>From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Let Ralph Debate in 2004
>Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 17:03:50 -0800
>
>On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 15:21:42 -0800, Joseph Wanzala <jwanzala at hotmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>I'm not sure what point you are making, but it should be clear that the
>>aid package was proposed by the Clinton Administration and blessed by
>>Human Rights Watch, who also gave the Clinton administations' humanitarian
>>efforts in the Balkans their imprimatur.
>>
>>http://www.colombiasupport.net/200002/wp-hrwreport-0224.html
>
> I was agreeing w/ you! FY2000 and 2001 would have been yrs. that the
>budgetary priorities in national security policy were being shaped by these
>types of centrists,
>http://opednews.com/kall1003_Podesta_Center_for_american_Progress.htm (an
>anecdote about John Podesta. Long-time Ca. State Senator, Nick Petris, and
>I walked a precinct in '88 together for Dukakis, in neigborhoods in Oakland
>that had supported Jesse Jackson. W/O prompting from me [I was up to my
>eyeballs doing some volunteer work for the Christic Institute publicizing
>the "Secret Team" thesis of Daniel Sheehan on the origins of Iran-Contra,
>at the time], Petris in the car ride back, started complaining that he had
>given Podesta tons of info on the "October Surprise" allegations against
>Reagan/Bush, that Petris thought would sink Bush. Podesta refused to air
>the case via the Dukakis campaign. This was after the disastrous, bloodless
>reply of Dukakis to CNN's Shaw re: what if Kitty, your wife was raped. I
>felt that Dukakis should have gone for broke, and thrown in the Nixon
>October Surprise of '68, via some of the same set of operatives (Richard V.
>Allen) towards Anna Chenault, that sinked LBJ Paris Peace Talks pressure on
>the SVN to compromise w/ the NLF. (Richard Holbrooke was a young protege of
>Clark Clifford on the USG team ar the talks.)
> Anyway, back to the point I wasa trying to make, implicitly. Yes, as Bob
>Dole said in '76 (and Carl Oglesby too at the '65 anti-war March in D.C.,
>preparation for which, was one more in the series of movers and counter-
>moves that drove the New Left away from Old Left right-wing social
>democrats in LID and AFL-CIO), all the wars of the 20th C. have been,
>"Democrat Wars, " but, one also has to recognize that the left-wing of the
>party has been, along w/ the realist wing of the bourgeoisie (remember
>Harold Willens, who funded a group og big businessmen against the Vietnam
>War, along w/ folks like Stanley Sheinbaum and Max Palevsky of Xerox or
>IBM), was, along with the street pressure of millions in the streets, what
>shortened the war and prevented North Vietnam from being nuked (the
>Haldeman Diaries and other Nixon admin. autobios and histories back this
>up, I betcha Ellsberg says the same in, "Secrets.") and getting the US out.
>Driven, of course, by the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese themselves,
>w/ important military support from the USSR and PRC. Liberals got us in,
>and radicals pushing liberal elites and widening ruling class splits, got
>us out. That the USG, has a structural imperative and as a captive of
>capitalist/imperialist interests and, well the logic of capital itself as
>elucidated by that fellow w/ the beard (1818-1883), to be a counter-
>revolutionary hegemon, forever looking for new arenas for rape and pillage
>and pilferage and pollution, is pretty elementary radical ABC's. However,
>the US Left, the explicitly socialist/communist, anti-capitalist left, by
>itself, could not fill a sports stadium that seats 45 or 55K, despite there
>now being a slight majority, according to some poll data, now against the
>war. Like center-right pundit, William Schneider said once in The Atlantic,
>apropos of the Culture War and his experierience knocking on doors in
>working class neigborhoods of Boston for the anti-war Vietnam Summer in '67
>or '68, the majority of those he spoke w/ hated the war ("Those Harvard
>smartypants got us into it.") and hated the anti-war movement at Harvard
>and the rest of the country and "snot-nosed" hippies, even more.
> Lastly, on humanitarian intervention and HRW, which s/b discussed again
>here, more fully, as I reminded Steve Philion, there are many that hold
>policy making and researcher positions w/ HRW, that come out of the Left,
>like Joe Stork, who was an editor of MERIP, who wrote for Monthly Review
>Press in the mid-70's a book on Oil and Imperialism, Reed Brody, who wrote,
>"Contra Terror in Nicaragua, ' for South End Press, who was just
>interviewed by Pilger for a documentary on Afghanistan and George Black,
>who worked for NACLA.
> (I remembered that Cockburn had attacked, Jose Vivanco of HRW in The
>Nation in the last yr. or. Here Jeff St. Clair, I can assume, does not
>think he is the Devil,
>http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair07162003.html "Twenty years ago General
>Ríos Montt ran a military regime that killed thousands of people," says
>Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human
>Rights Watch. "Today he should be on trial, not running for president." On
>another list, a Puerto Rican marxist-leninist who called me, gasp, a
>liberal, the other day, recently, again, said that Clinton's foreign policy
>was worse than Reagan's! Replying, I mentioned the Guatemalan genocide
>(over 200K killed)
>http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/latin_america/guatemala.html , "...
>assassination of Guatemalan leftists...", esp. horrific under Rios Montt,
>fully supported by Reagan, who said Montt was , "getting a bad rap on human
>rights, " by groups like HRW's America;s Watch and AI.
> David Chandler, who has written for New Left Review, has a book very
>critical of the Bosnian intervention, published by Pluto Press (Far right
>hawk, Roger Fontaine of Reagan's NSC and the notorious, Sante Fe Committee,
>has a blurb by Chandler on the back cover of a book of his from CATO on
>himanitarian intervention.)
> http://www.unu.edu/p&g/kosovo_full.htm , "KOSOVO AND THE CHALLENGE OF
>HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION: Selective Indignation, Collective Intervention,
>and International Citizenship."
>http://www.foreignpolicy2000.org/library/issuebriefs/IBHumanRights.html
>http://www.ploughshares.ca/content/WORKING%20PAPERS/wp012.html Human Rights
>Watch 2000, Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, vol. 12, no. 1 (D),
>February. [Online] Available from http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/ .
> A volume w/ a mix to agree w/ and disagree w/
>The New Killing Fields Massacre and the Politics of Intervention
>
>Edited by Kira Brunner and Nicolaus Mills,
>
>Introduction by Michael Walzer
>
>Basic Books A group of war reporters and analysts looks back on the killing
>fields of the late twentieth century and poses questions for the future of
>human rights.
>
>The New Killing Fields revisits Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East
>Timor--sites of four of the worst instances of state-sponsored killing in
>the last half of the twentieth centur--in order to reconsider the success
>and failure of U.S. and U.N. military and humanitarian intervention.
>Through original essays and reporting by, among others, David Rieff, Peter
>Maass, Philip Gourevitch, William Shawcross, George Packer, Bill Berkeley,
>and Samantha Power, The New Killing Fields asks about the future of
>peacekeeping in the next century. In addition, theoretical essays by
>Michael Walzer and Michael Ignatieff frame the issue of both past and
>future intervention in terms of today's post-Cold War reality. As human
>rights abuses increasingly occur in "failed states" such as Afghanistan,
>which pose international security threats, the future of human rights will
>not be, as it once was, considered solely a question of the beneficence and
>charity of the West.
> -- Michael Pugliese, way overposted
>
>
>
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