Kemstone's Journal

Listening to these Republican candidates talk about Obama, I often wish we actually had the kind of president they’re attacking. The paint him as some kind of progressive lion, zealously going after the super-rich on behalf of the working class, steadfastly holding to an ideology of civil liberties even if it compromises America’s safety, and systematically dismantling our empire abroad, all the while apologizing to the world for our previous transgressions. I don’t know who this person is that they keep railing against, but it’s not the Obama I know.

The fact is that the Republicans are banking on the majority of their base having a completely distorted view of the president thanks to conservative news sources like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. These media outlets have made a calculated decision to create their own narrative about who Obama is and what he wants to do, to emphasize every tiny little thing that supports that narrative and de-emphasize, ignore, or even outright lie about anything that doesn’t.

The Obama you see on Fox News is not a real person but actually a fictional character based on the stereotype of liberals that conservatives have in their minds. He wants to raise taxes, impose strict regulations on business, cut defense, eliminate gun rights, encourage more abortions and gay marriages, read terrorists their rights, and purge all religion from the public sphere. When the Republican presidential candidates talk to their debate audiences and the crowds at their campaign rallies about Obama, they’re talking about this guy, a radically liberal president who—unfortunately for them—doesn’t actually exist.

The real Obama hasn’t raised taxes. He’s far too timid to take the political risk. He’s cut taxes across the board and agreed to extend the Bush tax-cuts for two years. He says he’ll fight to let them expire next time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

As for the idea that he’s imposing crippling regulations on businesses, that is simply absurd. Barack Obama is the Goldman Sachs president. His entire financial team and his last two chiefs of staff have been Wall Street insiders, and according to internal memos it would appear that they dictate his every move in that area. The “historic financial reform” legislation that passed last year is widely acknowledged by bankers to be a complete joke. Not one of the people who caused the financial crisis of 2008 has been prosecuted for committing fraud, and Wall Street continues to thrive thanks to taxpayer bailouts (which Obama supported) while the rest of the country struggles.

I hear over and over again that Obama has drastically cut defense spending. Simply not true. Defense spending has increased every year since Obama took office, it’s just that the rate of increase has gone slightly down thanks to the cutting of a few strategically unnecessary projects like stealth-fighters designed to fight the Cold War. Some might say that it’s merely stretching the truth to refer to a slower rate of increase as a “cut”, but I call it lying.

And as for the whole general idea that Obama is weak on defense, consider his doubling-down in Afghanistan and the recent foray into Libya. He withdrew troops from Iraq but only because he was forced to under a treaty signed by the Bush administration which he tried and failed to renegotiate.

On gun rights, Obama has not lifted a finger to do anything about it, other than quietly write an op-ed on the issue after the Gabby Giffords shooting, in which he did not endorse a single reform that didn’t enjoy at least a 60% approval in polls. And afterwards he did absolutely nothing to attempt to initiate those reforms.

On social issues, one can point to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and pretend that Obama is the “fierce advocate” of gay rights that he claimed to be, but he dragged his feet on that issue for quite some time and he still refuses to publicly come out in support of gay marriage. And on abortion, what has Obama done? Nothing. He won’t even touch that issue with a ten-foot pole, so afraid is he of the potential criticism. But he will make it harder for young women to obtain birth control.

When it comes to the idea that Obama would rather read terrorists their rights than keep America safe, this is where the distance between the real Obama and the fictional Obama is at its widest. Not only has Obama continued the civil liberties abuses that began under the Bush administration, but he’s actually expanded them, to the point where now it’s written into the law that the president has the power to throw American citizens into prison without a trial purely on suspicion of ties to terrorism. He appeared to make a genuine effort to close down Guantanamo as soon as he took office, but when that failed he never brought the issue up again, and the prison remains open and could conceivably remain so for generations. He doesn’t do waterboarding anymore but he hasn’t prosecuted anyone responsible for that war crime, all the while bringing the hammer down on whistleblowers like Bradley Manning who dared to make the abuses of our military public. Finally, if you really want to know whether or not Obama is soft on terror, you can ask Osama bin Laden.

And lastly, there’s the matter of religion. Newt Gingrich told a crowd of supporters that as soon as he takes office, he’ll repeal every single anti-religious act passed by the Obama administration. That shouldn’t take long, as no such acts have been passed by the real Obama. The fictional Obama is the one carrying out this “war on religion” we keep hearing about. After all, that guy is secretly Muslim and born in Kenya, and obviously on a crusade to undermine America’s Christian moral foundation.

Running against a fictional character may work for the Republican candidates in the primary, but it’s going to blow up in their faces if they try that in the general election, which is exactly what Obama is counting on. If Mitt Romney accuses Obama in a debate of raising taxes, Obama will be poised and ready with the facts to prove that he has not. The same goes for the accusation that he’s cut defense, gone after gun rights, and so on. The major political advantage Obama has garnered for himself by going against his liberal base time and again on nearly every single issue is that the Republicans can’t make a fact-based attack on him for doing any of the things that liberal presidents are normally criticized for doing. The best they can do is say that he talked about doing such things in the 2008 campaign.

If they’re forced to run against the real Obama, there are plenty of things to criticize him for, but they are guilty of those same things themselves. Romney could expose every last way in which Obama has been a puppet of Wall Street, but he knows quite well that he’s running to be the next puppet of the very same interests.

But the truly funny thing is that aside from his ties to the financial industry, most conservatives would like the real Obama if they knew who he was. If you just changed the D in front of his name to an R and read off a list of the actions he’s taken since his term began, they’d understand him to be a moderate who is slightly left-of-center on some issues but right-of-center on most.

The real Obama governs like a moderate Republican of former days, before the party drifted off to its right-wing fringe. The real Obama would win a national election against any of these clowns the Republicans have put forward in this primary, and they know it. That’s why they have no choice but to run against a fictional character instead, and it’s why they’re going to lose the general election when the curtain is pulled back and independent voters get a good look at who Obama actually is.

The Iowa caucuses were last night, and after months and months of exciting horse-race politics in which nearly every single Republican candidate surged to front-runner status and then fell back again, the winner was the guy everybody originally thought would win.

Mitt Romney came in first place ahead of Rick Santorum by just 8 votes. The narrow margin made the night as dramatic as the rest of the race has been so far, but like the entire presidential electoral process in general, it was mostly inconsequential. Santorum only did so well because his popularity happened to peak at just the right time, but like every other alternative-to-Romney candidate in the field, his numbers will plummet once people start paying more attention to him.

