As I hear about sending more troops to Iraq, I can’t get off my mind a quick comparison chart in this month’s Mother Jones showing lower recruiting standards for the army. How much lower will they need to go to meet targets? We know they are already sending in high-paid mercenaries. At what point will conscription begin? I’m sure they know the answer to this, but I don’t know.

A friend sent me a news of the weird notice yesterday that brought all of this forward for me. A 22-year old Iraq war veteran — bored, apparently — decided to try something he’d seen on Jackass. He shoved a fireworks rocket up his rectum and lit it. The Daily Mail even has a lovely video. Granted, he’s British not American. Maybe the war made him unstable. Still, this leads me to wonder if the standards aren’t already too low. How many Iraq war veterans from any country could win Darwin Awards?

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I know Bush says he’ll do what he wants, and he will trot out as many generals as he can find to support his plan. But, I hope Congress remembers what so many Americans said was the main issue on their minds when they voted for change, and I hope they fight this man and his plan. Apart from all of the reasons WE SHOULDN’T BE THERE, we clearly don’t have the depth for this. Shouldn’t the generals be telling Bush that? Yes, they are. Then they find themselves retired.

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Last night I heard George Bush say that mistakes in Iraq were his fault. I agree. That’s simple.

So, what’s the fuss about?

Absolutely everything else he said. The absolutely-everything-else is the part I don’t particularly agree with.

Surge, surge, surge. I read several articles today comparing our current situation to Vietnam–Bush channelling Nixon, a point-by-point comparison of Bush’s speech with Lyndon B. Johnson’s speech exactly 40 years earlier, Vietnam All Over Again (from the President of Veterans for America), and how a left-over liberal (Joe Klein) still manages to support the Iraq war. That sounds dangerously close to neocon territory.

If you aren’t into the idea of escalation, how about joining an emergency rally later today?

Salt Lake City, Federal Building, 5:30pm, Thursday, January 11th

Everywhere else

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I get tired of evangelical Christians’s idea of left behind. I get tired of hearing how much money other evangelical Christians make off the idea, too. I think, “Just leave me behind already.” It’s what I like to think of as Left Out Front. I don’t buy into their reality anyway, so I anticipate quite a nice world without that particular influence. Maybe not a world without problems, but let’s deal with one thing at a time.

I figured that just to show I know it’s Sunday, I’ll mention This Week in God, a segment from the Daily Show. Rob Corddray’s (formerly Stephen Colbert’s) God Machine landed on a left behind video game in which righteous Christians blow up unbelievers (minus one point) and save others (plus two points). In an Alternet review of the game, you will find all sorts of fun prayer requests from the makers of the game–as well as hundreds of hostile comments, many with local Utah relevance. Remember that violence is cool as long as the Right people come out on top, way up top, soaring into their clouds.

It is any wonder that self-declared righteous are so eager to get their hands on real guns then find and kill an enemy? Their virtual realities prepare them to believe and participate in their other realities. Or maybe their virtual realities make them crave realities that they have to create in order to find that deep satisfaction in this nasty material world.

Happy Sunday.

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“3,000 deaths in Iraq, countless tears at home,” said the New York Times headline.

“Iraq braced for unhappy New Year,” said the BBC.

Every big number is shocking, no matter how it is calculated, so let me offer this one.  More than 650,000 Iraqis dead.  For what?  I know the justifications given.  I’m still asking.  For what.  Is life really so expendable for the people willing to make decisions to send soldiers to kill and be killed?  Well, yes, of course it is–at least some lives are.

What I wonder is how life could become precious enough to these decision makers that they would look to nonviolent means to settle differences in the world.

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Can they see our hand in this? That’s what Richard Nixon asked Henry Kissinger immediately following the September 11, 1973, coup in which Augusto Pinochet lead a military overthrown of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

Which question was Nixon really asking Kissinger?

• Can THEY see our hand in this?
• Can they SEE our hand in this?
• Can they see OUR hand in this?
• Can they see our HAND in this?
• Can they see our hand in THIS?

I want to answer all of the above. Despite their decades of protestations, it has certainly been clear for a long time that WE SEE THEIR HAND IN THIS.

Like many young Americans and others, I first learned a few details about the Chilean junta nearly 10 years later when Costa-Gavras’ film Missing was released. In the film, an American journalist, Charles Horman, finds out more than he is meant to about U.S. involvement, then he comes up missing. Most of the film follows his wife and skeptical father as they work their way through the Chilean and U.S. bureaucracies to find out what happened to him. The film implied that the hand of the U.S. was at work, and subsequently declassified documents have confirmed this.

There was plenty more to learn than even an Oscar-winning film can tell. I have learned some of that history and politics since. I have sent students into libraries to find their own answers. I live with the illusion that I know something about the hand of the U.S. in Chile.

Even now, though, after Pinochet’s death yesterday on International Human Rights Day, I think of the people with whom I first saw Missing. I was a student at la Universidad de Puerto Rico at the time, and I saw the film with members of the Puerto Rican Independence Party. (If you don’t know who they are, think of them as one of the three big targets of the FBI’s CoIntelPro program, along with the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement.) My companeros took it upon themselves to give me the education in U.S. foreign policy that my high school hadn’t managed to. I was skeptical of their claims, but I was also more skeptical of the U.S. government from that point on. I count this as an important moment in my seeing their hand in so much of the world.

So, if you consider Augusto Pinochet this week of his death, maybe you could consider the ways in which YOU SEE THEIR HAND IN THIS. This what? The possibilities are broad. Fill in the blank with any foreign relations incident of the 20th or 21st century and see what hands you can see.

Where to start? Some of the most interesting documents on the hand of the U.S. in Chile and elsewhere can be found at the National Security Archives, housed at my alma mater George Washington University. Nixon’s comment from a telephone conversation with Kissinger was part of an interview today with Peter Kornbluh on Democracy Now. Kornbluh is the author of “The Pinochet File.” You can read that at the NSA, too.

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