Highlights from British inquiry into Iraq war

The UK’s public inquiry into the Iraq war (the “Chilcot Inquiry“) has featured testimony from major figures at the time of the invasion and has further strengthened criticism of the war on multiple fronts. Testimony affirms that pre-war intelligence did not paint Saddam Hussein as a threat, that the coalition had decided to wage war before weapons inspections were completed, that non-military options were not seriously pursued and that, in the opinion of many, the war was illegal.

A selection of notable quotes from the inquiry:

• “I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war, and that was the firm view of most international lawyers.” – Hans Blix, former United Nations chief arms inspector.

• “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam.” – Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director-general of MI5 (British military intelligence).

• “We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low.” – Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director-general of MI5.

• “When I kept reading them [intelligence reports], I kept saying to myself, ‘Is this intelligence?’ It was not very substantiated but clearly was robust.” – Lord John Prescott, former deputy prime minister.

• “The real problem, which I did draw several times to the attention of London, was that the contingency military timetable had been decided before the UN inspectors went in under Hans Blix … you had to short-circuit the inspection process by finding the notorious smoking gun … and we – the Americans, the British – have never really recovered from that, because, of course, there was no smoking gun.” – Sir Christopher Meyer, UK ambassador to the US (1997-2003).

• “In my opinion, that use of force had not been authorised by the (United Nations) Security Council, and had no other basis in international law.” – Sir Michael Wood, senior legal adviser at the Foreign Office in 2003.

• “I feel responsibility but no regret for removing Saddam Hussein. I think he was a monster.” – Tony Blair, former Prime Minister.

Culture on the Brink

While researching the U.S. counterculture, I stumbled across a brief, apprehensive article about the growing popularity of recreational LSD use. The article (Drugs: The Dangers of LSD) appears in TIME in 1966, when the counterculture began to hit its stride but before the peak of its influence. It provides a historical snapshot of mainstream hysteria regarding the exploding drug culture.

In the last year … 75 patients were admitted to Bellevue because of LSD reactions, nine of them reported “uncontrollable impulses toward violence,” and two of these had attempted murder.

To such recognized LSD experts as Los Angeles’ Dr. Sidney Cohen, author of The Beyond Within (TIME, Dec. 18, 1964), the “acid head” who is “taking a trip” is more likely to become passively fascinated by the glories or horrors of contemplating his own navel than to react violently against others. Suicide is a more probable result than murder. But Dr. Cohen concedes that any man who stays on LSD for three days would require repeated, increasing doses, and might have reactions not previously seen by psychiatrists. Equally important is the basic personality of the LSD user: on college campuses and in beatnik dives in California, most users are young, directionless and more confused than hostile; New York City may well have a greater proportion of hard-core misfits, with different problems.

Insurgent Math

‘Insurgent Math’ is an arithmetic championed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was the commander of U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan before Obama impressed him into the American army of the unemployed.

‘Insurgent Math’ holds that, “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.” It is a foundational concept in the counter-insurgency doctrine that dominates military strategy in Afghanistan. On the battlefield, it has manifested in stricter rules of engagement, specifically with regard to heavy support fire, such as air strikes and artillery barrages. In an attempt to calm the concerned and satisfy the gung-ho, McChrystal sold these rules to the troops under the slogan, ‘Courageous Restraint.’

Now, with the coalition’s war effort marred by major setbacks, it’s increasingly likely that ‘Courageous Restraint’ will be dismissed along with McChrystal.

In February, the coalition launched a highly-touted offensive in the town of Marjah, which, after its takeover, was to receive a “government in a box.” At the time, the local governor warned that the operation could last one month. It has lasted almost five.

Also, in June, McChrystal announced that a critical operation in Kandahar would have to be pushed back from summer to fall, due to an inability to win support from local leaders, “some of whom see the Taliban fighters not as oppressors but as their Muslim brothers.”

In addition to these hitches, U.S. casualties have climbed considerably. June was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in the nine-year war and, at the current pace, 2010 will be the deadliest year.

High-profile articles in Rolling Stone and the New York Times report soldiers’ frustrations with the stricter rules of engagement, which many feel put them in increased danger – and let the Taliban off the hook. “Some rules meant to enshrine counterinsurgency principles into daily practices, they say, do not merely transfer risks away from civilians. They transfer risks away from the Taliban,” writes C. J. Chivers of the NYT.

The new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, says he plans to review these rules. It’s doubtful he will eliminate them completely. Like McChrystal, he certainly believes that “you can’t kill your way out of Afghanistan.” Still, in response to a din of criticism about the progress of the war, he’ll likely ease them.

Really, the general faces an intractable dilemma. The idea of ‘Insurgent Math’ is built on sound principles (and on some statistics); civilian casualties undoubtedly inflame popular hatred against the U.S. and its allies. But innocent lives will always be lost in war. While there’s some indication that casualties decreased during McChrystal’s reign, there were still 452 civilians killed by pro-government forces in 2009. By the general’s own equation, that’s 4,520 new insurgents.

