The ‘Nader Problem’ in a Broader Perspective

Column No. 35

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - October 21, 2004

A friend sent me a comment on the upcoming election from a just-retired senior government department employee, certainly strongly anti-Bush, but concerned about what a Kerry Administration might mean for the country as well.  As my friend said, the comment speaks volumes.  I have paraphrased it here.

“I have been involved with education all of my life.  It happens too that I have been concerned from the beginning of the Bush Administration’s term with the influence that the thinking (if you can call it that) of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has on its policies.  I felt that if our countrymen understood the agenda of the current administration, which comes right out of PNAC, we perhaps could do something about obstructing their objectives.

“In regard of the upcoming election, I am very concerned that, should he become President, in substance, although certainly not style, Senator Kerry’s foreign and domestic policies won’t differ that much from Bush’s.  I have been reading in several left-wing journals that tell this to their readers.  These writings have led me to believe that even if Kerry is elected, we have a heck of a job ahead of us if we think for one minute that a Kerry win will give us our nation back.  Although he would appoint reasonably-minded judges, would pay more attention to environmental preservation, try to do something about health care and education, show some concern about the preservation of civil liberties, and have a markedly less confrontational and aggressive foreign policy, he still will, these journals and their writers say, ultimately be beholden to corporate interests in the United States.

“This is, of course, pretty much what Ralph Nader says when he tells us that there is no difference between Kerry and Bush, and that, therefore, people who really want to make a change in our country should vote for him.  Thom Hartman's ‘We the People’ explains quite succinctly how Corporations became ‘persons’ and why this is not a good idea for the human beings who are living their lives on this planet, especially the ones who inhabit this nation.  I know all about Bush, but if these analysts are correct, in the long run there really isn’t that much difference between him and Kerry so why not go with Nader in trying something new?”

My friend asked me for advice on how to answer this friend of his.  This is what I suggested to him.

Here's an alternate response to the "Nader Question" that your friend raises that I have developed.  See what you think.  The usual response begins with “But there is really is a difference, a huge one.  Let me count the ways.”  However, let us for the sake of argument grant everything that these Nader-leaning folks say, that there is really no, or very little, difference between Kerry and Bush.  To begin with, this is like saying that there was very little difference between Roosevelt and Hoover, they were both capitalists, so why vote for either one, or that, in Philip Roth's account of the 1940 election, there was very little difference between Roosevelt and Lindbergh.  So what if one was anti-Semite, they were both capitalists.  Obviously, there is a good deal to dispute on the facts of that statement, but let us even grant it as a premise.  Then the following issues and questions arise:

1.    Nader will not win.  Nader is not now and never has been, even when he was the Green Party's standard-bearer, a political organizer.  (Now it happens that he has been even cast out by the Green Party.)  Thus, granting that his goals are both laudable (I would grant much but not all of that) and achievable in America in the foreseeable future (I would not grant that), and given that achieving them would require a long-range political plan, money, and a huge amount of very hard work, what positive purpose will be achieved by voting for him, knowing that he is no political organizer, totally lacking in any of the necessary skills for building an alternate political movement?

2.    The Nader vote could very well tip the election to Bush.  While people like your friend and the left-wing magazines she reads believe that there is not any real difference between them, the Kerry voters and the Democratic Party do think, very strongly, that differences are there.  How would a Bush victory in this context help Nader both promote his ideas and organize (well, not Nader himself, but like-minded thinkers) in the Democratic Party and among the Kerry voters, Democrat and non-Democrat alike?

3.            Let's say that in a second Bush term, the country slides into Depression, and/or has a major credit collapse, public and private, and/or moves steadily in the direction of concentration of governmental power in the hands of the Executive Branch which then uses that power to crush dissent, and/or the Iraq crisis turns into the Iraq Disaster (of one kind or another), and/or you name it, the results of known Bush policies.  In addition, let us say that it would be the Nader vote that will have caused Bush to get in, or at least that is what the public perceives would have taken place.  What then happens to Nader's ideas and the possibility of promoting them?

4.             Let's say that Kerry wins, despite the Nader vote.  How much traction would Nader and his followers, and even the Green Party, tarred by the Nader brush, have in a Kerry Administration?  Who would give them the time of day?  I would not, and I happen to like many of their ideas.  Would that be a good outcome for the future of their good ideas, much less Nader personally as an influencer of policy?

5.            On the future of the Democratic Party, win or lose this time around.  For many years, well before 2000, Nader has carried no weight with me because he refused to work within the Democratic Party to try to change it.  He offered no plan for trying to get it back to its progressive New Deal roots, for using that heritage of the modern party to get it to offer real alternative policies to those of the Republican and their friends in the DLC.

Nader’s claim has always been that he wanted to change the Party, not create a "third force" or third party.  Well, you do not change a party by working outside of it.  You change it, as Howard Dean already has done in spades in two short years, by working inside it.  You change it by organizing, by raising money for its progressive wing, by supporting its lesser-office candidates who are progressives, by working on philosophy, ideology and platform in the off years, and so and so forth.  Nader has done none of this and has shown himself incapable of doing any of it.  Nor does his campaign this time around offer the prospect of leaving any structure in place for working, in whatever way one can think of, to change the Democratic Party.  Nader's statements seem to indicate that the Party should change its positions on various issues because he says they should.  I wonder if your friend really takes such a position seriously and thinks that Ralph Nader and like-minded people can really affect change this way.

6.            Finally, does anyone seriously think that, for the foreseeable future, anyone who is not well-connected with the corporate power elite in this country is going to be elected President?  What in my view many people do not realize is that at this time, with no strong anti-capitalist working class organizations in place, the corporate elite is hardly unified.  Just look at how they are lining up on the two different sides in the present election.  There are major splits among them on how best to govern the country and indeed on what the role of government in a capitalist country is, precisely.

