[wvns] Eric Walberg: Bush's Divine Comedy

Vermont poll says 2/3 want to impeach Cheney, 55% of US want to
impeach him. Maybe it will happen?

Bush's Divine Comedy: The good, the bad...
Eric Walberg
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/871/special.htm

"Dante Running from the Three Beasts", "The Harlot and the Giant", and
below, "Lucifer" 1824-27 engravings of Dante's Inferno by William
Blake. Replace Dante with Rumsfeld, the Harlot with Rice, and the
giant with Gates.

New enemies in United States President George W Bush's wars are
popping up in unexpected places. The latest one is peaceful Europe,
where determined demonstrators and human rights lawyers recently
ambushed former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld at a breakfast
meeting in Paris organised by Foreign Policy magazine. He fled,
fearing arrest over charges of ordering and authorising torture of
detainees at both Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It seems that even the election of an American- friendly French
president is no guarantee of immunity in gay Paris for American
officials anymore. Under international law, authorities in France are
obliged to open an investigation when a complaint is made while the
alleged torturer is on French soil. According to activists in France,
who greeted Rumsfeld with shouts of "murderer" and "war criminal", US
Embassy officials remained tight- lipped about the former defense
secretary's whereabouts citing security reasons. He was whisked off to
Germany, where a similar writ against him was quashed recently, but
under the Schengen agreement that ended border checkpoints across a
large part of the European Union, French law enforcement agents are
allowed to cross the border into Germany in pursuit of a fleeing
fugitive. "Rumsfeld must be feeling how Saddam Hussein felt when US
forces were hunting him down," activist Tanguy Richard said. "He may
never end up being hanged like his old friend, but he must learn that
in the civilised world, war crime doesn't pay."

General Augusto Pinochet's arrest in Britain in 1999 is the most
famous case of successfully arresting such a high level pro-Western
war criminal, though he managed to die in bed at home before any
authorities could bring him to book. Various Israelis have had to cut
short their trips abroad to avoid arrest, and now Rumsfeld has had a
taste of this medicine.

The International Federation for Human Rights, the Centre for
Constitutional Rights, the European Centre for Constitutional and
Human Rights, and the French League for Human Rights filed the
complaint after learning that Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit Paris.
This trend of pursuing war criminals who like to travel does not
portend well for many other participants of Bush's regime. Just think
of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz or the seemingly harmless war
criminal Condoleezza Rice. No concert tours of Europe in your
retirement, Dr Rice. Dubya had never travelled outside the US until
shortly before his "election" seven years ago, so he won't lose much
sleep if he can't see the Eiffel Tower in his twilight years.

The guilt for the many crimes that Bush and company have perpetrated
goes deep, and many figures will, like their Israeli counterparts,
have to have international lawyers on retainers, not to mention
private detectives and bodyguards, keeping track of legal proceedings
against them and/or possible acts of revenge. There are possibly
millions of Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Brits, Americans -- hey,
victims and relatives of victims of Bush's wars can be found in just
about every country around the world. The next few decades will not be
easy for these unfortunate folk.

The creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002 was
supposed to herald a new age where political leaders would think twice
before invading other countries illegally and torturing and murdering
foreign populations or even their own local people, as in the case of
Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Leaders from the latter have endured the most
famous prosecutions, though the trial of Slobodan Milosevich left a
bitter taste in many mouths, with the telltale odour of hypocrisy and
Western scheming, and Milosevich's suspicious death in the Hague still
raising questions.

The US under president Bill Clinton signed on to the ICC but only to
influence its agenda. There was never any intention of submitting it
to the Senate for ratification, and since then the US has blackmailed
and bullied anyone it could to sign so-called "Article 98 agreements".
In 2003, the United States stopped military aid to 35 countries (among
them nine European countries). In 2005, Angola became the 100th
country to cave in to US pressure to avoid the suspension of military
assistance and Economic Support Fund aid. In March 2006, Rice, bless
her heart, admitted that the US position on Article 98 agreements was
"sort of the same as shooting ourselves in the foot".

