As I listened to the opening to the State of the Union speech, I know I was going to have a rough night. Last week, I spent a couple hours on the phone with a seminary friend. One of her daughter’s friends from high school was just killed in Afghanistan as a member of the Indiana National Guard, and my friend was trying to deal with the effect this is having both on her daughter and also the mother of the dead soldier (who was also a friend of my friend).

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. . . .

I’m sorry, but our military adventurism has not made us safer, nor more respected, and to start the speech like this really put me off.

As one who makes a lot of public speeches, I was struck by the way in which this speech was structured. In particular, I quickly noticed that the way in which each issue was laid out followed the same pattern.

Before Obama made any kind of progressive-leaning statement or proposal, he always seemed to embrace or praise some kind of conservative sentiment or talking point first. When talking about the “house of cards” that is the housing industry mess, he criticized homeowners first and banks second. When talking about tax reforms, relief for corporations came first. When talking about education, raising standards came first, and criticizing shortsighted budget cuts came second. When talking about students, mandating education up to age 18 came first, before raising the issues of college affordability or post-college jobs.

Oh, wait a minute.

(scrolls through text of the speech again)

He didn’t say anything about these grads getting jobs after college. My bad.

Or his.

*sigh*

When talking about “American-made energy,” Obama spent paragraphs praising the oil and natural gas industries before saying one word about alternatives. Every single time, no matter what the issue, it felt not as if the conservative position was a leadup to the something stronger from the progressive end of things, but rather that progressive-leaning positions were being given the rhetorical back seat.

*sigh*

The financial crimes unit stuff really ticked me off. “So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count,” he said, but passing legislation makes no difference if charges never get filed and cases do not get tried. Robo-signing and forgery are already criminal acts, lying to grand juries and judges is already illegal, and robosigning on a massive scale is a conspiracy to commit fraud. You don’t need new legislation to file these charges or prosecute the offenders. These are already crimes; you just need to treat them like that, rather than continuing to look for a deal that will give banks immunity for their past crimes.

Blergh.

Obama delivered the speech well, and the word had clearly gone out not to step on the rhetoric by applauding every sentence and screwing up the rhythm and flow. Kudos to whoever pushed the Congress critters not to turn this into an applause circus.

Oddly, given the prominence given to the conservative issues and talking points throughout the speech, as well as the hagiographic depiction of the military, the very last paragraph was a very pleasant surprise.

No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we’re joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

(Am I way off base for thinking Obama probably needs to thank Elizabeth Warren for essentially writing it? See her comments here, starting at about the 0:55 mark.)

The repetition of “This nation is great because . . .” rang the changes of progressive thinking without apology. There was no “this nation is great because we’ve got bigger weapons” or “larger navies” or “more precise drones.” There was no “this nation is great because it’s every man for himself in the jungle of the market.”

No, the greatness of our nation — our true greatness — comes not from our military might but our unity of purpose, and not just any purpose but the purpose proclaimed in a document that begins “We the people of the United States . . .” and laid out more fully in the words that follow:

. . . in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. . .

It’s a pity that more of the speech wasn’t built around that theme of what makes this nation great. Instead, Obama reached again and again to the talking points of the right first, then gestured left, hoping again for a middle ground that does not exist.

Ah, birthdays.

Yes, it’s President Obama’s 50th, but I’m more impressed with Helen Thomas, who came along some 41 years before Obama. To put the two in perspective, Helen has spent more years grilling presidents and their spokespeople than Obama has spent out of diapers.

One of my delights at FDL are the Book Salons, where authors famous and not-so-famous come to chat with whomever drops by. The subjects covered by the books are wide ranging, and the authors are generally really happy to chat about whatever questions the FDL commenters pose.

Somewhere on my “Top FDL Book Salons of All Time” list is Helen’s November 2009 chat about her book “Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President To Know and Do.” To give you a flavor of it — and the remarkable woman who celebrates her 91st birthday today — here are some of exchanges in the comments (with my own current observations in italics).

A word of warning: it’s amazing — and somewhat depressing — to see how on-target her comments in 2009 remain some 20 months later.

* * *

Jeffrey Feldman (host of the chat): It’s clear from the book that Lyndon Johnson’s presidency made a strong impression on you both. If Johnson were around to give Obama advice on the top issues right now (health, Afghanistan, unemployment, carbon levels), today…what do you think he would say?

