29 January 2008
26 January 2008
02 January 2008
Fathering a New Country
While the rest of the world has been bogged down by Bush-league wars, Russia has quietly [and not so quietly] been re-inventing itself better than Madonna.
Natural resources, strategic location and Duma-loads of money - the pride is back, baby! And to solidify his place in history, Putin will give birth to a New Russia - now with more superpower.
Russia: Putin's Plan To Become 'Father Of A New Country'
By RFE/RL analyst Victor Yasmann
Many observers of Russia are puzzled as to why President Vladimir Putin went to such bizarre lengths to turn the country's recent legislative elections into a "national referendum" on his own rule.
After all, Putin completely dominates the political stage, and he could have easily initiated and passed any changes to the constitution needed for him to run for another term as president. His oft-repeated assertions that he respects the letter and the spirit of the current constitution ring hollow, given Kremlin policies like the restriction of opposition political parties, strictures on civil society, suppression of nonstate media, subordination of the judicial system, and abolition of the direct election of regional administration heads.
Even most foreign observers -- while noting the unfair nature of the Duma elections and the myriad ways the Kremlin misused its power against weak political opponents -- have never really doubted the outright victory of the pro-Putin forces.
That victory was never in doubt because Putin is genuinely popular, for a mixture of objective and subjective reasons. Because of the vast revenues Russia accrues due to high global energy prices, the standard of living for many Russians is improving markedly -- and most of them attribute that prosperity to Putin personally. Putin has also hijacked populist policies from both the right and left ends of the spectrum. Borrowing from the left, he has increased pensions and state aid programs. From the right, Putin adopted the policy of a sharp reduction of business taxes and a low, flat-rate income tax for individuals. Finally, Putin's efforts to restore Russia's standing as a power in the international arena is enormously popular among Russians, many of whom remain bitter about the economic hardships and foreign-policy weakness of the 1990s. The yearning for a restoration of Russia's prestige is expressed throughout society, in areas as diverse as sports and the arts. This feeling has saturated the atmosphere because of the Kremlin's skillful manipulation.
A career intelligence officer, Putin has taken considerable pains to conceal his plans. It has become commonplace to say that Russian policy under Putin has become a series of "special operations." This secrecy is simply a part of the mindset of Putin and the siloviki -- people associated with the security organs and the military -- who surround him.
Questions Raised
Until mid-December, there was evidence that Putin was having trouble choosing a successor for when his current term expires in March 2008. His anointing of First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev does not necessarily make things simpler. Many believed the successor should come from among the siloviki who form Putin's inner circle, or at least be acceptable to them. It is unclear how Medvedev, who does not come from the ranks of the siloviki, will hold up. Moreover, because these siloviki are divided among themselves, it's unclear there is even such a thing as a candidate acceptable to all factions -- one who will be recognized as the supreme commander by the entire military and security community. Putin must also keep in mind that Russia is the world's second most powerful nuclear power and Medvedev, if he remains the successor of choice, must be an acceptable and predictable partner for the international community, particularly the United States.
Some clues about Putin's intentions can be found in an 800-page manifesto issued last summer by a group of about 70 pro-Putin, national-patriotic academics under the title "Russian Doctrine." The book is presented as a set of "guidelines" for the next administration and a kind of national, supra-party platform. It contains detailed foreign- and domestic-policy proposals, including autocratic reforms to the military, national-security system, the economy, the mass media, education, and culture.
Moreover, it was approved at the September World Congress of Russian People, an annual event sponsored by the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Kirill, who handles foreign relations for the Moscow Patriarchate and is one of the leading ideologues of the Putin regime, took pains to praise it.
The "Russian Doctrine" presumes that the Russian Federation is doomed to extinction because it will be unable to cope with the looming challenges of international competition. Within the next decade, the authors claim, Russia will increasingly begin to lag behind China, India, the United States, and some Southeast Asian countries. In response, the authors propose a new state structure based on the traditions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Interestingly, they propose doing so without dissolving the Russian Federation: that is, they urge the creation of a "parallel state" initially operating unseen behind the facade of the current one. It would consist of a system of political and economic institutions accessible only to Putin and the siloviki that the authors call "the invisible, networked Russia."
However, on closer inspection, the model described in "Russian Doctrine" resembles neither tsarist Russia nor the Soviet Union so much as it does the sociopolitical structures of Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930s.
Parallel Institutions
It isn't hard to find examples of the sort of parallel institutions the authors describe in the policies enacted during Putin's two terms as president. In 2005, he created the Public Chamber, a pseudo-public, estate-based organ similar to ones that existed in parallel to the legislatures of the countries mentioned above. More importantly, the Kremlin has been actively creating state megacorporations in key sectors of the economy, including energy, nuclear power, aviation, shipbuilding, and nanotechnology. The number of these new entities has mushroomed in the last few years, most of them being headed by siloviki from Putin's inner circle.
In December, the finishing touches were put on Rostekhnologia, a conglomerate based on the arms-export monopoly Rosoboroneksport and including virtually all weapons producers and traders, as well as machine-building firms and the giant carmaker AvtoVAZ. Rostekhnologia is headed by Sergei Chemezov, a KGB colleague from Putin's days in Dresden, East Germany. The doctrine of a corporate state also has its roots in the political climate of 1930s Europe.