Amnesty International and the European Commission Legal Service argue
that these agreements are not valid, that Article 98 refers to Status
of Forces Agreements, mission agreements and extradition treaties, not
to a general exclusion for other states' nationals from being handed
over to the ICC. In October 2002, the Council of the EU adopted a
common position permitting member states to enter into Article 98
agreements with the US, but not as general protection of US nationals.
So US citizens are still subject to prosecution by many of the 140 ICC
member- countries, if the unlucky parties can be nabbed while on
foreign soil, even if those countries have signed the suspect Article
98 agreements.

Too bad Rumsfeld didn't pay heed at the time to the warnings of the
senior diplomats who resigned in the months building up to Bush's
invasion of Iraq in 2003 in protest against his warmongering. John
Brown, who joined the State Department in 1981, said he resigned
because he could not support Washington's Iraq policy, which he said
was fomenting a massive rise in anti-US sentiment around the world. In
a resignation letter to secretary of state Colin Powell, Brown said he
agreed with John Brady Kiesling, a diplomat at the US Embassy in
Athens who had quit in February over Bush's apparent intent on
invading Iraq. "I am joining my colleague in submitting my resignation
from the Foreign Service effective immediately because I cannot in
good conscience support President Bush's war plans against Iraq.

Throughout the globe, the United States is becoming associated with
the unjustified use of force," Brown said in the letter, a copy of
which he sent to Agence France Presse. "The president's disregard for
views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy,
is giving birth to an anti- American century. I joined the Foreign
Service because I love our country. Respectfully, Mr Secretary, I am
now bringing this calling to a close, with a heavy heart but for the
same reason that I embraced it."

Clearly these honourable diplomats resigned rather than waited for
their pensions, realising that this was their only meaningful way of
protesting against the escalation of US crimes abroad. Maybe they also
wanted to be able to take pictures of the Eiffel Tower in their old
age. Imagine how humiliating, if you are a thinking person and have
any ethical standards at all, to have to defend with a straight face
the current policies of the US government, year in, year out, that is,
until you get your head blown off by one of the millions of people
wishing to avenge their personal loss.

... and the ugly

The main theatre of Bush's war on the home front has been the State
Department. The front opened with his unprecedented appointment of a
general as secretary of state, though Colin Powell was probably one of
the most "diplomatic" of Bush's appointments. Powell proved to be a
relative wimp around the White House, and resigned in relief after
four years of being forced to spout most undiplomatic lies.

Condoleezza Rice's ascendancy to the post, which made slightly more
sense considering she was a professor of foreign relations, should
have been greeted with relief by the staff. But the underlying
tensions between State and Defense continue to fester -- perhaps
metastasise is a more appropriate term. The US military quietly and
repeatedly complains that its forces have been pressed into service in
so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) that should have been
filled by State, Commerce and Agriculture Department personnel. Yes,
enlisted soldiers can be ordered to go anywhere, and apparently for
indefinitely extended tours of duty, unlike the laid-back civilians.

But this is changing for the better, at least from the armed forces'
point of view with two new developments on the home front portending
the creeping militarisation of State. First, the State Department has
said it will "require" its diplomats to staff its embassy in Iraq due
to a lack of volunteers. The assignments are limited to one year,
unlike the usual 2-3 year extendible foreign postings, and Iraq has
the highest pay of all, including an astounding five free trips home
during the 12- month postings. Forty to 50 new posts will be added
next year to the 200 jobs at the embassy, the biggest in the world.
There are few takers, despite a standing offer of two salaried years
learning Arabic prior to going to Iraq. According to Harry Thomas,
state department human resource director, only those with compelling
reasons, such as medical problems or extreme personal hardships, will
be exempt from disciplinary action for refusing to go. "We have all
taken an oath to serve our country and so if someone decides they do
not want to go, then we would consider appropriate actions. We have
many options, including dismissal from the foreign service."