Further, as readers of  these columns know, I think that there are huge differences between Kerry and the Georgites on such fundamental questions as what Constitutional Democracy means here at home, much less in Iraq.  I have written more than once in this space about how The Patriot Act, among other things, vitiates the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and how the proposed “gay marriage amendment” would eliminate the equal protection clause of the 14th.  The Patriot Act substitutes the Rule of Man for the Rule of Law, and doing so constitutes the essence of fascism.  Just how far does my friend’s correspondent, and the analysts she is presently listening to, think the “process of progressive change” in this country could go were the Georgites to really get their way in dealing with dissent, just the way they have already told us they want to.  They would do this through their use of The Patriot Act, with their newly-appointed in-pocket Federal judiciary that couldn’t wait to have the chance to give them these powers, in a second term.

In summary, granting everything that Nader and his left-wing allies say how would anything that Nader is doing or could, given his make-up, possibly do, help the progressive cause.  (Funnily enough, it is now coming out that Nader has received significant contributions from Republicans and he knows of the sources.)  No, I am afraid that if we want to create a truly progressive Democratic Party in this country, we are going to have to do much better than Ralph Nader, in every sense of the term.

THE DEBATE

Column No. 33 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – October 7, 2004

This comment on the first Presidential debate, Sept. 30, 2004, comes in two parts.  The first consists of comments based on live notes that I took down on my laptop computer as the debate progressed.  The second, very short, presents a few thoughts about particular issues that did not come up, and their significance, and a couple of comments on post-debate commentary.

Part I

First, I thought that the questions coming from Jim Lehrer of PBS were well-done, to the point, no zingers; none planned out specifically to embarrass either candidate a la the famous question to Dukakis in 1988 about Kitty and the death penalty for a potential rapist.  Second, I thought that Kerry was marvelously well-prepared and so well-rehearsed that he did not look at all like he was rehearsed, just the way the top method actors do it.  Bush, most observers agree, looked tired, weak, wimpy, out-of-place, the trademark smirk replaced by a look that could have come from a Mad magazine cartoon.  To me, Kerry looked Presidential.  Bush looked like an arguer, not even a debater (but then I am prejudiced).  Bush often appeared halting: the “uhs” and the “you knows.”  Kerry didn’t utter one “uh” until almost the end of the 90 minutes.

Kerry came out fighting on such on-the-ground Iraq issues as shortages of body armor and armed Humvees.  He pointed out the truth, that the situation on the ground, for the Iraqis and American troops, is getting worse by the day.  He attacked Bush on what he has done and not done, and put forward positive plans.  Bush’s main response was to immediately lie about the connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and then make the amazing claim that America’s security lies in “securing freedom around the world.”  Kerry kindly did not ask him just how Bush planned to go about that monster task, especially with a military that is already way over-stretched, at the same time that he is clamping down on freedom so fiercely here at home.

Bush ducked on the question, would the election of Kerry make it more likely that a terrorist attack would occur.  “He won’t. win, I will,” said Bush.  Bush went to the argument he kept repeating ad nauseum, that the US is “attacking the enemy everywhere we find him.”  He talked about the progress of voter-registration in Afghanistan.  He did not talk about voter-registration and what his party is doing to ensure that the lowest possible number of Afro-Americans get to vote in Florida.  Bush attacked the “ideology of hatred,” but did neglect to mention the hatred that spews forth every day, against, for example, our homosexual community, from his base in the Republican Religious Right.  Kerry used the opportunity presented by the question to say that he will be strong on terror, by going after it in places it is truly bred.  In that context, he attacked Bush on going into Iraq, citing the Bush lies on WMD, etc.  Kerry then used the opportunity to he list his military endorsers (and the list is a long one).

When Kerry was asked (Lehrer using Kerry’s own words) “What colossal misjudgments has Bush made?”  He cited: not wanting to go to the UN on Iraq in the first place; giving up on the UN inspection process (he did not say the obvious: Bush knew that he couldn’t let Hans Blix proceed to the end because he, Bush, already knew that Blix would in the end find no WMD); Bush did not use war only as a “last resort,” that Bush lied (although Kerry was careful never to use that specific word) in saying that “the inspections failed.”  Kerry got in a Kerry-type (that is subtle) zinger by pointing out that Iraq was not at the center of the war on terror until Bush went to war in Iraq.

Kerry called for new spending on homeland security and Bush asked “how is he going to pay for it?” Bush of course has never raised similar questions about the cost of the war in Iraq, and it was on raising the money to pay for that war by not giving yet another tax cut to the rich that Kerry voted, once, against the famous “$87 billion.” When Kerry attacked tax cuts in relation to paying for homeland security, presenting at the same time a detailed plan for taking many specific homeland defense actions that Bush has not, Bush didn’t respond.

Bush continually called all the Iraqi insurgents “terrorists,” that is until towards the end he referred to them as “Saddam loyalists” and “Ba’athists.”  Hmm.  One of Kerry’s subtle jabs that will get continuing play is his use of George I against George II on not going to, and going to, Baghdad without a doable exit plan.  Another is Kerry’s admission that he made a mistake in how he talked about the war, while the Pres. made a mistake in invading Iraq.  Which mistake would you rather have, Kerry said?  Brilliant.

When Kerry was asked about Bush lies, he said that he wouldn’t use that word, but gave examples Bush “not being candid:” “yellow cake and the State of the Union address,” “building a real coalition,” “not allowing the UN process to go to completion,” “abandoning other lines of diplomacy,” “told us he had a plan.”  Kerry also used the opportunity to talk about his own foreign policy experience.

Kerry used his Vietnam experience in a very sophisticated, understated way.  A great one-liner was that we “must not confuse the war with the warriors.”  He went on to say that he is determined to make sure that the outcome of the Iraq War honors their nobility.  He said that he has a plan for winning in Iraq, and spelled it out in detail.  The President never did the same thing, either because he doesn’t have a plan, or does but couldn’t possibly share it with American people or the world, not to mention the people of Iraq, because it primarily focuses on making sure that American oil companies get their hands on that Kurdish oil.

The President is not getting the job done, Kerry said, and he very smartly referred to his website where viewers can find more detail on his position. Kerry talked specifically about giving up the bases the US is building in Iraq, and said that he will make a clear statement that US has no long-term designs on Iraq.  He pointed out that when US forces first arrived in Baghdad, they guarded the oil ministry, but not the nuclear energy ministry.  He could have mentioned many other civil ministries and the museums being left to the predations of the looters, but did not.

