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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Back to the Future in the Middle East

2019: “Wow, what a year I was! Y’all will never see the likes of me again. Twelve months of impulsive Trump tweets, GOP campaign aides going to prison, the Ukraine brouhaha blowing up, wacky Rudy going nuts on television, wild hearings in the House of Representatives, and finally, impeachment! Boom! Top that!”

2020: “Here, hold my beer. How about war in the Middle East, as a starter?”

Ah, the Middle East, home to so many great American foreign policy decisions. Remember those weapons of mass destruction that were hidden all over Iraq in 2003? The ones that the Bush administration (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, et al.) used as “evidence” to start a war that got 4,400 Americans killed and 31,000 wounded in action; the war that also resulted in an estimated 500,000 or so Iraqi deaths?

Turned out, of course, that there weren’t actually any weapons of mass destruction to speak of. Oops. Sorry, dead people. But at least the Bushies had to go through the process of trying to convince Congress that a dire threat existed before launching missiles and a subsequent invasion.

With the Trump administration, such Constitutional niceties are being ignored. Trust us, they say. We knew about some nasty plots to kill Americans that were about to be carried out by Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, so we assassinated his ass at the Baghdad airport. Ironically, the evidence — which we’ll probably never see — was provided by the same “deep-state” intelligence agencies that have been demonized for months by the president and his supporters. Guess they cleaned up their act.

In lieu of consulting with Congress or even the Gang of Eight, the president let a few friends at Mar-a-Lago in on the news in advance, so they could adjust their stock portfolios, plus Senator Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, his children, Vladimir Putin, and others in his inner circle. After the strike, the president tweeted a message to Congress that he stated would “serve as notification” of his right to do whatever he wanted in the Middle East. Trump followed that with a tweeted threat to Iranian leaders that the U.S. had a list of 52 “cultural sites” that would be targeted if the Iranians dared to respond. Sure, that’s a war crime, but so what? The president then, literally, returned to the golf course and continued to tweet, presumably between shots.

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told the media that the Pentagon would not target cultural sites, despite the president’s continued insistence — live and via tweet — that we would.

All this caused me to wonder what would happen if for some reason Twitter went out of business. How would the president communicate with Congress or the American people or foreign friends and adversaries? Facebook? Instagram? Tik-Tok? The importance of Trump’s favorite social media platform will be a subject future historians will be mulling over for years, I suspect. But I digress.

So, here we are, seven days into the new year, the new decade, on the brink of conflict in the world’s most volatile region — home to Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. Oh, and Afghanistan, just on the other side of Iran, lest we forget. What a complex stewpot of hideous outcomes could be concocted within the confines of this tortured hunk of planetary real estate.

Does anyone think there’s a plan or a strategy here? Does anyone have confidence that this president would shrink from using nuclear weapons if Iran responds in a way that threatens his fragile ego? More important, does anyone have confidence that anyone around this president would or could stop him? It’s a “no” from me, on all counts. A Republican congressman told CNN on background this week that when Trump gets ready to act, “You can’t out-escalate him.” How reassuring.

2020 is upping the ante.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Slouching Toward Refuge

A looming battle is building between United States cities, some states, and the federal government. The issue involves sanctuary status for communities reluctant to cooperate with officials of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), given the Trump administration’s stated goal of detaining and deporting all undocumented persons.

The modern sanctuary movement began in the 1980s when perhaps a million people from Central America fled their war-torn homelands (the wars, in all cases, partially financed by the United States). Reagan-era (1980-88) policy referred to these folks as economic migrants. (According to this logic, the migrants were fleeing poverty, not the wars we promoted.)

President Ronald Reagan refused to acknowledge the political dimension of the conflict, and thus, migrants were ineligible for protection under the 1980 Refugee Act. Against this backdrop, some cities with significant Hispanic populations organized a “sanctuary” movement to provide shelter (mostly in religious houses of worship), protection, and aid for people who, literally, were running for their lives.

So we go, historically, from bad to worse.

Back in the 1980s, our nation actively pursued Cold War proxy wars in Central America, the arms industry profited from those wars, we helped destroy infrastructure in three Central American nations displacing multitudes, and then we shut our doors to fleeing refugees. All of this seems, when looked at holistically, especially cruel, written not in conformity with reality but for a modern, tragic Italian opera.

Now we have Mr. Trump, a Reagan redux but without the charm, affability, or charisma of the great communicator. The two presidents share one important characteristic: cluelessness. Given Trump’s recent executive orders, we see a rapid descent back to the ’80s, but this time, thanks to technology, the world can watch the tragedy in real time.