In addition, during the Duma campaign, Kremlin-inspired activists energetically promoted the idea of Putin as "national leader" after he leaves the presidency. Analysts have speculated that Putin could play a role in Russia similar to that played by former South African President Nelson Mandela or former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping after their retirement. But in combination with the emerging corporate state, a national leader would seem more like Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, or Spain's Caudillo, Francisco Franco. Russian ideologists have been compelled to adopt the English-based word "lider" since the Russian "vozhd" is strongly associated with Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.
Using its hegemony over Russian culture and information, the Kremlin has been able to infuse the national consciousness with the idea of a renewed imperial state. Maksim Kalashnikov, one of the authors of the "Russian Doctrine" project and a leading proponent of new-empire thinking, has written that nothing better reflects the aspirations of a national elite than a country's science fiction books. "Today most of our science fiction is revanchist, imperial literature in which Russians are redeeming their shame [from the 1990s] and building up a new superpower," he wrote.
Two Russias
The phenomenon has not escaped the attention of Russia's neighbors. The Ukrainian website glavred.ua wrote recently that there are two Russias -- a proto-imperial Russia inside the country and a regular country from the outside. Igor Panarin, a Russian expert on information wars and a proponent of the new imperialism, told the website: "Inside the country, in the virtual world, such an empire is, indeed, being created. This is very good and it is to the credit of the current president. The next goal is to expand this public relations campaign beyond Russia's borders."
In 2006, neo-imperialist author Mikhail Yuriev published a science fiction utopia called "The Third Empire," in which the action is set in 2053. In Yuriev's vision, the world then will be covered by five super states -- India, China, the American Federation (comprising North and South America), an Islamic caliphate, and the Russian Empire. The latter includes all of Russia and the former Soviet republics and also sweeps all the way across Western Europe and even encompasses Greenland. In the text, Yuriev describes how Russia conquered Europe and Turkey in a series of "expansionist wars."
Although Yuriev's vision is fantastic, it is not completely divorced from reality. In early 2007, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry published a report on Russia's economic development through 2020. The report contained an optimistic, a neutral, and a pessimistic forecast. Under the optimistic forecast, Russia would emerge as one of the world's 10 most-developed countries by the end of the period. However, according to press reports, Putin ordered the neutral and pessimistic scenarios removed and made the optimistic scenario even rosier. Under Putin's vision, by 2020 Russia will be among the world's top five most-developed countries, on a par with the United States, China, India, and Japan. In short, Russia would be the most advanced country in Europe, state television commented recently.
If Putin is indeed following a plan along the lines of the "Russian Doctrine," then perhaps some of his next moves can be anticipated as he leaves office and focuses on the creation of a new political infrastructure and networks. The new president, a handpicked loyalist, might undertake a large-scale purge of the 1990s elite from the state apparatus, the mass media, and other positions of power. The "Russian Doctrine" identifies this as a top priority.
Speaking to RFE/RL on December 1, liberal economist Andrei Illarionov mentioned his concern that the new president might launch mass repressions, including some that touch the security apparatus. The new president might also be called upon to implement other reforms that are expected to meet with resistance at home and abroad, including the possible reform of the territorial-administrative divisions of the Russian Federation. Regional Development Minister Dmitry Kozak has already drawn up a plan to divide the country up into several "macroeconomic regions." Kozak told reporters last week that the plan covers the period through 2020 and "will be a leap forward in the development of various territories."
Then, after this dirty work has been done, a new draft constitution, based on "conservative values," can be introduced. Under it a new schedule of elections will be laid out and Putin can return to the Kremlin in glory, the father of a new country.
But to implement this plan, Putin needs to be sure that he has more legitimacy than his successor. That's why he turned the Duma elections into a personal referendum. Taken together, Unified Russia and A Just Russia pulled in more than 70 percent of the vote. Since the president elected in March will be unlikely to get much more than 50 percent of the vote, Putin will have an important "legitimacy edge." With Medvedev's call for Putin to step in as a future prime minister, the plan would appear to be well under way.
Natural resources, strategic location and Duma-loads of money - the pride is back, baby! And to solidify his place in history, Putin will give birth to a New Russia - now with more superpower.
Russia: Putin's Plan To Become 'Father Of A New Country'
By RFE/RL analyst Victor Yasmann
Many observers of Russia are puzzled as to why President Vladimir Putin went to such bizarre lengths to turn the country's recent legislative elections into a "national referendum" on his own rule.
After all, Putin completely dominates the political stage, and he could have easily initiated and passed any changes to the constitution needed for him to run for another term as president. His oft-repeated assertions that he respects the letter and the spirit of the current constitution ring hollow, given Kremlin policies like the restriction of opposition political parties, strictures on civil society, suppression of nonstate media, subordination of the judicial system, and abolition of the direct election of regional administration heads.
Even most foreign observers -- while noting the unfair nature of the Duma elections and the myriad ways the Kremlin misused its power against weak political opponents -- have never really doubted the outright victory of the pro-Putin forces.