Kerry pointed out that 35 to 40 countries around the world have a capability of making WMD.  Any pre-emptive war must be undertaken with credibility, he said. Another fine one-liner in this context was: “We didn’t need to rush to war without a plan to win the peace.”   In this context he did make the one statement that the Republicans will use to their advantage: “the global test” one.  What he meant was that before going to war on its own, the US should make sure to take into account the positions of our allies and see if they will come along with us in significant numbers, but if in the end the President decides to go it alone, after exhausting all other options, he should.  But that is not how the Republicans will spin it, and since they have little else to go with, spin it they will.  Kerry is going to have to fix that one quickly.

Kerry responded instantly on the question, what is the most serious threat to US security: nuclear proliferation.  He stated that he will help Russia to clean up its left-over nuclear material as quickly as possible (which Bush is not doing; has actually cut funds for that project) and that he will give up our own new nuclear weapons expansion program as quickly as possible, for it is totally hypocritical to ask for nuclear proliferation controls when the US is developing an entirely new generation of nuclear weapons.  In relation to relations with Russia, Bush said that there need to be checks and balances in a democracy.  Funny, he doesn’t seem to think that when it comes to government in the United States. He is working as hard as he can to eliminate that primary feature of our Constitution. Oh yes, also on Russia, Bush approved on Putin’s response to the Beslan horror.  Kerry let that one go.

There are many other observations to make, such as that Kerry pointed that Powell had had to apologize for mis-leading UN, Bush has messed up in North Korea, Bush talks about negotiations and sanctions in dealing with the truly dangerous North Korea and Iran, but for some reason didn’t want to follow the same rout in dealing with the much less threatening-to-us Iraq, but this note is getting rather long as it is.

Part II

Let me just mention of a couple of issues that weren’t there, and why not.  Lehrer asked Bush to address the “character” issue.  Bush just lobbed compliments in Kerry’s direction.  He couldn’t get into the Swift Boat Brownshirt-type lies because then that would have given Kerry the opening to bring up the truth about Bush’s own “military service” record.  Nor did he openly raise the “flip-flop” issue, because his handlers knew that Kerry would come back with both barrels on Bush’s own, much more serious, flip-flops (like, for example, the reason he went to war in Iraq).  Second, Bush couldn’t mention 9/11, formerly a big “how great did I respond on that one, folks” issue for him, because that would have given Kerry an opportunity to bring up Richard Clarke, Treasury Secretary O’Neill, the 9/11 Commission Report and what his party is and is not doing with it in Congress, the famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, and so on and so forth.  Sometimes what isn’t said can be as fascinating as what is

And finally, briefly on the immediate post-debate analyses.  Bush is in real trouble.  The only people saying what a great job he did were his flacks, especially Karen Hughes who was all over the place.  I held my nose and watched Fox on purpose.  Well, when Morton Kondracke and Bill Kristol, big Bush cheerleaders, say that “on balance” Kerry “did better” (“won” was a word that just couldn’t cross their lips, now could it), that means that it went extremely well for Kerry.  Friday morning, again, even a commentator from The Wall Street Journal, interviewed on NBC, was saying that Kerry did very well and Bush didn’t.

I do have to note that post-debate on Fox, after their pundits, mainly right-wingers of course, gave it to Kerry on points, right-wing flack Sean Hannity, playing “journalist,” came on, to “interview” Hughes.  So one of Bush’s strongest national-media supporters interviews one of Bush’s strongest inner-circle supporters.  And then the same flack “interviews” (yes, it was a second debate in fact) Richard Holbrooke, representing Sen. Kerry.  Well that’s “fair and balanced” isn’t it?  After all, they had one from each side, with the rather weak liberal Alan Colmes nowhere to be seen up front.  He did come on later, after most people (including me), on the East Coast at least, had turned off their televisions sets and gone to bed.

And now I am turning of my computer.  Hope that you found something of interest and use in this not-so-little missive.

VIETNAM AND IRAQ: SOME COMPARISONS

Column No. 32a By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - OCTOBER 6, 2004

The military situation in Iraq is reportedly deteriorating with amazing rapidity.  Despite what Bush and his Iraqi Charlie McCarthy “Prime Minister” say in public, the Georgites realize this too.  That this is so is indicated by the column that appeared from the pen of the White House’s official leaker, Bob Novak, he of Valerie Plame fame, beginning to prepare the way for the institution of a “cut and run” strategy, presumably to be implemented as soon as possible after a putative Bush victory on Nov. 2 (perish the thought!)

On one level, there is an amazing, and tragic, reprise of the US War on Vietnam taking place in this US War on Iraq.  Recall that in the Viet Nam era the American people were first told that it would be a militarily easy task to beat the “Commies” and install “democracy,” just as we were told it would be easy to find those Iraqi WMD, break up the Iraq/al-Qaeda link, beat Saddam and install “democracy.” Yet in both cases that has proved not to be the case. Given that covert American intervention in Vietnam began around 1956, the military situation in Iraq is actually deteriorating at a faster pace than it did in Vietnam.  In Vietnam, there was a real “South” Vietnamese, anti-nationalist, army and at some point “Vietnamization” of the war (referring to those Vietnamese who fought on the US side) against the Ho Chi Minh communist-nationalists appeared to be a real possibility. But in the end “Vietnamization” never happened. “Iraqi-ization” now appears to be a dead letter from the git-go.

And so, there is an increasing amount of analytical interest in comparing the two wars waged by the US at then, one end and now, the other end of the Asian continent.  In these examinations, most people look at strategy and tactics of the wars themselves.  In this column, however, I am looking at the issue from a rather different perspective, that of one real American victory (in Vietnam) and the other a potential one (in Iraq).

“Victory?” you might be saying at this point?  “American victory” in Vietnam?  We lost, didn’t we?  Well, militarily we seemed to have lost.  Nixon began the military disengagement, and the final pullout took place under President Ford, with those haunting photographs of people leaving by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, as the legitimate government of Vietnam entered the city, providing a visual exclamation point.  But if one examines what happened in terms of the original goals for the US Vietnam intervention, set by Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers in the 1950s, the US won: their goals were achieved.

