Haiti and the 'Devil's Curse'

with Peter Hallward, Anthony Fenton, and Danny Glover

"As thousands of tons of desperately needed food, water, and medical supplies piled up behind the airport fences-and thousands of corpses piled up outside them-Defense Secretary Robert Gates ruled out the possibility of using American aircraft to airdrop supplies: "An airdrop is simply going to lead to riots," he said. The military's first priority was to build a "structure for distribution" and "to provide security."

On Tuesday, a doctor at a field hospital within site of the runways complained that five to 10 patients were dying each day for lack of the most basic medical necessities. "We can look at the supplies sitting there," Alphonse Edward told Britain's Channel 4 News."

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Canadian Project for a New American Century

In July 2005, Canada's Chief of Defence Rick Hillier explained our new relationship to the people of Afghanistan :

"These are detestable murderers and scumbags. They want to break our society. If Canada is attacked, it will be only because it is a free country.
They detest our freedoms. They detest our society. They detest our liberties."
By sending troops to Afghanistan, he argued, Canada is actually protecting itself : "We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people."

Our job is also, he might as well have added, to placate the US for having foolishly avoided public advocacy for its adventure in Iraq.

Four years and many platitudes about little girls going to school later, the Canadian military manual of counterinsurgency (COIN) operations doctrine begun in 2005 and spanning the Bush and Obama presidencies is now complete.
Authorized by the head of the Canadian army Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, it is, Anthony Fenton writes at The Dominion, "a synthesis of two recent US Army Field Manuals" and a model of US-Canada "synergy":

Obama's administration has sent clear signals, through political appointments and holdovers (such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates), that the US military and national security apparatus' transformation toward fighting smaller, "irregular wars" begun under Bush will continue apace.

Only a week before Bush left office, Gates, together with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Director of USAID, Henrietta Fore, co-signed the US Government Counterinsurgency Guide.

Neo-conservative historian Eliot Cohen, who oversaw the Guide's creation, wrote in its introduction:
"Insurgency will be a large and growing element of the security challenges faced by the United States in the 21st century...Whether the United States should engage in any particular counterinsurgency is a matter of political choice, but that it will engage in such conflicts during the decades to come is a near certainty. This Guide will help prepare decision-makers of many kinds for the tasks that result from this fact."

Thank you, Eliot Cohen, charter member of the Project for the New American Century, signatory to the 1998 white paper on "regime change" in Iraq, and all-round advocate of US military imperialism.

Although PNAC was disbanded in 2006 when its founding members decamped to the Foreign Policy Initiative, both its membership and its objectives of an imperial US COIN agenda continue through Obama and into a Canadian manual on military doctrine.

Suddenly this picture becomes less amusing.

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Fenton :

"According to Lt. Gen. Leslie, the Canadian Army is "at the cutting edge" of Western armies readying themselves to fight 21st-century wars.

Since General Leslie signed off on the COIN manual last December, the COIN Center and Canada have collaborated on more than 20 exchanges, including "COIN Leader Workshops" and "COIN Integration" meetings.
Members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command (CEFCOM) met with the [US]COIN Center for discussions about "US-Canada COIN synergy" five days after Leslie wrote in his issuing order for the new COIN doctrine that it is "complementary to our allies."
In April, the US COIN Center "visited military installations and think-tanks in Canada to inculcate the Canadian military establishment with COIN doctrine and best practices."

Recent meetings have concentrated on how best to sell this idea to the Canadian public.

Maybe they could brand it as the Canadian Project for a New American Century.

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Anthony Fenton at The Dominion. Go.

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Edited to fix link - thanks, Chris

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The Pornography of Power

Journalist Robert Scheer on his new book "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America"

From a rough transcript of an interview on Democracy Now :

AMY GOODMAN: The Pornography of Power—why pornography?

ROBERT SCHEER: Because it’s not the real thing. It’s a trick. It’s like—I liken it to a lap dance. You know, you’re promising something that doesn’t exist. They’re promising security. These defense contractors, lobbyists, politicians, they pretend they’re dealing with real issues in the world, and they’re not. They’re just getting your money, and they’re deceiving you."

"I say, we had a situation where Bush vetoed an extension of child healthcare that would have involved $7 billion, OK? That’s two subs that we don’t need that are built every year. Alright? We have the F-35, an airplane that’s a $300 billion program. Why do we need new planes? The F-22, a $65 billion program. So we are wasting trillions of dollars on this old-fashioned defense budget that benefits Boeing, benefits Lockheed. Everyone knows it’s a scam. Everyone knows there is no military function for this, there’s no national security. And what happened is they got a license to steal. 9/11 was their license to steal."

"The irony now is that when these defense hawks—when they challenge my book and they say, "Well, of course, we don’t need these submarines to fight al-Qaeda. They don’t even have a rowboat. And of course we don’t need, you, now, new stealth bombers to fight al-Qaeda. But there’s the China menace."
The irony is here, China is financing our arms development. They are charging us interest to lend us money to build weapons ostensibly to attack them, and they’re laughing up their sleeve. They know this is a joke."

"Imperialism doesn’t pay. You know, here in California, I’m paying, what, $4.40 for gas, and we have seized the second-biggest pool of oil in the world? And we’re now paying—you know, the price of oil has gone up six-fold since George Bush has been president, and you want to tell me imperialism pays?
So I think the failure of the neoconservatives really is the failure of the imperial model. The Germans learned that. The French learned it, the English. Everybody in the world knows old-fashioned imperialism does not pay for the average person. It pays for Halliburton. It pays for, you know, Exxon. But it doesn’t pay for the taxpayer."

Interesting that Scheer nearly dedicated his book to Richard Nixon, who, he said, "was a horrible man, and he killed a lot of people and should have been tried for war crimes. But the fact is that Richard Nixon was the enemy of the neoconservatives."