This new directive created a storm, and the usually quiet corridors of
State were the scene of a noisy protest last week. A meeting of 300
diplomats, infuriated at the move sprung without any notice or
discussion, confronted Thomas. Jack Croddy, a senior foreign service
officer and ex-NATO political adviser, told the meeting, "I'm sorry,
but basically this is a potential death sentence and you know it. Who
will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?" One
veteran of a nightmare posting in Basra, Rachel Schnelling, appealed
to Thomas, "we have a moral imperative as an agency to take care of
people who come back with war wounds. I asked for treatment and I
didn't get any of it," she said in comments greeted with a standing
ovation.

American Foreign Service Association President John Naland said a
recent survey found only 12 per cent of the union's membership
believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was "fighting for them".

Thomas shot back, "don't you or anybody else stand there and tell me I
don't care about my colleagues. I am insulted." When he had calmed
down, he went on to explain that the State Department had made
"directed" assignments before, such as in 1969 when an entire junior
foreign officer class was sent to Vietnam. Thomas pooh-poohed
suggestions that young Americans would be deterred from joining the
foreign service given the increasingly criminal nature of US
activities abroad and the need by the diplomatic corps to defend and
even promote these actions. "After Google and Disney, we are the most
popular place for people to work," Thomas said, referring to a recent
survey. Of course, this can be interpreted in a less kindly light --
American youth are living in blissful ignorance of the world, fed
cultural pap the likes of Mickey Mouse, and don't know what they're in
for.

Besides having to live in war zones and defend the criminal policies
which the military is busy carrying out at present, another gripe that
the diplos have with the military is their reliance on mercenaries to
protect them, since the army is unable to do so. Richard Griffin,
assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, recently
resigned (in protest? disgrace?) after the release of a damning report
on the lack of adequate monitoring of the Blackwater security firm.
Within hours, the Iraqi government revoked the immunity from
prosecution granted to private security firms. The most infamous
incident of Blackwater's policy of "shoot first, ask later" was on 16
September in which employees of Blackwater killed 17 innocent Iraqis
in Baghdad. The guards were escorting a US state department convoy.

Despite the Iraqi government's attempts to legislate otherwise, the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) stipulates that the
"multinational force, foreign liaison missions, their personnel,
property, funds and assets and all international consultants shall be
immune from Iraqi legal process". Good thing for the Aussies and
Brits, as murder and pillage are not limited to the US private thugs.

On 9 October Australian Unity Resources Group guards fired upon a car
in central Baghdad killing two women, and on 18 October guards of a
British security company fired on a car wounding three people. And
this is only the tip of the massive mercenary iceberg in Iraq, which
no one bothers (or allows) keeping tabs on. It's not at all clear that
it is legal for diplomats to be hiring mercenaries to "protect" them,
and again, who wants to face the possibility of being charged as an
accomplice to murder or whatever years down the line in some tinpot
European country?

But a second development in the ongoing militarisation of State has
been courtesy of the military's new allies in the diplomats' own Ivory
Tower colleagues. The US Army and Marine Corps recently published its
new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24), its new Little Red
Book, at the prestigious University of Chicago Press, tastefully
printed in a camouflage, faux-field ready edition, designed to slip
into flack jackets or Urban Outfitter accessory bags. General (Dr)
David Petraeus himself wrote the forward along with posterboy
Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, and Harvard JFK School of Government's
Sarah Sewell the introduction. It has spawned a minor media orgy, with
sexy Nagl decked out in parade dress pitching it in Newsweek and on
all the TV networks as Petraeus's intellectually fuelled "smart bomb"
-- the secret weapon for victory in Iraq. In what looks like a
surprise meeting of minds with the armchair diplomats the Manual is
being hyped by all as a move away from the crude logic of "shock and
awe" in the common goal of pacifying the natives, or as it's called in
newspeak, "winning hearts and minds", through a new appreciation of
local culture. The big stick's "speak softly".