Helen: LBJ would say “Get the hell out of Afghanistan and don’t make the mistakes I did in Vietnam. Give your all-out support for public health insurance option, and forget about collecting Republican votes. I did that with Medicare, and it worked.”

(“. . . and forget about collecting Republican votes.”? Either LBJ hasn’t shown up, or Obama listens to him as much as he listens to Paul Krugman.)

* * *

dakine01: . . . if you could corner President Obama and force him to make ONE policy change or political act, what would you tell/force him to do?

Helen: I’d tell him to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and pay more attention to people at home who are hungry and without jobs.

(The fact that we’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and still have enormous numbers of people at home who are hungry and without jobs is mindboggling.)

* * *

Teddy Partridge: Did George W Bush give you a nickname, and did you ever get called it?

Helen: I’m sure he did, but I don’t want to hear it. Probably not for a familiy [sic] audience.

(I’m sure she could speculate on some of the possibilities, though — and she’s probably on target with regard to its suitability for publication.)

* * *

Peterr: No disrespect intended toward the late Tim Russert, but his testimony at the Scooter Libby trial — where he stated under oath that his presumption was that every conversation he had with a person of prominence was considered off the record unless otherwise stated — was strong evidence to me that there is often far too cozy a relationship between the DC media and those they cover.

In your many years of covering the White House, what is the best way you’ve seen for ordinary folks to push the media to act in the interests of the general public when they seem to have cozied up a bit too much?

Helen: For starters, people should not get mad when reporters seem rude to politicians. Sometimes that’s the only way to get their attention, and get real answers. They have to be accountable, and they usually don’t to be. [sic -- perhaps should be "don't want to be."]

Peterr: My problem with the reporters isn’t that they are too rude, but they aren’t persistent ENOUGH when confronted with stonewalling, for example. When a press spokesperson — or the President — responds to a difficult question by tossing out lots of bright shiny objects to distract folks from the fact that they didn’t actually answer the question, how can we encourage the media to say “Excuse me, but that didn’t address what you were asked. Would you like to try again?”

Is there any chance at all that a reporter at a presidential press conference would ever give up their own personal question by saying “Mr. President, I don’t think you answered what my colleague asked you a moment ago. Could you please answer *that* question?”?

Helen: Excellent point. It should happen more often, especially when follow-ups are barred. We can always hope.

(Yes we can. We’re still hoping . . . but no luck so far. But I felt honored to not only have had Helen answer my question, but let me offer a followup. Sure beats the way in which some presidents have treated Helen.)

* * *

demi: What are both* of your recommendations for us to get the biggest bang for our dollars in terms of affecting the changes we want from our government? [*Addressed to Helen and Craig Crawford, her co-author, who was doing the typing for both of them]

Helen: For starters, elect people who speak for the people and not the superich. And get Goldman Sachs out of the Treasury Dept!

Cynthia Kouril: [standing on chair cheering and clapping]

(I think lots of folks shared Cynthia’s reaction, and still do. Speaking of which . . . have you heard the rumors that Timothy Geithner may be on his way out at Treasury? What are the odds that a Goldman Sachs alum of some kind might take his place, should Geithner leave?)

* * *

perris: Helen, what do you think of obama’s opinion that “we need to look forward not backward” addressing the abuses of the previous administration? . . .

Helen: It’s covering up the past. We must learn from our mistakes, no matter how painful.

(Sadly, Obama has continued to want to remain stubbornly ignorant of the past — or wants the rest of us to remain ignorant of it — and thus prolong the pain. See just about anything written by Jeff Kaye on torture, for example.)

* * *

Dearie: Helen & Craig, you might notice that many of us on the left & central-left have kind of maxed out on Obama. Helen, you’ve seen presidents come and go; do you think Obama has a chance to clean up his image with us progressives?

Helen: Yes, if he displays more courage.

Craig: He’s nailed hope. It’s time for audacity.

(Helen, after watching the repeated caves to the GOP since this book salon, I’d say that’s a major hypothetical you put out there. Courage in defending Democratic principles (let alone progressive principles) has not been terribly much in evidence. Craig, we’re still waiting on that audacity. The longer he waits, the more audacious he’ll have to be.)

* * *

Speaking of hope . . .

Every president hopes that God broke the mold when he made Helen Thomas. Everyone else better hope that those presidents are wrong. She is one of a kind, to be sure, but we sure could use more media people who follow in her footsteps.

Happy birthday, Helen!

(Oh, and you too, Mr. President. Kudos to you for recognizing that in the White House press room, her birthday was at least as significant as your own.)