To disregard ‘Insurgent Math’ would be both unproductive and unconscionable. Yet, at the same time, strict rules of engagement frustrate the fighting force, while high casualties increase already-prevalent public opposition.

Like the war itself, it’s a no-win situation.

The Coming American Austerity

The G20 Summit in Toronto concluded with a declaration that the “advanced economies have committed to fiscal plans that will at least halve deficits by 2013 and stabilize or reduce government debt-to-GDP ratios by 2016.” The non-binding agreement follows shortly after the Greek debt crisis, which in turn has sparked a crisis of confidence regarding other highly-indebted European nations, particularly Spain and Portugal.

In short, the G20 agreed to austerity. The thinking is that “the failure to implement [fiscal] consolidation where necessary would undermine confidence and hamper growth.”

The dissenting view, advanced by President Barack Obama, holds that sufficient economic growth cannot be realized without further government stimulus. Likely due to the president’s influence, the declaration acknowledges the risk that “synchronized fiscal adjustment across several major economies could adversely impact the recovery.” Yet, for all the reservations and qualifications in the declaration, it’s clear the G20 is willing to take that risk.

While non-binding, the U.S. has still agreed to the deficit reduction goal, and that agreement, combined with the Democrats’ waning political mandate, will make it difficult to pass another major stimulus bill. Though we haven’t yet seen major federal cuts to social welfare programs (i.e. ‘austerity’), Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that “because Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress won’t authorize additional aid to state governments, that austerity is coming anyway, in the form of budget cuts at the state and local levels.”

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states face severe budget gaps at least through 2012, and they point out that federal assistance has mostly been used up, with only about $40 billion remaining for 2011.

“States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs [...] When all is said and done, states will have to deal with total budget shortfalls of some $260 billion for 2011 and 2012.”

Without additional government stimulus, the burden of economic growth will fall overwhelmingly on the private sector. The riskiness of this strategy is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that, in May, private employers only added 41,000 jobs – compared with an increase of 390,000 in government (mostly temporary Census positions). The official employment report for June isn’t released until Friday, but initial estimates put job gains in the private sector at a dismal 13,000.

But these numbers are, of course, pre-Toronto. The question is whether the deficit reduction programs will improve confidence in the private sector enough to stimulate growth and sustain the recovery.

Another Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, says it will not.

“The austerity measures that are occurring in Europe are increasing uncertainty. The austerity measures that are occurring in Europe are leading to downgrades because business (finance) realizes that, if the government isn’t supporting these economies, growth is going to be lower, and, with growth lower, economic problems across the board are going to be greater.”

Stiglitz called for more stimulus, particularly investment in areas likely to yield high returns, which he identified as public technology, infrastructure and education. Likewise, he criticized current low-yield investments in military and war.

Barring further government investment, the forecasts from both Krugman and Stiglitz are grim. Stiglitz said there is a “very high risk” of a double-dip recession, while Krugman worries that we are in the process of entering a full-blown depression.

The Living Skin

On a summer afternoon, I am as stagnant as the summer air. I sit, paralyzed by the heat. I wait for a cold breeze, and I wait for a productive flourish, but they are the same things – ideas only.

I know nothing of the summer morning; I wake in the afternoon. The sun burns deep into the evening, and if I were to rise early enough, I might miss the night entirely. So I shorten my day.

By 1 PM, guilt tries to pinch me awake, but I’m a persistent sleeper. By 2 PM, however, he’s slapping me and reminding me of winter in Boston, when a 2 PM start would have only left me two hours to enjoy the distant light.

So soon I’m on the porch, ‘breakfast’ on the table next to me and seven hours of tropical heat in front of me. There is simply no urgency on such bountiful days. I meditate on my surroundings. I meditate on how to fill my time, and I let the meditation swallow great chunks of it.

A mosquito pierces the skin on my forearm, drawing my attention. I raise my palm for a strike. My elbow is the fulcrum. I am a simple machine. I draw back my arm, but then stop. Instead, I tense my arm, and he flies off.

It would have been petty of me to squash the mosquito after he so deftly slipped my defenses. I learned Freud, that’s called ‘displacement.’ Besides, if we have enough blood to give to the Red Cross, we have enough for a mosquito to have a sip of. Enjoy, my friend.

During summer, I don’t mind insect bites and other itches. On the arms, on the ankles, on the shins – the living skin pulses, inviting the fingers to scratch. When I rake my fingernails over the bumps, I know instant relief. When I don’t, they wait for me, never absent, but never intrusive, either.

Donating blood to mosquitoes is a maddeningly passive affair. By contrast, deliberately contracting poison ivy is an active man’s sport. Plus, it’s rewarding: Scratching doesn’t just bring relief (and rawed skin), it spreads the rash. Exponential returns.

If I could reliably identify poison ivy, I’d dry my body with its leaves, grease my pans with its urushiol, then toss it into the fire and let its fumes coat my lungs. As it is, I’d probably waste my time ingesting some unremarkable knock-off shrub.