And so as early as January 5, with only one primary contest finished and ten months to go before the general election, I can boldly pronounce who the winner of the 2012 election will be: Wall Street, and the rest of Corporate America.

It’s all over, folks. The corporate plutocracy that owns the media and our politicians now has this one in the bag. They already own Barack Obama, and they’ve owned Mitt Romney for quite some time. Both of these guys have demonstrated that they will do whatever the big corporations want them to do, with a few minor exceptions Obama has to make for political reasons (e.g. the consumer financial protection bureau).

The choice between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is a choice between two different brands of the same product. It’s like being offered Pepsi or Coke when what you really want is orange juice. (Or more accurately, it’s like a choice between Coca-Cola and Royal Crown Cola, both of which are owned by the same company.)

The powerful financial interests which make up the establishment would call the shots no matter who gets elected, be it Obama, Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, or almost any of the others. There are only three candidates in the entire race who would not be beholden to them: 1- Rocky Anderson, who is a third-party candidate and therefore has no chance, 2- Buddy Roemer (a.k.a. “who is that?”) and 3- Ron Paul.

Yes, the last best chance for real change in 2012 was a Ron Paul victory in Iowa. He was the only real threat to the establishment, but they were able to snuff it out in Iowa. Unfortunately, he was too easy of a target.

Don’t get me wrong—there’s a lot to dislike about Ron Paul. Those racist newsletters are a disastrous reflection on his character and his obvious lies to pretend he knew nothing about them made it clear that he’s not quite as honest as he seems. His die-hard libertarianism, if fully implemented, would be a disaster of epic proportions.

But he’s not running for dictator. He’s running for president, and the president does not have nearly the kind of power it would require for him to implement his entire agenda. He would try to eliminate the department of commerce, of education, of energy, the EPA, and so on, but Congress wouldn’t let him. There would be bipartisan opposition to all extremist legislation he proposes, and while a few Republicans would take his side in some fights, the vast majority are owned by the establishment and the establishment would make defeating him their top priority.

On the other hand, there are certain things the president has the power to do all on his own without approval from Congress. He could and would stand against the military industrial complex and get our troops out of Afghanistan immediately, saving billions of dollars of the national budget currently being wasted. He could end the war on drugs, freeing up law enforcement to focus on more serious crimes and deal a death-blow to the cartels. Finally, he could aggressively go after and prosecute every single one of those Wall Street bankers who committed the fraud that crashed the economy and then walked away with millions in taxpayer-funded bonuses.

But this is all a fantasy. Ron Paul would never win the Republican nomination, though I think he’d probably stand the best chance of beating Barack Obama because unlike any other Republican he actually appeals to liberals for the reasons stated above. No progressive is going to vote for Romney, but plenty would be tempted to vote for Ron Paul.

At the very least, a Ron Paul nomination would turn the establishment media on its head. The mainstream media, owned by the same corporations that own the government, would throw everything they have at Paul including, possibly, rational arguments over policy! There would be a real debate over things like the proper extent of the role of government in people’s lives, and conservatives would look at his extreme views and be forced to acknowledge that it should at least play some role. There would be a real discussion over the efficacy of the war on drugs, and if enough people look at the statistics it might finally tip the scales against prohibition, an obviously failed and counter-productive policy. Finally, we’d have a real debate over the wars, and with the Democratic candidate in favor of them and the Republican candidate against, people would have to consider their own opinion instead of just accepting the default position of their team.

But the best thing about the imaginary Paul vs. Obama scenario is that Fox News and the rest of the conservative corporate media would take Obama’s side. After all, he’s a part of the establishment and Paul is not. It serves their purposes to be against Obama now because they are still hoping for a more corporate-friendly president, but if Paul were to be the Republican nominee all that nonsense about Obama being a socialist left-wing radical would go straight out the window and the likes of O’Reilly and Hannity would be talking night after night about how Obama has actually been governing pretty much like a moderate Republican.

Sadly, none of that will happen now, so the establishment can rest easy. There will be no real change this year. The middle-class continues to be squeezed and squeezed but the tipping point has not yet been reached and that slowly roasting kettle will not boil over. In 2011 many people finally took to the streets in a genuine rebellion against the establishment, but that political energy will be absorbed by the election as people eventually accept a candidate and line up behind them. Instead of fighting for real change, most of these people will be fighting to re-elect Obama for the sole reason that they believe Romney will be far worse. But in reality, it will make almost no difference.

The American presidential electoral process used to have the potential to bring about change, but ever since the government has been completely absorbed by the corporations and all of the candidates bought by the same interests, it’s become little more than a sideshow—a useful distraction for the politically-active to direct their energy away from actually fighting for real issues. It’s only January, but the election is already over. The 1% win. The rest of us lose.

I’ve remained silent on the Libya issue until now for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that it’s taken me a long time to settle on a position. Even now my opinion is highly nuanced and subject to change as the situation develops and more information comes to light. Normally I’ll only write a blog post when I feel very strongly about something or I have an opinion that I don’t see being expressed much elsewhere, but since this is a rather significant event in modern American history I feel obliged to write down my thoughts even if they’re neither unique nor firmly held.

The question of whether the United States should have gotten involved in the conflict between Gadhafi and the rebels seeking to overthrow him can be approached from two basic standpoints: intentions and consequences. If we take the stated intentions of President Obama at face-value, it seems we did the right thing going in. Gadhafi did promise to murder many thousands of his own people, and if the prevention of genocide isn’t a justifiable reason to use military force then I don’t know what is. I think we have a moral obligation to prevent genocide wherever and whenever we can.

However, it’s hard to justify intervening in Libya when we didn’t also intervene in Rwanda, the Sudan, and Darfur. It calls our motives into question when we selectively intervene like this, and the fact that Libya has oil while these other countries don’t taints the entire moral calculation as to whether or not our intentions here are correct.

But when all is said and done, oil or no oil, consistency or inconsistency, I think it’s better to have done something than to have done nothing. As one commentator said, I’d rather prevent some genocide some of the time than to prevent no genocide any time.

As for judging the rightness of our actions based on the consequences, this is almost impossible at this early stage. We may help the rebels topple Gadhafi and pave the way for a bourgeoning democracy, in which case history will judge our actions quite kindly. We might fail to oust Gadhafi and genocide will occur anyway, in which case all we’ll have done is waste a lot of resources. And we might find ourselves locked in yet another quagmire from which we can’t seem to extract ourselves no matter how many allies initially went in with us, in which case we’ll have another Iraq- or Afghanistan-like situation on our hands and we’ll have to judge Obama just as harshly as we judged Bush for getting us into a mess with no clear plan for getting us out.

