Stop Me Before I Vote Again

.. by making the opposition to military occupation a principle of US foreign policy it would end a vital rallying cry of Al Qaeda and its affiliates.... Nothing further unites and expands the international jihadist movement more than the prospect of opposing a perceived foreign occupation of Islamic lands.... outside military forces that control a foreign territory end up tarnishing the political character of that country. They employ violence to achieve their goals retard social and economic development and inevitably incite armed resistance....

And while he's at it Uncle oughta end other guys' occupations too, like

... India in Kashmir, Morocco in Western Sahara, Turkey in Northern Cyprus, and Israel in Palestine....[with a] full array of diplomatic incentives.

In fact it does turn out that Micah is not quite ready to renounce the big stick; he just wants to keep it in ready reserve:

There should, of course, be exceptions to a non occupation doctrine: international peacekeepers or foreign militaries authorized by the UN Security Council, peacekeeping or stability operations recognized by the consensus of international organizations such as NATO, short-term humanitarian interventions intended to prevent future mass killings.... and deployments welcomed by the recognized government of a state.

On second thought, let's go ahead and hand the guy a cigar -- just make it an exploder.

Feingold faults Bush on Somalia policy
Coleman argues 'robust strategy' needed
BY FREDERIC J. FROMMER
Associated Press

Returning from a recent trip to Africa, Sen. Russ Feingold faulted the Bush administration for what he called a failure to develop a policy on Somalia....

Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who will lead the Senate Foreign Relations African Affairs subcommittee next year, visited Ethiopia and Kenya, two countries that neighbor Somalia, during a weeklong trip. An Islamic militia has taken over much of Somalia, including the capital, and the country's prime minister said this week his troops were bracing for war.

"The stakes are very high for us," Feingold said in a telephone interview....

Feingold warned that the militants could have an impact not just in Somalia but in the entire region....

"So this is just the kind of situation that we should be paying real attention to, instead of only obsessing about Iraq," Feingold said. "Our failure to have a policy in this area is a threat to the American people...."

My prediction: not one single Democrat in Congress will have a bad word to say for this US-sponsored bloodbath. And indeed, why should they start now?

Darfur: the issue for liberal activists who don't want to run a chance of ending up at Club Gitmo. Here's a note I received from Africa Focus:

-------- Original Message --------
To: flugennock
Subject: Sudan: Why Doesn't Bush Act on Darfur?
From: africafocus@igc.org
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 07:18:27 -0800

Sudan: Why Doesn't Bush Act on Darfur?

AfricaFocus Bulletin
Dec 29, 2006 (061229)

http://www.africafocus.org/docs06/sud0612b.php?media

"The crisis in Sudan's Darfur region is intensifying without a meaningful response from the White House [despite President Bush's promise not to allow genocide 'on his watch']...

Jayzus, AF, give the Chimp a break. He's trying to gin up a pretext to bomb the living piss out of the Sudan and take the oil -- uhh, that is, 'save Darfur' as fast as he can:

http://counterpunch.org/frank05112006.html
'Save Darfur? Not So Fast', by Joshua Frank in CounterPunch, 05.11.06

http://www.sinkers.org/posters/outofiraqintodarfur/index.html
You've seen it, you know it, you love it, 05.17.06

Oh, and just a quick rundown of some of the reasons why Darfur is a distractive, bullshit 'crisis':

1. The US media are all over it like it was Terry Schiavo. Anne Curry of NBC's 'Today' show has done several live remotes from Darfur -- in true 'embed' style, sitting in the back of a jeep hauling ass across the desert. George Clooney of NBC's 'ER' has also done several live remotes from Darfur that aren't so much journalistic segments as knock-offs of 'Save The Children' ads.
2. The US media are fighting tooth and nail to avoid mentioning US genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, but when it comes to Darfur, you'll hear them blurting out the G-word more times than you've had hot dinners. (see no.1)
3. They've got their own goddamn' TV commercial now, f'cripesake, airing heavily during NBC 'Today' and 'Meet The Press'. Anyone here remember what happened to MoveOn and assorted other outfits who raised the cash to shoot and buy time for pro-peace PSAs and 'issue ads' against the US genocide in Iraq?

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday proposed adding 92,000 troops to the Army and Marine Corps, initiating the biggest increase in U.S. ground forces since the 1960s to shore up a military that top officers warn is on the verge of breaking from prolonged fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This I think is the backstage deal behind Bush's phoney surge: "go along with this tits-on-a-bull 20k new buffalo roam, Gen'rul, sir, and you'll get those new brigades you've been wanting so bad."