Trump’s executive order regarding refugees seeks to ban people from some majority Muslim nations and is especially unkind, given that one of the nations on the original list, Iraq, was completely destroyed by the U.S. in the illegal (but profitable) war of 2003 that never really ended. Syria is on the list, a country we’ve begun bombing with cruel consequences for a civilian population stuck in a sectarian civil war. Trump’s order, rewritten to pass constitutional muster in the eyes of skeptical judges, has been enjoined once more by skeptical judges.

The President’s executive order on immigration seeks to fulfill an unfulfillable campaign promise: to deport all “illegals.” Given that the administration is determined to win somewhere, sanctuary status for cities — and a few states — has reappeared in the media, with Trump threatening to pull federal grant money in retaliation for these cities’ noncompliance with federal mandates.

The current sanctuary movement is about city leaders protecting the people within their jurisdictions from federal overreach; the central concern involves trust and public safety.

For example, police departments need support from people living in cities and communities who witness crimes; their job is not to enforce federal (and, in this case, politically motivated) immigration executive orders, but to protect people from petty and more serious crimes. When the police are seen as potential agents of deportation, police work and public safety collapse. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions doesn’t seem to understand any of this and has reacted by bullying local officials, reminiscent of the mid-19th-century Alabama leadership style that defines him.

Trump has already made it clear that raids and deportations will occur as America cracks down on the undocumented. Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Obama, who deported a lot of people, Trump wants to round up everyone who is not in the country with proper documentation — including women and children. People who cross a border without permission, or overstay a tourist visa, have committed a civil code violation, not a crime. Only a cruel cynic could accuse a child who crosses a border with parents or relatives of having committed any type of legal violation. But this administration, unfortunately, is bringing new meaning to cruel and unusual.

We need collaboration between federal and local officials. We don’t need a mass roundup of innocents to appease the political positions of a few fanatics. A showdown between some states/many cities and the federal government is approaching, but given the path this administration is charting, we might be heading back not to the 1980s, but way back to the 1860s.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair at Latino Memphis. Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (March 26, 2015)

Reuters | Lee Celano

Robert Durst

HBO struck gold with the six-part documentary, The Jinx:
The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Especially during the jaw-dropping finale, when the alleged triple-murderer was heard off-camera, muttering to himself into a hot microphone what sounded like a confession. Durst’s arrest the day after the show’s finale created such white-hot news coverage that I don’t think I’d be revealing any secrets to offer a short synopsis. Durst is the estranged heir to one of the richest real-estate firms in New York, which manages 1 World Trade Center, among other high-rent properties. His personal wealth is estimated at $100 million. In 1982, Durst’s first wife disappeared and her body was never found. Though suspected of murder, Durst remained free until the investigation was reopened in 2000.

The day before Durst’s closest confidant was to be interviewed about the case by prosecutors in Los Angeles, she was found murdered execution-style in her home. Fleeing to Galveston, Texas, Durst rented a $300-a-month room and disguised himself as a mute woman.

In 2001, Durst was arrested for killing his 71-year-old neighbor and dismembering the corpse, which he placed in several garbage bags and scattered in Galveston Bay. Celebrity attorney Dick DeGuerin, who not-so-successfully represented David Koresh during the Waco standoff, admitted that Durst cut up the body, but said that it was postmortem, after a struggle over a gun. The jury decided that Durst acted in self-defense when the gun went off, so the slicing and dicing was moot, and he got off. They never found the head.

Durst agreed to take part in hours of interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, ostensibly to deflect blame and set the record straight. In the series’ final episode, after being confronted with damning evidence, Durst retired to the men’s room, forgetting he was still wearing a live microphone and said, “There it is. I’m caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” The day after the final episode aired, Durst was arrested in a New Orleans hotel with $40,000 in cash, a loaded revolver, his passport and original birth certificate, an over-the-head latex mask, and five ounces of pot.

He will most assuredly be arraigned in Los Angeles for murder, so if you enjoyed the documentary, just wait until the trial. Some of the greatest entertainment L.A. produces comes from their live broadcasts of criminal trials. Look at what they’ve given us over the years: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the cops who beat Rodney King, Phil Spector, and Dr. Conrad Murray. But the Robert Durst show will be the trial of this early century. This will be too salacious not to televise.

HBO’s ratings were far too good not to continue this series. We know that we live in a violent country and that there are killers who walk among us — some of them mass murderers. The Durst case took over three decades to unravel, which proves that justice is sometimes late in arriving, but you never know when it will come knocking at your door.

