The Israeli Neocon Fantasy: A Paroxysm of U.S. Military Violence at the Promised Land's Bidding...

"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living." -General Omar Bradley, U.S. Army Field Commander, Battle of Normandy, WWII 1944.

Reuel Marc Gerecht's screed justifying an Israeli bombing attack on Iran coincides with the opening of the new Israel lobby campaign marked by the introduction of House Resolution 1553 expressing full support for such an Israeli attack.

What is important to understand about this campaign is that the aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is to support an attack by Israel so that the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.

That has long been the Israeli strategy for Iran, because Israel cannot fight a war with Iran without full U.S. involvement. Israel needs to know that the United States will finish the war that Israel wants to start.

Gerecht openly expresses the hope that any Iranian response to the Israeli attack would trigger full-scale U.S. war against Iran. "If Khamenei has a death-wish, he'll let the Revolutionary Guards mine the strait, the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It might be the only thing that would push President Obama to strike Iran militarily...." Gerecht suggest that the same logic would apply to any Iranian "terrorism against the United States after an Israeli strike," by which we really means any attack on a U.S. target in the Middle East.

Gerecht writes that Obama might be "obliged" to threaten major retaliation "immediately after an Israeli surprise attack."

That's the key sentence in this very long Gerecht argument. Obama is not going to be "obliged" to join Israeli aggression against Iran unless he feels that domestic political pressures to do so are too strong to resist. That's why the Israelis are determined to line up a strong majority in Congress and public opinion for war to foreclose Obama's options.

In the absence of confidence that Obama would be ready to come into the war fully behind Israel, there cannot be an Israeli strike.

Gerecht's argument for war relies on a fanciful nightmare scenario of Iran doling out nuclear weapons to Islamic extremists all over the Middle East. But the real concern of the Israelis and their lobbyists, as Gerecht's past writing has explicitly stated, is to destroy Iran's Islamic regime in a paroxysm of U.S. military violence.

Gerecht first revealed this Israeli-neocon fantasy as early as 2000, before the Iranian nuclear program was even taken seriously, in an essay written for a book published by the Project for a New American Century. Gerecht argued that, if Iran could be caught in a "terrorist act," the U.S. Navy should "retaliate with fury". The purpose of such a military response, he wrote, should be to "strike with truly devastating effect against the ruling mullahs and the repressive institutions that maintain them."

And lest anyone fail to understand what he meant by that, Gerecht was more explicit:

"That is, no cruise missiles at midnight to minimize the body count. The clerics will almost certainly strike back unless Washington uses overwhelming, paralyzing force."

In 2006-07, the Israeli war party had reason to believed that it could hijack U.S. policy long enough to get the war it wanted, because it had placed one of its most militant agents, David Wurmser, in a strategic position to influence that policy.

We now know that Wurmser, formerly a close adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu and during that period Vice President Dick Cheney's main adviser on the Middle East, urged a policy of overwhelming U.S. military force against Iran. After leaving the administration in 2007, Wurmser revealed that he had advocated a U.S. war on Iran, not to set back the nuclear program but to achieve regime change.

"Only if what we do is placed in the framework of a fundamental assault on the survival of the regime will it have a pick-up among ordinary Iranians," Wurmser told The Telegraph. The U.S. attack was not to be limited to nuclear targets but was to be quite thorough and massively destructive. "If we start shooting, we must be prepared to fire the last shot. Don't shoot a bear if you're not going to kill it."

Of course, that kind of war could not be launched out of the blue. It would have required a casus belli to justify a limited initial attack that would then allow a rapid escalation of U.S. military force. In 2007, Cheney acted on Wurmser's advice and tried to get Bush to provoke a war with Iran over Iraq, but it was foiled by the Pentagon

As Wurmser was beginning to whisper that advice in Cheney's ear in 2006, Gerecht was making the same argument in The Weekly Standard:

"Bombing the nuclear facilities once would mean we were declaring war on the clerical regime. We shouldn't have any illusions about that. We could not stand idly by and watch the mullahs build other sites. If the ruling mullahs were to go forward with rebuilding what they'd lost--and it would be surprising to discover the clerical regime knuckling after an initial bombing run--we'd have to strike until they stopped. And if we had any doubt about where their new facilities were (and it's a good bet the clerical regime would try to bury new sites deep under heavily populated areas), and we were reasonably suspicious they were building again, we'd have to consider, at a minimum, using special-operations forces to penetrate suspected sites."

