Duty to Warn

Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.

Sometimes a “nuclear threat” has been imaginary. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical overdrive -- fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist.

In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently nuclear-armed, Bush isn’t likely to order an attack on that country, as he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do against Iran.

By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years -- and probably more like a full decade -- away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms.

The reality that the Vietnam War was a hopeless catastrophe definitively penetrated the mass American psyche when CBS Nightly News Anchor Walter Cronkite---the "most trusted man in America"---faced the facts.

That was in 1968, shortly after the Tet Offensive shredded any pretence that an American victory (whatever that would mean) was possible in Southeast Asia. When Lyndon Johnson heard Cronkite had turned on the war, he knew it was over, and soon thereafter declined to run again.

Now Tom Friedman has done the same thing about Iraq and Southwest Asia. Has anybody noticed?

Friedman has long been the lead neo-liberal cheerleader for the American attack on Iraq. From his perch on the New York Times op ed page, Friedman has pontificated long and in earnest about the need for the US military to establish "democracy" in the land once run by Saddam Hussein, that horrific dictator installed by the US military, then fired in the wake of 9/11 attacks conducted by his bitter rival, Osama bin Laden.

Through the actions of a lone man with an unstable mental history, the Middle East wars have hit my community. Naveed Haq, from a middle class Pakistani-American family in eastern Washington State, shot six women at the Seattle Jewish Federation, in the city where I live. He killed one and left three critically wounded, saying "I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel." I've never been to the Federation offices, but I've worshipped at affiliated Seattle synagogues, attended Federation-sponsored events, and met one of the women who was critically wounded. So Haq's reprehensible attack felt personal. Aside from the shooting of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane and an ambiguous 1994 incident involving a New York taxi driver and a van of Hasidic students, this may be the first politically motivated killing of an American Jew by an American Muslim in the past sixty years. As such, it risks sharply increasing the level of fear in America's Jewish communities, and with it the reflex support of even the most questionable Israeli actions.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Do you think the Bush administration is going after the press? The San Francisco Chronicle says on the front page this morning, "Cameraman Jailed for Not Yielding Tape," whereas The New York Times is reporting, "U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records." I'm feeling like a bunny trying to outrun a pack of wolfhounds.

East Hampton, New York -- Anthony Marshall, the tabloids tell us, wouldn't buy his elderly mother her prescribed medicine, locked her poodles in the pantry and refused to buy her hair dye or her favorite make-up.  His mom is Brooke Astor, the ultra-rich socialite, now frail, helpless and dependent on her son.

While others merely gossiped about this tragedy of dogs and cosmetics, George Bush acted.  In a deft maneuver at the end of last week, Bush rammed through Congress a massive reduction in the inheritance tax.  As a result of the tax change engineered by the White House, Marshall stands to save $9 million on the $45 million he expects to inherit from his mom.

George W. Bush could feel Anthony's pain.  It's not easy being a child of incredibly wealthy parents.  Indeed, as the President noted, "death taxes" are supremely unfair to those who've earned these millions.  As Mr. Bush often mentions, he himself worked long hours his whole life to be born into a rich family.

I think Condi's right. As Israel wreaks biblical vengeance on Lebanon, we may well be witnessing, as she put it, "the birth pangs of a new Middle East." But the devil baby that crawls out of the wreckage will be one that makes even her boss pause mid-swagger.

God help us. The reckless cynics are in control. Just like that - hundreds dead, half a million refugees, a nation's infrastructure shattered. The perpetrators beat their chests and reload. The U.S. expedites its delivery of bombs to Israel, which is driving Lebanon "to the gates of hell and madness," as Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said.

"I don't want to remember, but I can't help it. What I remember most is the sound, the sound of the planes, and I was scared because I thought there were so many. I fell asleep last night, but all I could hear in my sleep were the planes."

Birth pangs. Maybe the bombs that destroyed the home of the 8-year-old girl in the southern Lebanon village of Ayta Chaeb, quoted by an AP reporter from her hospital bed in Tyre, were autographed by little Israeli girls. Maybe they were decorated with hearts and Stars of David. Maybe they said "from Israel with love."

The frayed threads anchoring the American government to reality have finally snapped, just at the moment radiologists are reporting that Americans are getting too fat to be X-rayed or shoved into any existing MRI tube.

The gamma rays can't get through the blubber, the same way actual conditions in the outside world bounce off the impenetrable dome of imbecility sheltering America's political leadership.

Twenty-three years after one of America's stupidest presidents announced Star Wars, Reagan's dream has come true. Behind ramparts guarded by a coalition of liars extending from Rupert Murdoch to the New York Times, from Bill O'Reilly to PBS, America is totally shielded from truth.

Here we have a secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who gazes at the rubble of Lebanon, 300,000 refugees being strafed with Israel's cluster bombs, and squeaks happily that we are "witnessing the birth pangs of a new Middle East."

AUSTIN, Texas -- State of play in the Middle East: Lebanon, extensively damaged plus a half-million refugees; Syria, tired of being dissed; Israel, disproportionate. Are you kidding? Did it work last time they occupied Lebanon? Condi Rice, undercut by neocons at home? Iraq, completely fallen apart. Iran, only winner? Everybody else, mad at Bush. Most under-covered story, collapse of Iraq.

And what do I think this is? A media story, of course.

From the first day of 24/7 coverage, you could tell this was big. By the time Chapter 9,271 of the conflicts in the Middle East had gotten its own logo, everyone knew it was HUGE. I mean, like, bigger than Natalee Holloway. Then anchormen began to arrive in the Middle East and people like Anderson Cooper and Tucker Carlson -- real experts. Then Newt Gingrich -- and who would know better than Newt? -- declared it was World War III. Let's ratchet up the fear here -- probably good for Republican campaigning.

BREAKING NEWS: After months of debate and hours of arguing on the floor, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution today requiring certain large employers to pay a living wage.

The bill require stores with at least 90,000 square feet that are operated by companies that annually do $1 billion or more in sales to increase their wages and pay benefits to their employees. By July 2010 such stores must pay at least $10 an hour and give an additional $3 in fringe benefits an hour.

Mayor Daley still has the opportunity to veto the bill, but enough Aldermen support the bill to override his veto.