The authorities already know the identities of some others who have committed terrible atrocities, and yet they walk free. Their names are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and Tenet. They met in secrecy, concocting a story to sell to the American people about why the Iraq War was absolutely necessary on the pretense of weapons of mass destruction, a term of their own invention.

They invaded and occupied a nation that had not harmed us, then sent over the U.S. Viceroy, “Jerry” Bremer, who disbanded the Iraqi army and barred former members of Saddam’s political party from government, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of men out of work. These two dumbass decisions led directly to insurgency, chaos, sectarian civil war, and the birth of ISIS. The cost of the Iraq War is immeasurable in both dollars and human lives. So where are all the warmongers now? They’re all wealthy and serve on corporate boards and think tanks. Some are professors at prestigious universities. Bremer lives in Vermont, painting rural landscapes while dabbling in French cuisine. Cheney made a fortune in “blind trust” stocks from no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries. The rest advise the current Republican Party. No one but Cheney’s flunky, Scooter Libby, ever faced criminal charges concerning the war, but rumblings about legal recourse have been growing louder across the globe.

In 2012, the Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal convicted Bush, Cheney, and six others in absentia for war crimes. Torture victims told of mistreatment by U.S. soldiers and contractors who used some of the same practices that Japanese were executed for after WWII. Transcripts of the trial were sent to the International Criminal Court, which may never act, but the Durst case proved there’s no statute of limitations on atrocities.

Then, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, I know of a cozy, tropical prison down in Cuba that’s just perfect for detaining war criminals. Imagine the ratings if they televised that trial.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Trashed

After a wonderful Mississippi River trip on the Memphis-based American Queen, we arrived at Beale Street Landing on Sunday morning of last week. We were embarrassed for the city, as we immediately saw construction debris around the unfinished and over-budget structure. More disturbing was the massive amount of debris and trash floating in the water between the dock and the building.

We landed at river towns and cities from New Orleans to Memphis. We were greeted by proud city ambassadors and clean downtown ports in all the stops except Memphis.

The Riverfront Development Corporation has been unable to manage the development of Beale Street Landing. Further, more than half of its funding comes from the city, and an overwhelming percentage of the expenses are salaries. The president of the RDC got a raise this year, and the RDC just added a vice president who is paid in excess of $120,000.

Based on what over 300 arriving passengers and hundreds of crew members from the American Queen saw last weekend, the RDC and its staff are incompetent. I suggest that the city pull its funding and take over the functions of running the city’s riverfront.

Robert Burns

Memphis

Iraq War

Looking back on the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq war, many of us can remember the silence in the media before this war started. It was a disservice to those Americans who were willing to stand up and say that they wanted their sons and daughters that are taught to fight to be put in the right fights and the right causes. These voices were smothered by the neocons who believed the Bush administration was right to invade Iraq. No real challenge came from the media against going into Iraq. In fact, the neocons were given a free hand, and the faint voices that spoke out against the war were kept off the front pages and judged by many as unpatriotic.

Those of us who believe our country went down the wrong path have to stand up and not march behind those who are willing to fool themselves. In Vietnam and Iraq, we didn’t buy into the overstated greatness of those causes that many of us saw as trumped-up illusions.

The other side has always used patriotism to feed the illusion that we were all in it together. We love this country, and we love our sons and daughters. We don’t want them coming back in body bags, with missing limbs and damaged minds, in service to leaders looking for a selfish legacy and driven by a false ideology.

Alfred Waddell

West Dennis, Massachusetts

Sharia Law

Two of our wonderful lawmakers in Nashville have once again displayed their knuckle-dragging ignorance (Letter from the Editor, March 28th issue). Senator Bill Ketron and Representative Judd Matheny questioned why Muslim footbaths were installed.

A great question from those who help make our laws, except, as we know, those “footbaths” are mop sinks. In defense of Matheny, he denied asking about the mop sinks, saying “it’s not ringing a bell.” Perhaps it’s due to him missing a clapper. Let’s hope bidets haven’t been installed. These two might think they are drinking fountains.

Oh well, back to more important business, like destroying our public education system, putting guns in every classroom, voting against renewable energy, and allowing road kill to be eaten.

Jack Bishop

Memphis

Gay Marriage

A homosexual is one who is sexually attracted to others of the same sex. Except for a genetic variation of nature, they are virtually identical to heterosexuals. They feel the same kind of attraction to the same sex as heterosexuals feel about the opposite sex. Some argue that the Bible condemns homosexuality, but I believe (through science) this behavior has been proven to result from natural genetic variation.

