America Lost the Cold War

America lost the Cold War.

Let me say it again.  America lost the Cold War.

Let me make myself clearer.  Communism may have failed, but America lost the Cold War.  

It wasn't Ronald Reagan or Robert Welch or Young Americans for Freedom who won the Cold War.  Two guys from Poland, Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa, with a little help from their friends in Lithuania, brought down the Soviet Union.

Well, okay, you're thinking, we didn't necessarily win the Cold War by ourselves, but we Americans took actions of fight Communism and keep it from spreading, so we certainly didn't lose it. Oh, really?  Well, then, let's review those actions:

When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, President Harry Truman went to the United Nations to approve a multinational military force (which ended up being 90 percent American) to counter North Korean aggression.  This was appropriate and proper, as the U.S. could not declare war on North Korea because it did not recognize the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (which is neither democratic, for the people, nor a republic) as the sole legitimate government of the Korean nation.  But it allowed future Presidents to start wars in other countries without congressional oversight or even, in some cases, approval.  This made the executive branch much more powerful than it was supposed to be . . . which proved to be dangerous when Donald Trump took office.

In the meantime, we built up the Japanese economy to make it a bulwark against Communism in China and North Korea.  We never suspected that, in time, the Japanese economy would become a threat to our own.  Now Toyota is the most popular auto brand in the United States. 

When the Chinese Communists drove the Nationalist government to Taiwan, the United States continued to support the Nationalists and keep the People's Republic of China out of the United Nations, which only earned the U.S. a lack of credibility among our allies - which had long accepted the truth of the Communist takeover of China - and the suspicion of Third World countries who thought it subliminally racist that a white government was telling an Asian country how to govern itself.  The United States finally relented and allowed the People's Republic of China to take China's seat at the United Nations in 1971 and became the last Western nation to officially recognize it . . . in 1979.  

Speaking of subliminal racism, the U.S. government supported right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America to prevent communist governments from taking over and in come cases backed military coups to overthrow democratically elected leftist governments - like fifty years ago today, when the United States had Chilean President Salvador Allende overthrown by the fascist General Augusto Pinochet.  And we wonder why so many Latin Americans hate us.  Anyway, supporting right-wing dictators didn't work when we backed Batista in Cuba and got Castro and it didn't work when we backed the Somoza family in Nicaragua and got the Sandinistas.     

As for Cuba, efforts to dislodge Castro almost brought the world to nuclear annihilation, and efforts to make foreign countries pay for leasing state-owned property in Cuba confiscated from American owners after the Cuban Revolution, like the odious Helms-Burton Act, created resentments from Western allies such as France and Canada. 

Our biggest struggle against Communism was the war in Vietnam.  You know the story about that by now.

When a socialist prime minister took control of Iran in 1953, the U.S. and Britain backed a countercoup to restore the Shah to power to prevent nationalization of Iran's oil fields.  The British eventually withdrew from the Middle East, and the U.S. steadfastly and wholeheartedly continued to support the Shah to prevent Iran from becoming a Soviet satellite and keep the U.S.S.R. from having access to the Persian Gulf . . . and then an Islamic fundamentalist revolution took place, leading to a seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the holding of 52 Americans hostage for fourteen months.  Iran and the United States remain bitter enemies, and Islamic fundamentalist jihad against the West has been prevalent ever since. 

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949, it was created mainly to allow the United States to come to the defense of a Western ally should the Soviet Union invade it - per the provisions of Article 5, that being at an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all of them.  This led the U.S. to spend money on the military and on developing new nuclear weapons and freed Canada and the nations of Western Europe to develop the sort of highly sophisticated welfare programs, public amenities, and mass transit systems that we lack. 

The Interstate Highway System was created partly for defense reasons to move troops - and missiles - around the country while also being available to employ for evacuating major cities in case of a Soviet nuclear attack.  In fact, it allowed middle-class white people to evacuate cities - where interstates were built through minority neighborhoods - and move to the suburbs, while the cities went to hell and developed a pathological urban ghetto culture now perversely celebrated as "hip-hop." 

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States aided the Islamic commandos fighting the Red Army.  After the Soviets withdrew and the U.S. turned its attention elsewhere, one of those commandos regrouped with his fellow fighters into a new organization that would use their training from the CIA to commit terrorist acts to spread jihad and fight American interests in the Islamic world.  That organization was al-Qaeda, and the commando who spurred its founding was Osama bin Laden.  After numerous attacks on American interests abroad, bin Laden then helped orchestrate the greatest terrorist attack on American soil - or anywhere, 22 years ago today.