A co-author, one of a supposedly new breed of warrior-
anthropologists, Montgomery McFate (curiously a woman), PhD (Yale), is
currently the US Army's Human Terrain System's senior social science
adviser. Human Terrain Teams (HTTs) -- I'm not making this up -- are
now embedding anthropologists with troops operating in Iraq and
Afghanistan, using ethnographic knowledge to advise and inform troops
in the field while travelling with armed escorts (Blackwater, anyone?)
and are, in some instances, themselves armed and wearing uniforms, yet
McFate incredibly maintains that these anthropologists are in
compliance with basic anthropological ethical standards, that
terrified locals used in research projects participate under
conditions of "voluntary informed consent". When asked how voluntary
ethical informed consent was produced in the presence of occupation
soldiers and mercenaries, McFate told writer and anthropologist David
Price that was not a problem because "indigenous local people out in
rural Afghanistan are smart, and they can draw a distinction between a
lethal unit of the US military and a non-lethal unit."

Not surprisingly, it turns out the Manual was cribbed from many
unacknowledged sources, including T E Lawrence, whose services to
British imperialism in the Middle East won him a knighthood (which he
curiously refused) almost a century ago, belying the argument that
such intellectuals constitute a "new breed". Whether these latter-day
Machiavellis plagiarise each other or not is hard to get too worked up
about when the Baghdad Museum is ransacked and a country destroyed,
helped along by the CPA, HTTs and PRTs, and it is unlikely that this
Manual will win any more hearts and minds than the shock-and-awe
bombing, but it is winning hearts and minds in America, apparently
convincing an avalanche of American youth to opt for the foreign
service instead of Disney. A truly sad testament to the state of US
youth and scholarship, prostituting themselves as cheerleaders for war
criminals. Nagl gets it right in his sound byte on the popular Daily
Show : "If I could sum up the book in just a few words, it would be:
'Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill."

Veiled conscription and now the Manual reveal the militarisation of
both the form and content of American diplomacy. Reality is imitating
art, in this case, the art of war. The thugs are winning not only on
the home front, but in the battlefield, where PRTs blur into HTTs,
both staffed with diplomats and their grad student colleagues,
bringing the now-conscripted diplomats' war-diplomacy smack-dab into
the hearts and minds of the terrified natives who haven't yet become
collateral damage to the occupation forces' war.

But this is exactly what happened in Vietnam, so there is really
nothing terribly new here. When you have a warmonger in the White
House, who happens to be both departments' boss by the way, war trumps
diplomacy. It doesn't take a nuclear physicist to figure that one out.
And the red glow at the end of the tunnel makes the end result look
more like a red-light district for the diplos. Not to worry, the
soldiers will be sure to come and visit.

But seriously, there are many generals and soldiers who dislike the
wars they are being forced to fight just as much as the vast majority
of US intellectuals and diplos. If only these antagonists could focus
their wrath on their common real enemy staring at them from the other
end of the tunnel. There's lots of antiwar sentiment and awareness of
the duplicity of the Bush regime, as the ongoing countrywide
demonstrations show. This is a lose-lose situation for everyone apart
from Bush's cronies. All the grounds to impeach their boss are in
place, just waiting for a catalyst.

And with Democratic congressman and presidential candidate Dennis
Kucinich's motion last week to impeach Vice- President Richard Cheney,
Bush's Divine Comedy Part II -- the Purgatory -- is beginning to
unfold, however haltingly. Kucinich didn't dare to attack Bush
himself, focussing on Cheney's lies about Iraq's supposed weapons of
mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda, and his threats of war against
Iran. The resolution was referred to the House Judiciary Committee,
where it will no doubt languish. Bush effectively built himself a
firewall against impeachment long ago by declaring a state of war. To
impeach a president-at-war and admit to the world that his wars were
illegal would be unprecedented in history and is virtually impossible.
This volume of Bush's biography will take a long time to write.

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