The French-Vietnamese War ended in 1954.  The Geneva Conference of that year produced a treaty signed by the French and the Vietnamese and guaranteed by Great Britain and the Soviet Union.  It brought hostilities to an end, temporarily divided the country in two, and provided for national elections to be held in 1956 -- elections that everyone knew would be won by Ho Chi Minh and his people.  Pointedly, the US refused to sign or recognize the treaty.  They knew that if the plan in it were allowed to proceed, the chances were very good that Vietnam would peacefully progress to socialism and could be an economic success.  If that happened, the same thing might well peacefully occur in other Southeast Asian countries, were democracy to be given a chance.  The “domino theory” about the spread of “socialism with a national face,” distinguished from and not necessarily allied with the Soviet Union, and certainly not with the traditional enemy, China, communist or not, was quite correct.

And so, in the view of the US leadership of the time, everything had to be done that could be done to prevent the democratic process from introducing socialism to a country and then possibly succeeding in a peaceful setting.  If looked at in this light, the Vietnam War was a US victory.  The peaceful establishment of socialism was prevented.  Its spread by example and peaceful means to neighboring countries was prevented.  Vietnam today has a sort of market socialist economy, but the country was ravaged by almost 20 years of war and two to three million of the best and the brightest of its people were killed.  It is hardly the economic or social engine of the development of democratically-installed socialism that it might have become had it been left alone.  In terms of the original American goals for the intervention, this was a win, a palpable win.

And what then, of Iraq?  Is there not going to be a definite US loss there, especially if the Georgites themselves are openly (through their Novakian mouthpiece) considering “cutting and running?”  Once again it depends upon what the real objectives of the invasion were.  We know that it wasn’t WMD, because there were none, and it wasn’t a “Saddam-bin Laden” link because there wasn’t one of those either.  We also know that it wasn’t “bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq” because a) that was a Georgite afterthought, b) the inimitable Paul Wolfowitz told us so in the following little noticed statement: “The purpose of this war wasn’t to remake Iraq any more than the purpose of World War II was to remake Germany and Japan”  (Tierney, John, “The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts,” New York Times News of the Week in Review, May 16, 2004, p. 5),  and c) since when have Republicans, given their record around the world since World War II, been interested in bringing “freedom and democracy” anywhere?  This crew doesn’t even believe in it for our country, viz. rigged elections and The Patriot Act.

So what was, and is, the objective then?  By a process of elimination if nothing else, it’s got to be oil, bases, and expanding US influence in the region.  OK, so what happens if the Georgites unilaterally withdraw after the elections (other than, too late, Kerry being handed a really good response to the “flip-flop” charge, but just a little too late?)  Do they achieve the third of the above?  No.  How about the second?  Well, possibly, at least a few of those bases under construction in the Western Iraqi desert, easy to supply by air, hard for any Iraqi resistance forces to get to across that desert.  And the first?  Well, possibly, bingo!

Let’s say a Georgite “cut-and-run” isn’t quite just a “get out.”  Let’s say that it’s done under the cover of a UN-sponsored establishment of a Federal Republic, but really a tri-furcation. The major Iraqi oil reserves, both known and estimated to be there, are in the Kurdish portion and the southern Shiite portion (sorry Sunnis, none for you under trifurcation). And let’s say that the Kurdish Republic receives US guarantees for its existence, enforceable from Turkey.  Turkey?  How Turkey?  They’ve got their own Kurdish problem, don’t they? But suppose that the US is able to make a deal with the Iraqi Kurds that in return for a reasonable share of their oil revenues, with the oil being directly in the hands of US oil companies of course, the Kurds will stop their campaign for an enlarged, unified Kurdistan.  And since the oil would go out through Turkey, the US might even be able to entice them to be nicer to their own Kurds in return for a nice royalty on the trans-shipments.  I know, I know, there are also Iran and its Kurds, but it might be possible to make a deal there, too. As it does to Bush’s fundamentalist Christians, it can talk to fundamentalist Muslims as well.

And so, if the original number one objective of the invasion was indeed oil, this scenario produces a US win, and a big one.  Just like in Vietnam. If it really is the oil, the Georgites don't need the whole damn place, they just need Kurdistan.  And while we sit here thinking, “Aren't the Georgites dumb and totally irresponsible, letting things go up in smoke and death like this”, maybe what is happening now was the grand design after all.  To let Iraq disintegrate into three, then ask the UN to come in to provide a “Federal Republic” fig-leaf, while the US conveniently keeps control of the "peaceful" part in the North (with those huge unexplored potential reserves).

I believe that the US oilmen have been focusing on Kurdish oil all along, ever since the American virtual protectorate for that region was set up following the end of the Gulf War in 1991.

How might a Kerry Administration deal differently with the situation?  I happen to think that the only possible. even relatively peaceful, resolution (notice I did not say “solution”) to the Iraq tragedy is in fact the establishment of some sort of Federal Republic. Repeating something I put forward in “TPJ 20, On the Kerry Campaign, I” of July 8, 2004, first, Kerry could renounce any US interest in owning or controlling any fraction of the Iraqi oil reserves, regardless of what part of the country they lie in.  Second he could announce that all construction on permanent US bases would be stopped and the bases disbanded or turned over to the UN on an interim bases, for future transfer to the Iraqi government from the UN.  (Without much fanfare, the Senator has already done this.)  Third, he could announce that, to the extent possible, given contractual obligations, reconstruction projects would be turned over to Iraqi companies.  Fourth, he would renounce the infamous “Bremer Plan” that opened up the whole Iraqi economy for pillage by foreign (mainly US) companies.  Fifth, he could propose a realistic Federal structure for a future permanent Iraqi government, with UN guarantees.  The country we know as Iraq was an artificial British construct dating from the 1920s.  Realism could countenance going back to some form of the centuries-old provincial arrangement, as it existed under the Ottoman Empire. And sixth, he could announce that US policy would be for the oil reserves to be the property of the entire Iraqi people, with the Federal government retaining control over it, again under a UN guarantee.

