Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

George Bush made another one of those tremendously awkward statements he tends to make when under pressure and when someone under his command makes a really, really big mistake:

Bush said he had discussed Haditha with Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “He’s a proud Marine. And nobody is more concerned about these allegations than the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps is full of honorable people who understand the rules of war.”

“If in fact these allegations are true,” Bush said, “the Marine Corps will work hard to make sure that that culture — that proud culture — will be reinforced. And that those who violated the law, if they did, will be punished.”

Makes you wonder whether he wants to reinforce the proud culture of vengeance that enabled Marines to murder 25 Iraqis in cold blood. As for the “reassuring” statement that those who violate the law will be punished…Hmmm, where have we heard that one before? If anyone leaked Valerie Plame’s name they’ll be fired. Remember that one? Anyone who tortured at Abu Graibh would be punished. Remember that one? Would anyone like to put a little money down on the proposition that anyone will be punished for this incident? Of course, they’ll have to have a sacrificial lamb, a Lyndie England or Charles Graner. But what of the officers who approved the bogus story and allowed it to go up the chain of command?

Such wonders He/We hath wrought: mother-in-law, Rabia Mohammed Hussein grieves the death of pregnant Nabiya Nassayef (photo: Hameed Rasheed/AP)

I know that what I’ve written above is harsh…how can we be anything but harsh in light of these terrible events? But those Marines who tragically allowed their anger at losing a buddy swell into murderous vengeance are only a symptom of a greater evil. The entire enterprise of the war is evil. If we brought our troops home now such incidents would not happen.

Today’s news brings further horror with the murder of a pregnant Iraqi woman, Nabiya Nassayef and her cousin, Saleha Mohammed, traveling in a taxi to a maternity hospital where she was to give birth. The U.S. military’s initial statement claimed they were in an exclusion zone and refused to stop when commanded by U.S. troops to do so. According to the Daily Mail, a later statement withdrew the earlier one and said the women had been killed “by mistake.” “By mistake.” Don’t those two words encapsulate our entire enterprise in Iraq. Why are we killing pregnant Iraqi mothers about to give birth? What possible good are we doing for that country?

Three years can be an eternity in pop music. Times and tastes change. Powerbrokers rise and fall. This maxim has proven doubly true for the Dixe Chicks. The last many of us had heard of them was after that sorry-assed flap over Natalie Maines’ “We’re ashamed we’re from the same state as George Bush” comment. Clear Channel (one of those powerbrokers who’s been somewhat humbled since then) served as the Fox News of the music world and let its dog-DJs loose on the Chicks. By the time they were done with them, sales of their number 1 selling (and extraordinary) Home were stalled (they eventually only sold slightly more than half the volume of their previous effort).

The Chicks went on Dianne Sawyer (if my memory serves) and apologized for showing Bush “disrespect:”

“I’m not truly embarrassed that, you know, President Bush is from my state, that’s not really what I care about,” Maines said…on ABC’s “Primetime Thursday.”

“It was the wrong wording with genuine emotion and questions and concern behind it. … Am I sorry that I asked questions and that I just don’t follow? No.”

It was an awkward, forced session in which they seemed to be tortuously taking back some or much of the truth they had spoken in that concert comment. Natalie cried during the interview. Certainly there was a great deal of emotion in the interview. But I half-wondered whether some of the tears might have to do with Natalie feeling forced to eat crow which she hardly found appetizing at all.

With their new Taking the Long Way, they’ve come out guns blazing. Their targets are of course the Clear Channel bullies of the world, George Bush, the war in Iraq (what got them into “trouble” in the first place). But they also take on some less likely forces like their former fans who turned on them and more broadly, country music in general which as a genre doesn’t seem to want to see itself as a “big tent” capable of including diverse musical, ethnic, cultural and political viewpoints.

The DC have always straddled a line somewhere between folk, country and pop music. And they continue that delicate and rewarding balancing act here. But one gets the feeling that they’ve said to themselves: “We’re never going to leave our fates in the hands of a single musical genre like country music again. We’re going to become bigger than that so we’ll never be vulnerable again.” And who can blame them after the horrid auto da fe that Clear Channel and their despicable fellow travelers treated them to?

To be candid, I’ve only listened to three tracks from the album so far and make my judgment solely based on that impression. But their last album, Home, was almost pure perfection for me. Taking the Long Way is an attempt to break away from the balance and charm of Home, while not diverging from it completely. That makes it raw, spare, angry, slightly off-kilter (along with powerful and beautiful). I love anger and righteous indignation. If you do too, you’ll like Not Ready to Make Nice (hear it). That’s why I find the current release very compelling. But it’s different than what’s come before. Don’t get me wrong–change can be good in a musical career. Questioning one’s artistic choices often leads to more thoughtful, artful music-making. That’s why I welcome this album. Jon Pareles has written a terrific profile of the album and the band in the NY Times.