The idea of waging a U.S. war of destruction against Iran is obvious lunacy, which is why U.S. military leaders have strongly resisted it both during the Bush and Obama administrations. But Gerecht makes it clear that Israel believes it can use its control of Congress to pound Obama into submission. Democrats in Congress, he boasts "are mentally in a different galaxy than they were under President Bush." Even though Israel has increasingly been regarded around the world as a rogue state after its Gaza atrocities and the commando killings of unarmed civilians on board the Mavi Marmara, its grip on the U.S. Congress appears as strong as ever

Moreover, polling data for 2010 show that a majority of Americans have already been manipulated into supporting war against Iran - in large part because more than two-thirds of those polled have gotten the impression that Iran already has nuclear weapons. The Israelis are apparently hoping to exploit that advantage.
"If the Israelis bomb now, American public opinion will probably be with them," writes Gerecht. "Perhaps decisively so." Netanyahu must be feeling good about the prospects for pressuring Barack Obama to join an Israeli war of aggression against Iran.

It was Netanyahu, after all, who declared in 2001, "I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in the way."

-Gareth Porter ("The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign, CommonDreams.Org, 7.30.2010. Image: -Kumar Corcoran, Jesus With A Sniper Rifle, 2010 ).

THE GOD OF WAR: "Not With A Bang But A Wimper...

THE GOD OF WAR doesn't dine on raw shank bone or bellow orders quite like he used to. When he talks to Congress, it goes more like this:

"And, oh, while you're up, I'm going to be needing, uh. . . $159 billion this go-around, you know, for the troops. Thanks."

It works.

With the war on terror in its 9th year and disappearing from even the pretense of national debate, let alone outrage and protest, and with the President of Hope prosecuting it so quietly most of us no longer notice, we could be at an eerie national transition point, beyond which war is no longer controversial or a big deal but just the way things are: "normal," like background noise. And the enormous transfusions of cash it requires - well, nice people don't talk about it.

Oh Lord.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Then along comes Alan Grayson freshman congressman from Florida, who has some fresh ideas about how to forestall this Orwellian transition. He introduced one of these ideas in the House last week. It's called H.R. 5353: The War Is Making You Poor Act. It's steeped stunningly in common sense and common knowledge, appeals in a blatant, teabagger sort of way to self-interest and everyman's taxation phobia - and strikes me as the focal point, almost Gandhiesque in the clarity of its outrage, of a reborn movement to end our wars in Asia and halt the spread of American hubris.

"The purpose of this bill is to connect the dots, and to show people in a real and concrete way the cost of these endless wars," Grayson wrote. "War is a permanent feature of our societal landscape, so much so that no one notices it anymore."

H.R. 5353 directly addresses the war's current "emergency" spending bill, which is about to come up for a vote and will - of course! of course! - pass as usual, with little debate, with perfunctory media mention. The current White House request, part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2011, is for $159.3 billion.

The War Is Making You Poor Act plucks that number out of anonymity and screams, "Wait a second!" This is an enormous amount of money, almost beyond calculation, and we must not make a decision about it transfixed in financial numbness.

The bill mandates that our operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan be funded out of the regular Department of Defense budget, which in 2011 is $549 billion. The $159.3 billion in special funds would be used instead to eliminate the federal tax on every American's first $35,000 of income (or $70,000 for married couples). And that still leaves $16 billion for paying down the national debt.

Yeah, I know, it's crazy. You can't mess with the system like this. The War God's funding machine grinds with bipartisan inevitability. I've watched the process over the years in mounting despair. Our elected reps are, at best, helplessly polite in the face of this inevitability. Dissent is token. We're on a permanent war footing in this country and will be till hell freezes over. Thus it is written. Read the New York Times.

Grayson's bill comes from so far outside the Beltway consensus I felt instant enthusiasm for it. My guess is that others will, too. Within a few days of the bill's introduction, nearly 24,000 people had signed the congressman's online petition endorsing it. For starters, I'd like to see that number hit six figures. Why not seven?

The bill right now has seven co-sponsors: Dennis Kucinich, Lynn Woolsey, John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Bob Filner and two Republican mavericks, Ron Paul and Walter Jones. Call your rep and urge him or her to support it as well. This is the only way it's going to happen, folks - we have to make our numbers felt on Capitol Hill. We have to break the unwritten rules that make even honest debate over these hellish wars impermissible.