Ironically, the United States became the only country in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance for which Article 5 was invoked.

So, yeah, we lost the Cold War.  Big time.

9/11 - Twenty Years Later

I don't have much to say about the twentieth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (plus the failed attack on the U.S. Capitol) today.  I thought I did, but what little I do have to say should be enough.

This twentieth anniversary takes on even more significance than it otherwise would have had in light of two ongoing major events - the fall of Afghanistan and a COVID outbreak spiraling upward with no ceiling in sight.  Right now, the United States is humbled, humiliated and defeated by the failure to secure the lives not just of so many Afghans but so many Americans, as more of our own people live in a more unequal society and in fear of a hideous death from a hideous and as right-wing populism threatens to erode our freedoms and turn into a fascist state.  Twenty years ago, Americans received sympathy and goodwill in the late of the 9/11 disaster.  But after two decades of squandering that goodwill through the Iraq War, the financial crisis, drone strikes, the mismanagement of the Islamic State crisis, the rise of the Tea Party, the election of Donald Trump, the rejection of international climate-change agreements, the COVID crisis, the death of George Floyd, the Capitol insurrection, and the assault on civil rights, and the mismanagement of the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, the United States only receives scorn, hatred, derision, and a hefty dose of schadenfreude.

There have been times before when I thought America had hit rock bottom and couldn't sink any lower.  Up to now, I've always been disappointed in being wrong, and today, as we hit what appears to be rock bottom again, I'm disgusted about being dead wrong.  But maybe, as President Biden tries to make greater inroads in controlling and ending the pandemic even as the country is finally in a state of peacetime with the end of the Afghan conflict, maybe, just maybe, Americans can come back and rebuild the trust of other nations and trust among each other, and start over using the assumptions of a caring, just, and generous society.

I hope I'm not wrong this time.  And I hope I'll be proven right by the 250th anniversary of American independence and the 25th anniversary of 9/11 in 2026. 

Talibonkers

Donald Trump made a smart decision this past week, but of course any smart decision Trump makes is more by accident than by design, and the accident that prompts it is usually a disaster of his own making.

Trump had allowed American diplomats to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan in an attempt to get U.S. troops out of the country that has ended many an empire (we're next).  The Afghan government objected to Trump's gambit, fearing that it would be shortchanged.  But after the Taliban bombed an American installation, Trump said he was canceling not only talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan but also talks with Taliban leaders at Camp David that were to be secret . . . until Trump let the secret out.

Let me let you in on a secret: Trump gets no points for his smart decision because he should never have made the dumb decision of inviting the Taliban to Camp David in the first place.  Trump probably had delusions of grandeur by achieving the same sort of foreign-policy coup that Bill Clinton (Trump is obsessed with all things Clinton) had when he got PLO leader Yasser Arafat to come to America to negotiate peace with Israeli Prime Minister Yihtzak Rabin.  But the idea of having the guys who gave shelter to Osama bin Laden to plan his attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - and for all this to come out around 9/11! - is so boneheaded that I needn't say any more.  Except to say that Arafat, once deemed a terrorist, never perpetrated an attack on Americans - indeed, 9/11 sickened him.  On September 11, 2001, when I was stranded in a railway station in Wilmington, Delaware, someone said to me that Arafat was a good man who couldn't control the radical elements under his leadership.  Somehow, I couldn't imagine anyone saying that about the Taliban chieftains.

The only good thing that came out of this is that John Bolton has been fired as national security adviser.  Now there won't be a war with Iran.  Don't expect Trump to answer for his blundering; he'll find another shiny object to distract us. 

Ten Years After

One of the more unpleasant truths about America after the events of September 11, 2001 is that we haven't changed for the better.  If anything, we've become more superficial and bellicose in the past ten years.  On September 12, 2001, I thought we Americans would be more intelligent and sensitive in our approach to the rest of the world and each other, and that we would be more united and more purposeful in how we lived or our lives.  Nothing could have prepared me for how wrong I was. 

I thought we'd rediscover a sense of community in out towns and cities and reach out to one another, but we became more cut off from each other.  9/11 actually drove more people into their own little worlds; we retreated into our houses and bought home theaters to take the place of concerts and movie theaters.  I expected people to make the connection between terrorism and foreign oil, and how money to purchase Middle Eastern oil found its way to supporting terrorist activities - not all of it, but enough to give us pause.  But instead of becoming more energy-efficient and less dependent on foreign oil, we bought more SUVs and almost let Amtrak go bankrupt.  We certainly can't persuade Republican governors to build rail transit projects in their states, and President Obama pays so much lip service to "green jobs" that it's become a national joke. 