Way back in January 2008, a certain presidential candidate gave a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the congregation once served by Martin Luther King Jr. . . .

. . . “Unity is the great need of the hour.” That’s what Dr. King said. It is the great need of this hour as well, not because it sounds pleasant, not because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exits in this country.

I’m not talking about the budget deficit. I’m not talking about the trade deficit. Talking about the moral deficit in this country. I’m talking about an empathy deficit, the inability to recognize ourselves in one another, to understand that we are our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper, that in the words of Dr. King, “We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

Pause for a minute and let that sink in: “the empathy deficit is the essential deficit that exists in this country.”

We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame, schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education. We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than ordinary workers are making in an entire year, when families lose their homes so unscrupulous lenders can make a profit, when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children are stricken with illness. We have a deficit in this country when we have Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others, when our children see hanging nooses from a school yard tree today, in the present, in the 21st century. We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities, when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur, when young Americans serve tour after tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged. We have an empathy deficit in this country that has to be closed. We have a deficit when it takes a breach in the levees to reveal the breach in our compassion, when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed, the sick that He calls on us to care for, the least of these that He commands that we treat as our own. So, we have a deficit to close. We have walls, barriers to justice and equality that must come down, and to do this, we know that “unity is the great need of the hour.”

These words were spoken in 2008, but they seem even more appropriate today. Those schools that were in trouble three years ago are in worse shape now, as every state in the country has been cutting back on funding, leaving every district to axe teachers and staff, raise class sizes, and defer maintenance. That “tour after tour after tour after tour of duty” has had at least one more “after tour” added onto it, and atrocities continue to pile up. Foreclosure fraud is rampant, the facts of the global financial crisis show serious legal problems for the bankers that created it, and yet the SEC is “taking a light touch” with the banks and bank executives apparently are getting Scooter Libby justice. (Have you heard the news? Goldman Sachs is likely to “face fresh embarrassment” over their role in the global financial crisis.) And as long as we’re talking about military action without congressional authorization, meet Libya.

If the need was great in 2008, it’s off the charts today.

But back to that candidate . . . skipping ahead in his remarks a bit:

However, all too often, when we talk about unity in this country, we’ve come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. . . We offer unity, but we are not willing to pay the price that’s required.

Of course, true unity cannot be so easily purchased. It starts with a change in attitudes. It starts with changing our hearts, and changing our minds, broadening our spirit. It’s not easy to stand in somebody else’s shoes. It’s not easy to see past our own differences. We’ve all encountered this in our own lives. What makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart, that puts up walls between us. We are told that those who differ from us on a few things, differ from us on all things, that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The Welfare Queen, she’s taking our money. The Immigrant, he’s taking our jobs. The believer condemns the nonbeliever as immoral, and the nonbeliever chides the believer for being intolerant.

[snip]

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The divisions, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame the plight of ourselves on others — all of that distracts us from the common challenges that we face, war and poverty, inequality and injustice. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing each other down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It’s the poison that we must purge from our politics, the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late. Because if Dr. King could love his jailer, if he could call on the faithful, who once sat where you do, to forgive those who had set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time and bind up our wounds and erase the sympathy deficit that exists in our hearts.

But if changing our hearts and our minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It’s not enough to bemoan the plight of the poor in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It’s not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block real reform in our health care system. It’s not enough — It’s not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet we continue to allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of an attack as a way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together in a common effort. . .

Boy, did he nail it on that one. As far as I can tell, the politics of fear is what makes DC run these days, not only on terrorism but on the budget, health care, social security, and everything else.

I wonder what ever happened to that guy. We sure could use someone like this in DC to take on the fear-mongers.

Say, did you hear that President Obama is going to give a speech on Wednesday, addressing deficit reduction? As the Washington Post headline writer summed things up, “Obama’s New Approach to Deficit Reduction to include Spending on Entitlements.”

Before he speaks on Wednesday, maybe Obama should go listen to what that presidential candidate had to say at Ebenezer Baptist Church a couple of years ago.

Terri Moon Cronk, a reporter for the Armed Forces Press Service, has a story currently in major front page rotation at the Department of Defense website about a speech given by DOD General Counsel Jeh Johnson that is appalling to anyone who has read or heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s “A Time to Break Silence” speech.

[Update: The DOD front page is still featuring the MLK observance ceremony, but they scrubbed Cronk's story from the highlight box, though it is still available at the direct link.]