Well, there’s something for openers, anyway, and far different from the imperial design of the Georgites.

FOUR 800 LB. GORILLAS IN THE CAMPAIGN ROOM

Column No. 32 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - September 30, 2004

I write this column not knowing the derivation of the term “800 lb. gorilla in the room.”  I take it to refer to an event or an issue that is of great importance in a given setting, to which no one in said setting is referring.  One or more participants may be aware of the creature’s existence, but others may be totally oblivious. But in any case, no one is talking about their nature, considering how they came to be in the room, or planning in any way how to deal with them, at least openly.  What the gorilla population thinks about having the name of their species used in this sense I have no idea, but if they take offense at it, I do apologize.  I didn’t make up the term myself.

There are (at least) four major issues that very seriously effect and are-having/will-have a major impact on the future of our country.  Three of the gorillas significantly concern themselves with both foreign and domestic policy. The Bush Campaign is not talking abut any of these gorillas and certainly wants to stay as far away from them as possible.  For its true position on any of them would definitely be a negative factor for the Georgites.  The gorillas I am talking about are: true Sharonist policy for Israel/Palestine, the Patriot Act and its assault on our Constitutional rights, the role of Big Oil in both domestic and foreign policy, and the Christian Right and its true agenda.

Even though it is the case that the Georgites simply want to these gorillas to stay in their corners, unnoticed, the Kerry Campaign isn’t referring to any of them either, for a variety of reasons.  One is that they might not know how to deal with one or more of them, in terms of policy, or politics, or both.  A second is that in one or more instances the Kerry position is not all that different from that of the Georgites.  A third is that the issue is extremely complex and therefore much groundwork in educating the public would have to have been laid before a reasonable position could be discussed in the electoral context.  Therefore, I am not raising these issues here with the thought or the claim that the Kerry Campaign should take them up now.  But were the Senator to become President, he is going to have to deal with at least two of them, and I think that he should at some time in the future deal with the other two as well.

The first of the “will have to deal with” issues is that, almost certainly,  the current Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, does not in any way, shape, or form desire peace with the Palestinian people – at least a peace that would envision a viable, independent, if demilitarized, state for them in the West Bank and Gaza.  What he wants, or at least appears by his actions to want, is to make conditions so uncomfortable for the Palestinians in the West Bank that they will leave, hopefully, in Sharon’s terms, for Jordan.  Since his days as a young Army officer, Sharon has referred to the territory now comprising the nation of Jordan as the only true Palestinian homeland, the 1947 UN decision on partition to the contrary notwithstanding.

Sharon, of course, does not currently say this out loud.   But several of his cabinet ministers do, as do numerous political and religious figures in Israel to Sharon’s right (if you can imagine anyone to the right of Sharon).  Furthermore, the “facts on the ground,” as the Sharonists like to refer to them, that is the ever expanding conglomeration of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, indicate that this is the ultimate goal.  There is nothing in the current Israeli policy of annexation, destruction, and ghettoization that indicates anything else.  The next US President will be forced at some time during his term to deal with this reality that no one happens to talk about.  Gorilla No. 1.

Next is the Patriot Act and its assault on the Constitution.  I have written about this issue in other columns and will revisit it only briefly here.  Under the Patriot Act the President can, on his own authority, search any home without obtaining a search warrant from a non-secret judge, label any person, citizen or non-citizen, a “terrorist”  or “terrorist threat;” then proceed to arrest and  imprison that person without making the fact of the arrest public, without informing the person about the offense with which they are being charged; and may hold the person indefinitely without access to a lawyer and without being brought to trial, not even to a grand jury proceeding.

Certain of these provisions have been held to be unconstitutional by a closely split Supreme Court, but the current regime has not backed down in wanting to have them in some form on the books.  If the Georgites win the election, and get the opportunity to replace even just Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, rest assured that the current anti-Administration decisions will be reversed.  And the Georgites want both to make the Patriot Act permanent and expand the powers under it.  Thus, at a stroke, the Patriot Act, without the benefit of going through the Amendment process, has repealed the Fourth Amendment’s protection against warrant-less searches without probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of the due process of law, and the Sixth Amendment’s guarantees of “speedy” jury trial with full knowledge of charges and the opportunity to confront witnesses in criminal cases.  Gorilla No. 2.

Gorilla No. 3 is the role of Big Oil in the determination of both foreign and domestic policy of the United States. In foreign policy, for example, if the Iraq invasion is not really about oil, hegemony in the Middle East, and the establishment of permanent bases there (the U.S. has 10 plus of them under construction), what is it about?  We know that it is not about WMD or al-Qaeda (except in the sense that a British diplomat, taking the 17th century English playwright’s George Fahrquahr’s name in vain, recently referred to US policy as a Recruiting Officer for them).  It is not about freedom or democracy either.  Bush’s record on those subjects for his own country (see Gorilla No. 2) shows that George Bush has no interest in either one.  But the Project for the New American Century of Perle, Wolfowitz, W. Kristol, etc., which began proposing an Iraq invasion back in the 1990s and are the foreign policy setters for the Georgite regime, gave us the real reasons for the attack, to which now the aims of Sharonist Israel can be added.

As far as domestic policy is concerned, I don’t have to go through all of the environmental stuff, that fact the Bush and Cheney both come from the oil industry, the power of the oil lobby, and etc. Just this note.  It is not the “insatiable addiction of the American people” to oil that make us use so much of it.  It is the oil industry’s insatiable addiction to the profits they derive from it.  Why do we have such an antiquated railway system compared with every other industrialized country, and one that runs mainly on diesel rather than electric power?  Why is energy conservation a dirty term in the US?  Do shopping mall parking lot lights really have to stay on all night, as do the lights in my own office complex, where there is no master switch to turn them off in the open spaces?  Why was one of the first acts of the Reagan Administration, the first in which the oil industry really had juice, to summarily end a major alternative/renewable energy research program that had started under Carter?  Why does not the industry itself realize that yes, no matter much oil they discover, EVENTUALLY it is going to run out, and then where will they be, to say nothing of us?