That victory was never in doubt because Putin is genuinely popular, for a mixture of objective and subjective reasons. Because of the vast revenues Russia accrues due to high global energy prices, the standard of living for many Russians is improving markedly -- and most of them attribute that prosperity to Putin personally. Putin has also hijacked populist policies from both the right and left ends of the spectrum. Borrowing from the left, he has increased pensions and state aid programs. From the right, Putin adopted the policy of a sharp reduction of business taxes and a low, flat-rate income tax for individuals. Finally, Putin's efforts to restore Russia's standing as a power in the international arena is enormously popular among Russians, many of whom remain bitter about the economic hardships and foreign-policy weakness of the 1990s. The yearning for a restoration of Russia's prestige is expressed throughout society, in areas as diverse as sports and the arts. This feeling has saturated the atmosphere because of the Kremlin's skillful manipulation.
A career intelligence officer, Putin has taken considerable pains to conceal his plans. It has become commonplace to say that Russian policy under Putin has become a series of "special operations." This secrecy is simply a part of the mindset of Putin and the siloviki -- people associated with the security organs and the military -- who surround him.
Questions Raised
Until mid-December, there was evidence that Putin was having trouble choosing a successor for when his current term expires in March 2008. His anointing of First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev does not necessarily make things simpler. Many believed the successor should come from among the siloviki who form Putin's inner circle, or at least be acceptable to them. It is unclear how Medvedev, who does not come from the ranks of the siloviki, will hold up. Moreover, because these siloviki are divided among themselves, it's unclear there is even such a thing as a candidate acceptable to all factions -- one who will be recognized as the supreme commander by the entire military and security community. Putin must also keep in mind that Russia is the world's second most powerful nuclear power and Medvedev, if he remains the successor of choice, must be an acceptable and predictable partner for the international community, particularly the United States.
Some clues about Putin's intentions can be found in an 800-page manifesto issued last summer by a group of about 70 pro-Putin, national-patriotic academics under the title "Russian Doctrine." The book is presented as a set of "guidelines" for the next administration and a kind of national, supra-party platform. It contains detailed foreign- and domestic-policy proposals, including autocratic reforms to the military, national-security system, the economy, the mass media, education, and culture.
Moreover, it was approved at the September World Congress of Russian People, an annual event sponsored by the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Kirill, who handles foreign relations for the Moscow Patriarchate and is one of the leading ideologues of the Putin regime, took pains to praise it.
The "Russian Doctrine" presumes that the Russian Federation is doomed to extinction because it will be unable to cope with the looming challenges of international competition. Within the next decade, the authors claim, Russia will increasingly begin to lag behind China, India, the United States, and some Southeast Asian countries. In response, the authors propose a new state structure based on the traditions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Interestingly, they propose doing so without dissolving the Russian Federation: that is, they urge the creation of a "parallel state" initially operating unseen behind the facade of the current one. It would consist of a system of political and economic institutions accessible only to Putin and the siloviki that the authors call "the invisible, networked Russia."
However, on closer inspection, the model described in "Russian Doctrine" resembles neither tsarist Russia nor the Soviet Union so much as it does the sociopolitical structures of Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in the 1930s.
Parallel Institutions
It isn't hard to find examples of the sort of parallel institutions the authors describe in the policies enacted during Putin's two terms as president. In 2005, he created the Public Chamber, a pseudo-public, estate-based organ similar to ones that existed in parallel to the legislatures of the countries mentioned above. More importantly, the Kremlin has been actively creating state megacorporations in key sectors of the economy, including energy, nuclear power, aviation, shipbuilding, and nanotechnology. The number of these new entities has mushroomed in the last few years, most of them being headed by siloviki from Putin's inner circle.
In December, the finishing touches were put on Rostekhnologia, a conglomerate based on the arms-export monopoly Rosoboroneksport and including virtually all weapons producers and traders, as well as machine-building firms and the giant carmaker AvtoVAZ. Rostekhnologia is headed by Sergei Chemezov, a KGB colleague from Putin's days in Dresden, East Germany. The doctrine of a corporate state also has its roots in the political climate of 1930s Europe.
In addition, during the Duma campaign, Kremlin-inspired activists energetically promoted the idea of Putin as "national leader" after he leaves the presidency. Analysts have speculated that Putin could play a role in Russia similar to that played by former South African President Nelson Mandela or former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping after their retirement. But in combination with the emerging corporate state, a national leader would seem more like Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, or Spain's Caudillo, Francisco Franco. Russian ideologists have been compelled to adopt the English-based word "lider" since the Russian "vozhd" is strongly associated with Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin.
Using its hegemony over Russian culture and information, the Kremlin has been able to infuse the national consciousness with the idea of a renewed imperial state. Maksim Kalashnikov, one of the authors of the "Russian Doctrine" project and a leading proponent of new-empire thinking, has written that nothing better reflects the aspirations of a national elite than a country's science fiction books. "Today most of our science fiction is revanchist, imperial literature in which Russians are redeeming their shame [from the 1990s] and building up a new superpower," he wrote.
Two Russias
The phenomenon has not escaped the attention of Russia's neighbors. The Ukrainian website glavred.ua wrote recently that there are two Russias -- a proto-imperial Russia inside the country and a regular country from the outside. Igor Panarin, a Russian expert on information wars and a proponent of the new imperialism, told the website: "Inside the country, in the virtual world, such an empire is, indeed, being created. This is very good and it is to the credit of the current president. The next goal is to expand this public relations campaign beyond Russia's borders."
