This might be the best book I've ever read.
"Before & After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis," Phyllis Bennis' in-depth look at our actions abroad, provides us with a very good understanding of just how we've managed to place ourselves neck-deep in shit. I'm even considering a 2012 presidential run just to rectify all of the wrongs we've caused over the years.
Plenty of interesting reading...allow me to provide a sampling:
- Bush, so keen on keeping (US-provided) chemical weapons out of Saddam's hands, refuses to back a new protocol for enforcement of the germ warfare treaty. The London Times noted that: "For six years, everybody talks about the importance of verification (as it relates to weapons inspections). And then America discovers that its facilities, too, would have to be verified. The brazen nerve! America might be treated as though it were just another country! Mr. Bush's America seems in danger of convincing itself that it can force everybody to make concessions, while itself remaining impervious to change." Not surprisingly, the US is the largest producer of germ weapons seed stock in the world. But while we can refuse to put teeth on a treaty, we can bomb Iraq for essentially the same thing? Go figure...
- After WWII, Bennis notes, "although exploding industrial growth in the US resulted in the need for new workers, which might have led to a new welcome for Holocaust survivors, and the US Department of Labor announced that the US could easily absorb 400,000 new immigrants, the Jewish refugees were largely still excluded." As a result, Jewish refugees, most of whom openly stated their desire to come to America, were shipped to Palestine. Israel was created solely because we didn't want Jews coming here (well, also because Truman felt having Israel as a "junior partner" in the Middle East would help serve our interests. British prime minister Clement Atlee warned Truman that a mass Jewish immigration threatened to "set aflame the whole Middle East." Sounds about right...
- In the mid-'90s, the UNSCOM inspection agency that was sent into Iraq looking for WMDs was performing double duty. According to the New York Times, inspectors were also installing "an American eavesdropping system so secret that only a handful of (US allies) had full access to it. This, understandably, led to tensions..." Inspectors were gathering intelligence on Iraq for the US and Israel. UN resolutions prohibit efforts to overthrow a government or assassinate any leader...but then again, the UN doesn't matter to us...
- Colin Powell's assertion that "we have succeeded" in Iraq because we "stopped talking about Iraqi children," sums up the ruthless stance taken by this administration...
- Maybe y'all knew this, but I didn't -- the UN did NOT create no-fly zones in Iraq -- the edict was concocted by the US and Britain on a whim, and they're not part of any resolution...
- Our nation's hypocrisy runs rampant. According to Bennis, "The US purports to champion democracy as the linchpin of US foreign policy, while continuing to prop up governments famous for denying any hint of democracy to their own peoples. And then...Bush claims the September 11 attackers were motivated by hatred for American democracy...But it is a pretty good bet that the fury of those who cheered them on...was fueled...at least in part by American support for far-flung governments denying their people the same democracy the US claims to stand for." Not a real shocker...like we're supposed to believe Middle Eastern nations "hate freedom"...
- Tell me again why we still back Israel and shield them from UN war-crimes investigations? Looking solely at the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, we can find all sorts of after-school-special materials. A 57-year-old man, moving in a wheelchair equipped with a white flag, was shot and run over by Israeli tanks. A paralyzed man was crushed in his home after Israeli soldiers refused to give his family time to help him out of the house before they bulldozed it. A 14-year-old was shot to death by Israeli armored vehicles while walking to buy groceries.
- But wait...there's more. A 42-year-old Palestinian schoolteacher, employed by the UN's Palestinian relief agency (UNRWA), was shot by a sniper in his home while going to the second floor to get milk for his young child. He collapsed and was dragged downstairs by his wife. Israeli soldiers had sealed off the hospital, and when he showed his UNRWA card to an Israeli soldier and begged for help, he was told to "call Kofi Annan." The man's house was demolished, but he was admitted to the hospital...a full week later.
- John R. Bolton, a Bush staffer who once served under Reagan (shocker), actually said this at some point: "There is no United Nations. There is an international community th occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that is the United States, when it suits our interest, and when we can get others to go along...When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interest to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests we will not." Yeah, that doesn't sound imperial at all...
- One of the few beacons of light came from the final chapter, where Bennis runs a transcript of Congressman Dennis Kucinich's "voice to an alternative vision." In order to avoid carpal tunnel, I won't re-type the whole thing...but I'll sum it up by saying that shows evidence that sanity might still prevail in this country. Bennis also writes her own speech, a sort of "what-Bush-should-have-said-on-nyneleven" piece, in the same chapter. If only our nation were being run by such rational minds...
Basically, there's no way I can do justice to "Before & After." There's just far too much stuff to even cover in one rant. For anyone looking to gain a comprehensive understanding of why we're doing what we're doing, this book would be a perfect jump-off point. While "Forbidden Truth" focused mainly on our oil-driven ways, Bennis looks at just about everything else -- the entire history of US-Israeli relations, our climb toward hegemony and unilateralism, and just how out of hand we've gotten since we essentially attacked ourselves more than 16 months ago.
If someone can read this book and tell me that our nation is doing the right thing around the world, then they're in serious need of a soul. How anyone, regardless of how loyal he or she might be to the GOP, can back this administration is beyond me. How there hasn't been a deafening call from the masses for a gargantuan foreign policy change, I'll never know.
What I do know is this -- any comeuppance we get down the road is more than deserved. The American ideal has eroded away into a Fourth Reich -- and we're the new world Nazi. Our founding fathers would be ashamed to call us Americans...and we should be ashamed to attach that name to ourselves as long as we allow our leaders to act in such an un-American fashion. The land built by those seeking refuge from oppression has become the greatest oppressor of all.
I still love the United States. I just hate what we've become.
-- O
3:02:03 AM 
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