But for now, we seem to have prevented Gadhafi from murdering thousands of his own people, so from a standpoint of consequences I would still judge our actions correct at the moment.

Of course it’s even more complicated when you consider some of the side-issues involved here. For one, I think we did the right thing by acting under the banner of the United Nations, letting France make the first move and handing off leadership as soon as possible. The last thing we want is to reinforce the perception of those in the Muslim world that we’ll use any excuse we can to drop bombs on Muslim countries. I think that if we play our cards right, this could really help us change the narrative of Muslim perceptions of the United States. In this case, at least, we are siding with the people against their brutal dictator. If we did this more consistently, I think it would be a far more effective tactic in the “war on terror” than any occupation ever could.

However, we can’t escape the possibility that this whole thing could backfire. If we help the rebels topple Gadhafi and then pull out and say, “you’re on your own” and the situation descends into chaos and violence, we might very well be blamed. Once you extend your hand to help one side win a fight, it could look very bad for us to pull our hand away when the initial fight is over. Conversely, if we stick around to help the freed Libyans in the aftermath of their revolution, we could be perceived as once again meddling in affairs we have no business sticking our noses in. Making sure this is a multi-national operation will help to mitigate that perception, but I worry we may soon find ourselves in a lose-lose situation.

Then there’s the issue of whether Barack Obama should have sought congressional approval for this military action. I am personally very uncomfortable with the idea of the imperial presidency, so I would have liked to see some discussion about this before we went in. I don’t like how the president can just plunge our nation into an international conflict without giving our representatives a chance to debate the merits in public and the media a chance to delve into the details for the sake of the public’s understanding.

From a pragmatist’s standpoint, however, I understand why this particular president would have chosen to bypass this particular congress at this particular moment in American politics. The Republicans will seize any opportunity to weaken the president no matter what the consequences, and handing them a chance to obstruct this military action for the sake of scoring political points would not have been worth the potential loss of tens of thousands of Libyan lives. Still, I would rather have seen some more discussion about this before we went in, and I’m very wary of the idea that any future president can bomb any country for any reason without seeking the approval of the American people in any way.

The final point I want to make is perhaps the only opinion I hold with 100% conviction, and that is that every American with a shred of respect for logic has to admit that the Republican Party has no interest in either ideological consistency or what is best for this country. I don’t think anyone who is honest with themselves could believe that had George W. Bush done the exact same thing in this situation, the Republicans who are currently criticizing Obama wouldn’t have supported him 100%. It should be abundantly clear to any rational person that Republicans and the commentators on Fox News will criticize Obama for anything, for any reason, no matter how much it contradicts positions they’ve previously held.

Either he shouldn’t have intervened at all, he should have intervened sooner, or in Newt Gingrich’s case both—depending on which day you ask. Some who cheered for the Iraq invasion now jeer American intervention as though they’ve always been opposed to it. Some who derided anyone who criticized Bush’s policies at a time of war as “unpatriotic” and accused them of “demoralizing the troops” are the very same people who are now criticizing Obama’s policies at a time or war. Somehow it doesn’t “embolden the enemy” to criticize a Democratic president at a time of war, only a Republican.

And last but certainly not least by far—any Republican who called for intervention (either before or after the actual intervention) should be forced to explain to the American people why we can afford to pay for foreign military campaigns but we have to cut pay for middle-class workers, take away food stamps and heating assistance from the poor, slash Social Security and Medicare, de-fund NPR, bust up the unions, and do all of these other things they insist we must do for the sake of “fiscal responsibility”. If we can afford to send hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cruise missiles to Northern Africa, I think we can afford to hand out a few food stamps.

So these are my thoughts on the Libya question at this point in time. I rarely support the president these days, but on this one I think he did the right thing (although I do have my reservations about his failure to involve Congress). I’m not an ideological pacifist or an isolationist—I do think violence can be justified to prevent more violence and I do think stronger nations ought to defend weaker ones—and I think this falls into the narrow category of morally justifiable military actions. I just wish we were more consistent.

Trouble is hardly ever not brewing on the Korean peninsula, but things have been heating up recently. As the crazed über-narcissistic dictator Kim Jong Il hands the reins of power over to his young and presumably equally narcissistic son Kim Jong Un, North Korea seems to be itching for war with their South Korean enemies. Between the testing of nuclear missiles and this past week’s artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine this escalating into full-scale war.

If that happens, I’ll do something I’ve never done before in my lifetime and advocate for the U.S. military to get involved in the conflict. The South Koreans are our allies and it would be wrong of us to stand idly by as the Kims of North Korea attempt to kill millions of them and subjugate the rest. Those living under the North Korean regime have been handed one of the unluckiest lots in life imaginable, and it would be a moral error to let that regime expand and doom another population to the same fate. It would be just as wrong as letting Adolf Hitler conquer Europe.

I say this as someone who vehemently opposed the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan before it started. I didn’t think conventional military tactics were the right approach to stopping terrorism. A nation-state didn’t attack us on 9/11. A small group of people who hate us did, and dropping bombs on their fellow Muslims and killing innocent civilians seemed like the most counter-productive response possible. That would only lead to more terrorism, and more hatred of the U.S. internationally.

Now, if war breaks out in the Korean peninsula it will be an entirely different matter. North Korea is an actual nation-state with an actual military made up of actual soldiers. An act of aggression on their part against South Korea would absolutely call for military intervention. We’d be fighting a country as opposed to an ideology.

The potential benefits of such a scenario are actually enormous. If the U.S. is suddenly confronted with a real war against a real enemy, it would have a clarifying effect on the wars of the last decade. The very juxtaposition of these two types of wars would highlight their differences in a way that we’ve never seen before in our history, and even without having to reflect on it too hard both liberals and conservatives alike would be able to understand why one kind is justified and the other is not.

A war against a Hitler-like aggressor with an actual military would bring the country together like it hasn’t been since WWII, and our political parties might just put aside their bickering for a brief historical moment to deal with a real threat to world peace (though I admit that’s a pretty big might, seeing as how the Republicans have shown us that they’re not above playing politics with matters of international security).

It would also give us a good reason to completely pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, as we couldn’t possibly fight three wars on three fronts at the same time. This would then lead to a restoration of the image of America abroad, as the rest of the world will see us actually doing what we’ve only been pretending to do for the last few decades: defending freedom.

A war fought for noble purposes as opposed to one fought for corporate profits would go a long way to restoring the world’s faith in America, and Americans’ faith in themselves.