In 2006, neo-imperialist author Mikhail Yuriev published a science fiction utopia called "The Third Empire," in which the action is set in 2053. In Yuriev's vision, the world then will be covered by five super states -- India, China, the American Federation (comprising North and South America), an Islamic caliphate, and the Russian Empire. The latter includes all of Russia and the former Soviet republics and also sweeps all the way across Western Europe and even encompasses Greenland. In the text, Yuriev describes how Russia conquered Europe and Turkey in a series of "expansionist wars."
Although Yuriev's vision is fantastic, it is not completely divorced from reality. In early 2007, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry published a report on Russia's economic development through 2020. The report contained an optimistic, a neutral, and a pessimistic forecast. Under the optimistic forecast, Russia would emerge as one of the world's 10 most-developed countries by the end of the period. However, according to press reports, Putin ordered the neutral and pessimistic scenarios removed and made the optimistic scenario even rosier. Under Putin's vision, by 2020 Russia will be among the world's top five most-developed countries, on a par with the United States, China, India, and Japan. In short, Russia would be the most advanced country in Europe, state television commented recently.
If Putin is indeed following a plan along the lines of the "Russian Doctrine," then perhaps some of his next moves can be anticipated as he leaves office and focuses on the creation of a new political infrastructure and networks. The new president, a handpicked loyalist, might undertake a large-scale purge of the 1990s elite from the state apparatus, the mass media, and other positions of power. The "Russian Doctrine" identifies this as a top priority.
Speaking to RFE/RL on December 1, liberal economist Andrei Illarionov mentioned his concern that the new president might launch mass repressions, including some that touch the security apparatus. The new president might also be called upon to implement other reforms that are expected to meet with resistance at home and abroad, including the possible reform of the territorial-administrative divisions of the Russian Federation. Regional Development Minister Dmitry Kozak has already drawn up a plan to divide the country up into several "macroeconomic regions." Kozak told reporters last week that the plan covers the period through 2020 and "will be a leap forward in the development of various territories."
Then, after this dirty work has been done, a new draft constitution, based on "conservative values," can be introduced. Under it a new schedule of elections will be laid out and Putin can return to the Kremlin in glory, the father of a new country.
But to implement this plan, Putin needs to be sure that he has more legitimacy than his successor. That's why he turned the Duma elections into a personal referendum. Taken together, Unified Russia and A Just Russia pulled in more than 70 percent of the vote. Since the president elected in March will be unlikely to get much more than 50 percent of the vote, Putin will have an important "legitimacy edge." With Medvedev's call for Putin to step in as a future prime minister, the plan would appear to be well under way.
01 January 2008
"When we act, we create our own Reality."
If you're big enough, things happen when you move.
So in spite of the Butterfly Effect [or maybe because of it], countries act and the rest of us react. The USA acts. Russia acts. Venezuela acts. China acts. India acts. Pakistan acts. Israel acts.
A new reality sets in [or perceived reality]. And the rest of the world turns.
Scheherazade in the White House
‘We’re an empire and when we act, we create our own reality’
How George Bush’s wartime administration used a magician, Hollywood designers and Karl Rove telling 1,001 stories to sell the invasion of Iraq.
By Christian Salmon
A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ ”.
Suskind’s article was a sensation, which the paper called an intellectual scoop. Columnists and bloggers seized on the phrase “reality-based community” which spread across the internet. Google had nearly a million hits for it in July 2007. Wikipedia created a page dedicated to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University: “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community’, their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah, right…’)”.
The remarks, which were probably made by Karl Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.
Disney to the Rescue
The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provided a spectacular illustration of the White House’s desire to create its own reality. Pentagon departments, keen not to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf war in 1991, paid particular attention to their communications strategy. As well as 500 embedded journalists integrated into sections of the armed services, great attention was paid to the design of the press room at US forces headquarters in Qatar: for a million dollars, a storage hangar was transformed into an ultramodern television studio with stage, plasma screens and all the electronic equipment needed to produce videos, geographic maps and diagrams for real time combat.
A scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the television programme Good Morning America. In 2001 the White House had put him in charge of creating background designs for presidential speeches – unsurprising to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without food. Blaine claimed in a book in 2002 that he was the successor to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century magician who agreed to go to Algeria at the French government’s request to help it quell an uprising by showing that his magic was better than that of the rebels. It is not known whether that is what the Pentagon expected from Blaine but it seems that use was made of his illusionist talents for special effects.
Scott Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who worked within the Republican propaganda machine, created many backgrounds against which Bush made important statements during his terms of office. On 1 May 2003 he stage-managed the presidential speech on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier before a sign reading “Mission accomplished: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
The show didn’t end there. Bush landed aboard the carrier in a fighter plane renamed Navy One; on it was written “George Bush, Commander-in-Chief”. He was seen leaving the cockpit dressed in a flight suit, his helmet under his arm as if he were returning from war in a remake of Top Gun (the film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is a familiar face in Hollywood-Pentagon operations; he made a reality TV show, Profiles from the Front Line, on the war in Afghanistan).
