Buoyed by public opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans favor U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, anti-war protestors rallied in cities across the country to voice opposition to the Bush administration's Iraq policies and their consequences. Recent United Nations reports show that more than 30,000 Iraqis were killed in 2006 alone, and more than 34,000 were wounded. Other estimates put the total Iraqi death toll since the war began at more than 1,000,000.
At least 3,000 U.S. troops have been reported killed since the invasion began and 23,000 have been reported injured. Deaths and injuries among the more than 100,000 mercenary soldiers and contractors deployed in the country under private unaudited contracts with the Bush administration, in addition to the 130,000 U.S. troops, are unknown.
Despite the recent pronouncement of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that the U.S. will maintain its military presence in Iraq for decades, and presidential candidate Hillary Rodhman Clinton's statement that she would maintain U.S. forces in Iraq if elected, several hopeful signs that the conflagration may be brought to an end have emerged in recent weeks.
One is that the various Iraqi factions are negotiating among themselves an agreement to forge a national front that would replace the Maliki regime that the Bush administration played a major role in establishing to protect U.S. interests and sign the long-awaited oil agreement favoring Western oil interests. Once in power, this new government, according to informed sources, would be in the position to implement the preferences of the overwhelming majority of Iraqi citizens that U.S. forces leave the country immediately.
Another hopeful sign can be discerned in recent negotiations among key players in Middle East countries surrounding Iraq which indicate a growing willingness on their part to step in to help indigenous Iraqi forces restore law and order, rebuild the country and remove external troublemakers who have entered the country in order to oppose the U.S. presence using terrorist tactics.
A further hopeful sign of growing opposition to Bush policies are the increasing calls to impeach the president. Most of these efforts are led by Democrats but they are being joined a small but increasing number of Republicans. Given the apparent gridlock in the U.S. Congress on the war issue, due to the slim majorities held by Democrats and the tendency of certain Southern "Blue Dog" Democrats to side with Republicans, the focus of anti-war opposition is now shifting to the States.
Twenty 20 state legislatures so far have introduced resolutions opposing the President's proposed escalation in Iraq. Of equal importance are the public statements of prominent lawmakers, including Republicans, raising the prospect of impeachment, and the actions of state and municipal legislatures that are passing resolutions calling for impeachment
Time for Multilateral Negotiations with the al Qaeda Movement
According to the BBC, al-Jazeera, the Arabic TV station, has broadcast a lengthy speech from a tape that it claims was made by the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. In it, bin Laden proposes a "long-term truce" with the U.S. on the basis of "fair conditions". The Bush administration immediately rejected the offer, according to the Voice of America, after confirming that the voice on the tape was indeed that of bin Laden."We do not negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business," Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan stated flatly.
Comparison of the full transcript of bin Laden's statement with the Voice of America article reveals a possible discrepancy in the Bush administration's interpretation of bin Laden's offer with what he may have intended, if his statements are taken at face value. The Voice of America article contains the following:
"U.S. intelligence officials say the voice heard on an audiotape aired Thursday on Arab television is indeed that of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. In the taped message, he threatens more attacks on the United States, but says there can be a truce in the war on terror if U.S. forces pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq."
According to the transcript, bin Laden does not make any direct statement linking the truce to U.S. forces unilaterally withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq. The only direct reference he makes to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is when he refers to U.S. public opinion polls "which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq". He refers to Afghanistan and Iraq in relation to the truce in what appear to be deliberately vague terms:
"We do not object to a long-term truce with you on the basis of fair conditions that we respect.
"We are a nation, for which God has disallowed treachery and lying.
"In this truce, both parties will enjoy security and stability and we will build Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the war. . . .
If you have a genuine will to achieve security and peace, we have already answered you.
Bin Laden's current truce offer is not the first but one of a number of peace overtures that typically accompany his statements. While intelligence experts conclude that it is a sign of weakness and that its intent is to weaken public support for the Bush administration's conduct of its "war on terrorism", these interpretations fail to explain how it advances al-Qaeda's objectives for bin Laden to express interest in a truce.
While bin Laden's speech lends itself to a variety of interpretations, it does not specifically state that al-Qaeda intends to single-handedly rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, it does not state that the U.S. must unilaterally withdraw from these regions, but rather that the U.S. must stop fighting Muslims "on our land". If these statements are taken at face value, bin Laden's lack of specificity might well be construed to justify the commencement of truce negotiations to determine what "conditions", if any, the parties might find mutually acceptable.
If the Bush administration does not see fit to enter into such negotiations, which apparently it does not, members of the international community and global civil society skilled in nonviolent conflict resolution have every reason to take up this challenge, as outlined in "Time for Multilateral Negotiations with the al Qaeda Movement". Security analysts agree, particularly in the light of post-9/11 attacks on Madrid and London, that the globalized al Qaeda movement and its autonomous members worldwide now operating in more than 70 countries continue to possess the capacity to inflict wide-scale damage in future attacks on the U.S. mainland and major cities abroad.