Homosexuals are therefore entitled to engage in sexual behavior consistent with their genetic makeup, so long as it is between consenting adults. And, by extension, they should be allowed to marry as well.

Humans are sexual beings, as was intended by their creator, and to suggest that a genetic variation of nature somehow makes homosexuals less human is an inhuman concept.

Joe Bialek

Cleveland, Mississippi

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

It Was the War, Stupid

The singer Jewel wrote a song a few years ago entitled “Hands.” It featured the line “In the end, only kindness matters.” It would have made a nice theme song for Hillary Clinton’s speech last Saturday. At the end, Hillary was magnanimous and kind. I still like Hillary. Really. But I could not vote for her.

My admiration for her started when I met her at a Women’s Leadership Forum in Washington in 1993. She gave a brilliant speech, much like her historic concession speech, featuring her views on making women and families healthier and more economically secure. Afterward, she generously made herself available to the packed room and chatted for hours with the women gathered there. As a friend took a photo of us together, Hillary warmly commented on how thrilled she was to see such a large delegation from the Mid-South, a region close to her heart. She was sunny and sweet.

Ten years later, the first installment of this column was written in Hillary’s defense. On the morning of the release of her biography, Living History, The Commercial Appeal did a front-page hatchet job on both the book and its author, with the clear implication that no one in Memphis had enough admiration or respect for Hillary to read it. Later in the day, as I stood in a long line at the bookstore with others who were purchasing several copies, it made me angry that the only daily newspaper in this city had painted such an inaccurate representation of its citizens. Ironically, the book hit number one on the bestseller lists locally, as well as nationally.

The ridiculous silliness Hillary had to endure was hard to watch at times. From the idiotic cookie recipe contests to the moronic focus on her changing hairstyles and pantsuits, sexism was definitely on parade in the media, but she took it well and often displayed a remarkable sense of humor about it.

However, when it came to supporting Hillary’s efforts to become president, something difficult and piercing surfaced. Although painful to acknowledge, Democrats were beginning to understand that the compromises that were committed during the Clinton years ultimately had damaged the Democratic Party. This style of politics was nothing more than an excuse to call weakness a strength. Negotiating, settling, sucking up, and triangulating had undermined the party by sapping its strength and by failing to demonstrate the courage to fight for convictions that were too important to compromise.

And so it was with Hillary. It was that lack of conviction that did her in. It was “that vote.” After five long years of the “March of Folly” called the Iraq war, Americans were no longer going to be satisfied with an if-I-knew-then-what-I know-now explanation. The country wanted a full-out acknowledgment that preemptive war is wrong. We now know that the Iraq war was started on a pack of lies and that voting to go to war was not a matter of being misinformed. It was a matter of willfully upholding, for political expediency, George W. Bush’s disastrous doctrine.

That Hillary either could not or would not recognize her mistake in doing so was stunning. It rankled then, it is baffling now, and it will forever bewilder those of us who were ready to give their support. Her refusal to renounce the war and apologize for her part in helping sustain it was truly unforgivable.

Pundits and pollsters are claiming the economy will be the deciding issue in this election. It very well may be, but Bush’s legacy, especially the Iraq war, will ultimately be the factor dominating the minds of the voters, because the appalling and ruinous Bush war is the reason we have the appalling and ruinous Bush economy.

In 2004, Bill Clinton explained the Bush reelection by claiming voters would rather vote for someone who is wrong and strong than someone who is right and weak. Four years later, that theory sounds as compromising as other Clinton conjectures, because the people know that a vote by any Democrat for the war in Iraq was, in fact, a sign of political weakness, not strength. Clearly, it was wrong.

This year, Democrats have chosen wisely by nominating Barack Obama, for he is both strong in his convictions and right about the issues, most especially the war. Unfortunately, Hillary, who knew what was right but chose to defend what was wrong, paid the price, because until it ends, it’s still the despicable war, stupid.

Cheri DelBrocco writes the “Mad as Hell” column for memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

“No End in Sight”

“Saddam hurt us badly, it’s true. This is something we won’t forget. But what came is worse than Saddam.” — Iraqi man at Baghdad market in No End in Sight

What is most troubling about the endlessly repeated assertion that “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power” is not just that it sounds so seductively true while quite likely being false. It’s that the phrase is designed, fundamentally, to close off discussion. It’s a preemptive strike on fact, truth, and honest analysis.