The former New York Times theatre critic, Frank Rich, described the television coverage of this event and said it was fantastic – like theatre. David Broder of The Washington Post was captivated by what he called Bush’s physical posture. Sforza had to stage the scene carefully so that the city of San Diego, about 60km away, was not seen on the horizon when the carrier was supposed to be out in open sea in the combat zone.
But the staging was never as explicit as on 15 August 2002 when Bush solemnly spoke of national security in front of Mount Rushmore with its sculptures of the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. During his speech the cameras were placed at an angle that allowed Bush to be filmed in profile, his face superimposed on to those of his predecessors.
The Image Becomes the Story
For Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the “great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve”, Sforza rented three barges to take the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan’s declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with the Statue of Liberty in the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was around the speaker’s head was as important as the head itself.
What is around the head turns an image into a legend: “Mission accomplished”, the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty – over time the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the desired emotion. For Americans in 2002 nothing could have had a greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was ready to concentrate on important matters.
According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control”. Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.
As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world.
Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement”. This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”
So in spite of the Butterfly Effect [or maybe because of it], countries act and the rest of us react. The USA acts. Russia acts. Venezuela acts. China acts. India acts. Pakistan acts. Israel acts.
A new reality sets in [or perceived reality]. And the rest of the world turns.
Scheherazade in the White House
‘We’re an empire and when we act, we create our own reality’
How George Bush’s wartime administration used a magician, Hollywood designers and Karl Rove telling 1,001 stories to sell the invasion of Iraq.
By Christian Salmon
A few days before the 2004 presidential election, Ron Suskind, a columnist who had been investigating the White House and its communications for years, wrote in The New York Times about a conversation he had with a presidential adviser in 2002. “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.. and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’ ”.
Suskind’s article was a sensation, which the paper called an intellectual scoop. Columnists and bloggers seized on the phrase “reality-based community” which spread across the internet. Google had nearly a million hits for it in July 2007. Wikipedia created a page dedicated to it. According to Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University: “Many on the left adopted the term. ‘Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community’, their blogs said. The right then jeered at the left’s self-description. (‘They’re reality-based? Yeah, right…’)”.
The remarks, which were probably made by Karl Rove a few months before the Iraq war, are not just cynical and Machiavellian. They sound like they come from the theatre rather than from an office in the White House. Not content with renewing the ancient problems discussed in cabinet offices, pitting idealists against pragmatists, moralists against realists, pacifists against warmongers or, in 2002, defenders of international law against supporters of the use of force, they display a new concept of the relationship between politics and reality. The leaders of the world’s superpower were not just moving away from realpolitik but also from realism to become creators of their own reality, the masters of appearance, demanding a realpolitik of fiction.
Disney to the Rescue
The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 provided a spectacular illustration of the White House’s desire to create its own reality. Pentagon departments, keen not to repeat the mistakes of the first Gulf war in 1991, paid particular attention to their communications strategy. As well as 500 embedded journalists integrated into sections of the armed services, great attention was paid to the design of the press room at US forces headquarters in Qatar: for a million dollars, a storage hangar was transformed into an ultramodern television studio with stage, plasma screens and all the electronic equipment needed to produce videos, geographic maps and diagrams for real time combat.
A scene in which the US army spokesman, General Tommy Franks, addressed journalists cost $200,000 and was produced by a designer who had worked for Disney, Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the television programme Good Morning America. In 2001 the White House had put him in charge of creating background designs for presidential speeches – unsurprising to those aware of the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood.
More surprising was the Pentagon decision to recruit David Blaine for interior design; he is a magician famous in the US for his TV show and for conjuring tricks such as levitating or being shut in a cage without food. Blaine claimed in a book in 2002 that he was the successor to Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century magician who agreed to go to Algeria at the French government’s request to help it quell an uprising by showing that his magic was better than that of the rebels. It is not known whether that is what the Pentagon expected from Blaine but it seems that use was made of his illusionist talents for special effects.
Scott Sforza, a former ABC TV producer who worked within the Republican propaganda machine, created many backgrounds against which Bush made important statements during his terms of office. On 1 May 2003 he stage-managed the presidential speech on the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier before a sign reading “Mission accomplished: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
The show didn’t end there. Bush landed aboard the carrier in a fighter plane renamed Navy One; on it was written “George Bush, Commander-in-Chief”. He was seen leaving the cockpit dressed in a flight suit, his helmet under his arm as if he were returning from war in a remake of Top Gun (the film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is a familiar face in Hollywood-Pentagon operations; he made a reality TV show, Profiles from the Front Line, on the war in Afghanistan).
The former New York Times theatre critic, Frank Rich, described the television coverage of this event and said it was fantastic – like theatre. David Broder of The Washington Post was captivated by what he called Bush’s physical posture. Sforza had to stage the scene carefully so that the city of San Diego, about 60km away, was not seen on the horizon when the carrier was supposed to be out in open sea in the combat zone.
But the staging was never as explicit as on 15 August 2002 when Bush solemnly spoke of national security in front of Mount Rushmore with its sculptures of the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. During his speech the cameras were placed at an angle that allowed Bush to be filmed in profile, his face superimposed on to those of his predecessors.