The US oil industry owns very little of the stuff in the ground now.  They make their money by selling the oil they import from the producing nations.  Therefore, to make as much profit as they can, now, they need to sell as much of the stuff as they can, now.  In this case, it is the future of mankind, not the devil that will take the hindmost.  That is why they were, and are, so eager to get their hands on the oil patch in Kurdish Iraq, which may contain the largest reserves outside of Saudi Arabia. Gorilla No. 3

Gorilla No. 4 is our homegrown Christian fundamentalist movement that has so much in common in its approach to civil government with the Muslim fundamentalists.  Just briefly here, in domestic policy these people want to enforce by the use of the criminal law their prescriptions for certain personal behaviors that, given the fundamental weakness of their arguments, they can not get people to abide by voluntarily.  They want to establish that the US is a “Christian Nation,” just as long as they, and only they, get to define just what is “Christian,” and in their vocabulary “love thy neighbor as thyself” is surely not part of it.  In foreign policy, the millenarianism of the Armageddonistas, of which George Bush himself may well be one, holds that the modern state of Israel must hold all the land that the Bible defines as “Israel” before the “Rapture” can occur.  And so their more-than-fervent support of Sharon and what he is really after.  (Oh-so-briefly) Gorilla No. 4.

Should Kerry win, in my view our task as progressive Democrats will be get these gorillas out of the corners and into the arena of policy discussion.  If Bush wins, our task will be to start immediately working on developing a platform for the Democratic Party that will firmly and strongly oppose the Republicans on all of these issues, propose resolutions for them, and set about finding the right candidate to be the Gorilla Tamer for 2008.

Fixing the Kerry Campaign

Column No. 31 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH-  September 15, 2004 I had said that I would not again get into this topic.  Many observers write on it, and a few, like our own Michael Carmichael, write on it very well.  But as of the time of this writing, the Kerry Campaign is in deep trouble, so I am putting in my two cents.  Not that anyone in the Campaign will pay any attention to what I say, or to similar thoughts expressed by others who are not part of the magic inner circle of (more often than not) losers.  But at least I will feel better.

In a reasonably rational country with some historical sense, with a reasonably rational media, and a party running against him with some reasonable devotion to telling the truth, Kerry would win easily.  Why?  The disasters of the Georgites (as I like to call them) are legion and only too well-known.

In foreign policy, Iraq, the substitution of unilateralism for multilateralism, the adoption of an open policy of preemptive war (in contravention of the UN Charter), unalloyed support for Sharonist expansionist policy in Israel/Palestine, the abject decline of the American position and prestige in the world, and so on and so forth.  In economic policy, massively cutting taxes for the rich, while massively expanding spending so that in a breathtakingly short period of time, we face the largest budget deficits and national debt in our history, all accompanied by a massive expansion of private domestic debt and increase in foreign commercial debt, so that many traditional fiscally-conservative Republicans, not to mention the rest of us, are terrified of the long-term consequences, and so and so forth.

In the matter that I personally am most concerned with, the preservation of traditional American Constitutional Democracy, the Georgites have gone after it with a vengeance (obviously not realizing the totally painful irony that they claim to be in Iraq to "establish democracy and freedom," while they are doing their damnedest to stamp it out here at home).  Consider: the “Patriot Act” (because of its length and complexity obviously written sometime before 9/11 --- it could not possibly have been written in the two weeks between the horror and the date on which it was introduced to the Congress), allows the President, entirely on his own authority, to deny US citizens: protection against unreasonable search and seizure (the 4th amendment gone), the right to the due process of law (the 5th amendment gone) and the right to a speedy jury trial in a criminal case (the 6th amendment gone).  The so-called “gay marriage” amendment would gut the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.  And this President is ignoring Congress by the use of Executive Orders on major matters, like the reorganization of our intelligence services, to a degree previously unheard of, even in a wartime actually declared by Congress, the only way war can be declared, under the Constitution, thus unilaterally and very significantly altering the system of checks and balances.  The deficiencies of the Georgites in the above three realms are matched in every other one, as readers of TPJ know only too well.

Given the record of the Georgites, how can Kerry win, electorally?  As I have been saying for months, Kerry can win, and win easily, if he can mobilize a significant number of people who ordinarily don’t vote, as I am fond of saying, “getting 20% of the 50%.”  He will also benefit from increasing the number of Republicans who for any number of reasons have determined to vote for “Anybody But Bush,” the so-called “ABBs” (which includes many well-educated Republicans who do vote regularly.) The mother lode for Kerry, Bob Shrum and colleagues to the contrary notwithstanding, is thus not the ever-shrinking number of “undecideds.”  To court folks who are still on the borders, you need to stay on the borders, exactly where you don’t want to be to get significant numbers of both usual non-voters and ABBs to the polls to vote for you.

What to do, then, strategically?  As I have also been saying for months, the single most important element is gaining and maintaining control of the political agenda.  Kerry had control of it, until mid-summer.  But since the middle of August, the Republicans very cleverly changed it.  They know what they are doing, and they know very well that if the agenda is George Bush and his horrible recording office, they will lose.  So get the focus off Bush, using, occasionally, truth, like the Senator’s voting record, irrelevant to the present time, but true, and, much more often, lies, both about Kerry (as with the Swift Boat Brownshirts) and about what is going on in the world, in Iraq, our economy, our environment, our education system, and so on and so forth. These people are masters of Goebbles' “Big Lie” technique: tell a big lie, but keep telling it over and over again, and people will come to believe it, as in Cheney and the fictitious al-Qaeda/Saddam link.

To get the agenda back onto Bush, it seems to me, and many other observers who actually get quoted in the newspapers, that the Campaign needs to adopt a single common theme designed to accomplish that task.  I suggest learning from Karl Rove, beyond Lee Atwater’s “always attack, never defend.”  Attack, alright, but make sure to focus your attack on your opponent's strength, not his weaknesses.  Of course, if you cannot do that truthfully, you use lies. But one has to admit, that using their privatized Ministry of Propaganda, otherwise known as Fox “News” Channel, the Washington Times, and most of political talk radio, which managed to make a pack of lies about John Kerry’s war record into a “controversy,” they have done this very well.  Well, let's learn from them, and let's make the single theme of the last 45 days Bush's core issue, "trust."