All that said, I do not believe such a restoration would be worth the loss of so many Korean lives and the lives of American soldiers, so I sincerely hope that North Korea is just flexing its muscles and that the ultimate result of the death of Kim Jong Il will be peace rather than war.

We demand smaller government (except for the defense department).

The government needs to balance the budget (as long as it doesn’t involve raising taxes).

The government better not mess with the free market (so it should let giant corporations merge and monopolize every industry).

The government needs to look out for the interests of the middle class (by letting the richest people take as large a share of the nation’s wealth as possible).

The government has to drastically cut spending (but continue to pay billions for military equipment designed to fight the Soviet Union).

The government’s primary responsibility is to eliminate the threat of Islamic terrorism (which it can do by invading Muslim countries, killing loads of civilians, and imprisoning and torturing their friends and neighbors).

The government needs to stay the hell away from religion (unless it’s to impose Biblical law on all citizens).

The government better not step between us and our doctors (unless it’s to deny us the choice to have an abortion).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us who we can and can not marry).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when it comes to tapping our phones or groping us at the airport).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us which chemicals we’re forbidden to put in our bodies).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (except hire people directly).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (by cutting tax-rates for giant corporations that don’t pay any taxes anyway).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (as long as it doesn’t force companies to create those jobs in America instead of overseas).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean eliminating oversight of Wall Street so that they can continue to get rich by putting the entire economy in jeopardy).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting corporations maximize profits by deceiving and screwing over consumers at every opportunity).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting the coal and oil industries cut whatever corners in terms of worker and environmental safety that they see fit).

Our biggest concern is for the well-being of our grandchildren (but it’s not even worth considering whether scientists are right about climate change).

We firmly believe in living by Christian values (except for loving thy neighbor and caring for the less fortunate).

We believe in abiding by the constitution (except for the parts about equal rights and the separation of church and state).

Our ideology is superior to all other political ideologies (because it’s based on our gut feeling that it is).

The White House successfully moved to have a federal appeals court judge grant a temporary freeze on the recent ruling of another judge which would have forced the military to stop enforcing the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. The Obamapologists are out in full force, saying that he had to appeal the ruling because the only way to make a repeal of the policy permanent would be to do it legislatively.

Not true. Here’s how Obama could end the policy once and for all in just two easy steps:

Step 1- Issue an executive order halting the implementation of DADT.

Step 2- Get re-elected.

If Obama were to use his position as commander-in-chief to insist that the military not discharge anyone for being gay under his watch, such an order could theoretically be reversed by the next president. But in the mean-time, you’d presumably have thousands of soldiers coming out and serving openly without fear of discharge.

By the time a republican has a chance to take over, assuming Obama is re-elected, gays will have been serving openly in the military for 6 years, and since these nonsense arguments about unit cohesion are nonsense, everyone would be able to see quite clearly that a ban on openly-gay soldiers was not in fact the only thing holding our military together.

More importantly, if you suddenly decide to start kicking them out again, you’d have to fire thousands of soldiers who have already been serving openly (without any problems) for years, and even some who were openly gay from the moment they enlisted. Even the most conservative military leaders wouldn’t want the kind of chaos that would ensue from a re-instatement of DADT and they would almost certainly uniformly oppose it. The next republican president would be in for quite a fight if he were to try and re-instate it, and with the majority of the country and all of the military leadership against him he would almost certainly not want to take up that fight.

In fact, we don’t even need 6 years. Just 2 years of openly gay soldiers serving in the military without causing any problems would be enough to make a potential re-instatement of the policy too messy to implement.

All Obama has to do is say the word and he’ll have brought about one of the most significant advancements of civil rights in recent history. But he won’t. And he wonders why people are “whining”.

Just when I think I’m not interested enough in any of today’s news stories to get a political blog entry done, the good old Tea Party Nation sends me another absurd e-mail by Judson Philips, this one titled “Treason”:

The word treason gets thrown around a lot, but this is one instance where I cannot think of any other word to describe what happened.

2004 was one of the bloodiest years in Iraq. In late 2004, the battle of Fallujah raged. The United States would suffer some of the heaviest casualties of the Iraq war during this time.

The America hating group "Code Pink" wanted to establish a "peace camp" at Fallujah. The US military rejected their request for assistance to get to Fallujah and assistance while they were there. The military had legitimate concerns about the $600,000 in cash and goods that were going to be distributed. The military legitimately feared that some of this support would go to insurgents who were killing American marines.

I couldn’t find anything on the Code Pink website about hating America, but I’ll take Mr. Philips’s word for it.

Other than that, there’s nothing to object to so far. The military did reject the $600,000 worth of goods that this group was going to distribute to Iraqis in need, because God forbid any of this money winds up in the hands of the terrorists. The innocent Iraqis would just have to suffer in order to prevent even the possibility of helping the guilty ones.

Enter Barbara Boxer and Henry Waxman. They each wrote letters to the American Embassy in Jordan asking that the Embassy assist Code Pink in its Iraqi adventure. Code Pink went to Iraq in 2004, decrying the war as "killing Iraqi children." While American soldiers were fighting to liberate Iraq, these people, with Boxer and Waxman, knowingly aiding and abetting them, gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

First of all, don’t you love the snarky way Mr. Philips addresses the point about “killing Iraqi children”? Hah! What a bunch of liberal pansies Code Pink must be, to point out that our pointless invasion of Iraq resulted in the deaths of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of children. How unpatriotic of them. We’re not supposed to talk about the dead children. Acknowledging the most horrific result of war gives “aid and comfort to the enemy”.

Second of all, if offering humanitarian assistance is “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”—the legal definition of treason—then there are a whole lot of traitors in this country. Anyone who donates any money to an organization that provides food or medical assistance to a Muslim country in which our troops are engaged is guilty of treason. They should all be hanged, according to the ever-so-wise Judson Philips.

Of course Boxer and Waxman do not care. Patriotism for them is a joke. They do not love this country, nor do they care for those who do. The members of Code Pink who went to Iraq in 2004 are traitors and should be tried for treason. The Bush administration did nothing to those who helped the insurgents who killed Americans. Perhaps our next President will have the intestinal fortitude to do something about this. After all, there is no statute of limitations on treason.

Obviously, people like Boxer and Waxman pushed for humanitarian assistance because they hate America and they hate patriotic Americans. Genuine human compassion for the victims of the war couldn’t possibly have factored into their decision-making process at all. They simply calculated that every hungry Iraqi mouth fed and every wounded Iraqi child healed would be a slap in the face to patriotic Americans. After all, it’s a zero-sum game, isn’t it? The better off the Iraqis, the worse off the Americans. True patriots want to make life as horrible as possible for Iraqis so that Americans can reap the benefits.