Consequently, what’s so rewarding about No End in Sight, the most thorough and sober documentary yet made about the Iraq war, is how the film stands up for the primacy of such values …

Read the rest of Chris Herrington’s review of No End in Sight from this week’s Flyer.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Welcome to the Occupation

“The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power.” — Republican talking point since 2003

“Saddam hurt us badly, it’s true. This is something we won’t forget. But what came is worse than Saddam.” — Iraqi man at Baghdad market in No End in Sight

What is most troubling about the endlessly repeated assertion that “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power” is not just that it sounds so seductively true while quite likely being false. It’s that the phrase is designed, fundamentally, to close off discussion. It’s a preemptive strike on fact, truth, and honest analysis.

Consequently, what’s so rewarding about No End in Sight, the most thorough and sober documentary yet made about the Iraq war, is how the film stands up for the primacy of such values. In this film, written, directed, and produced by political scientist and first-time filmmaker Charles Ferguson (who holds an MIT doctorate and experience at the Brookings Institution), truth trumps ideology, as it no longer seems to in American politics.

No End in Sight is not the partisan polemic many might expect from an Iraq war documentary, though it may well be taken that way by the dead-enders still clinging loyally to the by-now discredited administration that launched the war. What No End in Sight aims to be is a history of the American occupation of Iraq, from its very origins to something close to the present day. As such, it’s a calmly furious yet meticulous record of human failure.

The central dynamic of No End in Sight very much mirrors the reality of the Bush years: It’s an account of massive failure in which the bulk of the participants — i.e., Ferguson’s interview subjects — come from within the administration (the rest are journalists), and liberal/Democratic opposition is persona non grata. The disagreements presented here are the ones that have largely defined the past six years of American life — those between pragmatists and ideologues (or “competents and incompetents” or “appeasers and aggressors” — take your pick) within the Bush administration. These are battles that pitted experienced analysts against relatively inexperienced policymakers with the department of defense (DOD) and aggressive, empowered DOD officials against their more reasonable yet more ineffectual counterparts at the state department.

Most of the figures most responsible for the Iraq disaster — Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz, overmatched occupation commander Paul Bremer — declined to be interviewed for the film. And so the perspective that emerges is one that has been too little seen: That of the career defense strategists and diplomats and soldiers swept up in the mess, now horrified and haunted by what they witnessed.

These are people such as: Col. Paul Hughes, director of strategic policy for the U.S. occupation, who was working on reassembling the Iraqi army before orders from Washington came to disband it; Barbara Bodine, a state department Mideast expert and part of the initial staff at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, who was soon fired for “offering opinions that were counter to the prevailing wisdom in Baghdad at the time”; Marc Garlasco, a senior Iraq analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was tasked in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 with finding a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, eventually reporting that none existed, only to see the vice president contradict him — without evidence — on national television; and Seth Moulton, a marine on the ground in Iraq watching in horror the misbehavior and waste of American private contractors.

The president himself barely registers here, which seems apt, as No End in Sight portrays President Bush as oddly disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the war he launched. Instead, the villain, to the extent there is one (or only one) is Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who is thoroughly discredited through the repetitive use of a very simple device: the juxtaposition of his date-stamped press conference clips with what we subsequently know. This puts Rumsfeld’s blustery, sarcastic press conferences (“I don’t do quagmires,” he quips) in proper perspective, making them corrosive, revolting displays of ignorance and arrogance.

No End in Sight doesn’t expend a lot of energy questioning the morality of or initial justification(s) for the war, which may upset those who demand more of a polemic. But the film certainly doesn’t dissuade anyone from concluding that the war was immoral or unjustified from the outset, including plenty of material that damns the war in conception without the need for Ferguson himself to make that case. The film also refuses to make any arguments for what should be done now, ending with a series of thoughts from its various interview subjects without endorsing any of them (though the film’s own pessimistic perspective is perhaps right there in the title).

Instead, No End in Sight focuses on the U.S. occupation itself, tracing, in merciless detail, the series of human errors that took an already bad situation and made it horrifically worse. Central to this perspective is the belief that, even if the war was a mistake in its very conception, it didn’t have to go as tragically awry as it did. This is backed up by footage of the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion and the testimony of a Time reporter who was on the scene, who says, “It was a confusing, loud, noisy, scary, hopeful place all wrapped together” — a situation where “the presence of Americans hadn’t yet been rejected.” But, No End in Sight asserts that that rejection was already inevitable.