While the album covers many bases, it does not wear its politics on its sleeve. But you leave with no doubt who the villains are. They’re still George Bush and the war-makers. But the Dixie Chicks politics and artistic presentation is no longer as off-hand as that London concert comment. In the past three years, Maines’ and her partners have thought long and hard about what makes a musical career and a life worthwhile. They want you to know that there’s nothing flippant anymore in what they do. As the Tom Petty song says: “They won’t back down” any longer. There’ll be no more apologies for their views on music or life. Their audience will take them or leave them on their terms.

It’s a harder, more studied approach. But after what they’ve been through they’d be fools not to make such calculations. After all, you’ve got to save yourself first. Your audience will follow. And not the other way around.

Here are the lyrics for Not Ready to Make Nice:

Forgive, sounds good
Forget, I’m not sure I could
They say time heals everything
But I’m still waiting.

I’m through with doubt
There’s nothing left for me to figure out
I’ve paid a price
And I’ll keep paying.

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should.

I know you said
Can’t you just get over it
It turned my whole world around
And I kind of like it.

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over…

In Haaretz, Yossi Sarid takes the opportunity offered by Israel’s Yom Hazikaron (”Day of Remembrance”) and the publication of Amos Elon’s, The Pity of It All: Jews in Germany 1743-1933, to draw some important moral lessons for Israel in its current intractable war with the Palestinians. What’s more, Sarid’s moral lessons can just as easily be applied to Bush’s misadventures in Iraq.

Elon dwells on the Jewish and non-Jewish intelligentsia which ardently waved the flag in support of German’s entry into one of the most disastrous and least necessary wars of the last century: World War I. He notes that even Zionist progressives like Martin Buber supported the cause. How can such otherwise wise and far-thinking people be duped by such nationalist frenzy?

Sarid uses this portion of the book to criticize a similar acquiescence among Israeli intellectuals to the 1967 War. We might also profit by wondering at a similar betrayal by our liberal elected officials and others who should’ve known better: why did they not question more vigorously the assumptions or arguments that led us to war against Iraq?

This book is a universal warning against the charms of damnable wars and the mendacity of their mongers. It’s a red…warning light against the sweep of emotion and outbreak of adrenalin whenever people go to war in the name of the peace they claim in vain…Every war that could be avoided and is not is foul and forbidden; every war of choice is born in sin, and the sin brings with it a punishment; every war that is meant to satisfy the urges of expansion is cursed, and will chase down its initiators and bring them down; every war that results in occupation is bound to get complicated, corrupt and eventually fail; every war meant to teach a lesson, pay back the enemy in their own kind, to avenge or even just deter, will end in great sorrow and innocent victims; every war that does not have defined and achievable political goals will bring forth only a worse reality than what preceded it, that which gave birth to the war in the first place.

By those standards, Israel did not have wars, just adventures. Only the War of Independence was a life or death war - a war of no choice - and if we had not won it, we would have not survived. The Six-Day War is portrayed as a war of national salvation, but it was not. The threats posed to Israel at the time could have been foiled with limited military actions, without entrapping the country in the trash-bin of occupation from which it has yet to escape. When almost everyone wept at the thrill of being at the wall-of-destruction’s memory and in excitement over the Third Commonwealth, only a few wept over the destruction. There were many intellectuals then who hurried to march in step to form the Movement for the Greater Land of Israel; most have since regretted it.

The ultimate allegiance we owe in deciding whether to continue fighting senseless wars like the Intifada or the Iraq war is not to some sense of national destiny, but rather to the fallen who’ve given their lives in wars that need never have been fought in the first place:

There are 22,123 fallen people counted on this Memorial Day. The pain of losing them only worsens: The more war one knows, the more pain one knows. Today we bow our heads over their graves in eternal sorrow, but also with a terrible sense of missed opportunity: many, many who we loved could have lived and did not need to die. Bereavement and failure, together.

Tariq Ramadan (photo: Laurent Gillieron/European Pressphoto Agency)

Tariq Ramadan’s endless, Kafkaesque danse macabre with the Justice Department continued yesterday in a case brought by the ACLU on his behalf protesting the denial of a U.S. visa on grounds that he is a national security threat. I should correct that…the government has refused to say why they denied him entry, but implied that it was because he was a threat.

The NY Times reports that at the hearing the government said:

…That Mr. Ramadan’s case had been and remained a national security matter, and that statements he made in recent interviews with American consular officials in Switzerland had raised new “serious questions” about whether he should be allowed to come to the United States.

