COMMENT
'We felt we had a very effective strike, but, as you do the bomb-damage assessment, sometimes other factors such as clouds get in the way, and if there was any doubt at all as to whether we reduced...
...Striking workers face employers who can legally hire permanent scabs, and who are increasingly adopting this tactic as a way to break unions...
...More wiretapping and more unrestrained searches and seizures will not eradicate the drug problem...
...The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America—and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy automatic weapons...
...So what was the U.S...
...The power of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was on display at a tiny little conference called by the Progressive Caucus during the Chicago convention...
...Turkey used the U.S.-imposed no-fly zone as protection for its own jet fighters, which scorched Kurdish villages...
...The Democrats are also going along with traditional Republican malarkey about lowering the capital-gains tax...
...government wasn't their friend when Turkey killed 20,000 Kurds in the last twelve years...
...Today, the Kurds in northern Iraq are split...
...Since the embargo has been in place, some 600,000 Iraqi children have died from malnutrition or inadequate health care, according to a U.N...
...But we know how important it is that we stay united and get our House and Senate back and get our President back...
...The United States views Iran as "rogue" enemy number one, yet here was the United States siding with the Kurdish faction allied with Iran...
...This imperial strategy is bankrupting us, and it is bringing more violence and death not just to Iraqi civilians but also to Third World people from Guatemala to East Timor...
...If we were going to fall on our swords, this is where we would do it," said Woolsey...
...So why does the United States pursue it...
...He didn't need to make a clandestine call to Dick Morris to know that sending missiles to Iraq would make his poll numbers soar...
...We felt we had a very effective strike, but, as you do the bomb-damage assessment, sometimes other factors such as clouds get in the way, and if there was any doubt at all as to whether we reduced the effectiveness of his air-defense system, we thought it would be prudent to go back with a restrike.' —General Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff President Clinton's decision to launch missile strikes against Iraq in early September was both hypocritical and immoral...
...And the Democrats have now signed on to the balanced-budget idea, which will tie the government's hands during an economic downturn and risk transforming a recession into a depression...
...it is hurting Iraqi civilians...
...Keep that faith," Jackson intoned in a characteristically moving address...
...she told reporters...
...and it fails time and time again...
...Despite McKinney's upbeat introduction—"We're here to claim success"—it was clear from the turnout that this was hardly a show of force...
...Any family could take up to $500,000 in profit tax-free when selling a house under the new Clinton proposal...
...approval...
...The American public wants to believe that our government wears the white hat...
...But the U.S...
...empire...
...It's a shame that Democrats who have a greater vision than the Clinton Administration's policies reflect are so timid...
...To dispute this assumption is beyond what Noam Chomsky calls "the bounds of thinkable thought...
...And the U.S...
...Bob Dole and Bill Clinton alike are sounding the call...
...Then, on September 5 of this year, within a week of Saddam Hussein's assault, Turkey once again sent jet fighters to strike Kurds in northern Iraq, once more with U.S...
...Cokie Roberts, George Will, and Sam Donaldson appeared ready to suit up and hop in the next F-15...
...We didn't hear calls to bomb Ankara or assassinate Turkey's leader...
...government would shed its imperial role—farewell "surgical strikes," adieu CIA—not only would there be less violence around the world, there would finally be a chance here in the United States to "establish justice" and "provide for the general welfare," as the preamble to our Constitution requires...
...Two weeks before Dole's speech, the San Jose Mercury News published a massive, three-part investigative story on the CIA and crack-peddling during the contra war in the 1980s...
...The U.S...
...Yet the Democratic Party no longer stands for economic policies designed to increase the standard of living for working people...
...Dole especially is ready to let loose the military to stamp out drugs...
...And the demand is homegrown, right here in the United States...
...The Pentagon budget—all $260 billion of it—is based on waging two simultaneous wars in the Third World (one is never enough...
...government wasn't their friend back when Saddam Hussein was a trusted ally and was brutalizing Kurds right up to the day he invaded Kuwait...
...And, after selling out this one unifying principle, the President is not taking a lot of heat from the left wing of his party...
...So much for pressure from the left...
...Funny he should mention the CIA...
...Clinton also bombed Iraq to flex American muscle for the world to see...
...And it's particularly distressing to hear progressive Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo give speeches invoking the party's populist tradition, from the New Deal to the Great Society to the civil-rights movement, even as that tradition is dismantled...
...Here is the prime hypocrisy of U.S...
...The $260 billion Pentagon budget, meanwhile, remains virtually untouched, so that balancing the budget just means slashing social programs...
...But the U.S...
...The analysis does not get deeper than that on the network news, or in The New York Times...
...The persecution of the Kurdish people is tragic and wrong, no matter who is the aggressor...
...Both Jackson and Cuomo mentioned the welfare repeal, which they each opposed, only to say that they would agree to disagree with the President...