Mainstream coverage of Grayson's bill has been skimpy and dismissive. The big news outlets crossed over long ago into Orwell's nightmare and, at their privileged remove, fully embrace it. As Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald notes: "The decree that we are ‘at war' has been repeated over and over for a full decade, drummed into our heads from all directions without pause, sanctified as one of those Bipartisan Orthodoxies that nobody can dispute upon pain of having one's Seriousness credentials immediately and irrevocably revoked."

I submit that it's time to reclaim our country - $159 billion at a time.

-Robert C. Koehler, "Stopping Orwell's Nightmare", CommonDreams.org, 5.27.2010. Image: "The Monolith" from "2001: A Space Odyssey," directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968 ).

Obama: The Audacity Of Hopelessness...

With Obama's massive troop escalation (can the Nobel Peace Prize be rescinded?) he's made Afghanistan his war, reminiscent of President Johnson's Vietnam War escalation. At the current death rate of 500 soldiers per year the events depicted in the film will soon become a shattering reality for many more Americans. And next year Obama will spend some $65 billion on Afghanistan, more than for the Iraq war.

Afghanistan, the "Graveyard of Empires," is this administration's most egregious failing and is now fated to define Obama's legacy. Beyond Afghanistian, maintaining permanent military bases and large garrisons in Iraq, allowing Israel to evade a just two state peace with the Palestinians, clandestine Blackwater (now Xe services) assassins roaming around Pakistan, the killing of hundreds of Pakistani civilians by CIA Predator drone attacks authorized by Obama early in his tenure, and a continuing U.S. military build-up in Colombia under the guise of a phony "war on drugs," also are on the list.

A one-year litany of domestic disappointments could be captured by a bumper sticker reading "the audacity of hopelessness." After handing over almost $3 trillion to bankers, we have a jobless "economic recovery," an official 10.2 percent unemployment rate which is actually 16.5 percent, the number of home foreclosures continues to rise and a country in which one in four children only manage to keep hunger pangs at bay because of food stamps and soup kitchens.

In the face of this situation Obama's first stimulus package was pitifully small, and while it did "save" some jobs, it wasn't nearly enough for serious job creation. Obama's professed support for helping workers to unionize evaporated shortly after his inauguration. And under Obama's watch, as noted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, "Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families' heads, the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion dollar bonuses -- this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam..."(10/20/09).

The nine largest banks are distributing $32.6 billion in bonuses. But given the jobs crisis and depression-like situation confronting tens of millions of our fellow citizens, Obama found a record-breaking $664 billion for the Pentagon for fiscal 2010. Finally, Obama and many Democrats quickly abandoned government single payer national health insurance -- the only plausible solution to our healthcare crisis -- caving to the despicable, predatory, for-profit private health insurance lobbyists. (Note: These lobbyists gave $1.8 million to 18 key members of Congress).

For those who worked and voted for Obama, especially younger folks, all of this must be a bitter pill to swallow, a giant step backward toward disillusionment and cynicism. I prefer to interpret it as a necessary and valuable lesson in electoral illusions for those truly serious about making this a better country:

Obama, a brilliant and charismatic politician, was always a conservative corporate Democrat, a self-described believer in "the free market," and an enthusiastic accommodator to the rich and powerful. In the words of one pundit, Obama is Clinton without the sleaze. He would never have been given a favorable vetting by the financial elites who chose our presidential candidates if he represented the slightest threat to their domestic interests and global empire. By the way, the latter includes 800 military bases in 130 countries.

According to astute political analyst Paul Street, the Obama campaign set new corporate fundraising efforts, including nearly $1 million from Goldman Sachs. In short, aside from some crafty rhetoric Obama was never a social justice populist and viewing him that way always contained a massive dose of wishful thinking. In that narrow sense, Obama has been entirely consistent and didn't really betray anyone.

More and more Americans are wise to the fact that because Democrats and Republicans are virtually indistinguishable on the issues that matter most, the "change we can believe it" will not be forthcoming from these two business parties.

Short term we need a mobilized and vocal movement from below that dramatically increases the political costs for those resisting needed reforms. Longer term, we need systemic change, change in the class structure of capitalism. Until and unless workers who produce all the goods and services in our society participate in making the major economic policy decisions -- to run the economy democratically -- we will only be tinkering with a system that primarily serves those who own it. We need a new broad-based political party that actually responds to the genuine grievances and aspirations of ordinary working people and youth.