I thought our culture would become more meaningful and less tawdry.  How could reality shows prosper after the reality of 9/11 on our TV screens? But our culture got much sillier and a whole lot meaner.  One Hollywood producer said that action movies would always remain popular due to demand for them in a global, multilingual audience - because everyone understands the international language of "BOOM!"

I suddenly developed a greater appreciation for mime when I heard that.

Even worse, Americans failed to learn the reality of how the world works.  We constructed, on a planet full of tragedy and loss, a civilization designed to confute and deny such realities.  The peoples of Europe, who endured one war after another and found its values comprised and tested so much for so long, certainly understand this reality, and their cultural assumptions - that life is full of tragedy that must be dealt with - contradict the blind optimism of Americans.  With the worst terrorist attack ever brought to our shores, I found it hard to understand why America was not able to start over with a better understanding of civilization in the same way Western European countries understand it.

Perhaps the worst outcome after 9/11 was how President George Walker Bush took the opportunity offered by the attacks to pursue a unilateral militaristic foreign policy.  Journalist Jonathan Alter touched on this point in remarks at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in his adopted hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, where he lamented how Bush failed to appeal to our sense of patriotism and ask us to sacrifice.  Alter noted the failure of Americans to lessen our dependence of Middle Eastern oil, to be sure, but he went further than that in pointing out how we ended up going to war in Iraq.  "We went to war under false pretenses against a country that had no connection to the attacks against us," Alter said. "We allowed fear to be exploited for political purposes and too often put our put our deepest values in deep storage. We failed to tap the idealism unleashed across the country to launch an era of national service."

Indeed, on September 22, 2001, Bush told us to go shopping.  He exhorted us to fly (not take the train) to Disney World (in the state where his brother was governor), essentially asking us to live in a September 10 world and continue propping up our consumerist society.  And how were we to deal with "the folks" (as Bush referred to al-Qaeda on the day of the attack) who committed these acts of terrorism? Bush more or less told us to let the experts handle it. We were given freedom to go about our business, even as the government cracked down on our civil liberties.

So when Bush carefully insinuated that Saddam Hussein was a threat without explicitly saying Saddam was or might have been involved with 9/11 (he let people think Saddam was), he got the country to back him into going to war in Iraq in March 2003 and tick off a planet that had been on our side eighteen months earlier.  Those of us who opposed invading Iraq were met with the following question from those who thought Iraq was involved with al-Qaeda and 9/11: "Have you forgotten what happened to our country?"

"No," I wanted to reply at the time. "Have you?" :-(

On September 13, 2011, we're too divided to solve any problems, be it the economy or the ongoing wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  We can't even provide relief money to victims of Hurricane Irene because Senate Republicans complain how costly it is.  The division in this country was created from exploitation of our unity on September 13, 2001, and that is George Walker Bush's worst legacy.

Rudolph The Long-Nosed Republican

My jaw almost dropped when Rudolph Giuliani appeared on ABC-TV and insisted to George Stephanopoulos that we had had no terrorist attacks under George Walker Bush, completely forgetting that the September 11, 2001 attacks happened on Bush's watch. Many people found this ironic, given that Giuliani was mayor of New York when the 9/11 attacks happened and has used the event to buttress his own national security credentials. Stephanopoulos apologized for not calling Rudy on the mistake, but Giuliani continues to insist that President Obama has done nothing to make us safer.

Giuliani has since said that he meant we'd had no terrorist attacks in the United States since September 11, 2001 under Bush. Okay, I'll give him that, because I'm a charitable sort of guy, but even that remark isn't entirely true. How about the 2001 anthrax attacks? Okay, so Giuliani meant there had been no Islamic terror attacks under Bush after 9/11, and pointed that out as much. "[A]s far as we know," he said of the anthrax attacks, "that was not done in the name of Islamic terrorism."

Even if you grant that, you have to consider the SUV attack at the University of North Carolina, where a Muslim inspired by Muhammad Atta intentionally hit nine people with his sport utility vehicle to punish America, as well as the 2002 Washington, D.C.-area sniper attacks orchestrated by one John Allen Muhammad, a member of the Nation of Islam, as an act of jihad. If Giuliani were to insist that he was only referring to foreign Islamic terrorism, I couldn't grant any benefit of the doubt there. Too many qualifiers. But that still wouldn't be true, as an Egyptian militant shot up a El Al (the Israeli national airline) ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport in 2002. All of this happened under Bush.