...Every politician declares it...
...Turkey views the Kurds, whether in Iraq or in its own country, as a threat...
...If Bob Dole wants to get at one major drug supplier, he might want to take a close look at Langley...
...And in part, drugs are an escape from devastation: from the loss of jobs, the loss of promise, the loss of hope that afflicts much of our nation...
...We should all hope and pray" that the President can "avert this risk by further legislation before children are actually harmed," Cuomo said...
...As long as that demand is as strong as it is today, the supply will rise to meet it: Other countries will take up the slack...
...policy in the region that the Kurds should not establish a state of their own...
...This "face-saving" argument is used time after time when the United States takes military action...
...They seem to think that by rolling over now they can keep some influence in a second Clinton term...
...The slim showing was a stark contrast to the raucous victory parties hosted by Christian evangelicals and rabid pro-lifers at the Republican convention...
...While President Clinton and the Democrats in Congress did pass marginal improvements in the Earned Income Tax Credit and the minimum wage, a far more significant move was the reappointment of Alan Greenspan, a tight-money man, as chair of the Federal Reserve Board...
...Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts...
...During the Presidential campaign, Clinton announced that he'd all but wipe out the capital-gains tax on home sales...
...You would have searched in vain for the facts about Turkey's invasion if you were examining the recent history of the Kurds that The New York Times published on September 4. It had only one entry for 1995...
...Contra drug dealers 'met with CIA agents both before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A.' —The Son Jose Mercury News 'As in 1992, the words "labor union" appear nowhere in the [Democratic] platform.' —Doug Henwood, editor of the Left Business Observer, in In These Times Liberals, R.I.P...
...American-style...
...The Washington elite would call this isolationism—a slur that becomes yet another defense of empire...
...allies Turkey and Israel...
...Yes, Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator...
...Madison Avenue tells us that a new beer, a new hairstyle, a new toothpaste, or a new car will bring instant sex appeal and satisfaction, and drugs are just one more quick fix to happiness...
...Such was the beginning of the crack epidemic...
...reaction to Turkey's invasion against the Kurds in Iraq last March...
...Almost the entire Washington establishment was advocating the bombing of Iraq...
...The series, written by Gary Webb, shows how the CIA illegally raised money for the contras in the 1980s by introducing crack cocaine to the gangs of inner-city Los Angeles...
...Jackson urged the delegates to "stand with the steelworkers," and Cuomo said, "Those middle-class workers, they are our workers...
...A handful of reporters and a few Democratic legislators, including liberal Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Lynn Woolsey of California, gathered in a hotel room to discuss the state of progressive politics...
...Referring to the terrible risk to poor children that the welfare repeal imposes, Cuomo in his very next sentence echoed Jackson's call to close ranks behind the President...
...Nor will stationing troops from San Diego to Texas stop the influx of drugs into this country, though it will drain our treasury in the process...
...It is a linchpin of U.S...
...Yes, he has persecuted the Kurds...
...Saddam Hussein does not pose a threat to the United States, or to the American people...
...We need to give the President the strength of a Democratic Congress...
...If it's not OK for Saddam Hussein to kill Kurds in his own country, then why is it OK for Turkey to invade Iraq to kill Kurds...
...Cuomo even praised Clinton's crime policy, saying, "Who can argue today that the Democrats are soft on crime...
...Security Council, unsupported by our allies...
...Prior to the bombing...
...Those people anxious about their futures—they are our people...
...report...
...Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine—a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA's army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices...
...But Cuomo said nothing about Clinton's expansion of the death penalty—which Cuomo has spent a lifetime fighting—to include sixty new categories of federal crimes...
...But they are rolling over on a slippery slope...
...In part, it's because our culture bombards us with a single message: Consume, consume, consume...
...every Administration wages it...
...But the promise that government will help people in times of need is exactly what Clinton has repealed by signing the welfare bill...
...Webb makes the point that while the contra war is now a distant memory, "black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects...
...policy: In March of 1995, Turkey invaded northern Iraq with 35,000 troops to wage war against the Kurds...
...government insists on ruling the globe...
...The answer: "The notion that there must be a sense of fairness and, in a time of need, the government must be there to help people...
...The domestic pressures on Clinton quickly became irresistible...
...Clinton is interested in his own reelection campaign, and in saving face for the U.S...
...This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the 'crack' capital of the world...
...The problem with drugs is not a supply problem, but a demand problem...
...Liberal Democrats had to ask themselves, "What is it that unifies our party...
...Now, in the fall of 1996, we're hearing the drumbeat roll and the trumpets blare for another enlistment, another engagement...
...the Pentagon is their advance man...
...I know the President is counting on us to fill in the loopholes in the welfare bill," Woolsey announced, pardoning the President, as did every other liberal-to-leftwing Democrat at the convention, for signing the welfare-repeal law in the first place...