Cheney actually knocked serveral balls into their assigned pockets here, but none with so steep a long-run price tag as this: more than $10 billion annually. Multiplying back in the standard Pentagon "prospective discount", I make that prolly 30 billion per year, when all is said and done.

But hey, Dick needed to help the brass hats

underscore the Pentagon's conviction that today's wars and anti-terrorism operations will endure for many years. "We call those 'long war' forces," a senior military official said.

At his own site -- from the Max Factor's fingertips to your screen -- comes evidence of the fatal fault line in the anti-empire edifice:

http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000988.html

"I supported the Kosovo intervention because I feared a genocide was in prospect, though I said there should be less indiscriminate bombing and more U.S. boots on the ground. I will be less inclined to be supportive of any such thing in the future.

Here's Max admitting he sinned, too, over Kosovo. His closing pledge -- "I will be less inclined to be supportive of any such thing in the future" -- is wonderfully sly, instinctively counter-pompous in its understatement; but ultimately not enough, not nearly enough.

We are all sinners! We all betray our beliefs! Our loyalty is fragile! St Peter before the cock crew.

No, this is not excusable. It's even a weasel in its implied premise: NATO should -- of course! -- make an armed response to... genocide.

In the future. Max tells us, I'll not be duped by the corporate press's rush to intervention, with every cry of genocide.

Really? Does Max think that NATO might actually move because of a genocide -- not as pretext, but as prime mover?

While you're lingering over this conundrum, notice the boots-over-bombs bit. The ultimate smart weapon : a redneck with a rifle. This boots-over bombs theory, combined with the loophole for moral intervention -- how many steps is this from an enlarged, standing, intervention-ready ground force? Maybe an increase in the speed and size of the fast response forces might prevent the next Pol Pot!

And then, of course, to avoid surprise -- "more intelligence assets are needed," so we can know when to respond, to stop the next Rwanda. And the warning has to come soon enough. Not when it's just about to happen. Not like the "Lost In Space" robot crying "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!" -- that poor tin can can only twigged when it was too late to head off the danger.

Max, I fear you are an interventionist on first principles. There is a point, for you, where you believe good intentions will lead bad people to do good things.

Of ocurse we all have in the back of our heads the Holocaust paradigm: surely something could have been done, should have been done, about Hitler.

Well, what? A preemptive strike in 1936, which would have been about the right time? To ask the question is to answer it: it's sheer fantasy to imagine that the Powers would have acted then, and for that reason. Does Max think the world has changed? And if so, why?

If war should come come between great powers again -- then yeah, we should all do what we can to make genocide prevention into War Aim #1. That's a reasonable lesson to learn from the anti-Nazi war. What's not a reasonable lesson is to use genocide prevention as a pretext for any future intervention. Such attacks are not do-overs for the missed opportunities of the Thirties.

Just like "no more Munichs!", "No more holocausts!" has a twisted ring these days. The Great Satan's lips are never far from mouthing either one or the other -- or both.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020802337.html?referrer=email

according to the Washpost's big character booster, this new group, calling itself Enough, aims

to tap into the grass-roots awareness and sense of rage generated by the Darfur crisis and create a social and political network that can identify potential wide-scale atrocities, particularly in Africa, and stop them before they occur.

Questions, questions, questions. Which role will they play? Will it be...

1) Long range intervention precursors?

or

2) Last-minute bums-rushers?

Place your bets. I'm puttin' all I got on number 2. What the GWOT needs now is another "last chance for salvation" good-guy, hair-trigger, gun-play Greek chorus.

One wiki click threw this up: he gets grant money from Ebay founder, billionaire and "Franco-Iranian" wizard Pierre Omidyar's eponymous Omidyar Network.

Seems our man has been beating this Darfur/Sudan drum for the biblical 7 years required to be a certifiable monofocal prophet -- but why this cause? Why this when his own government is deep in the short stroke phase of fucking Iraq? Why does the world humanitarian community need a self-righteous new england lit prof's quixotic knight errantry? Are there not Scandinavians enough to get the word out on this?