Thus I propose as the central theme, which the Campaign has indeed dipped in and out of, from time to time, but now to be the primary, unending focus: “You Cannot Trust George Bush.”  In the following list, the details of what George Bush has done and not done can be filled in by any reader of this column.  And so here is simply a list of topics for Kerry to hammer away on, but always being sure that the nail his hammer is hitting on is: “You Cannot Trust George Bush:”

*             As detailed in the Report of the 9/11 Commission, the Georgites did not prepare in any way for 9/11 despite everything from a very strong “heads-up” from Richard Clarke just after they took over to the Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001, to the request from the FBI for a vast increase in counter-terrorism funds that Ashcroft turned down on 9/10.

*              Bush lied about the reasons for invading Iraq.  “Bringing freedom and democracy” is a “Johnny-come-lately,” following the exposure of no WMD and no links to al-Qaeda as false reasons.  Does anyone think that if he had presented the former as the reason for invading, even this supine Congress would have given him the go-ahead?

*              Bush lied about how easy it would be to install a pro-Western democracy there, once the (initially easy) military battle was won.  “Mission Accomplished” and what it does not mean says it all.

*              Bush told us that he would create the conditions for democracy in Afghanistan.  Generally, outside of Kabul there is none, many of the old war-lords are back in place and in some parts of the country, the Taliban is making a comeback.

*            Bush promised “compassionate conservatism.”  Tell that to the rapidly increasing ranks of persons living below the poverty line, the growing ranks of the permanently unemployed, the swelling ranks of persons without health insurance, the expanding number of job-takers who find that their jobs do not happen to come with health-care benefits.

*            Why trust Bush when he doesn't trust the voters?  He was originally against having any kind of 9/11 commission, has put off the report of his own investigation of the intelligence agencies and their possible failures until after the elections, hides any information, even attendance lists, about meetings affecting everyone’s future, like that of the famous Cheney energy task force, provides for skyrocketing amounts of government classification, plummeting amounts of government data gathered that are actually released, a stone wall response to Freedom of Information Act requests, and so and so forth.

*            He promised straight talk, tax reductions for everyone, smaller government, environmental protection, disengagement from nation building abroad.  He trumpets as successes programs the funding of which he is cutting to the bone. And on and on.

You get the picture.  The data on the Bush record, beginning with what he promised in the 2000 campaign, is there for the taking.  The Kerry Campaign needs to take and use it.  The Kerry Campaign needs once again, as it was doing well in the Spring, to make Bush the agenda.  It is the only way to win, and if they can somehow manage to do it, they will win.  And so will we.

LESSONS FROM JAPAN, PART II: SUCCESSFUL OCCUPATIONS

Column No. 30 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - September 16, 2004

As I noted at the beginning of my recent column about “Lessons from Japan,” I recently was fortunate enough to spend a three-week vacation in that country.  Even more fortunately for me, it was my second visit.  My first was in 1971, in the company of my father who, among many other things, taught Asian history with a special interest in Japan.  While my Dad’s focus was more on the cultural history of the country, mine was always on the political, about which I have read on and off over the years.  For this trip, I renewed my acquaintance with Japanese history by reading Traveller’s History of Japan, 3rd edition, by Richard Tames, who among other things is the former head of External Services at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (New York: Interlink Books, 2002).

Bush’s War on Iraq, the reasons he gave for entering into it and the experience to date of the American occupation of that country brought to my mind some lessons of history that may be of interest and use.  They are found in a series of events that eventually lead to Japan’s involvement in World War II and then followed upon her defeat and subsequent occupation by the United Sates. These lessons might be called “When the Given Reasons for Going to War are Not the Real Ones” and “How to Run a Successful Occupation.” The previous column (9/2/04) dealt with the first; this one deals with the second.

As is well known, the War in the Pacific was brought to a sudden end in August 1945.  The “official” U.S. view of the suddenness with which it occurred is that the outcome was the result of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Many authorities disagree with this interpretation, however.  I happen to hold a contrary view, too. On my recent visit, much to my amazement I discovered, at the Nagasaki Peace Museum, that no less an authority on war than Dwight D. Eisenhower also took this position.

Why would one think that even without the atomic bombings the war would have ended very shortly?  The answers to that question can help us to understand why the U.S. occupation of Japan was successful (and that of Iraq is unlikely to be). In the summer of 1945, Japan had no more than six months of petroleum reserves on hand.  There was no way to import more.  As well, imports both of the raw materials necessary for the production of weapons and of food had virtually come to a halt.  For the American submarine campaign against Japanese surface shipping in the Western Pacific had been far more ferocious and far more successful than the best that the German U-boats had been able to throw at the British and American convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic. Getting through the U.S. naval blockade was only the occasional Japanese submarine.

The Okinawa campaign had ended in disaster for the Japanese defenders (to say nothing of the civilian population of Okinawa).  Most of Japan’s major cities had been flattened before the atomic bombings.  Curtis LeMay’s three-day firebomb raid of Tokyo in March, 1945, has been estimated to have killed more Japanese civilians than did the combined atomic bombings, and it virtually been burned to the ground a city in which most dwellings were constructed of wood and paper.  A peace faction was active in both in the Imperial Palace and in the Japanese government.  Negotiations were being sought with the U.S. to end the war, in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration demanding unconditional surrender, with one exception asked for by the Japanese: that the institution of the Emperor be allowed to remain in existence and the person of the then-present Emperor be allowed to remain in place.

This column is not about whether the atomic bombings were justified or what Truman’s real reasons were for approving them.  The point is that, with or without them, Japan was already thoroughly defeated. On August 15, 1945, the Head of State, the Emperor, over the radio, announced that fact to the population (which had never before heard the voice of any Emperor), there was a formal surrender on the after deck of the battleship Missouri in the Tokyo Bay, on September 2, 1945, and the Japanese war government was immediately disbanded.  In its place was substituted the person of General Douglas MacArthur, who with his staff entered Tokyo entirely peacefully.