The litany of deadly mistakes made by the American occupation that Ferguson cites begins before the war, with Bush’s decision to put the defense department — and therefore Rumsfeld — in total control of the effort, with the horribly abbreviated planning for occupation, and with the refusal to follow military advice about the number of troops it would take to occupy the country.

“It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army. Hard to imagine,” Wolfowitz is shown telling Congress prior to the invasion.

From there, the mistakes pile up: reliance on untrustworthy exile Ahmed Chalabi, not stopping the post-invasion looting, not protecting the country’s infrastructure and culture (aside from the Oil Ministry), and then the biggest mistake: disbanding the Iraqi army and thus putting 500,000 armed men out of work.

No End in Sight implies that these decisions and others like them — uniformly dictated from Washington by a small cabal consisting primarily of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz — created the chaos that fed the insurgency. Sectarian militias, No End in Sight asserts, initially emerged as sources of neighborhood security to fill a vacuum America created by removing Saddam and leaving nothing in his place.

Instead, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in nearly 4,000 American deaths so far, many thousand more soldiers seriously injured, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, and a projected cost of nearly $2 trillion. The occupation has also elevated Iran (the greatest beneficiary of the quagmire), set a violent civil war on top of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, and offers no end in sight.

As a sober, detailed record of a massive, ongoing, man-made tragedy, No End in Sight may be slightly energizing in its respect for the truth, but the emotion it provokes is a commingling of sorrow and rage. As Moulton the marine says near the end of the film: “Are you telling me that’s the best America can do? Don’t tell me that. That makes me angry.”

Categories
News News Feature

Women in Black

It’s straight-up noon on a hot Memphis Wednesday and Pamela McFarland is the first to arrive at the front steps of First Congregational Church in Cooper-Young. Dressed in black, she has come here to join the Women in Black vigil almost every Wednesday since the invasion of Iraq. “Because,” she says, “it is something I can do.”

The Rev. Cheryl Cornish, First Congregational’s pastor, rests several black foam boards against the base of one of the church’s columns. As Julia Hicks, the church’s director of missions, sets up a conga drum, more women arrive. Some they know; some are strangers, here for the first time. Each reads through the available signs: “Women in Black”; “Stop the Violence”; “Be a Peacemaker”; “Stop the War on Iraq”; “Grieve the Violence”; “Around the World Women Stand for Peace.” Each chooses a sign and takes a place in front of the church.

Every Wednesday since March 2003, Memphis Women in Black have gathered on the church steps. During the buildup to the war in early 2003, they held daily vigils. “People from all over the world voiced their opposition to this war,” Cornish says. “There were over 3,000 protests globally between January 3rd and April 12th of 2003, involving over 36 million people. And yet, we invaded.”

The vigils, now held from noon to 12:30 p.m., are a way to connect with the global movement for peace.

“It was the women of Israel and Palestine who needed to express their grief. Women are the ones most affected by war and the ones who are most left out of the decision-making process,” Cornish says.

Women in Black began in January 1988, a month after the first Palestinian intifada, when 15 Israeli women began gathering weekly at a major traffic intersection in Jerusalem. They dressed in black to denote their grief. They raised black signs that read, “Stop the Occupation.” Palestinian women joined the Israeli women. Within months, women were holding similar vigils throughout Israel.

As word spread, women in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia held solidarity vigils. Soon, Women in Black in other countries were protesting local issues as well. In Italy, it was organized crime. In Germany, the women gathered to grieve the violence of neo-Nazism, racism against guest workers, and nuclear arms. In Belgrade, Women in Black maintained their nonviolent opposition to the Milosevic regime. In March 2001, the Belgrade women were awarded the Millennium Peace Prize for Women from the U.N. Development Fund for Women.

As Julia Hicks begins drumming, retired consultant Dave Lindstrom takes his place in the shade of the porch, holding the “Blessed are the Peacemakers” sign. He and another man stand in the background, a supporting role. A longtime peace advocate, Lindstrom marched on Washington in 1963, where he heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Lindstrom has stood on the steps of First Congregational Church almost every week since the vigils began. It’s as much a part of his life as brushing his teeth. And when there’s a cold north wind blowing freezing rain? “You just remember to wear a black raincoat.”

“Sometimes it seems pointless,” McFarland says. “But regardless of what you think of war, still, kids are dying. Kids and people and old women are dying and nobody wants little kids to die.”

