Congressional hearings, White House damage control, endless op-eds, accusations, and defensive denials. Controversy over the events in Benghazi last September took center stage in Washington and elsewhere last week. However, the whole discussion is again more of a sideshow. Each side seeks to score political points instead of asking the real questions about the attack on the US facility, which resulted in the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Republicans smell a political opportunity over evidence that the Administration heavily edited initial intelligence community talking points about the attack to remove or soften anything that might reflect badly on the president or the State Department.

Are we are supposed to be shocked by such behavior? Are we supposed to forget that this kind of whitewashing of facts is standard operating procedure when it comes to the US government?

Democrats in Congress have offered the even less convincing explanation for Benghazi, that somehow the attack occurred due to Republican sponsored cuts in the security budget at facilities overseas. With a one trillion dollar military budget, it is hard to take this seriously.

It appears that the Administration scrubbed initial intelligence reports of references to extremist Islamist involvement in the attacks, preferring to craft a lie that the demonstrations were a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video that developed into a full-out attack on the US outpost.

Who can blame he administration for wanting to shift the focus? The Islamic radicals who attacked Benghazi were the same people let loose by the US-led attack on Libya. They were the rebels on whose behalf the US overthrew the Libyan government. Ambassador Stevens was slain by the same Islamic radicals he personally assisted just over one year earlier.

But the Republicans in Congress also want to shift the blame. They supported the Obama Administration’s policy of bombing Libya and overthrowing its government. They also repeated the same manufactured claims that Gaddafi was “killing his own people” and was about to commit mass genocide if he were not stopped. Republicans want to draw attention to the President’s editing talking points in hopes no one will notice that if the attack on Libya they supported had not taken place, Ambassador Stevens would be alive today.

Neither side wants to talk about the real lesson of Benghazi: interventionism always carries with it unintended consequences. The US attack on Libya led to the unleashing of Islamist radicals in Libya. These radicals have destroyed the country, murdered thousands, and killed the US ambassador. Some of these then turned their attention to Mali which required another intervention by the US and France.

Previously secure weapons in Libya flooded the region after the US attack, with many of them going to Islamist radicals who make up the majority of those fighting to overthrow the government in Syria. The US government has intervened in the Syrian conflict on behalf of the same rebels it assisted in the Libya conflict, likely helping with the weapons transfers. With word out that these rebels are mostly affiliated with al Qaeda, the US is now intervening to persuade some factions of the Syrian rebels to kill other factions before completing the task of ousting the Syrian government. It is the dizzying cycle of interventionism.

The real lesson of Benghazi will not be learned because neither Republicans nor Democrats want to hear it. But it is our interventionist foreign policy and its unintended consequences that have created these problems, including the attack and murder of Ambassador Stevens. The disputed talking points and White House whitewashing are just a sideshow.

(...) The way in which "America's soul is totally poisoned" is evident in virtually every debate over US policies of militarism. Over the weekend, several pro-war national security "experts" argued: "I'd pay closer attention to critics of drone strikes if they explained their recommended alternative." This is a commonly heard defense of Obama's drone assaults: I support drones - despite how they constantly kill innocent adults and children - because the alternative, "boots on the ground", is worse.

Those who argue this are literally incapable even of conceiving of an alternative in which the US stops killing anyone and everyone it wants in the world. They operate on the assumption that US violence is and should be inevitable, and the only cognizable debate is which weapon the US should use to carry out this killing (drones or "boots on the ground"?). Even though they have no idea who the US government is killing, they assume, with literally no evidence or basis, that those being killed are "terrorists" who want to attack the US and that therefore they - and anyone close to them - must be killed first. As Jonathan Schwarz noted on Sunday, they have literally embraced the same mindset as the Terrorists they claim to loathe: we must use violence and killing, even if it means we kill innocents, because we simply cannot conceive of any alternative.

Never once do they stop and wonder: why are there so many people in the world who want to attack the US? Never once do they do what King so bravely and rather subversively urged: "the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence" is it "helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves". King explained: "from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition." King thus urged the nation to "understand the arguments of those who are called enemy."