From the DOD story:

If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, would he understand why the United States is at war?

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” he said.

Let’s wind back the clock, shall we?

In his April 1967 speech (both text and audio at the link above), King makes it clear that the war being fought in his day and the world in his day was anything but simple. He lays out seven reasons why he was speaking out in opposition to the war, and first on the list was this: war saps the resources and the will of the nation to address glaring issues and needs at home.

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Second, and related to the first, is the toll of the war on those communities who are supplying the troops to fight the war:

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.

Yes, we have a volunteer force now as opposed to a military built around the draft as we did then, but the economic forces today are just as powerful as they were in the 1960s. Then, the rich had ways of avoiding the draft, while the poor did not. Today, the rich have options in difficult economic times that the poor do not. To a poor young person looking unsuccessfully for a job, that military recruiter’s pitch sounds more and more attractive. The Great Recession seems to have solved the military recruitment problems rather nicely. As John McCutcheon’s song about World War I put it, “the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame.” True about the Great War, true about Vietnam, and still true about Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then there’s King’s commitment to non-violence and his own intellectual consistency.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

King was very blunt: how can I preach non-violence and accept the violence of my own government? Call me crazy, but I don’t think today’s wars with their drone strikes, indefinite detentions without appeal, and government sanctioned torture (called such by everyone but our own government) would induce King to make an exception to his commitment to non-violence.

Then there’s that whole Nobel Peace Prize thing:

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for “the brotherhood of man.”

Moving on to specifics of the Vietnam war, King continues:

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators.

Substitute out the Vietnam references and replace them with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the corruption of the Karzai government, the massive “embassy” in Iraq, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda, and King’s language continues to speak very clearly and appropriately. Going on, King asks some rather pointed questions himself:

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? . . .

Gosh, that sounds like it might fit today’s wars, too. King speaks eloquently about the double standards of those who tried to justify Vietnam without applying those standards to themselves:

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. . . . How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. . .

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

Maturity. What a novel idea.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the — for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This does not sound like a man unfamiliar with war — and not just the war of his generation.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala — Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan fit nicely into that list.

As the Pentagon tries to twist King’s legacy to their own ends, it seems they only serve to demonstrate the wisdom of King’s words. We are indeed beset by “a far deeper malady,” to which the Pentagon apparently continues to turn a blind eye.

Here’s a link to the full text of Jeh Johnson’s speech, the relevant portion of which is this:

People like to speculate about what Dr. King would believe and say if he were alive today.

I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our Nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack.

To our individual servicemen and women who wonder whether their mission is consistent with Martin Luther King’s own message and beliefs, I refer you again to his very last speech in Memphis, the night before he died.

In it Dr. King talked about Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan on the dangerous road to Jericho.  With great effect Dr. King drew a parallel between the priest and the Levite who passed by the man on the road to Jericho, beaten and robbed and in need of aid, and failed to help him, and those in Memphis in April 1968 who hesitated to help the striking sanitation workers because they feared for their own jobs, for their own comfortable positions in the Memphis community.

He criticized those who are “compassionate by proxy,” and said to those in the audience in Memphis that night “The question is not, if I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?  The question is, if I do not stop the sanitation workers, what will happen to them.”

In 2011, I draw the parallel to our own servicemen and women, deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, away from the comfort of conventional jobs, their families and their homes.  Those in today’s volunteer Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road, and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people.  Every day our servicemen and women practice that “dangerous unselfishness” Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968.

In accepting his own Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, our President recognized that, in response to an unprovoked terrorist attack, war is inevitable to secure peace, and that the role of the military is to keep peace.

Fine words, but not supported by my reading of King. There was no asterisk next to King’s words about non-violence, and no footnote to his condemnation of war as a vehicle for social change.

Let me close with one last excerpt — one that picks up the image of the parable of the Good Samaritan to which Jeh Johnson referred:

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Our policies in Iraq and much of that region are not designed to transform the Jericho Road, but to make it safe for the corporate powers to travel. We did not build a mammoth embassy in Iraq to transform the place, but to guard our ability to exploit it. Whether napalm or drones, the message of King does not change: this way of settling differences is not just.

And the DOD attempting to say otherwise is offensive as hell.

In an interview posted yesterday by Germany’s Der Spiegel ISAF Commander David Petraeus was asked about corruption:

SPIEGEL: The build-up of an Afghan security apparatus is a key element of the whole effort. How concerned are you about corruption in the ranks of police and the army?