Judy Bettice, a member of Pax Christi and St. Patrick Catholic Church, saw a flyer about the Memphis group. Since she was teaching full-time in a Memphis city school, she could only join the vigils during school breaks. Undaunted, the proponent of nonviolence told her high school students about Women in Black and that she planned to wear black to school every Wednesday in solidarity. “Many weeks later, when I forgot it was a Wednesday, students asked me why I wasn’t wearing black that day!” she says.

“Women in Black is first of all a statement of grief,” Cornish says. “Grief for all the fallen children, women, men, soldiers, and citizens around the world who have been victimized by violence. It has been moving and healing to wear black and to name our grief — first of all, at the 9/11 attacks. We wear black to grieve every soldier lost in Iraq, every Iraqi citizen and child victimized by this war. We grieve that families have been separated; futures devastated by this war.” 

 

There’s not as much traffic on South Cooper in the middle of the weekday. For the most part, drivers are watching traffic. A few slow down to read the signs. Most of them honk or give a thumbs up. Walkers tend to just keep walking. Now and then someone will comment — like the man who strolls by with three young children. He reads all the signs, then says, “I agree with every one of them.” The Women in Black smile and nod in response.

“I wish passersby knew the actual power of their responses,” Hicks says. “When we get negative responses — which is quite rare — it simply reinforces our conviction to continue this presence for peace and nonviolence. But the positive response — even just a slight wave — is a joyful reminder that we’re not alone and that we’re standing for many, many people who either don’t have the time or maybe the readiness to stand on the street for themselves.”

For Cheryl Cornish, “Women in Black has been a way that I have expressed my faith and my commitment to live after the way of Jesus. When I stand on the street with a sign saying ‘No to War,’ I am living my faith and trying to say to others that there is another way to live.”

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

The mainstream press pretty much ignored it. It was and probably will be for another 15 minutes the darling story of the Internet. It certainly made the late-night talk-show rounds. (Or so I hear; I can’t stay up that late without a blood transfusion.) And I think it is the absolute best idea anyone has ever proposed regarding international warfare. The Pentagon had the idea of a “gay bomb” on its planning table in 1994 — yes, a bomb that would expose enemy soldiers to certain aphrodisiacs that would make them all homosexual and thereby less of a threat because they would suddenly drop their weapons to start having sex with each other. They should have pursued this further instead of giving in to pressure to shelve it. Yes, if it had been known then, it would have made the United States government the laughingstock of much more civilized countries that don’t run around looking for excuses to go to war in order to boost the profits of the companies in which their government officials are involved, but we really could have had the last laugh. It was at least worth a test. We could have tried it in Kuwait. Can you think of anything better than a bunch of suddenly gay Middle Eastern men? Unless it’s a bunch of unfathomably rich suddenly gay Middle Eastern men. Look, the thing was only going to cost about $7.5 million. Isn’t that what Halliburton is overcharging the military about every hour in Iraq? I say it is still worth a try. I was channel-surfing the Sunday political shows this past weekend just to briefly check to make sure we’re still liberating the world, and I actually heard one of the old white male show hosts ask, “The Iraq war: Is it working?” I thought it may have been a repeat from 2004, but no, they are still sitting around with their thumbs up the butts asking the same question — the answer to which everyone with an IQ greater than a tree stump already knows. And I thought to myself, why are they not trying to bring back the idea of the gay bomb? Certainly, nothing else is working. Is it because they couldn’t get past the difficulty of making a bomb that doesn’t look like a penis, thereby giving the enemies fair warning that we’re about to turn them all queer? Or are they afraid that the enemy countries (whoever they are at this point) might develop the same strategy and send one sailing to Washington and give us a new president named Georgia Bush? Vice President Dina Cheney? Are they afraid it might also work the opposite way and turn Condoleezza Rice straight? Or make Rudy Giuliani stop dressing up in drag at every given opportunity? Think of the conversations between Bush and Cheney when they are plotting their next move: George Bush to Dick Cheney: “Well, Dick — ha ha, I said Dick! — do you think we should go ahead and let Iran have it?” Cheney: “I don’t know, girl. I hear they have some great shops!” “Well, what about Baghdad this week?” “I don’t know, George, but there are a whole lotta daddies over there I’d suddenly like to bag!” Can you imagine how many more speeches Georgia would be making from his rose garden? And how much more fodder Dina Cheney’s wife Lynne would have for her homoerotic novels? Can you imagine how confused that family would be if Mary turned straight, Dick turned gay, and Lynne hooked up with Mary’s girlfriend? Now, that would be the bomb. One of my favorite things about all this are the very serious reactions by some in the gay community. They are highly insulted by the thought of a bomb making soldiers gay and dropping their guns to drop their pants, because it feeds into the stereotype that gay soldiers can’t be good soldiers because sex with their fellow soldiers is all they have on their minds. It’s an insult to all of the good gay men and women helping defend our country! It’s an outrage! Well, quit being so gay for a minute and get a life is what I have to say to them. Lighten up. Besides, you know you would like nothing more than for all of those good-looking Middle Eastern men to turn gay. Quit lying to yourselves. Stop being such sticks in the mud and accept the fact that, indeed, if we turned all the insurgents in Iraq gay, this war would be history. If we had dropped this gay bomb on Hitler, it would have saved millions of lives because instead of killing people he would have been much busier trying to do something about that mustache. So let’s give it a shot. It’s a war about penis size anyway.