-Gary Olson ( “Obama’s First Nine Months: Change We Can Believe In?,” CommonDreams.Org, 12.3.2009. Image: "Obama Fraud," Image Products, 2009 ).

Colonialist Conversions: Torture, Religion, Democracy & God...

"The special forces guys - they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom."

It's worse than you think.

Torture, religion, democracy, God. They're all part of the mixed-up, horrific business that George W. Bush unleashed in the Middle East and Central Asia, and that Barack Obama is struggling to control and rationalize. As the words above demonstrate, the 12th century is striving mightily to join hands with the 20th in the U.S. military: Unbridled religious arrogance is forging a link with high-tech weaponry and an unlimited defense budget.

COLONIALIST CONVERSIONS:

The speaker, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan was videotaped last year delivering a sermon at Bagram Air Base. Since Al Jazeera first broadcast the footage at the beginning of the week, it has spread widely on the Internet. (Video)

Like so much else that the Bush administration has bequeathed us, and the world - pre-emptive war and torture, for instance - this is nothing new, but suddenly it's overt. A U.S. military spokesman has denied that American soldiers are allowed to try to convert Afghans to Christianity - it violates Central Command's General Order No. 1 - and said that Hensley was quoted out of context. U.S. military spokesmen, of course, also routinely deny that U.S. bombing raids kill civilians.

And indeed, U.S. air strikes this week in a densely populated area in western Afghanistan's Farah Province, during a battle between Afghan soldiers and the Taliban, may have killed as many as 100 civilians, according to the New York Times. The Red Cross, the United Nations and the Afghan government are all expressing shock at the death toll, but our government will only acknowledge that it is "investigating the reports of civilian deaths," which is the standard, meaningless comment that reporters work into such stories, seemingly with no obligation to follow up. Forget about it and move on.

The possibility that we are - not officially but in the minds of many American soldiers and officers - waging a religious war that parallels the secular one, an Ann Coulter war ("We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," Coulter wrote on Sept. 12, 2001), is both deeply disturbing and utterly appropriate. The arrogance required for both efforts is so similar. The line blurs for many of the participants.

What is the difference between believing one can bomb a country into democracy and any sort of armed, uniformed proselytizing?

Putting a religious spin on the war on terror may be an official no-no, but when I read about Bargram's "hounds of heaven" and other recent reports of the growing evangelical Christian influence in the U.S. military (such as Jeff Sharlet's stunning investigative piece in the May issue of Harper's, titled "Jesus Killed Mohammed"), I think first of the extraordinary Winter Soldier testimony I attended a year ago in Washington, D.C.vvThis testimony, sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War, and vastly underreported in the media, featured vet after vet giving agonized, conscience-wracked testimony on his or her training and service in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. If one word could describe the overarching theme of the four-day event, it might be "Dehumanization."

"In our boot camp," said former Marine Matthew Childers, "we sang cadences about killing people."

Occupation means implicit disrespect. The testimony went on and on, describing detainee abuse, humiliation and starvation; the terrorizing of families during house raids; the casual brutalities and killings at checkpoints; vandalism and joy-riding around the ruins of Babylon; the shooting of pets to relieve boredom. And this is the context in which we now hear about earnest American Christians harvesting the souls of Muslims. Let us bow our heads in prayer, America. The worst of who we are is STALKING THE WORLD with religious fervor.

-Robert C. Koehler ("The Hounds of Heaven", CommonDreams.org, 5.7.2009. Image -J. Keppler, "Consistency," Library of Congress, 1891).

The Numbers: Human Trafficking, Arms Deals, Sex, Drugs & Art...

HUMAN TRAFFICKING:

Total value of the global slave trade:

$31 billion

Number of people enslaved today:

27 million

Price traffickers receive for a trafficked woman in Turkey:

$2,500

Price of an hour with a woman from the Emporer's Club V. I. P., the online prostitution ring frequented by former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer:

$5,500

DRUGS:

Price of one kilogram of cocaine in Colombia, South America:

$1,500

Price of one kilogram of cocaine in Miami:

$30,000

Chances that a U.S. one-dollar bill contains traces of cocaine:

4 in 5

Percent of total world trade accounted for by the illegal drug industry:

8

Ratio of opium production in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007:

2:1

Percent of worldwide heroin production accounted for by Afghanistan:

92

ARMS:

Barter rate for an AK-47 in Kenya in 1986:

10 cows

Barter rate for an AK-47 in Kenya in 2001:

2 cows

Total value of illegal small arms and light weapons trade:

$1 billion

Percent of global weapons sales accounted for by the U.S.:

36

Ratio of guns to people on the planet:

1:10

Ratio of guns to people in the U.S.