If truce negotiations offer any possibilities, however remote and improbable, of preventing such attacks and future loss of life, what reason could there be to reject them out of hand? In light of the fact that civil society constituents have been told by their governments that their military forces cannot protect them against the terrorist attacks they acknowledge are on their way, is it not in global civil society's interest to start truce talks through their own rapidly increasing conflict-resolving NGOs and umbrella groups, such as the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and the European Centre for Conflict Prevention? Now that U.S. military force has proved counter-productive, by increasing rather than reducing the number of terrorists and their supporters in the world, is it not in the interest of global civil society to start worldwide multilateral truce talks with the members, supporters and representatives of the al Qaeda movement who are willing to come to the negotiating table to identify the root causes of all forms of terrorism and what can be done to eradicate them nonviolently?
Osama bin Laden Raises Possibility of Truce with U.S. in al-Jazeera Tape
Jonathan Schell's article, "Faith and Fraud" in the November 6 issue of The Nation, argues that the goal of the Bush presidency has not been governing but rather acquiring, increasing and consolidating the power of the Republican Party. Schell joins Thomas Hartmann in zeroing in on the precarious state of the American democracy that has resulted from this power grab, per Hartmann's dramatic piece, "They Died So Republicans Could Take the Senate", CommonDreams.org, June 20, 2005.
Seen in an historical perspective, Schell's and Hartmann's analysis, and the recent revelations of Lawrence Wilkerson that a "cabal" appears to be operating out of the office of the American presidency, support the view that the Bush administration's seizure of power is the culmination of three decades of work carried out by a disciplined, multi-generational political vanguard of wealthy elites from the U.S. banking and financial services sector and core members of the military-industrial complex.
One of the vanguard's first objectives was to glom onto a grassroots electoral base that could give it electoral victories. It did this by instigating a culture war between right wing Christian Evangelicals and mainstream Americans, which it used to create a grassroots political organization controlled by the GOP large enough to elect Republican candidates at all levels of government. That goal was achieved at the national level with the election of Ronald Reagon.
The vanguard's second goal was to start transferring even more wealth to the wealthy than they already had, by means of tax cuts and by allowing free market forces to pull the financial rug out from under middle class and working families. By "starving the beast" through severe reductions in tax revenues that could be used for federal, state and local social programs and entitlements, the capacity of governmental authorities to "protect the general welfare" has become a shadow of its former self. The realization of this goal has been so successful that the middle class appears to be sinking rapidly into the ranks of the indebted working poor many of whom are on the verge of destitution themselves.
The vanguard's third goal was to enable the party and its allies to become "the imperial ruler of the globe", to use Schell's words. Their success in globalizing the world's economy via free market forces they control over the past 20 years needs no elaboration. The invasion and occupation of Iraq is the most dramatic first leg of their 21st century journey, and by the vanguard's criteria, things are not going too badly. The most important strategic victory attained by means of the Iraq invasion is that Bush administration's announcement that it was in the offing just before the 2002 Congressional elections enabled the GOP to gain control of both houses of the U.S. Congress and Bush to win re-election despite his previously sagging approval ratings.
The invasion itself allowed the Bush administration to dramatically expand its military presence in the Middle East. More than a dozen permanent military bases have been established in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, the largest U.S. embassy in the world is being constructed inside the "green zone" in Baghdad, and U.S. interests have seized control of the country's economy and oil fields. (The permanence of U.S. installations in Iraq suggests that the reason the "cabal" never bothered to develop an "exit strategy" is that it never intends to leave.) Although the insurgents and terrorists keep blowing up the oil pipelines, the administration has unlimited military resources to back-up its contention that it can eventually wipe them out. By continued detentions, torture and execution of countless numbers of suspects anywhere in the world where they can be apprehended, it apparently believes that it can prevent terrorist attacks from interfering with the global expansion of its military facilities and the deployment of its attack forces abroad.
In the meantime, the Department of Defense has taken center stage inside the U.S. as the only institution that has the manpower and logistical capabilities to protect American citizens who are in harm's way. This is mainly due to the fact that the Defense department had deployed core elements of the National Guard's reserves of manpower and materiel abroad, leaving most states without adequate first responders. After hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and signs of civil disorder appeared, only the Defense Department was able to restore order by sending in its forces, which apparently included private defense contractors transferred from Iraq.
In the aftermath, the Bush administration has sent up several trial balloons apprently testing the waters to see whether there would be any substantial opposition to moves it is said to be anticipating to authorize the deployment of military forces throughout the U.S. to cope with future natural disasters like hurricanes and epidemics like the avian flu. This would represent the ultimate triumph of the vanguard's militarized single-party state.