The Image Becomes the Story
For Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11, in which he prepared US public opinion for the Iraq invasion by glorifying the “great struggle that tests our strength and even more our resolve”, Sforza rented three barges to take the team to the foot of the Statue of Liberty, which he had lit from below. He chose the camera angles so that the statue appeared in the background during the speech. Frank Rich, commenting on this, quoted Michael Deaver, who stage-managed Ronald Reagan’s declaration of candidacy speech in 1980 with the Statue of Liberty in the background. According to Deaver, people understood that what was around the speaker’s head was as important as the head itself.
What is around the head turns an image into a legend: “Mission accomplished”, the Founding Fathers, the Statue of Liberty – over time the image becomes the story. But the event must resonate with the viewer, must make two moments interact: what is represented in the image and the actual moment it is seen. This resonance produces the desired emotion. For Americans in 2002 nothing could have had a greater emotional impact than a speech on war on the first anniversary of 9/11. The country had just come back from summer holidays and was ready to concentrate on important matters.
According to Ira Chernus, professor at the University of Colorado, Karl Rove applied the “Scheherazade strategy”: “When policy dooms you, start telling stories – stories so fabulous, so gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy. It plays on the insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control”. Rove did this with much success in 2004 when Bush was re-elected, diverting voters’ attention away from the state of the war by evoking the great collective myths of the US imagination.
As Chernus explains, Rove was “betting that the voters will be mesmerised by John Wayne-style tales of real men fighting evil on the frontier – at least enough Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.” Chernus believed that Rove invented simplistic good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell and tried to turn every election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus Democratic moral confusion. “The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what’s actually going on out there in the world.
Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement”. This August Rove was forced to resign by Democrat members of Congress. He announced his decision with an admission which could have applied to all his work: “I feel like I’m Moby Dick… they’re after me.”
Applied Entertainment
The best form of entertainment is in using it to actually do something worthwhile: stories that show our tremendous potential, games that teach us empathy and compassion, movies that relate our common humanity of struggle.
So now the United Nations announces that they have signed a deal with Marvel to apply comicbook status onto global governance.
Brilliant. I can't wait to see world leaders pounding on the address podium with Hulk hands.
Kapow! A Hero for our Troubled Times
Simon Usborne
The Independent
Spider-Man's challenges have so far been pretty small beer. Since he first spun his web in the 1960s, he has squared up to a gallery of rogues, from the multi-limbed Doctor Octopus to the shape-shifting Sandman. Yet so far he has only been tasked with rescuing the citizens of New York.
Now he is set for the truly big time. In a story out later this year, the Marvel hero will be called upon to rescue the battered image of a very real-world institution – the United Nations.
In a move that will add grist to the mills of critics of the UN, who say the New York-based international organisation is ineffective and is suffering a communications crisis, particularly in the US, the body is joining forces with Marvel Comics, the creative force behind a stable of superheroes that includes Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and theX-Men. The unlikely partnership will create a new comic book that will include UN characters working alongside "Spidey" and other superheroes to settle bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.
Details of the plot have not yet been released but, according to the UN Office for Partnerships, the script is being written and the final storyline is set to be approved next month. Cartoonists and writers are working for free. The comic is expected to be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature heroes including Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, as well as workers from UN agencies such as children's charity UNICEF and blue helmets of the peacekeeping forces.
Eventually, the work will be translated into several other languages and widely distributed, but it is American schoolchildren who the UN plans to target first in a bid to rescue its image; the comic will be distributed free to one million US school children later next year. The UN says on its website, "By making the complex UN system accessible to youth, the partners hope to teach children the value of international co-operation, and sensitise them to the problems faced in other parts of the world."
There is, of course, no mention on its website of the UN's troubled image but the initiative can only serve to bolster the organisation's reputation, which has become embroiled in accusations of corruption and ineptitude. Relations between the UN and the US have become particularly tense during the presidency of George Bush. More than 10 years ago, former US ambassador the UN, John Bolton went so far as to say there was "no such thing" as the UN and called the US the world's "only real power". He also declared that if the 38-storey UN building "lost 10 storeys today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference".
Marvel Entertainment, the parent company based in New York that owns Marvel Comics, is known in the publishing industry for zealously guarding its brand, regularly declining tie-in and licensing opportunities.
Many will raise an eyebrow at the firm's apparent UN love-in, but a look at the comic company's history reveals a long tradition of promoting political causes, and acting as a touchstone for American ideals and patriotism. In Spider-Man, the international body may have found a public relations supremo worth a thousand besuited Manhattan marketing executives.
Marvel burst on to comic store stands in 1939, on the eve as the Second World War, as Timely Publications. Founded by a magazine publisher called Martin Goodman, its first hit superhero was Captain America, who wore his politics on his star-spangled sleeve more overtly than any of his Marvel successors. Created by Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby, the first edition was published in March 1941 – nine months before Pearl Harbour. It featured "Cap", as fans came to know him, the alter ego of sickly Steve Rogers, punching Adolf Hitler on the jaw.
Such gung-ho scripting sent circulation of wartime editions spiralling to more than a million a month, outstripping that of news publications such as Time.