What were those statements and why did they raise such questions? Ah, we’re the Justice Department and under the new Alice in Wonderland rules embraced by the Bush Administration things mean precisely what we want them to mean. And we’re under no obligation to say anything at all if we don’t want to–even if a man’s freedom to travel and lecture in the U.S. about his field of expertise is denied.

But Ramadan has given us some idea of what Justice is so hot and bothered about. Hold onto your galoshes everyone, the Bern interviewers questioned him about the Iraq war and you know what they found? That Ramadan’s agin’ it:

In a recent interview, Mr. Ramadan said he had spoken openly [to the consular officials] about his opposition to the American occupation of Iraq.

Whoa, big news. Radical news! Stop the presses! If you prevented every foreigner who opposed the war from entering the country you wouldn’t have ANY such visitors here. How can they justify this idiocy??!

Joseph Cirincione has written a chilling Foreign Policy article, Fool Me Twice, in which he argues that the Bush Administration is preparing to attack Iran:

Are we about to bomb Iran’s nukes back to the Stone Age? (photo: Msnbc.com)

Three years after senior administration officials systematically misled the nation into a disastrous war, they could well be trying to do it again.

…For months, I have told interviewers that no senior political or military official was seriously considering a military attack on Iran. In the last few weeks, I have changed my view. In part, this shift was triggered by colleagues with close ties to the Pentagon and the executive branch who have convinced me that some senior officials have already made up their minds: They want to hit Iran.

…It is the administration’s own statements that have convinced me. What I previously dismissed as posturing, I now believe may be a coordinated campaign to prepare for a military strike on Iran.

I have also written here in this blog about the prospect of war against Iran: Bush Looking for New Military Adventure in Iran? I should note that Aipac and the pro-Israel lobby have been sounding the drumbeat of war for some time since Israel views a weakened Iran as beneficial to its security in the Middle East.

Cirincione recounts the budding Bush strategy to paint Iran as a rogue nation and notes the eerie resemblance to the bellicose and trumped up charges we heard from Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Bush in the runup to the Iraq war:

It is now trying to link Iran to the 9/11 attacks by repeatedly claiming that Iran is the main state sponsor of terrorism in the world (though this suggestion is highly questionable). It is also attempting to make the threat urgent by arguing that Iran might soon pass a “point of no return” if it can perfect the technology of enriching uranium, even though many other nations have gone far beyond Iran’s capabilities and stopped their programs short of weapons. And, of course, it is now publicly linking Iran to the Iraqi insurgency and the improvised explosive devices used to kill and maim U.S. troops in Iraq, though Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Peter Pace admitted there is no evidence to support this claim.

In my mind I think: “Congress couldn’t possibly allow Bush to get away with yet another disastrous military adventure like Iraq, could they? Would they not have learned their lesson the first time??” But then the author points out that Democrats are so squeamish about taking anything less than a hawkish position on national security issues they may be boxed into a corner by their own previous statements:

…The administration might be able to convince leading Democrats to back a resolution for the use of force against Iran. Many Democrats have been trying to burnish a hawkish image and place themselves to the right of the president on this issue. They may find themselves trapped by their own rhetoric, particularly those [read, Hillary Clinton] with presidential ambitions.

This brings up the interesting question. What would Hillary’s position be on a military strike against Iran? It sure would burnish her credentials to support one. But I know I’d never vote for her ever again in my life if she did. She’d have to face the question which voter segment can she afford to jettison in deciding what her position is with regard to Iran.

In order to avoid the fog of war, lies and propaganda that allowed the Bush Administration to sell the American people a bill of goods regarding the Iraq war, Cirincione has a sensible set of proposals to open the debate up to the light of day and reason:

The administration should now declassify the information it used to estimate how long it will be until Iran has the capability to make a bomb. The Washington Post reported last August that this national intelligence estimate says Iran is a decade away. We need to see the basis for this judgment and all, if any, dissenting opinions. The congressional intelligence committees should be conducting their own reviews of the assessments, including open hearings with independent experts and IAEA officials. Influential groups, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, should conduct their own sessions and studies.

An accurate and fully understood assessment of the status and potential of Iran’s nuclear program is the essential basis for any policy. We cannot let the political or ideological agenda of a small group determine a national security decision that could create havoc in a critical area of the globe. Not again.

One wonders whether this story in the Washington Post about a “gigantic” 700 ton “bunker buster” bomb test planned for the Nevada desert this June could be part of the upcoming campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities:

The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets — such as military headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range missiles — that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential adversaries around the world.