October 16, 2009
Reporting from the world's most troubled hotspots, Mark Danner has seen countless deaths over ethnic and political divides, and witnessed firsthand how U.S. attempts to exploit those conflicts have resulted in disastrous unforeseen consequences. Danner speaks with Bill Moyers about Obama’s challenges in resetting the mindset of America from war to peace, and redefining the US as a nation...>>>Read the Transcript and Watch the Discussion
Leadin from the transcript:
Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Journal.
President Obama has been holding one meeting after another trying to decide whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He would do well to hold off another discussion until he has sent everyone home for the weekend to read this new book with the provocative title, "Stripping Bare the Body", and a cover that holds the eye like a magnet.The subject is politics, violence, and war, and running through it is an old truth often forgot: you start a war knowing what you are fighting, but in the end you find yourself fighting for things you had never thought of.
In the meantime, you make decisions that inflict on people in far-off places suffering you never imagined.
That's but one stark truth you will find in these pages. The wars we fight, and the violence that feeds them, reveal like nothing else the hidden structures of power in Washington: the personal rivalries, the in-fighting and deal-making, the ambitions that decide our policies and often our fate. "Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War", you will discover, is a moral history of American power over the past quarter century.
Its author is Mark Danner, who throughout those 25 years reported from more mean places in the world than any journalist I know -- Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, and Washington, among them. Despite more than one close brush with death, he keeps going back. He writes for some of our leading magazines and has produced a series of acclaimed books, winning awards left and right as well as receiving the MacArthur Fellowship. All the while Mark Danner has been teaching journalism and foreign affairs at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College in upstate New York. He's been at this table before, and it's good to welcome you back.
And a few clips from the discussion:
BILL MOYERS: You say that the decisions being discussed, and about to be made in Afghanistan right now have very little to do with the war in Afghanistan and more to do with the politics in America. Explain that.
MARK DANNER: I think the political background here is extremely important. We have a new president, who made his case on foreign policy during the campaign on his opposition to the war in Iraq. And that opposition, to quote his speech in Springfield in 2002, was built on the perception that he is not against all wars, just dumb wars. So in this construction, the smart-- the dumb war was Iraq. The smart war, the right war was Afghanistan. Afghanistan allowed his dovishness on Iraq. So he has come into office having vowed to prosecute that war and fight it, because it was in American interest.
And now he has found, especially in the wake of the failed elections in Afghanistan, that he is getting into he's taking on a hornet's nest, putting his hand into a hornet's nest in a way I think he didn't anticipate.
BILL MOYERS: You make the point that we're more likely to be the target of attack because Obama is trying to win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.
MARK DANNER: I think that's true. I think that he is a political threat. And I think you have to look at the character of this war. You know, we're accustomed to calling it the "war on terror," even though Obama's no longer using the word. But it isn't a war where you try to seize territory. It's not a war where you're going to kill every jihadist. It's a war about politics. Think of a target. What you want to do in this war is prevent people from moving toward the center. That is, you want the people getting the money to not become more active supports. You want the more active supporters to not become active jihadists, to actually go into the fight. So, you're trying to do something political. You want to stop young Muslims from supporting this movement and taking part of it. That's the only way that this war will eventually be "won," quote unquote. And for the-- you know, when you look at it in these terms, George W. Bush was an enormous gift to the jihadists. An enormous gift.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
MARK DANNER: Because he embodied the caricature of the United States that Osama Bin Laden had put forth. An imperial power using its power blunderingly around the world, suppressing Muslims, repressing Muslim countries, occupying Saudi Arabia. You know, think of that image of Lindy England the young military woman standing in her fatigues, smiling at the camera, holding a leash. A leash that goes down to the neck of a naked Muslim man lying on the ground, grimacing in pain.
Osama Bin Laden, if he had hired the most expensive advertising agency on Madison Avenue, could not have embodied more brilliantly his ideology, which is that the United States is suppressing, humiliating, shaming, undermining the Muslim world, and especially Muslim men.
Obama, on the other hand, stands for-- you know, he has an African name, he's black, he has a Muslim middle name, he speaks about inclusion. I mean, look at his Cairo speech. Ideologically, he's an enormous threat to Osama Bin Laden. Because he does the opposite of what Americans are supposed to do.
Mark Danner:
You know, the Iraq war, in the first couple of weeks-- the so-called combat stage, as the George W. Bush administration called it-- the best estimate made by the Associated Press of civilian casualties, civilian deaths, which is certainly an understatement, It's a hospital count so it's only people who were brought to hospital morgues, was 3400 people. Now this is in two weeks.
This is more than the number in the United States who died in 9/11. And of course, Iraq is a tenth or an eleventh the size of the United States. So the equivalent, on the US side, would be 35,000 people died, civilians, in that war. They were never on camera. You never saw those bodies. You saw very few bodies. It was as if the American army simply marched up the road to Baghdad. And in fact-- you know, the military before the war, estimated collateral damage at 10,000, 15,000, something like that.
And you know, when you make a decision like that and say 10,000 to 15,000, or 7000, or whatever the number was, will probably be killed as a result of this intervention, people who have no-- you know, are not military and so on-- that it strikes me as an extremely serious thing. It's not like trying to kill civilians in a terrorist attack, needless to say. It's not, because that's your intention....>>>Read and Watch Rest Here
Mark Danner's Book: "Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War"
And from yesterday and today we get these:
US' Kerry: decide Afghan vote before adding troops
It would be irresponsible of President Barack Obama to commit to sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan when the outcome of that country's election is undecided, U.S. Senator John Kerry said on Saturday.
In an interview with CNN's "State of the Union," Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the United States should not proceed with a new Afghan strategy involving more troops without a clear partner in Kabul...>>>
Emanuel: Must Have an Afghan Partner Before Sending Troops
Before President Obama makes a decision about sending any additional troops to Afghanistan, there must be a careful assessment of the strength and viability of the Afghan government, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday...>>>
Seems like the message is being sent what with Kerry and now Emanuel have clearly spoken, they're not going to cowtow to cheney's puppet, especially after the extremely botched election results in Afghanistan, Taking The Neo-Con Ideology Down Even More Notches!!
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