To date, more than 200 million copies of Captain America comic books have been sold in more than 75 countries. A post-war lull in sales followed Captain America's heyday but, in the 1960s, other characters who walked out of the Marvel stable continued to reflect the politics of the day. The early 1960s, at the height of the cold war, saw the emergence of a new generation of superheroes, including a quartet called the Fantastic Four.
Channelling Cold War and nuclear paranoia, the work, created by Jack Kirby and comic book legend, Stan Lee, featured four Americans who gain super powers after being exposed to solar rays on a scientific mission to outer space. In one story, the foursome must do battle with the Silver Surfer, whose presence on Earth threatens the future of the planet.
Spider-Man, easily the most successful of Marvel's gallery of superheroes, was not immune to political influences. Another Cold War-era hero – Peter Parker's alter-ego first appeared in the comic book Amazing Fantasy in 1962 – Spider-Man also reflected American city-dweller's increasingly angst-ridden relationships with their metropolises. Here was a hero who could single-handedly rid the streets of crime.
In one controversial story, published in 1971, Stan Lee defied the Comics Code Authority with a story about the perils of drug taking. Responding to a request from the US Government to highlight the destructive force of narcotics, Lee penned a tale that saw Spider-Man facing up to the Green Goblin's son, Harry Osborn, who is hospitalised after taking LSD. This went against convention because the story depicted drug use, but Lee published anyway, and the CCA subsequently loosened its code to permit the negative depiction of drugs.
The early 1960s also saw the launch of one of Marvel's most politically astute superheroes. First seen in 1963, Iron Man was at first an anti-communist. In his first incarnation, the patriotic engineer Anthony Stark travels to wartime Vietnam, where he is captured by an evil warlord called Wong Chu, but later creates an iron suit of armour that gives him super powers and allows him to defeat the communists.
Iron Man's anti-red stance softens as opposition to the war grows and subsequent storylines see him turn his attention to Iraq in the first Gulf War.
This year sees the release of a mega-budget film version of Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr. Produced by Marvel itself, the film sees Iron Man travelling to Afghanistan to introduce a new missile design to US Air Force chiefs. This time, he is captured by Afghan rebels and is ordered to make a missile for them. Instead, he conceives his indestructible iron suit and saves the day.
The film can expect to be greeted by huge audiences at US military bases on its release next May. Back at the UN, chiefs have been quick to point out it was not they who came up with the idea for the new comics. That distinction lies with French filmmaker, Romuald Sciora. But a close look at his CV shows him to be something of a UN loyalist – his portfolio includes "À la maison de verre" (In the glass house), a series of short documentaries looking at the leadership and accomplishments of the last four UN Secretaries-General.
UN bosses will be eagerly anticipating the latest attempt to restore the organisation's reputation. They will also hope that the characters based on UN staff fare better than the character who started it all – Captain America. In an apparent shift from the tradition for getting behind American causes, Marvel killed off the Captain last April. He is felled by an assassin's bullet 66 years after he began battling villains.
Commenting on the hero's demise, Marvel writer Jeph Loeb said: "Part of it grew out of the fact that we are a country that's at war, we are being perceived differently in the world. [Captain America] wears the flag and he is assassinated – it's impossible not to have it at least be a metaphor for the complications of the present day."
Co-writer Ed Brubaker also alluded to the superhero's role in a more complicated political climate, where the increasingly blurred line between good and evil has become more of a struggle for comic book cartoonists to draw. "What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on and giving speeches on the street corner against the Bush administration," he said, "and all the really right-wing fans all want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein."
So now the United Nations announces that they have signed a deal with Marvel to apply comicbook status onto global governance.
Brilliant. I can't wait to see world leaders pounding on the address podium with Hulk hands.
Kapow! A Hero for our Troubled Times
Simon Usborne
The Independent
Spider-Man's challenges have so far been pretty small beer. Since he first spun his web in the 1960s, he has squared up to a gallery of rogues, from the multi-limbed Doctor Octopus to the shape-shifting Sandman. Yet so far he has only been tasked with rescuing the citizens of New York.
Now he is set for the truly big time. In a story out later this year, the Marvel hero will be called upon to rescue the battered image of a very real-world institution – the United Nations.
In a move that will add grist to the mills of critics of the UN, who say the New York-based international organisation is ineffective and is suffering a communications crisis, particularly in the US, the body is joining forces with Marvel Comics, the creative force behind a stable of superheroes that includes Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and theX-Men. The unlikely partnership will create a new comic book that will include UN characters working alongside "Spidey" and other superheroes to settle bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.
Details of the plot have not yet been released but, according to the UN Office for Partnerships, the script is being written and the final storyline is set to be approved next month. Cartoonists and writers are working for free. The comic is expected to be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature heroes including Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, as well as workers from UN agencies such as children's charity UNICEF and blue helmets of the peacekeeping forces.
Eventually, the work will be translated into several other languages and widely distributed, but it is American schoolchildren who the UN plans to target first in a bid to rescue its image; the comic will be distributed free to one million US school children later next year. The UN says on its website, "By making the complex UN system accessible to youth, the partners hope to teach children the value of international co-operation, and sensitise them to the problems faced in other parts of the world."