If the foregoing analysis holds water, what we may be seeing now is the result of a 30 year incremental coup d'etat in which the vanguard of a single-party militarized state has been seizing slowly but surely uncontestable power over the whole country. Falling approval ratings, the indictment of a high-level White House official, skirmishes between the ruling Republicans and minority party Democrats in the U.S. Congress are but ineffectual, rearguard actions. The vanguard and its patrons appear to be in firm control and there are few, if any, signs on the horizon of anything that could dislodge them in the near-term. With the easily corruptible electronic voting machines installed in every state of the union with no verifiable paper trail, even a counter-revolution at the polls could be sabotaged without a trace.
If there is to be any change in the way this single-party regime is conducting itself, it will have to come from the international community and global civil society at large in alliance with internal U.S. oppposition. If there is to be any means of saving innocent civilians from the cross-fires of the Bush administration's and al Qaeda's terrorist conflict, it will have to come from international initiatives, as outlined in Time for multilateral negotiations with the al Qaeda movement .
According to a former high level state department insider, Lawrence Wilkerson, the Bush administration has put the American people in grave danger by replacing traditional national security policy decision-makers and institutional checks and balances with a secretive and unaccountable cabal. In particular, Wilkerson alleges that the damage done by the Bush administration's cabal and its ill-conceived policies on the treatment of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere will bring shame to the American people when they fully come to terms with what has been done.
Wilkerson, who served for three years as chief of staff to former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell, went public on October 19, 2005 at a New America Foundation forum in Washington, D.C. and blew the whistle on what he calls the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. He accused the cabal of masterminding the poorly planned and executed U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. By deliberately excluding traditional participants and agencies that have always been an integral part of the national security policy-making process, the cabal devised policies, strategies and tactics that were so unrealistic and ill-suited to actual conditions that they are increasing rather than decreasing violent deaths and terrorist attacks in the country.
Reviving Dwight Eisenhower's warning that the American people must vigilantly safeguard the republic against the intrigues of the "military-industrial complex" and the defense industry that drives it, Wilkerson used the forum to sound the alarm over the dangers U.S. citizens now face as a result of the cabal's weakening of the decision-making capabilities of the federal government and its capacity to protect the national interest. Should a nuclear bomb go off in an American city, or natural catastrophes or pandemics like the looming bird flu hit the U.S. mainland, U.S. citizens cannot count on the government in power to protect them. It is too inept at making decisions that work, as its response to the Katrina disaster has demonstrated. The chaos that is likely to ensue from any one of these calamites will reveal a government no better equipped to defend the general welfare than that which existed before the Declaration of Independence.
According to Wilkerson, vice president Cheney and secretary of defense Rumsfeld form the core of the cabal. George W. Bush becomes an "integral" part of it whenever his intervention is needed. The cabal has been aided in concentrating power and carving out its pivotal role in policy-making, he asserted, by the carry over and expansion into the Bush administration of the influence of Cold War defense contractors. In fact, Wilkerson accused Cheney, who previous served as secretary of defense, of actually being "a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about . . . in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex". He asserted that the contemporary core of the military-industrial complex are defense contractors who -- like Lockheed, Grumman and Raytheon -- have become even more powerful now because "they're in every state. They've got every congressman, every senator. They've got it covered."
According to Wilkerson's analysis, the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal's power is a result not only of the influence of the military-industrial complex, and Congressional default, but of the failure of senior level federal officials in the executive branch to discharge their responsibility to serve the public interest. He singled out Condoleezi Rice in her role as national security advisor for egregiously failing to carry out the traditional and pivotal function of the advisor to bring together the diverse views of all the stakeholders in the national security policy-making mix. She was more at pains to cultivate her influence with the president, he asserted, than to ensure the viewpoints of all key agencies were heard and heeded in an even-handed process in which all options were transparently considered.
The cabal described by Wilkerson sits astride the presidency and the department of defense (DOD), which is endowed with a $400 billion dollar annual budget that is periodically enriched with the addition of hundreds of billions of dollars authorized for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan by Congress, which is controlled by Republicans. By contrast, the U.S. department of state receives only $30 billion annually, so little that Wilkerson questioned whether it remains a key player in the policy-making mix at all. Clearly driven by unusual patriotism, passion and fear for the future, Wilkerson openly lamented the state department's fall from grace, likening its beseiged, barricaded embassies abroad to prisons -- "concertina-wired Abu Ghraibs".
