Recycling Thugs & Ideologues

John Fife's interview on Democracy Now a couple of weeks ago got to the crux of the criminality and inhumanity of the Bush administration. It's a simple reflection of the criminality and inhumanity of the Reagan administration. Reagan was Commander-in-Chief for eight years and is now largely celebrated, while being reviled only by a few of us. If Reagan could get away with it and be so honored, Bush figured he should be able to do the same. It is really at the heart of why I'm so saddened and perplexed at what is accepted behavior by our leaders in this country which celebrates values of liberty and opportunity for all.

The ideologues and thugs from the Reagan era are just being recycled by Bush. Fife brings up the prime examples of John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams. When will we ever learn.

Fife's interview was preceded by a report on the arrests and charges being brought against members of the humanitarian aid group, No More Deaths. I highly recommend both the report and the interview.

Responsibility for Sweatshops and Child Labor

When I hear stories, such as the awful conditions under which young teenagers in Guatemala are forced to work to prepare products for export to the United States market, I feel despair that objections to the facilitation of such outrages by lauded free trade agreements are dismissed as the ravings of lefty loonies.

I don't claim to know that such abuses would be less in the absence of these agreements. Indeed that is a question not sufficiently answered by the Democracy Now report. But I don't believe the pretense of ignorance on the part of the corporations in this country about these abuses. At some level it is appropriate that we be bothered by the extent to which our comfort is made to depend on the misery of others.

If free trade can be used as a lever to force changes and better conditions for the oppressed in distant lands, I'll gladly hail that. But the extent to which these stories must find their expression in the alternative media suggest a willing complicity in need of greater exposure. Thank you Amy Goodman, for your role in making these stories more widely known.

Whatever you may believe about what make the best trade policies, it is not extreme to decry the abuse of under aged workers, or any workers, in the service of providing cheaper goods for the privileged among us. If that's how capitalism works, then capitalism is broken.

The Salient Condition

Amos Oz, longtime Israeli peace activist, whose 2003 account of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations brought a human face to both sides of that debate, last week defended Israel's recent incursions into Lebanon "as long as this operation targets mostly Hezbollah, and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians". Israel Hezbollah Lebanon

I must ask Mr. Oz if his salient condition has been met when I read reports from Human Rights Watch such as this account of Israel's use of cluster bombs corroborated elsewhere in the media and not denied by Israel. I find less, but some recent corroboration for the Lebanese President's accusation that Israel is employing white phosphorus as a weapon. The characterization of Israel's recent military operations as targeting mostly Hezbollah, certainly seems well off the mark.

I'm more than a little troubled by Oz's phrase "targets mostly" anyway. I would have opted for "strictly targets, with an emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties." If a significant minority of the targets are not demonstrably Hezbollah or terrorist, and the munitions used against those that are are prone to inflicting indiscriminate civilian casualties as well, then I find this action indefensible. Certainly Amy Goodman's daily broadcast summarizing events in Lebanon on Democracy Now leaves this listener horrified, even as others are appropriately horrified by the indiscriminate shelling of Haifa by Hezbollah.

Here is an interview Amy conducted with Noam Chomsky and others in the early days of the conflict. I know Goodman and Chomsky will be dismissed by right leaning pundits as extreme or "far left", but while I'll not take every word they say at face value, I cannot dismiss so easily the voices they bring to us which the mainstream media so easily ignores.

Mission Rejected

Since my previous post about Lt Watada's refusal to deploy to Iraq, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now has been featuring soldiers' stories and the resistance to serve by those in the military who oppose this war.

She interviewed Peter Laufer, whose new book, Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq covers the subject broadly. I've long intended to do a bit of research on the topic of military war resisters, but found that information hard to find. Peter Laufer explained in the interview that hard numbers are really hard to come by, since most soldiers who refuse deployment or redeployment are keeping a low profile, and the military is not interested in highlighting the issue.

Those cases we do hear about, many of which are listed here, are really subjecting themselves to harsh scrutiny for the cause which they believe in. Many others simply go AWOL, but whether their reasons constitute a resistance to the Iraq war for cause is not clear.

One early resister was staff sergeant Camilo Mejia, who served in Iraq, and then applied for conscientious objector status after discovering first hand what the war was really about. Those who casually dismiss such examples as simply cowardly are unlikely to have read the words of some of these heroes or to have thought through the issues very thoroughly.

Camilo Mejia, from his statement upon receiving the "Courageous Resister Award", August 2004:

I am only a regular person that got tired of being afraid to follow his own conscience. For far too long I allowed others to direct my actions even when I knew that they were wrong....To those who have called me a coward I say that they are wrong, and that without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that fear was there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill, there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself to my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, the man I wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me.

Other resources:

Kevin Benderman defense committee

Psychoanalysts against the war

Sir, No Sir a film