9:10

ART:

Reward for stolen painting by Vermeer:

$5 million

Total value of the black market in art:

$6 billion

Number of pieces of art stolen in the U.S. in 2006:

14, 981

Number of pieces of art stolen in the U.S in 2007:

16, 117

-Lapham's Quarterly, ("Crimes & Punishments" Vol. II, Number 2, Spring 2009. Image: Screenshot - " Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne," starring MariaCasares, directed by Robert Bresson, 1945).

Controlling The Battle Space: Pentagon Perception Management Tools

BAGHDAD: The black-and-white video starts with a mini-van locked in the crosshairs and the sound of a missile launching. A ball of fire suddenly consumes the van and a palm grove somewhere in Iraq. "Good shot," says a voice squawking over what sounds like a military radio. Before the one-minute video clip is over, two more SUVs are destroyed by Apache helicopters.

The video is one of dozens brought to viewers around the world by Maj. Alayne Conway, the top public affairs officer for the 3rd Infantry Division. When her unit was in Iraq, her office sent out four to six videos a day to media outlets around the world, as well as posting them on YouTube. "You want to make sure you edit it in the right way," Conway said. "You have to go through the steps. ... Is this something that is going to make Joe Six-Pack look up from his TV dinner or his fast-food meal and look up at the TV and say, `Wow, the American troops are kicking butt in Iraq?'"

Critics say the purpose of such violent material is not to inform the public about what the military is doing, but to promote it. Public affairs officers argue that they are in a battle with insurgents to shape the public perception of the wars they are fighting, and they will use every means available to push the military's version of events.

The Pentagon now spends more than $550 million a year -- at least double the amount since 2003 -- on public affairs, and that doesn't including personnel costs. Public affairs officers are, in the words of the military's training manual, a "perception management tool." Their job is to provide facts but not spin to American audiences and the American media.

Over the past two years, the number of public affairs officers trained by the Defense Information School has grown by 24 percent to almost 3,500. The military is also expanding its Internet presence from 300 to 1,000 sites and increasing its free cable programming on the Pentagon Channel by 33 percent to 2,080 programs.

Along with putting out its own messages, the public affairs arm tries to regulate what others put out.

In recent years, as reporting out of Iraq turned more negative, the public affairs department has increased its ground rules for media who embed with troops from one to four pages.

In mid-2008, Associated Press reporter Bradley Brooks was stepping off a cargo plane in Mosul en route to an embed when he saw pallbearers carry the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers from Humvee ambulances onto a plane. Brooks talked to soldiers, who mentioned their anger with political leaders, and wrote a story. Within 24 hours the military had expelled him from northern Iraq. He was told he had broken a new rule that embedded reporters could not write while in transit.

In 2008, eight journalists were detained for more than 48 hours, according to cases tracked by the Associated Press, more than in any other year since the war began. Since 2003, the Associated Press alone has had 11 journalists detained in Iraq for more than 24 hours. And a Reuters journalist has been detained by U.S. forces as "a security threat" since Sept. 2.

"All of these journalists, with the exception of the one being held now, have been released without charge. That troubles us because it suggests that they are not able to successfully charge these journalists with anything," said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Pentagon officials say commanders have the right to detain anyone they consider a threat to security, and that the U.S. Constitution does not apply to foreign battlefields."The U.S. military is going to control the battle space in which they operate," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told a gathering of journalists in April 2007. "The First Amendment provides no right of access to the battlefield -- zero, none." Whitman's assertion has never been tested in court, and legal opinions vary.

The public affairs department has even arranged to fly friendly bloggers to Iraq and Afghanistan, according to documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act. The public affairs office decided who could take part in special "Blogger Roundtables" with Pentagon officials in 2005, and transcripts show that those chosen were overwhelmingly pro-military and repeated the information they heard on their own Web sites without always revealing its source.

-AP ("Media, Pentagon Spar Over Control of Information," Associated Press, 2.6.2009. Image: -Sir Joe, "TV Dinner," Flickr, 2008).

The Holy Grail Of Victory: Death Will Be Our Darling & Fear Will Be Our Name...

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. "The war on terror" has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.

For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological "sophistication" and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

W.H. Auden: "Those to whom evil is done. Do evil in return."

Stanley Kunitz: "In a murderous time the heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking."