Go fuck yourself, Judson. If you really believe that doing any good by the Iraqi people whatsoever is tantamount to treason, there’s just no hope for you. Never mind that we’re now in a counter-insurgency strategy which means the only way to win is to win the hearts and minds of the people. Apparently anyone who tries to win hearts and minds is a traitor to America. When should we schedule the trial for David Petraeus?

We do agree on one thing, Judson—the first line of your article: “The word treason gets thrown around a lot.” Yeah…by you, asshole.  So why don’t you stop?

“Turn on the TV!” James shouted as he entered my college dorm room. “The war is starting!”

Are you serious? I’d just turned the damned thing off about a half hour earlier, getting sick of waiting for the fireworks that for all I knew wouldn’t be coming at all. I’d been glued to the TV all day, watching the cable news networks count down to the moment Bush’s 48-hour deadline for Saddam to leave Iraq reached 0:00. What an anti-climactic moment that had been. Once it came, the reporters started to remind everyone that this was just the count-down to the end of Bush’s cowboy-diplomacy deadline—that the actual fighting might not begin until the next day or later.

Thanks to James, I hadn’t completely missed the historical moment I’d been waiting for all day. The beginning of a war that might come to define my generation.

More than six years later, James reached me through a Facebook chat and informed me that he was enlisting in the military. That he’d very likely be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, but he’d given it a lot of thought and decided it’s what he wanted to do. The terrible economy had cost him his job a year earlier and in spite of his college-degree he couldn’t find any work elsewhere. The military seemed like his best option.

Throughout the years I’d also occasionally ponder joining the fighting, usually in my darkest moments when life seemed too overwhelming to figure out how to live it on my own. After graduating college with a relatively useless degree in philosophy, I spent the next couple of years just trying to figure out how to kill the remaining time I had left before death. The likelihood that there were far more years ahead of me than behind me would at times fill me with despair. I never seemed to fit in this world. What was I supposed to be doing here?

Important things were always happening, of course. Mostly too big to wrap my head around, too big to do anything about. Ever since September 11, the instant I heard someone in my high school classroom say the words, “They hit the second tower” I knew that I was probably one of those human beings cursed to live in interesting times. My sense of personal responsibility increased tenfold on that day and the weeks that followed.

After overcoming my initial reaction of anger and rage at the terrorists, I’d thought about it and decided that the best thing for the United States to do would be not to retaliate. We should go after the people responsible for the attack, but not invade an entire country. Not drop bombs that would kill innocent children and make those people hate us even more. After 9/11 we had a chance to show the world what an honorable nation we could be—to refrain from flexing our military muscles and instead focus only on the individuals responsible for the crime.

That was not a very popular position at the time, but I stood my ground and made my case to anyone who would listen. I pointed out that if we were in fact going to war, it would be people my age who would be doing the fighting. I asked everyone if they’d be willing to die for this cause. At that time, most said yes. Ultimately, most never did.

Had I believed in the cause, I might have enlisted. Had this been an event like Pearl Harbor in which my country had been attacked by an actual army from an actual nation that posed an actual existential threat to us, I would have followed in the footsteps of the “greatest generation” and gone to fight and die for my country.

But I never thought this was a noble cause. I didn’t think the fighting in Afghanistan was necessary, and I found the invasion of Iraq to be even less justifiable. If you’re going to put yourself in a position from which you might actually have to kill people—from which you might actually end up killing children—you’d better have a damned good reason, I thought. And giving my life a sense of purpose or direction never seemed good enough.

Those who’ve fought in these wars have my undying respect and admiration, but I just can’t make myself believe that their efforts have been for a good cause. They haven’t been fighting and dying for freedom. They haven’t even been fighting and dying for the United States of America. They’ve been fighting and dying (and killing and maiming) for Blackwater and KBR, for the military industrial complex, for neoconservative ideologues, and for multi-national corporations who have a vested interest in permanent warfare.

I could never be a part of that. All other considerations aside—the sense of accomplishment, the pride of my family, the benefits of being a veteran—none of these would be worth the sense of responsibility that I’d have to carry with me for the rest of my life for having been a part of one of history’s greatest crimes. And the invasion and occupation of Iraq was and always will be a crime in my mind, regardless of how it ultimately turns out.

But that doesn’t mean I consider the soldiers criminals. Far from it. They were following in the footsteps of their fathers, doing what they saw as the most noble thing they could do. In a sense I envy them. When the last decade becomes nothing more than a distant memory and the wars another chapter in the history books, they’ll be able to tell their grandchildren that they were there—that when their country made the call they stood up and answered it. No matter what the politics, that’s something to be proud of.

And what did I do? I partied with my college friends, I moved to California and relaxed on the beach, I flew to Germany to teach English to businesspeople, and I started a blog.

The Iraq war technically ends today. I’ve come a long way since that night in my dorm-room when James and I watched the bombs falling on Baghdad. I’m still not sure which direction my life is going, but I’m always thinking. These are interesting times, and the sense of historical responsibility is still nagging at me. And if I won’t fight, it seems all I can do now is write.

To all of my fellow millennials who fought in Iraq, who were injured, who died, or who watched their friends die: this one’s for you.

It’s time for an old-school personal journal entry, the kind I used to write all the time but which I now usually end up privatizing because they tend to get a bit too personal. This one has a strong political element so it definitely belongs on the blog even in its current mostly-political incarnation, so I’ll try to fight the impulse to engage in excessive introspection.

Yesterday, one of my friends—Oliver’s girlfriend Lena—was participating in a demonstration here in Hannover and I was invited to come along. Naturally I couldn’t resist—a genuine European lefty-protest is certainly worth checking out if the opportunity presents itself, and it would probably provide me with something worth writing about.

Well, I’m not really sure how that turned out. I can’t guarantee you’ll gain any valuable insight from this entry, but if you don’t mind long stories with no climax and no particular over-arching point, you might enjoy it. Who knows?

I’ll skip the part where Oliver comes by my flat a few hours before the protest starts while Lena meets up with her friends. I’ll start from the point when Oliver and I get off the tram and walk towards the Hannover Congress-Zentrum where the protest is taking place.

Actually, I need to start even earlier to explain what this whole demonstration was about. Apparently the higher-ups in the German military and the executives from the corporations that make up its military-industrial complex all gather together once a year for something called “La Luna” where they meet at the Congress building and have a jolly celebration together. It’s a bit more complicated than that but the Germans had a hard time explaining it in English. It also has something to do with a nearby military airport which Germany lets other countries use for military missions. And the soldiers are all from the “1st Panzerdivision” whatever that means. I tried to research the event but somehow the English-language media neglected to cover it.