Giuliani isn't the only Republican to try to imply that 9/11 was not Bush's fault. Bill Clinton was blamed for 9/11 by right-wingers almost since September 12, 2001, on the grounds that he left Bush a flawed national intelligence network . . . and also because he had failed to capture Osama bin Laden. So had Bush. And Bush didn't seem too serious about bin Laden even after the August 2001 memo indicating bin Laden's desire to strike inside the United States. This is all part of an orchestrated attempt to paint the Democrats as soft on terrorism, even as Obama demonstrates his own seriousness in dealing with the issue. What's appalling about Giuliani is that he built his post-mayoral career and political prospects on the idea that he's a security expert who knows how to combat enemy commandos bent on acts of war against American citizens. He's not. He did a great job keeping New York City together on September 11, 2001 and in the weeks after, but he didn't do anything that might have enhanced the security of New York City. If anything, he did something that weakened it by keeping the city central command center in the original 7 World Trade Center building after David Dinkins, his predecessor, advised him to move it to Brooklyn when Giuliani took over the mayor's office in 1994. The advice was ignored.

Even Larry King, not exactly a hardball interviewer, caught Giuliani rewriting history. Giuliani complained about Obama waiting three days to address the would-be "underwear bomber" on that Christmas Day flight into Detroit while Bush waited twice as long to address Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," on that flight into Boston. Giuliani insisted the Reid incident happened before 9/11. It happened three months after 9/11.

George Stephanopoulos was deeply ashamed of his lapse of journalistic professionalism, and he made that clear. Giuliani, by contrast, has no shame.

Trying Trial

Late word from Washington is that Attorney General Eric Holder will have 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and four other al-Qaeda operatives tried for the World Trade Center attacks in federal court in New York - literally in the shadow of Ground Zero.

Republicans have inevitably cried foul over this, but it took guts for Holder to go ahead with this. Although 9/11 was seen as an act of war, the current situation in Afghanistan finds al-Qaeda practically gone from that country after eight years of American and NATO involvement there in response to 9/11, yet that effort has apparently been as successful as it's going to get. The Taliban remain difficult foes. Al-Qaeda has resettled elsewhere, mainly in Pakistan. The best way to stand up against terrorist acts is to treat it as a law enforcement issue. Law enforcement should investigate and stop potential plots. That's how the British found that cell of terrorists hoping to blow up airliners over the Atlantic in 2006. Any plot that succeeds should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and the punishment should fit the crime.

Also, putting Muhammad and his confederates on trial in the federal judicial system, we have the opportunity to show the world that our judicial system works and can bring the kind of justice that Muhammad and the others deserve without torture or indefinite imprisonment without a trial. Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, said New York can handle the trial.

One bugaboo that remains is the failure to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. Although Holder says it won't be done by January 22, 2010 as planned, he thinks he can still have it done shortly thereafter. That would compensate for the resignation of White House counsel Gregory Craig, whose difficulties with closing Guantanamo supposedly forced his departure. The Justice Department claim Craig's resignation and the delayed Guantanamo closing are not related, but others see it as an abandonment and a scapegoating of Craig, one of Washington's best legal experts.

Contradictions

President Obama should be credited for releasing the CIA memos involving torture in the Bush administration. It sheds light on some of the most cruel and inhumane practices ever committed in the name of the United States under the guise of protecting the homeland.

However, Attorney General Eric Holder is all wrong when he says he declines to prosecute the CIA agents who were involved in the torture of suspected al-Qaeda combatants. I've heard all of the reasoning and rationale for this decision - the nation had just been savagely attacked on September 11, 2001, we didn't know what al-Qaeda was capable of, information involving future terrorist plots had to be extracted post-haste, the CIA agents were acting in good faith based on legal reasoning, and so on. None of them measure up. By treating these prisoners with the same cavalier attitude al-Qaeda showed toward the victims of 9/11, we descended to their level. We violated several of our own laws and likely violated international law, and we made ourselves hypocrites in the eyes of the world. These agents need to be prosecuted, and their superiors - those who approved the use of torture - should be given justice. Even an attack as horrible as 9/11 doesn't justify or excuse this policy.

Twenty years from now, Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA members for torture and simply move on and not do it again may be seen in the same light as Gerald Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon for Watergate, but I doubt it.