I’ll settle for the inertia option: playing host to the mosquitoes. The North Carolina insects haven’t yet learned about malaria, so it’s safe. Maybe they’ll raise bumps on every square inch of me. The itching will be so complete that they’ll have to dip me into a vat of aloe vera, like a corn dog into a fryer.

That would be a singular experience. A fine way to fill a summer afternoon.

Spiritual Health Reform

April 4, 2010 marked the 42nd anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. While best known as a leader of the African-American Rights movement in the 1960s, King also fought for the “reconstruction of [American] society,” which he said was being poisoned by poverty, militarism and materialism.

Exactly one year before his death, Reverend King delivered a speech, Beyond Vietnam, in which he denounced the United States’ military involvement in Indochina. He vividly recounted the widespread destruction of land, of institutions, of Vietnamese self-determination and of the Vietnamese themselves.

“They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children.”

King connected U.S. efforts in Vietnam with suffering at home, calling the war “the enemy of the poor” because it diverted human beings and their creative capacities away from the construction of society and enlisted them, instead, toward its destruction.

This speech marked the expansion of King’s work beyond support for Civil Rights and beyond opposition to U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia. He addressed what he called the “spiritual” health of American society.

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

These words were matched with action. Most prominently, King helped organize the Poor People’s Campaign, which called for money to be redirected from military use to social use. It demanded the government pass an “economic bill of rights” committed to increasing access to housing, resources and employment.

But in the embryonic stage of the Poor People’s Campaign – officially considered the ‘second phase’ of the Civil Rights Movement – King was assassinated. With its foundation suddenly ripped away, the campaign collapsed.

Forty-two years later, major remembrances of Reverend King typically discuss his Civil Rights work and little else. They fail to place the issue of Civil Rights within the context of his broader critique of American policies, domestic and foreign.

Forty-two years later, that critique is still incisive. As economic inequality and mass unemployment tear at the health of the nation, our government fights two needless wars that rob us of lives, of wealth and of community.

Still, there is now, as there was then, hope for revitalization.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

A Theory of Power

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.”

- Frederick Douglass

The Degeneracy Thesis

In the second half of the 18th century, prominent European intellectuals supported a theory claiming that “due chiefly to atmospheric conditions, in particular excessive humidity, all living things in the Americas were not only inferior to those found in Europe, but also in a condition of decline.”

This was known as the Degeneracy Thesis, and its supporters included Voltaire (a leading French philosopher), Frederick II (the king of Prussia), Comte de Buffon (the highest-regarded French biologist) and Cornelius de Pauw (a Dutch author considered the foremost authority on the New World).

“It is a great and terrible spectacle to see one half of the globe so disfavored by nature that everything found there is degenerate or monstrous,” remarked de Pauw, who went on to compare the native Americans with “beasts of prey,” insult Creoles (“never produced a single book”) and deride Eskimos (“fat and corpulent, and much under-limbed”).

Buffon turned to environmental variation to explain, in his words, why “the reptiles and insects are so large, the quadrupeds so small, and the men so cold, in the New World.” With the help of his training in Naturalism, he identified several contributing factors:

• “Greatly inferior” heat.
• “Stagnating waters” and abundant humidity, which reigns because “the transpiration of so many vegetables, pressed close together, [produces] immense quantities of moist and noxious exhalations.”
• The overloading of the air and the Earth with “humid and noxious vapours” blocks the Sun from bestowing “his most elivening rays upon this frigid mass.”
• “The scarcity of men, therefore, in America, and most of them living like brutes” has prevented cultivation, and so Nature “never opens her fruitful and beneficent womb.”

Thus, the New World is home to “the production of moist plants, reptiles, and insects, and can only afford nourishment to cold men and feeble animals,” Buffon said. Criticism wasn’t limited to native life, either. In 1770, another renowned French scholar claimed that America had not “produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science.”

These writings infuriated Americans, notably Thomas Jefferson, who wrote vigorous defenses of American animals, natives and colonists. He even convinced a general in New Hampshire to send twenty soldiers to kill a bull moose, which he could send to Buffon as “proof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds.”

Buffon later redeemed his legacy, somewhat, by revising his ideas about the biology of the Americas. And perhaps it’s also worth noting that he wasn’t entirely off-base; he predicted unparalleled prosperity in the New World, so long as its lands were cultivated, its rivers redirected and its marshes drained.

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Sources:

1. http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/a_genealogy_of_antiamericanism.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_de_Pauw
3. http://www.ansp.org/museum/jefferson/otherPages/degeneracy-1.php
4. http://faculty.njcu.edu/fmoran/vol5common.htm
5. http://www.ansp.org/museum/jefferson/otherPages/degeneracy-2.php#degeneracy
6. http://books.google.com/books?id=hhnIWGD5Zt0C&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=%22stature+and+majesty+of+American+quadrupeds%22&source=bl&ots=0DCO7cYDYr&sig=ZzI0qioDbOM1UZV-PIebp7NAcy8&hl=en&ei=CQycS8j-OMP68AbRh5n9DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22stature%20and%20majesty%20of%20American%20quadrupeds%22&f=false