MacArthur’s principal political task, after making sure that the peace was secure, was not to institute a needed democracy in Japan for the first time; Japan had had something of a democratic tradition going back to the Constitution of 1889, which established a constitutional monarchy. MacArthur’s political task was, rather, to restore, strengthen and broaden democracy in Japan.  His principal economic task was to get the Japanese economy, already well industrialized before the war, back on its feet.  His principal diplomatic task was to make sure that Japan would be part, even if not militarily, of the Western alliance against the Soviet Union.  These were all clear, and achievable, tasks.

On all of these fronts, MacArthur had nothing but cooperation from the Japanese.  There was no armed resistance to the American occupation.  The formal surrender, the pronouncements of the Emperor, and the immediate arrests of the top military leaders made sure of that.  Japan had a well-developed government bureaucracy.  Many of its members were delighted that the military was out of the way and that they could get back to doing what they knew how to do: run a country that had undergone remarkable economic development following the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

As long as the office of the Emperor was secure, and the Americans announced that while the Emperor was no longer to be considered divine as he had been ever since the office had been established in the mists of time 2500 years before, both the office and his person were to remain intact and in place as at the end the Japanese side had requested, the Emperor was on MacArthur’s side.  In fact, on New Year’s Day, 1946, the Emperor issued a “rescript” denying his own divinity, denying that the Japanese were superior people fated to rule the world (which had been the mantra of militarists), and setting forth as the national goals the maintenance of peace, the further development of the rich cultural history of Japan, and the achievement of economic advancement.

There were three main elements of the “Japanese miracle” that followed.  First, was the new Constitution, written by the Americans and accepted by the Japanese, which, among other things, established a long list of personal rights, equal rights for women, a reasonably democratic electoral system, and a guarantee of no military establishment.  Second was the fact that, while the Japanese industrialists had had much of their productive capacity destroyed and had lost their cheap labor pools and access to raw materials in China and Southeast Asia, they still had ample capital and an ample supply of labor in Japan.

The mystery of where this capital came from has never been fully revealed.  There was no American Marshall Plan for Japan.  It has long been rumored that in the process of repatriating the 6,000,000 Japanese nationals then living in the Japanese colonial empire, large amounts of looted gold were brought with them.  But wherever it came from, the Japanese industrialists had it.  Third was the onset of the Korean War, for which Japan became the main staging area and main supplier of non-military goods and services, which gave an enormous boost to the recovering Japanese economy.  And the rest, as they say, is history: a most successful occupation, as least for the country that was occupied.

Now, compare and contrast that with the Iraqi Occupation. In Iraq, there was an apparent military victory, but there was no formal surrender by the formerly sitting government.  The former Head of State was not only not left in place with a moderate change of status, but was arrested as a war criminal, as were almost all of his top officials and associates.  His sons were killed.  Both the army and the civilian bureaucracy were disbanded. There was clearly no advance planning for how to set up a new civilian government, and there was certainly no model within the country of what the Americans wanted to see instituted.

While to this day Japan has one of the most homogeneous populations of any country on Earth, Iraq, an artificial creation of early 20th-century British colonial policy, has major religious and ethnic divides.  The four Main Islands Japan had been under a unified government since the beginning of the 17th century.  The only experience the territories that comprise Iraq have had with unified government was under the British, an imported king, and a brutal dictator.

In the case of Japan, defeat came first, democratization second, on a clear and open agenda.  There were no hidden American plans for Japan.  In the case of Iraq, of course, the reasons given for going to war in the first place, WMD and connections with al-Qaeda, were quickly shown to be entirely spurious.  The substitute reason, democratization, was from the beginning considered by many Iraqis, even anti-Husseinites, to be spurious.

From the beginning, the real American reasons were thought to be, by many both within and outside of Iraq, oil, power, permanent military bases, and the protection of the Right-Wing Sharonist government in Israel. On top of that, there was the Bremer Plan for the complete economic subjugation of Iraq.  Except for the establishment of military bases, which the demilitarized Japanese were perfectly happy to have on their soil, there were no parallels from this list in the case of Japan.  Like Japan’s was, the Iraqi infrastructure is a mess, but an abundant supply of domestic capital for its reconstruction or for building/rebuilding anything else is nonexistent.  Furthermore, there is constant sabotage aimed at what infrastructure reconstruction is going on, something never in the Japanese experience.  For these reasons and others, there has been an increasing level of armed resistance to the American occupation of Iraq since it began, not at all the case in Japan.

There are many other factors that one could discuss; none of them similarities.  The point here is that the American occupation of Japan worked, both for the U.S. and for Japan.  Although in historical terms we are much too close to the day of “Mission [Not] Accomplished” to be certain of ultimate failure in Iraq, when one looks at the contrasts with how the occupation of Japan was achieved and carried out and what is happening under the American occupation of Iraq, it is highly unlikely that the current American strategy has even the slightest hope for success, either for ourselves or for the Iraqi people.

Junkie:  Dr. Jonas’ article was authored on September 9, 2004 for publication today.  Yesterday, this article, Arab League condemns terrorism in Iraq, pledges to support Baghdad.

The Arab League makes a number of points that support Dr. Jonas’ conclusions:

The Arab League condemned terrorism in Iraq and called on member states to restore full diplomatic relations with the interim government in Baghdad and do all they can to support it, after warning that the "gates of hell" had been opened there. . . .

The ministers also censured the US-led multinational force in Iraq for carrying out operations that endanger innocent lives. . . .

They also "strongly condemned the inhuman and immoral crimes and practices committed by occupation soldiers against Iraqis, especially in prisons and detention centers," saying they represented "a flagrant violation of human rights and international charters and treaties."  . . .

It "reaffirmed the importance of Arab presence in Iraq, including restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq at its normal level in support of efforts being exerted by the interim Iraqi government in this field."  . . .

It urged "the Arab League, in cooperation and coordination with the United Nations, to provide all forms of assistance to Iraq in the different fields, especially in the political process and reconstruction in Iraq." – Yahoo (emphasis added).

Had only Bush read his history!