So as the military brass and corporate big-wigs are having their lovely party in the Congress building, German lefties gather outside to yell at them and let them know how evil they are. That’s really all there is to it. The message is basically, “You say the military is good? Well, we say it’s bad! Take that!”

To be fair, you could be sure that some of the people who are responsible for the fact that German soldiers are still in Afghanistan would be attending the event. So at least a part of the message—the “Get out of Afghanistan” part—was a bit more specific than the overall “War is bad” message.

Back to the story. Typically, the tram stops right in front of the Congress-Zentrum but Oliver and I were surprised to find that the particular tram we needed wasn’t running at that time. Either they were afraid the protesters might block the tracks or they just wanted to make it as difficult as possible for protesters to get there—most of the protesters naturally assumed that the latter was the explanation.

So it was a bit of a walk from the nearest tram stop to the protest grounds, and all along the way there were scattered bits of colored paper with slogans like, “Es gibt nichts hier zu feirn” (There’s nothing to celebrate here). The one that really caught my eye was “Soldaten sind mörder” which means “Soldiers are murderers”. I told Oliver that you could never get away with saying that in America. You can protest the war all you like, but if you say anything bad about the soldiers you have crossed a sacred line.

Naturally, the streets were swarming with Polizei. We passed several dozen police officers, about a third of them mounted, before finally spotting the actual protest. When we arrived there was a small group of people—less than a hundred—walking down the street behind a van equipped with loudspeakers from which someone was shouting incoherent babble (even if my German was perfect I wouldn’t have been able to understand it) with horrible metal-music playing in the background. The whole group was completely surrounded by police, who were obviously prepared for a protest ten times the size. They were marching so close that you could almost believe they were participating in the demonstration themselves—apparently the Polizei are anti-military too!

In my solid black T-shirt and khaki pants, I was probably the most well-dressed person there. At least my long hair and beard made me fit in with the crowd, which I don’t otherwise need to describe because if you just picture what a crowd of young German protesters looks like you’re right on the mark. These people were living stereotypes.

There was one guy walking a little ahead of us with messy hair and tattered clothes, sporting a vest with a slogan sewed on to the back: “Ich trinke, Ich stinke, Ich bin der böse Linke.” You can probably guess what it means: “I drink, I stink, I am the evil Left.” All I could think was: You’re not helping, guy. I get it—you are exactly what mainstream Germans think you are (you’re jobless, you never bathe, you buy beer with taxpayer money) and you don’t care. But seriously, that message helps no one. It only reinforces the majority of Germans’ perception of young liberals as lazy drunken scumbags who should therefore not be taken seriously.

After a few minutes of marching, Oliver and I both had to piss and we knew Lena was back at the main protest grounds anyway so we split from the marchers and walked towards the Eilenriede—the city forest—which is right across from the Congress building. We took care of some business there and got back to the road just as the protesters were returning to the main grounds.

We had to cross the street to get to the main grounds—the field right outside the Congress building—and while there were no cars coming Oliver and I waited until the light was green because a crowd of five Polizei were standing right there and we didn’t want to give them any excuses.

Lena was there with a few of her friends and I went up and shook everyone’s hand. There was an older lady with gray hair, a thirty-something guy with red eyes, and a thirty-something woman named Anka whom I recognized from Lena’s costume party last year when I went dressed as Jesus and got completely trashed. Anka is quite beautiful and I found myself admiring her frequently throughout the evening, but I confirmed with Oliver that she does (of course) have a boyfriend.

I learned a bit more of the background of the protest from Lena and also learned that this was not just one group that organized the protest but actually several different lefty organizations that were protesting at the same time and trying to coordinate their efforts as they went. One of the groups was about to take a megaphone-van for a spin around the block, and half the crowd would be going with them while the other half—Anka included—stayed behind.

So we marched a little further and I tried to listen to what the woman on the megaphone in the van was saying. Her voice was much clearer but there were too many distractions for me to give the necessary amount of attention it would have taken for me to understand the German. She was definitely talking about Hindenberg a lot for some reason—I knew about the zeppelin but apparently the guy was a real piece of shit as well—and Lena told me that he was from around here or something. I guess this was the anti-Hindenberg part of the demonstration. Yeah, fuck him and his blimp.

At one point the crowd suddenly erupted with noise. They were shouting at someone walking by, and I tried to peer over the crowd to see who they were shouting at. It was some guy in a soldier’s uniform walking back from the zoo (also near the Congress-building) with his family. They were shouting “Mörder! Mörder!” at him. Wow, I thought. If a crowd of anti-war protesters in America were ever caught on tape shouting “Murderer!” at a soldier and his family, it would be broadcast on Fox News 24/7. The soldier, of course, just smiled and continued on his merry way.

This actually happened several more times during the walk, even with occasional chants breaking out. “Blud! Blud! Blud an deine Hande! Blud! Blud! Blud an deine Hande!” which I’m sure I don’t need to translate.

At one point the Polizei came and stopped a girl a few feet away from me who was carrying a sand-filled hospital glove with red paint on it. They opened it up to see if it was some kind of bomb or maybe filled with anthrax or something, but it was just a clever little piece of symbolism. They kindly gave it back to the girl who was acting like her rights had just been terribly violated.

You might be getting the impression at this point that I was feeling a bit of contempt for the protesters, but that’s not totally accurate. I certainly thought a few of them were not helping the cause (like Herr Trinke Stinke) but I always admire people who get out and make their voices heard. I even confess that I have a slight bit of admiration for the people who go to Tea Party rallies—they may be dead wrong on all the issues and possibly a little racist, but at least they’re doing something. At least they’re making their voices heard in a far more visible way than signing online petitions or blogging.

The irony of this particular protest, however, is just how invisible it was. The Congress-Zentrum is not in a very high-density area of the city. The immediate surroundings are quiet residential neighborhoods, the city zoo, and a giant forest. The Polizei had us bottled in nice and tight, so our message wasn’t really reaching anyone other than the poor citizens who happened to live in that area and maybe some elephants at the zoo.

So we got back to the Congress building as the woman in the van finished her speech and tossed on some Rage Against the Machine. Now that’s protest music. If all we did was stand on the lawn and blast Rage all evening I would have been more than happy.

For the next half hour or so we stood on the lawn and shouted at people as they arrived at the Congress building for their La Luna celebration. It wasn’t hard to tell who the bad guys were—they were all dressed in suits and escorting their wives in fancy dresses. They all got hollered at and called murderers as they walked by. Most of them smiled and laughed.