There is, of course, no mention on its website of the UN's troubled image but the initiative can only serve to bolster the organisation's reputation, which has become embroiled in accusations of corruption and ineptitude. Relations between the UN and the US have become particularly tense during the presidency of George Bush. More than 10 years ago, former US ambassador the UN, John Bolton went so far as to say there was "no such thing" as the UN and called the US the world's "only real power". He also declared that if the 38-storey UN building "lost 10 storeys today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference".
Marvel Entertainment, the parent company based in New York that owns Marvel Comics, is known in the publishing industry for zealously guarding its brand, regularly declining tie-in and licensing opportunities.
Many will raise an eyebrow at the firm's apparent UN love-in, but a look at the comic company's history reveals a long tradition of promoting political causes, and acting as a touchstone for American ideals and patriotism. In Spider-Man, the international body may have found a public relations supremo worth a thousand besuited Manhattan marketing executives.
Marvel burst on to comic store stands in 1939, on the eve as the Second World War, as Timely Publications. Founded by a magazine publisher called Martin Goodman, its first hit superhero was Captain America, who wore his politics on his star-spangled sleeve more overtly than any of his Marvel successors. Created by Joe Simon and artist Jack Kirby, the first edition was published in March 1941 – nine months before Pearl Harbour. It featured "Cap", as fans came to know him, the alter ego of sickly Steve Rogers, punching Adolf Hitler on the jaw.
Such gung-ho scripting sent circulation of wartime editions spiralling to more than a million a month, outstripping that of news publications such as Time.
To date, more than 200 million copies of Captain America comic books have been sold in more than 75 countries. A post-war lull in sales followed Captain America's heyday but, in the 1960s, other characters who walked out of the Marvel stable continued to reflect the politics of the day. The early 1960s, at the height of the cold war, saw the emergence of a new generation of superheroes, including a quartet called the Fantastic Four.
Channelling Cold War and nuclear paranoia, the work, created by Jack Kirby and comic book legend, Stan Lee, featured four Americans who gain super powers after being exposed to solar rays on a scientific mission to outer space. In one story, the foursome must do battle with the Silver Surfer, whose presence on Earth threatens the future of the planet.
Spider-Man, easily the most successful of Marvel's gallery of superheroes, was not immune to political influences. Another Cold War-era hero – Peter Parker's alter-ego first appeared in the comic book Amazing Fantasy in 1962 – Spider-Man also reflected American city-dweller's increasingly angst-ridden relationships with their metropolises. Here was a hero who could single-handedly rid the streets of crime.
In one controversial story, published in 1971, Stan Lee defied the Comics Code Authority with a story about the perils of drug taking. Responding to a request from the US Government to highlight the destructive force of narcotics, Lee penned a tale that saw Spider-Man facing up to the Green Goblin's son, Harry Osborn, who is hospitalised after taking LSD. This went against convention because the story depicted drug use, but Lee published anyway, and the CCA subsequently loosened its code to permit the negative depiction of drugs.
The early 1960s also saw the launch of one of Marvel's most politically astute superheroes. First seen in 1963, Iron Man was at first an anti-communist. In his first incarnation, the patriotic engineer Anthony Stark travels to wartime Vietnam, where he is captured by an evil warlord called Wong Chu, but later creates an iron suit of armour that gives him super powers and allows him to defeat the communists.
Iron Man's anti-red stance softens as opposition to the war grows and subsequent storylines see him turn his attention to Iraq in the first Gulf War.
This year sees the release of a mega-budget film version of Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr. Produced by Marvel itself, the film sees Iron Man travelling to Afghanistan to introduce a new missile design to US Air Force chiefs. This time, he is captured by Afghan rebels and is ordered to make a missile for them. Instead, he conceives his indestructible iron suit and saves the day.
The film can expect to be greeted by huge audiences at US military bases on its release next May. Back at the UN, chiefs have been quick to point out it was not they who came up with the idea for the new comics. That distinction lies with French filmmaker, Romuald Sciora. But a close look at his CV shows him to be something of a UN loyalist – his portfolio includes "À la maison de verre" (In the glass house), a series of short documentaries looking at the leadership and accomplishments of the last four UN Secretaries-General.
UN bosses will be eagerly anticipating the latest attempt to restore the organisation's reputation. They will also hope that the characters based on UN staff fare better than the character who started it all – Captain America. In an apparent shift from the tradition for getting behind American causes, Marvel killed off the Captain last April. He is felled by an assassin's bullet 66 years after he began battling villains.
Commenting on the hero's demise, Marvel writer Jeph Loeb said: "Part of it grew out of the fact that we are a country that's at war, we are being perceived differently in the world. [Captain America] wears the flag and he is assassinated – it's impossible not to have it at least be a metaphor for the complications of the present day."
Co-writer Ed Brubaker also alluded to the superhero's role in a more complicated political climate, where the increasingly blurred line between good and evil has become more of a struggle for comic book cartoonists to draw. "What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on and giving speeches on the street corner against the Bush administration," he said, "and all the really right-wing fans all want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein."
The United States of Denial
A country is what it does.
Despite the year-end hang wringing in the New York Times editorial, America, you are what you do and what you have done - just like the rest of us.
Looking at America
Editorial
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.
Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.
Despite the year-end hang wringing in the New York Times editorial, America, you are what you do and what you have done - just like the rest of us.
Looking at America
Editorial
There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.
It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.
The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.
Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.
Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.
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