Categories
News News Feature

Get Real

For most Americans, who now wish we had never invaded Iraq, the notion of expanding that extraordinarily lethal mistake into neighboring Iran and Syria must seem insane. Yet those same brilliant neoconservative strategists who brought us the war in Iraq and constantly urge its escalation exist in their own special reality. They speak of military hostilities against Iran and Syria with anticipation rather than apprehension. As we have learned over the past four years, their dreams often turn out to be our nightmares.

For four brief hours on Memorial Day, however, the neoconservative drive toward a wider conflagration in the Middle East stalled when ambassadors from the United States and Iran met in Baghdad.

The historic significance of that meeting should not be underestimated, even though U.S. officials emphasized that no further meetings would necessarily occur. Convened under the auspices of the Iraqi government, which maintains close relations with Tehran as well as Washington, the meeting represented the first substantive bilateral discussion between American and Iranian officials in three decades.

Relations with Iran have been poor ever since the mullahs seized power from the U.S.-sponsored shah in 1979, but in recent months the increasing strains between us have brought armed conflict closer. Longstanding grievances against Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism in the region have been exacerbated by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear arsenal and allegations about Iranian agents supplying weapons to the insurgents in Iraq.

As these problems worsened, American policy toward Iraq has vacillated between “containment” and “regime change,” applying economic sanctions and threatening rhetoric in varying degrees. That policy cannot be described as a great success. Iran has become more aggressive and more influential in the region as a direct consequence of the violent regime change that we inflicted on Iraq.

What we have not tried, until now, was talking to the Iranian leaders. Breaking the taboo against speaking directly with them represents the change that the Iraq Study Group urged six months ago as the most promising path toward disengagement from that bloody quagmire, when its report highlighted the need for regional talks including Iran and Syria.

Naturally, such signs of sanity were immediately met with furious denunciations from the far right, echoing the shrill attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and several congressional colleagues who dared to visit the Syrian leadership in Damascus. When the Pelosi trip was followed weeks later by overtures from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to both the Syrians and the Iranians, it became plain that U.S. policymakers were considering a sensible shift.

The real danger is that whenever we start talking with our enemies, we may discover potential areas of compromise or even agreement. Progress would undermine the arguments of politicians and pundits who prefer a policy of permanent war.

But we already know that both Syria and Iran have cooperated with us in the past when they believed that their interests coincided with those of the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Syrians were obliging enough to accept a Canadian citizen whom we deported and to torture and interrogate him on our behalf. (Unfortunately, he was innocent.) During that same period, the Iranians were helpful in western Afghanistan when the U.S. and its allies overthrew the Taliban.

There is no reason to pretend that the Syrian and Iranian regimes are anything but deplorable in their domestic conduct and foreign policy. But it is also true that those governments and the societies they control are more complex than our warmongers would tell us. Close observers of Iran, for instance, believe that our threatening attitude actually weakens the democratic forces in their struggle with the mullahs — and that improved relations, including normal diplomatic exchanges, could only strengthen reformers.

Is there reason to believe that negotiating with the Iranians or the Syrians would lead to any worthwhile result? Our allies in the Iraqi government — whose survival we have ensured with thousands of American casualties and hundreds of billions of American dollars — certainly think so. The Iraqi diplomats talk with their counterparts in Damascus and Tehran every day.

Those facts won’t dissuade the neoconservatives both within and outside the Bush administration from maligning any gestures toward realism. We are still living with the terrible consequences of the last great neoconservative triumph — the war in Iraq — and the enhanced power that their errors have bestowed so ironically on Iran. In coping with that reality, it is long since time that we learned to ignore their bad advice.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer and Salon.com.