I don't know or care whether he's just another useful idiot --- I doubt it --- or a sly Ivy-chafed geef out for some spotlight self-aggrandizement, and smart enough to know what humane causes pay well. What he's actually doing either way is aiding and abetting the Yankee Doodle imperial project -- that and precious little else. This whole people-who-love-people, groupies-for-humanity grapple is about China's countering Uncle's containment policies across the southern half of the planet -- in this case specifically, oil-rich, well-located Sudan: the Iraq of the Horn!

http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1493

JAMES JENNINGS
President of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid organization that has worked in Darfur since 2004, Jennings said today: "President Bush doesn't understand Sudan any better than he did Iraq. The U.S. is behind the curve by making policy decisions based on ethnic cleansing that happened in 2004, and is jumping the gun by circumventing UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon's already negotiated joint African Union/United Nations solution. By trying to trump the UN Security Council through unilateral action, Bush is likely to make the situation in Darfur worse, as he did in Iraq. The new sanctions on Sudan are a blunt instrument that will hurt the refugees and may lead to a larger war, rather than stopping it. If embracing a more forceful policy on Darfur is the administration's way of enlarging the so-called 'War on Terror,' it will backfire and create more terrorists, as it did in Iraq."
More Information

...naa-aawwwww, you're kidding. No shit, Red Ryder. But, still the Africa Action folks and the "Call To Conscience" folks and the Working Assets sign-toters should be just thrilled to the teeth that George W. Chimp is finally doing something to Save Darfur!

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070702/012629.html

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According to the dominant ideology, Rwanda was about nothing but an ethnic genocide, Yugoslavia was about nothing but an ethnic genocide, Darfur in Sudan is about nothing but an ethnic genocide, etc. Imperialism first helps ethnicize politics in reality halfway (by simplifying and hardening formerly fluid tribal formations into often racialized ethnic groups and using one to govern the rest) and then ethnicizes people's understanding of it totally in ideology. If what's happening is an ethnic genocide, there are "good victims" -- the ethnic group subjected to genocide -- and "bad guys" -- the government in the Third World committing genocide. You go in by declaring that what you are doing is to save "good victims" from "bad guys" and end by deposing the government and setting up the "good guys" who say they represent "good victims" in power. The "good guys" then run the country for you. In the process you help sentimentalize and dumb down politics in your own country: realpolitik, the ruling class think, should be reserved for closed meetings of the power elite, for masses don't and shouldn't understand it.

Realpolitik [is what] the French socialist power elite around Mitterand discussed in closed meetings, a glimpse of which is available in the newly declassified documents.... [T]he way they saw it, Rwanda was about a proxy war between the French-backed Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement (MRND) government, its Forces armées rwandaises (FAR), and peasant militias loyal to the MRND on one hand and the Front patriotique rwandais (FPR) of Paul Kagame, which was backed by Uganda and the USA, on the other hand. The French understanding of realpolitik is closer to reality than the sentimental ideology of an ethnic genocide, but the French socialist imperialists lost, so they lost the ability to control the narrative, too, which they had already all but lost to the American and Americanized media favoring US imperialists even before their actual defeat.

The Le Monde article that the Independent cites not only claims that what was happening in Rwanda was nothing but an ethnic genocide and but also that the French socialist imperialists should have gotten hints by late 1990 that a genocide was being prepared and should have certainly recognized that a specific plan for it was hatched _between_ the Arusha accords and the assassination of the then Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana.*

Notice, however, that the only source of the plan was an anonymous informant, uncorroborated by others. The media, generally devotees of humanitarian imperialism, find it useful, though, because the Arusha accords and the Habyarimana assassination might disrupt their narrative without it for they both might remind some of the reality of the civil war that was an inter-imperialist proxy war.

That said, the Le Monde article has bits that felicitously reveal the line of thinking common to all imperialists when they confront a looming defeat. Here's one from February 1993.

The next day, general Christian Quesnot, Mitterand's own chief of staff, and the number 2 of the Africa group in the [President's office], Dominique Pin, presented different options to [Mitterrand].

The first was to evacuate the French and pull back the Noroit mission. The authors rejected this option out of hand: "It would be checkmate for our presence and policy in Rwanda. Our credibility on the continent would be impaired."

Generalissimo Mia Farrow wants to send in the mercenaries:

Activists turn to Blackwater over Darfur

Mia Farrow, the actress and activist, has asked Blackwater, the US private security company active in Iraq, for help in Darfur....

Ms Farrow said she had approached Erik Prince, founder and owner of Blackwater, to discuss whether a military role was either feasible or desirable.

She acknowledged that many people might have reservations about Blackwater being involved in Darfur – the company’s men were involved in the fatal shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians last September – but said the threat of violence to refugees meant all options had to be explored....

Mr Prince has raised the possibility of a role in Darfur for security companies.

Ms Farrow, who represents Dream for Darfur, a human rights group, and other lobbyists this week lambasted the UN Security Council for its “shameful” failure to halt killings in the Sudanese province....

“How long will you continue to allow the government of Sudan to manipulate this body?” Ms Farrow asked council members. “Did Adolf Hitler get to choose which troops should be deployed to end his genocide?”

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(*) Including that ubiquitous old stager Ruth Messinger, a short-period comet in my sky since I moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan thirty years ago.