...Counting the millions of deaths thai the U.S...
...Yet no Third World nation can muster even a credible threat against the U.S...
...Working people in the United States have seen their real incomes decline by 5 percent since 1989, even as corporate profits have reached a forty-year high...
...But short of a miracle, there is nothing on the horizon to make us believe the Democrats will do right by their traditional constituents—minorities, the poor, and the great majority of working people whose interests are not the same as the interests of corporations...
...But if the U.S...
...The effect of the tax cut is to redistribute tax money to the well-off and to real-estate speculators...
...There appears to be no single Kurdish side for the United States to be on...
...Bob Dole had already begun to claim that Clinton was weak and vacillating on Saddam Hussein...
...The war on drugs will never be won until we solve the larger problems besetting America...
...other ports of entry will open...
...And he followed that up by rescinding the decision to allow Iraqi civilians to receive food and medicine...
...The differences between the two parties are little more than cosmetic...
...But that is not what our leading politicians have in mind...
...One group allies with Saddam Hussein, one with Iran, and one with the Kurdistan Workers Party...
...We must start with a plan to use our military power, particularly our technological capabilities, to fight this battle, to involve our intelligence agencies, including the CIA, in this effort," he told the American Legion in early September...
...empire has caused is just not done...
...First, because it is in the economic interests of the multinational corporations that exercise so much power over our government: They want access to the raw materials and cheap labor in the Third World...
...We have both the Republicans and the Democrats to thank for that...
...He's a regional power, who pales in comparison with other regional powers, such as U.S...
...Instead of standing astride the globe, the United States should start taking care of its own people...
...And second, because the ideology of empire has taken such a grip on the American psyche that any politician who tries to buck it will face charges amounting to treason...
...The Washington Post's chronology, "An Embattled People," which ran on September 1, also conveniently omitted Turkey's assault...
...Thanks to NAFTA and GATT, American workers are now competing with workers in the Third World who labor for starvation wages...
...The United States approved of it...
...A Kurdish state would threaten one of our major regional allies, Turkey, which itself has a large Kurdish minority that has been seeking independence...
...A lot of soul-searching has taken place on the part of the Progressive Caucus," McKinney said...
...Their rationale: The United States would look weak in the eyes of the world if it did not enforce the no-fly zone...
...Even to call the United States an empire is a ghastly admission not to be uttered in polite company...
...But Clinton bombed Iraq anyway...
...Still on Drugs The war on drugs may be the longest-running conflict since the Hundred Years' War...
...This is an extremely callous act, for the humanitarian embargo is not hurting Saddam Hussein...
...Greenspan does the bidding of the bankers and bondholders on Wall Street who worry about rising wages and even the hint of inflation...
...If we were serious about ending drug abuse, we would look at the reasons people use drugs...
...Already, our rights to privacy have been drawn and quartered as a result of the war on drugs...
...But the last thing we need is a more militarized society, courtesy of our drug policy...
...Turkey also used weaponry provided by the Pentagon to conduct this war against the Kurds...
...military...
...But it is grossly hypocritical for the United States to pretend it is a friend of the Kurds...
...imperial strategists, this presented some vexing problems...
...Clinton is not interested in protecting the Kurdish people, or in saving Iraqi citizens from Saddam Hussein's brutality...
...The convention was a funeral for Democratic Party liberalism, and Jackson and Cuomo were sent up to give the eulogies for the old doctrine...
...As a result, we as a nation are pursuing one costly misadventure after another, while our own domestic needs go woefully unmet...
...For U.S...
...It was one of the reasons the United States went to Vietnam, and one of the reasons it took so long to get out...
...So a couple that buys a house for $1 million and sells it for $1.5 million can make a killing...
...government cries only crocodile tears over the Kurds...
...But they will eradicate our constitutional rights...
...Both Cuomo and Jackson invoked labor...
...Turkey was not mentioned...
...The message from the Progressive Caucus, as from every quarter of the Democratic Party this fall, is: "Get in line behind the President...
...The argument is based not on defending the American people, but on defending the U.S...
...Nor will destroying coca plants throughout South America solve the drug problem, though it will ruin the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of indigenous farmers...
...that we're the good guys in a world of bad guys...
...And so The New York Times cheers Clinton for exercising "the right mix of American power and restraint," and the networks slap the label Target: Iraq on their coverage—a convenient device, since they can simply replace Iraq with the next target that comes down the imperial pike...
...empire...
...It was one more act of war, undeclared by Congress, unapproved by the U.N...
...And using Clinton's signing of the welfare bill as, perversely, yet another reason to vote for the Democrats, Cuomo added: "We cannot rely on the Republicans to cooperate with President Clinton to save our children...
...This weakness on the Democratic left is heartbreaking...
...Webb writes...
Vol. 60 • October 1996 • No. 10
