Tom Hayden's Blog, page 17

War Powers Vote

The House Majority has voted to demand that President Barack Obama seek Iraq war approval under War Powers Resolution. This leaves Obama with three choices: defying Congress with word games over the "advisers" he is sending to Iraq; complying with the War Powers Resolution reporting requirements and timelines; or pulling back to avoid a constitutional conflict with the Congress, as he did in the clash with Syria.

A rush of messages and letters from the grass roots appears to have motivated many House members to join a voice vote on Friday. The final count is at the UFPJ legislative action site. Since it's hard for Democratic liberals to oppose the president, constant messages from their districts are helpful. Ron Paul-Republicans can be expected to stand up on the War Powers issue, but both parties are led by politicians who think it's expedient to be hawkish, until, of course, it's not. On the Democratic side, the hawks included Rep. Brad Sherman, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, Rep. Julia Brownley, Rep. Jim Costa, Rep. Tammy Duckworth, Rep. Eliot Engel, Rep. Jim Moran, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Rep. Steve Israel. All voted “No” on Rep. Barbara Lee's amendment to block funding for combat in Iraq.

The Other Hayden Says Iraq is "Dead"

Former CIA director General Michael Hayden says Iraq is dead, “It’s not going to be reconstituted," and will be replaced by three "successor states." One of those, which Gen. Hayden calls "Sunnistan," will become a safe haven for terrorists and should be treated like Waziristan, a zone of secret operations and drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan. The second, called "Shiastan," should be shored up by recapturing the oil refinery north of Baghdad, and then left in a sharply reduced space. The US should "snuggle up comfortable" to Kurdistan, America's only ally, where the Peshmerga forces are competing for full control of the oil in Kirkuk. 

The Rise of White Power

I grew up in an early Detroit suburb, Royal Oak, and lived there for seventeen years, a model son of the white lower middle class. I attended an extremely conservative Catholic church dominated by Fr. Charles Coughlin. The postwar economic boom seemed in those days to make progress for all a real likelihood. All seemed well in an economy which was supposed to "lift all boats." After high school I entered the University of Michigan at one hundred dollars tuition per semester. The autoworkers' union, which had led militant factory occupations ten years earlier, was winning more than twenty dollars an hour for assembly line workers. One-third of America's corporate sector workforce was unionized for bargaining power. The everyday evidence of upward mobility suggested that black people would follow to the Promised Land, sooner rather than later.

Behind the "Madness" in Iraq: The Comeback of the Neocons

Ethnic divisions in Iraq, as of 2012. (Photo: The University of Texas at Austin, General Libraries)American activist anti-war networks are perfectly right in standing against renewed US intervention in Iraq. So far Obama has been forced by events to send some 275 US troops for embassy protection, while a decision on bombing is being mulled. The confused Congress needs to be called upon to be a counterweight against the hawks who want nothing more than to blame Obama instead of themselves for "losing" Iraq. But there is far more to do. We are deep into the battle over memory.

Stay Out of Sectarian Civil Wars

The US had no business invading Iraq in the first place. We toppled a dictatorship on a false 9/11 rationale. That plunged Iraq into a sectarian civil war inside a war with the United States. We left behind a vengeance-driven Shiite regime aligned with Iran. Now the sectarian war in Syria is enlarging into a regional one. The Sunni tribes we thought we defeated are taking over the north and pushing towards Baghdad. The primary blame for this disaster is on the Bush administration but also on all those who succumbed to a Superpower Syndrome, which said we could redesign the Middle East. Now some of the same people think we can salvage our reputation by bombing the Sunnis. The tragedy is that the neo-conservative "chicken hawks" who never fought but sent so many American soldiers to their young deaths are going to blame Obama for "losing" the war. Sorry, but there is no reason whatsoever to justify further loss of American lives or tax dollars on a conflict which we do not understand and which started before the United States was born.

When Local Goes Global: The Path to a 2015 Climate Treaty

[image error]Environmentalists and political leaders like Governor Jerry Brown have a major chance to advance the battle against climate catastrophe by pursuing a timeline toward the United Nations climate treaty negotiations in December 2015 in Paris.

So far, little public discussion has occurred about the climate talks. A sense of despair lingers from the collapse of the Copenhagen talks in 2009 and from the gridlock caused by climate-deniers in Congress.

When Local Goes Global: The Fath to a 2015 Climate Treaty

[image error]Environmentalists and political leaders like Governor Jerry Brown have a major chance to advance the battle against climate catastrophe by pursuing a timeline toward the United Nations climate treaty negotiations in December 2015 in Paris.

So far, little public discussion has occurred about the climate talks. A sense of despair lingers from the collapse of the Copenhagen talks in 2009 and from the gridlock caused by climate-deniers in Congress.

Rebuttal: Governor Brown's Environmental Record

I hope I can sit down with Dan Bacher to discuss his accusations that I am “greenwashing” Governor Jerry Brown. His litany of grievances is informed and well argued. I agree with many of his points, but I have trouble understanding his basic mission, which seems to be to take down Jerry Brown and dismiss everything the clean energy movement has achieved in California since 1974. It's an unbalanced form of argument. Essentially Dan is claiming that everything California has achieved over the decades is worthless in comparison with what California, and Brown, have not achieved. 

Americans Welcome Sgt. Bergdahl Home

After the negotiated release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, I called an old friend who spent years as a POW in Vietnam's prison camps to ask for his response. Preferring to keep his name out of the papers for the moment, he was following the situation closely. In summary though, what he said was as follows:

In the 60's, We Did Overcome

Shortly before he was murdered, Robert Kennedy was underlining this passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not try to weakly reconcile yourself with the world. ... Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."