And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington's certainty, Richard Farina wrote:

"And death will be our darling and fear will be our name."

Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring "war on terrorism," chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be. Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" program and told viewers:

"Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism."

But the "war on terrorism" rubric -- increasingly shortened to the even vaguer "war on terror" -- kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so:

"We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war."

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize -- or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

The new U.S. "war on terror" was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.

Now, in early 2009, we're entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president's escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence. And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration's reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.

"This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced," Norman Mailer wrote in his book "Why Are We at War?" six years ago:

"It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void..."

Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Norman Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002:

"This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. ... There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist."

And there will always be plenty of rationales for continuing to send out the patrols and launch the missiles and drop the bombs in Afghanistan, just as there have been in Iraq, just has there were in Vietnam and Laos. Those countries, with very different histories, had the misfortune to share a singular enemy, the most powerful military force on the planet.

It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, that we are the United States of America -- but what that really means is still very much up for grabs. Even the greatest rhetoric is just that. And while the clock ticks, the deployment orders are going through channels.

Now, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, convenience masquerades as realism about "the war on terror." Too big to fail. A beast too awesome and immortal not to feed. And death will be our darling. And fear will be our name.

-Norman Solomon,("Why Are We Still At War?,"Common Dreams, 2.3.2009. Image: -Jaqian, "Lost Holy Grail," Street sign found on telephone pole, Flickr, 2007).

The PSY OPS Evening News With Your Host...

The U.S. general commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan has ordered a merger of the office that releases NEWS with PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS (PSY OPS) which deals with propaganda, a move that goes against the alliance's policy, three officials said. The move has worried Washington's European NATO allies -- Germany has already threatened to pull out of media operations in Afghanistan--and the officials said it could undermine the credibility of information released to the public.

Seven years into the war against the Taliban, insurgent influence is spreading closer to the capital and Afghans are becoming increasingly disenchanted at the presence of some 65,000 foreign troops and the government of President Hamid Karzai. Taliban militants, through their website, telephone text messages and frequent calls to reporters, are also gaining ground in the information war, analysts say.

U.S. General David McKiernan, the commander of 50,000 troops from more than 40 nations in NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), ordered the combination of the Public Affairs Office (PAO), Information Operations and Psy Ops from December 1, said a NATO official with detailed knowledge of the move.

"This will totally undermine the credibility of the information released to the press and the public," said the official, who declined to be named.

ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Richard Blanchette said McKiernan had issued a staff order to implement a command restructure from December 1st which was being reviewed by NATO headquarters in Brussels, but he declined to go into details of the reorganization. "This is very much an internal matter," he said. "This is up with higher headquarters right now and we're waiting to get the basic approval. Once we have the approval we will be going into implementation."

But another ISAF official confirmed that the amalgamation of public affairs with Information Operations and Psy Ops was part of the planned command restructure. This official, who also declined to be named, said the merger had caused considerable concern at higher levels within NATO which had challenged the order by the U.S. general.

DECEPTION ACTIVITIES:

NATO policy recognizes there is an inherent clash of interests between its public affairs offices, whose job it is to issue press releases and answer media questions, and that of Information Operations and Psychological Operations. Information Operations advises on information designed to affect the will of the enemy, while Psy Ops includes so-called "black operations," or outright deception.

The new combined ISAF department will come under the command of an American one-star general reporting directly to McKiernan, an arrangement that is also against NATO policy. "While coordination is essential, the lines of authority will remain separate, the PA reporting directly to the commander. This is to maintain credibility of PA and to avoid creating a media or public perception that PA activities are coordinated by, or are directed by, Info Ops," the NATO policy document says. "Public Affairs will have no role in planning or executing Info Ops, Psy Ops, or deception activities.”

The United States has 35,000 of the 65,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, operating both under ISAF and a separate U.S.-led coalition operation, but both come under McKiernan's command. Washington is already scheduled to send another 3,000 troops to arrive in the country in January and is now considering sending 20,000 more troops in the next 12 to 18 months, further tipping the numerical balance among ISAF forces.

"What we are seeing is a gradual increase of American influence in all areas of the war. Seeking to gain total control of the information flow from the campaign is just part of that."

- Jon Hemming (“Press And Psy Ops To Merge At NATO Afghan HQ, Reuters, 11.29.2008. Image: Leonard Mccombe, TV Newscaster Walter Cronkite, Watching 3 Different News Broadcasts, Life Magazine, 1971).