Petraeus: Corruption has to be put into context. We have to recognize that the Afghan government has taken numerous steps against corruption. The border police chief for West Afghanistan is in jail, a number of provincial police chiefs have been fired or put into custody. Numerous commanders as well as provincial governors have been replaced. In the broader Afghan administration hundreds of judicial workers, including judges, have lost their jobs due to problems with their integrity. Having said that, President Karzai is the first to announce publicly that more needs to be done because corruption undermines the legitimacy of governance on all levels.

SPIEGEL: It might sound disrespectful, but one could also say that if President Karzai wanted to fight corruption he could start doing so within his own family …

Petraeus: There are plenty of locations in which corruption can be countered, there are plenty where it has been countered and there are plenty where it needs to be countered.

SPIEGEL: What steps are taken to counter corruption in a practical manner?

Petraeus: I have just issued a "counterinsurgency contracting guidance". You know the saying that in counterinsurgency missions "money is ammunition," but we have to be careful into whose hands we put that ammunition, that money. The new guidelines are issued to make sure that we supply people who support our policies and not those who oppose them. We also created a new agency to oversee and implement greater transparency within all the organizations that are involved in contracting issues. But again: I don’t think that anyone is under any illusion that we’re going to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in five years or less. President Obama has said that our aspirations should be realistic. We are not going to turn one of the poorest countries in the world, that was plunged into 30 years of war, into an advanced, industrialized, Western-style democracy. What we want to achieve is Afghanistan’s capacity to secure and govern itself.

Spencer Ackerman described the counterinsurgency contracting guidance like this last week, noting a significant omission:

But “COIN Contracting” goes beyond knowing whose business to patronize. Get the community involved, Petraeus’s guidelines say, using “local shuras and Afghan government and private sector leaders” to sign off on projects and expose troops to a wide array of Afghan businesses. Look for relatively small-scale projects that Afghan companies can take on and sustain, like “agriculture, food processing, beverages, and construction.” Buy local goods and labor whenever possible. If you can’t use an Afghan business for a project, encourage the people you hire to use Afghan workers. And if you find out that a project you’re funding benefits “criminal networks” ­ insurgents, powerbrokers, random ne’er-do-wells ­ stop what you’re doing.

One conspicuous absence from Petraeus’s guidelines: there’s nothing in here about private security contractors. Granted, many of them work for the State Department, guarding diplomats, or for the CIA, doing… other things. But some also work for NATO troops, directly or indirectly, to the point that Karzai has made an issue of seeking their wholesale ouster from the country. Petraeus just doesn’t touch the issue.

The latter paragraph kind of makes a mockery of the former, don’t you think?

From the counterinsurgency contracting guidance itself:

Where our money goes is as important as the service provided or the product delivered. Establish systems and standard databases for vetting vendors and contractors to ensure that contracting does not empower the wrong people or allow the diversion of funds. . . . Hold prime contractors responsible for the behavior and performance of their sub-contractors.

Whether or not our private security contractors are reporting to State, CIA, DOD, or anyone else, they’re *our* contractors — and holding prime contractors accountable seems to be in short supply. (As Marcy notes, this is an ongoing problem, not anything new.)

The question this leads me to is quite simple: is "do as we say, not as we do" ever going to work as a military strategy in a COIN operation?

If the answer is "no," then the followup question is daunting: how much more must be spent and how many more people must die as we pursue a doomed strategy?

[Photo: DoctorWho via Flickr]

Back in the stone ages when I was a lowly State Department intern, export control laws were a big deal (or at least that’s how I remember things).

Today . . . not so big a deal anymore, apparently:

The company formerly known as Blackwater violated U.S. export control laws nearly 300 times, ranging from attempts to do business in Sudan while that country was under U.S. sanctions to training an Afghan border patrol official who was a native of Iran, the State Department said Monday.

The alleged violations were spelled out in documents released Monday by the State Department as part of a $42 million settlement with Blackwater that will allow the company, now known as Xe Services LLC, to continue receiving U.S. government contracts.

Why does this sound familiar?

Hmmm . . .

Parent: "I’ve told you hundreds of times not to do that! Hundreds!"

Kid: "Sorry."

Parent: "Sorry? Sorry? You’ve lied to me about it — hundreds of times! Hundreds!"

Kid: "I said I was sorry. (pause) But I can still have my allowance and go play at my friend’s house, right?"

Parent: "OK. But don’t let it happen again."

Yeah, that’s going to work.