist designation.

Ed Rendell speaking for the MEK; MEK founder Massoud Ravaji with Saddam; and Hillary Clinton with smiling MEK activists before Congress

So what does this have to do with Israel? NBC foreign correspondents Richard Engel and Robert Windrem answer this pretty clearly: They report that MEK agents are being trained by Israel and are being used to perform the assassinations inside Iran, such as the recent killings of five nuclear scientists. According to Engel and Windrem:

“Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, ‘All your inclinations are correct.’ ”

In this NBC report, Israeli commentator Ronen Bergman is asked on video about MEK involvement in assassinations of Iranians. Watch his sly non-answer. He subtly smiles, as if to say, “Can’t go there. Ask another question.” Bergman is writing a book tentatively titled, Mossad and the Art of Assassination. The United States, of course, is now moving into this nefarious business with its new Special Ops Doctrine.

The ad in support of MEK is very strange in that it never mentions MEK or any other name for the organization — only the dismal conditions at Camp Liberty. No doubt the reports of bad conditions are true, since the Maliki government disdains these people as terrorists and only seems to give them a break due to US pressure. If one had never heard of MEK, the $139,000 ad would seem a complete mystery. Clearly, those who paid for the ad (something called the National Association of Iranian Academics in Britain) were smart enough to know a revealed name would make the true nature of this terrorist organization a Google search away.

In the current Israel/Washington climate, the lifting of MEK’s terrorist status is likely a fait accompli. If you murder Iranians you aren’t a terrorist in today’s Washington mindset.

MEK may soon become the Contras of the anti-Iranian war fever. The Contras were thugs and cutthroats from Anastasio Somosa’s hated Guardia, but for Ronald Reagan they were “freedom fighters.”

And so Truth marches on.

If the US sits back and lets Israel attack Iran, it’s inevitable the US will become involved. And one thing will be certain: As Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “It will be ugly.”