At this point I have to offer another confession and say that my mind was a bit more focused on all the attractive females around than on the politics of it. Man, there were a lot of good-looking lefty chicks. Is a protest a good place to meet women? Could be. But whenever I spotted someone that I felt the urge to make sweet love to, I thought of the million and a half steps I’d have to take to get to that point, beginning with the most difficult step of all: introducing myself and hoping they speak English. No, the ocean between me and these women was far too vast to try and swim.

One of the good-looking women was going around with an egg-carton passing out what looked like eggs but which I believe were actually filled with paint. I thought, “Oh good, now it’s going to get interesting” but I was mistaken. A few people threw eggs at an effigy of a German soldier they’d erected on the field, but nobody egged any of the military-elites or their wives.

Finally the big van parked on the lawn from which someone had been shouting at the Congress building all afternoon picked up its gear and got moving. We were now going to take the protest away from the Congress building and towards an area where there might be some people. We formed up behind the van and noticed that the crowd had now grown to somewhere between two and three hundred. That didn’t seem too shabby but they were a bit disappointed because they’d been expecting to break a thousand. Certainly the Polizei were over-prepared. The ratio of protesters to police was almost 1:1.

One of the police divisions had strange markings on the backs of their jackets and I turned to ask if anyone knew what they meant. Anka, the beautiful thirtysomething, actually answered me in English but only to say she didn’t know. How wonderful of her to go through the trouble of trying to find the English words. I think I might be falling in love. But what to say next? I guess I can ask her how many protests she’s been to before and start a conversation that way…oh she just walked away and is talking to someone else now. Too late. (That’s when I went to Oliver and confirmed that she was, in fact, taken).

We continued marching down the street and shouting “Mörder!” at everyone in a suit who passed by. It felt like we were just this mob of people walking around looking for people to yell at. If you were in a suit, you were targeted. Doesn’t matter what you do for a living or even if you had nothing to do with La Luna…Suit = Murderer.

A bit of a ruckus erupted behind us a few minutes into the march, as a shouting match broke out between two of the protesters. One of them seemed like he was about to get violent, and seven police officers came to drag him away from the rest of the crowd. The older lady that Lena knew said in German I understood perfectly: “Seven police to one protester! Wouldn’t it be a dream if we had seven teachers to one student?”

When we reached a big intersection half the crowd seemed to want to go straight but the mounted police quickly moved their horses in to block the way. Some protesters starting running towards them, apparently thinking that the fun was about to begin. But instead of violence there was just a big shouting match and in the end the group took a right-turn and went the direction we were apparently allowed to go.

At that point, Lena and Oliver had to leave because they needed to be back in Celle by 9 p.m. and it was 8:00 now. I said goodbye to all the people I’d “met” including the lovely Anka, and the three of us broke ranks and headed back towards the Congress building where Lena’s car was parked.

Along the way she found a discarded sign and figured she’d take it back with her because the placard could be painted over and used for future protests. If it weren’t for the sign, nobody would have been able to know we’d been a part of the protest group, but the sign changed the whole dynamic. The police kept their eyes on us, and as we approached the Congress building and passed within inches of some of these suit-clad politicians, soldiers, and businessmen with their fancily-dressed wives (murderers, all of them) we got plenty of dirty looks. I found I had the urge to start yelling “Blud an deine Hande!” at them, but the police could have cracked my skull within fifteen seconds.

There were a lot more ‘murderers’ arriving now but the protest had moved on to the city so they were spared the bombardment of insults. I said that a much more effective tactic would have been to just slash all their tires, as oddly enough the police didn’t seem to have anyone monitoring the parking lot. I didn’t know any of those people but their fancy suits and dresses seeped under my skin somehow and I just felt this strong loathing towards them. These are the power-elites I’m always railing against. They may be second-rate power elites but they still profit from bloodshed. The fact that they were there to celebrate their ill-gotten success was a tad infuriating.

Hence the protest, which all in all I’d say was a good thing. Yeah, there were a lot of idiots there and it might have contributed to reinforcing negative stereotypes of left-wing activists, but just the very existence of left-wing activists is a good thing. Thanks to their visibility, the political spectrum in Germany is much farther to the left than in America where it seems that the only protesters are the Tea Party crowds on the right. Because Germany does have a radical, left-wing fringe, it provides breathing room for the more moderate liberals to take more liberal positions. “Yes, I think certain aspects of socialism are beneficial to a civilized society, but that doesn’t mean I want to hand over complete control of everything to the state like some of my liberal friends do.” In America, if you so much as suggest that it might be a good idea for the government to maybe provide health insurance for just a few citizens, you’re a radical socialist communist Maoist.

Without frequent, visible left-wing protests, the media narrative is that all of the political energy is on the right. The American left has retreated from the streets to the blogosphere and we’re suffering the consequences for it. Politicians tend to be reactionary types, and right now they’re only reacting to the Tea Party because the left isn’t making its message heard.

So to my fellow American lefties I say: Germans were protesting the war in Afghanistan yesterday. What have you been doing?

I’ve had some trouble figuring out how to approach this story. With over 90,000 previously classified documents from the war in Afghanistan having been posted on WikiLeaks, an online state-independent organization dedicated to fighting power through truth, most of the media coverage thus far has been either about WikiLeaks itself or about how there is nothing contained in these documents that we didn’t already know. I’ll touch briefly on what I see as the three main elements to the story—what it says about the wars, how the media has covered it, and the larger implications of the existence of an organization like WikiLeaks in terms of humanity’s future.

The War

I confess I haven’t read all 90,000 documents, so I can’t offer too much analysis of what they actually contain. What I do know from reading articles about the documents is that they contain details that basically confirm everything critics of the war have been saying for years—that it looks to be going very badly, that Pakistan’s interests aren’t exactly aligned with ours and they may be working against us in some cases, and that far too many innocent civilians have been killed by the U.S. military either through recklessness, carelessness, or honest errors of judgment.

Those of us who have been critical of the war from the very beginning can point to this and say it supports the arguments we’ve been making. Most importantly, these documents should highlight the fact that what we’re doing in Afghanistan (and Iraq as well) is not ‘warfare’ in the sense that most Americans still think of the term—two opposing armies meeting on the battlefield with the intention of doing as much damage to the other side as possible—but is more of an occupation. When you’re looking for historical precedents, this is far more like the British occupation of [insert name of third-world country here] than it is like either of the two World Wars.