So obscure are the rationales for the cabal's decision-making and so opaque are their decision-making processes, Wilkerson alleges, that few in the policy-making milieus he frequented understand what led the cabal to its decision to invade Iraq and why post-invasion decisions have led to such dismal outcomes. He asserted that the U.S. does have "strategic interests" in the Middle East that justify its presence in Iraq and, quite surprisingly, that if it does not hold the course it will have to return within 10 years with 5 million Americans to take over the entire region. But none of these interests can be served, he said, without thorough going reform of federal decision-making to prevent similar concentrations of power in the future.
His recommendations, which focused on revamping and re-integrating the structures and processes of federal decision-making, raised as many questions as they answered. Can they work when the influence of civil society, the American public at large, has been dwarfed by a national government that is dominated by a single political party, and its free market economic allies and the military-industrial complex? What groups outside of the incumbent administration have the motivation and leverage to provide an impetus for the reforms?
Can Wilkerson's remedies be put into action after a political party comprised of wealthy elites and core members of the military-industrial complex has spent 30 years currying the favor of a right wing electoral base of tens of millions of right wing conservatives and religious fundamentalists?
Can they work when that same political party has gained control of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, as has the Republican Party, and when a majority of the members of the Supreme Court have been nominated by Republicans?
Can they work when core functions of the democratic process have been corrupted by campaign finance practices that allow special interest groups to buy votes through campaign contributions and their lobbyists to determine the outcomes of legislative processes? When both political parties, Republican and Democrat, have so severely gerrymandered electoral districts throughout the country that few races are competitive and few insurgents have a chance to present their candidacies? When electronic voting machines and the networks used to tally and transmit votes can easily be rigged by either political party in states where they are in power?
On September 6-7, 2005, Washington, D.C. was the scene of a unique dialogue among national and international policy-makers. It was sponsored by the New America Foundation and six institutional co-sponsors. Collaborators included think-tanks of all persuasions and the Club of Madrid, a democracy-building consortium of 55 former presidents of democratic countries. A number of new and provocative policy options were put on the table for dealing with the underlying causes and consequences of 21st century terrorist attacks and the Bush administration's "global war on terrorism".
Despite being held "inside the beltway" only two blocks from the White House, what made the dialogue unique was the fact that views diverging from those of the Bush administration regarding the causes of terrorism were seriously considered, including those of the few Muslims in attendance. Most notably, economic and political causes of 21st century terrorist attacks dating back to U.S. and Western colonial interference in the Middle East were examined and brought up to date. Continued interferences that were identified include persistent U.S. support of despotic, theocratic regimes in the region and elsewhere; its uncompromising support of Israel and apparent disdain for the rights of Palestinians; the implanting of U.S. military installations on Middle East soil; and U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 in search of oil, additional permanent military bases and opportunities to create unfettered free market economies.
Government officials, security analysts, academic experts and journalists from the U.S. and Europe emphasized the counterproductive consequences of U.S. military operations in Iraq that have dramatically increased terrorist attacks and anti-U.S. sentiment around the world. These operations include egregious U.S. violation of international laws through its detention, rendition and interrogation practices that have resulted in the torture and inhumane treatment of civilians and combatants taken prisoner by U.S. forces.
Several speakers proposed unique policy options that have rarely if ever been discussed on U.S. soil. One was that the time has come to negotiate a nonviolent solution to the conflict between the U.S. and the emerging global disapora of successors to the original al Qaeda movement. Another was that the economic and political grievances of indigenous Muslim groups must be resolved by global civil society and the international community of law-abiding nations - not the U.S. government - to assure that these groups can freely acquire sustainable livelihoods and political and civil rights without U.S. coercion or interference in their domestic affairs.
Several speakers argued without opposition that the U.S. government under the Bush administration lacks the legitimacy, the know-how and the institutional resources needed to build democracies abroad. The institutional failures of the federal government to protect American citizens from either 9/11 or the far more numerous but preventable human losses from Katrina demonstrate that it has too much work to do at home to shore up its internal defences against natural and terrorist diasters than to dissipate its resources in counterproductive military campaigns abroad.
At the end of the conference, the bipartisan Partnership for a Secure America comprised of incumbent and former Congressional representatives, ambassadors and high level government officials issued a statement calling for a bipartisan approach to developing U.S. foreign policy as it relates to terrorism and national security. A copy of the statement can be found with the summary reports of the conference working groups on the Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose website. The webcast and videotapes of the conference can also be accessed at the site.
Of note is a follow-up event announced at the conference, co-sponsored by the New America Foundation and AmericanRespect.com. An interdisciplinary policy dialogue, BEYOND BULLETS: Economic Strategies in the Fight against Terrorism, will take place on September 21, 2005.
On March 11, 2005, at the conclusion of the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security, the comprehensive Madrid Agenda was issued by 55 former presidents of democratic countries who comprise the Club of Madrid. They convened the Summit under the patronage of the King of Spain to commemorate the victims of the Madrid terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004, and identify ways to defend democracy and protect human security while preventing future terrorist attacks.