Ironically, we may have Rush Limbaugh to thank for helping us drive this point home. His completely outrageous misunderstanding of the nature of this war, deliberate or otherwise, perfectly exemplifies the problem with the war hawks’ thinking:

“The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict. US Special Operations Forces have targeted militants without trial.” Afghans have been killed by accident. Why, that is unheard of. That is unheard of, in any war, anywhere in the history of the world, that civilians have been killed by accident?

That’s unheard of! Do you realize what this says about us? How guilty, how rotten-to-the-core can this country be? Innocent Afghan citizens killed by accident! In the old days it used to be on purpose (i.e., Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden). In the old days the definition of winning a war was killing people and breaking things. In the old days, there was no such thing as a “surgical strike.” In the old days, you purposely killed innocent civilians. That’s what war was all about. That’s how you won it! But now all of a sudden these big WikiLeaks documents say that Afghans have been killed by accident. Whoa, the incompetence of the US military!

By completely missing the point, Rush has actually confirmed the point we’re making. This is not WWII, in which victory can be secured by carpet-bombing cities and devastating the enemy to the point where his will to fight is broken—in this kind of conflict ‘winning’ involves actually helping the civilians, providing them security and infrastructure in order to win their hearts and minds so that they would rather support their government and fight the Taliban instead of joining the Taliban to fight their government. If people like Rush Limbaugh—who seem to relish the idea of indiscriminate destruction—want that kind of war, they need to rethink their support of this one.

If we decided to do a Dresden-style carpet-bombing of Kabul, it would be like kicking the ball through our own goal-posts a thousand times over. Every last able-bodied Afghan civilian would take up arms against us, and the rest of the Muslim world would join them. The war would be over. The victory would belong to the Taliban, to Al Qaeda, and to every other militant or insurgent group that we’re supposedly waging ‘war’ against.

The fact is, ‘war’ as we know it seems to be coming to an end. This piece by Andrew Bacevich lays out this case perfectly, and it’s the biggest lesson that we could potentially learn from these leaked documents if our nation were to actually have a serious discussion about it.

The Media

Unfortunately we’re not going to have a serious discussion about the nature of war in the 21st century any time soon, thanks to the nature of the American mainstream media in the 21st century. The reaction to this leak has been every bit as pitiful as one would expect, and the media’s extreme deference to the established power-structure has seldom been more apparent. It’s as if every corporation within the military-industrial complex got together to feed their talking points not just to the White House but directly to the media organizations themselves.

“This is not news” was the headline from nearly every front. “Nothing to see here. No big revelations. This is only stuff we already know.” Jason Linkins and Ben Craw at the Huffington Post did a superb job of mashing together the reaction to the leaks from the White House and the media, which are barely distinguishable:

To be [extremely] fair to the White House and the media, this is a legitimate point. What has been revealed by the documents are merely the details behind the broader facts that we already knew if we’d been paying any attention.

But the best points are made right at the end of the clip, as Jon Stewart says “I’m not reacting to the newness of it, I’m reacting to the fucked-uppedness of it,” and Dennis Kucinich wonders why—if we already knew all of this—we haven’t been debating it for the last six years. This may not be new, but it’s fucked up stuff that calls for debate and frankly should have been debated every step of the way.

But these leaks don’t fit the proper time-table for the White House and the media. This is supposed to be election season, when everyone is talking about the economy and the impact it will have on the upcoming mid-terms. Afghanistan is not supposed to be among the election issues this year. The debate is supposed to happen next year when we approach the July 2011 deadline that Obama said would be when we begin our withdrawal.

But if things really are going as badly as the documents suggest, there’s no excuse not to have the debate right frickin now. This has been the single deadliest month of combat in Afghanistan since the war began. If we know the war is un-winnable, why let our soldiers continue to die for a lost cause? The sad truth is, our brave men and women overseas aren’t dying for national security or even for Afghan liberation anymore—they are dying for politics.

The Future

This is why organizations like WikiLeaks have such tremendous potential for the future of humanity on this planet. I’ve written extensively about the current precipice on which we stand, from which we can either sit idly by as civilization collapses and the human species faces extinction, or wake up and do what needs to be done to tear down the existing power structures and put something in their place that will allow for a peaceful, sustainable existence worldwide.

One of the biggest tools of the powerful is secrecy. The less the masses know about what the power-elites are doing, the less chance there is that we’ll be able to stop them. Certainly, as long as no one is held accountable, they won’t be afraid to make decisions that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Case-in-point—we’re just now learning about what was said in behind-closed-door meetings regarding the escalation of the Vietnam War 40 years ago. Because the transcripts of these meetings were classified and everyone in the room knew they would remain classified for the next four decades, they didn’t have to worry about making mistakes or doing the right thing. They needed only do what they wanted to do or what it was in their best short-term political or financial interests to do—by the time anyone found out they’d either be dead or too old to bother prosecuting. Currently, the White House can make any decisions it wants with impunity because they don’t have to worry about being held accountable for another forty years.

WikiLeaks has the potential to change that. Had the person who leaked these documents online gone to an actual mainstream news organization, it’s likely the editors would have sat on the story. By putting it on WikiLeaks, they guaranteed that the story would get out there. WikiLeaks itself can’t be prosecuted for leaking the documents because it doesn’t exist within the jurisdiction of a particular country.

As Janine R. Wedel and Linda Keenan write, WikiLeaks can serve as a counter-weapon to the “Shadow Elite” who direct the course of world events. The people who benefit from the existing power structures, who profit from war and by sucking money from the middle class, can only get away with it as long as nobody is paying attention. If somebody at the highest echelons of power suddenly develops a conscience, WikiLeaks will be waiting.

Yes, there is the potential for some innocents to be harmed if leaks are made irresponsibly, but it’s a small price to pay for a much greater good.

I keep saying that the internet is the best chance we have to come together as a species and really change the way the world works from the ground up. So far we haven’t even come close to realizing that potential, but sites like WikiLeaks could go a long way towards bringing us to that goal. It can be one of the most powerful tools we have to fight back against the powerful, and I hope its influence continues to grow.

At the very least, it can help make up for what the mainstream media is missing, and force us to examine facts that would not have otherwise been reported. The facts about the war in Afghanistan almost all lead to the conclusion that our nation is doomed unless it starts withdrawing, so the more facts that come to light the more pressure there will be to do so. Neither the White House nor the leadership of either political party wants to deal with that pressure right now, but that’s too bad. The lives of our soldiers, the security of the Afghan people, the health of our economy, and the long-term interests of the human race depend on keeping that pressure as high as possible for as long as it takes.