Adhering to King's prescription - "understanding the arguments of those who are called enemy" - would clearly reveal the obvious "alternative" to Obama's global assassination program: namely, ceasing the endless violence that is what drives so many people to want to bring violence to the US in return, combined with prosecutions of the handful of people who possess both the intent and capability to attack the US.

Arguing that "we must drone-bomb people in order to stop terrorism" is the equivalent of arguing that "we must continue to smoke cigarettes in order to stop lung cancer". As ample evidence proves, the so-called "solution" to Terrorism - endless violence and killing - is actually its primary cause. As the Yemeni blogger Noon Arabia put it this weekend after a series of multiple drones strikes on her country: "For those arguing effectiveness of drones, let me explain: civilians killed => animosity towards US = Qaeda members increase = Vicious !"

King made the same argument about Communists: that western militarism is not a solution to that ideology but is precisely what drives people to embrace it. He quoted a Vietnamese Buddhist leader who wrote that "each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct"; that "the Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies"; and that "Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat." That Buddhist leader, quoted King, warned that "the image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism." (...)

Every war - particularly protracted ones like the "War on Terror" - demands sustained dehumanization campaigns against the targets of the violence. Few populations will tolerate continuous killings if they have to confront the humanity of those who are being killed. The humanity of the victims must be hidden and denied. That's the only way this constant extinguishing of life by their government can be justified or at least ignored. That was the key point made in the extraordinarily brave speech given by then-MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield in 2003 after she returned from Iraq, before she was demoted and then fired: that US media coverage of US violence is designed to conceal the identity and fate of its victims.

The violence and rights abridgments of the Bush and Obama administrations have been applied almost exclusively to Muslims. It is, therefore, Muslims who have been systematically dehumanized. Americans virtually never hear about the Muslims killed by their government's violence. They're never profiled. The New York Times doesn't put powerful graphics showing their names and ages on its front page. Their funerals are never covered. President Obama never delivers teary sermons about how these Muslim children "had their entire lives ahead of them - birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own." That's what dehumanization is: their humanity is disappeared so that we don't have to face it.

But this dehumanization is about more than simply hiding and thus denying the personhood of Muslim victims of US violence. It is worse than that: it is based on the implicit, and sometimes overtly stated, premise that Muslims generally, even those guilty of nothing, deserve what the US does to them, or are at least presumed to carry blame.

Few things have characterized the post-9/11 American world more than our worshipful embrace of our generals. They’ve become our heroes, our sports stars, and our celebrities all rolled into one. We can’t stop gushing about them. Even after his recent fall from grace, General David Petraeus was still being celebrated by CNN as the best American general since Dwight D. Eisenhower (and let’s not forget that Ike commanded the largest amphibious invasion in history and held a fractious coalition together in a total war against Nazi Germany). Before his fall from grace, Afghan War Commander General Stanley McChrystal was similarly lauded as one tough customer, a sort of superman-saint.

Petraeus and McChrystal crashed and burned for the same underlying reason: hubris. McChrystal became cocky and his staff contemptuous of civilian authority; Petraeus came to think he really could have it all, the super-secret job and the super-sexy mistress. An ideal of selfless service devolved into self-indulgent preening in a wider American culture all-too-eager to raise its star generals into the pantheon of Caesars and Napoleons, and its troops into the halls of Valhalla. (...)

The day after Thanksgiving, when Americans were still digesting on La-Z-Boys and watching football, the State Department quietly announced that the 2012 conference for a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons had been canceled by the United States. It doesn't quite qualify as inconvenient news deliberately dropped over a holiday weekend (Israelis and Palestinians were probably watching the news, not sleeping off turkey), but it comes close. 

The cancelation doesn't reflect well on President Obama, who had made nuclear non-proliferation a priority in his administration. In 2009, shortly after his inauguration, he appeared in Prague and presented an ambitious plan to achieve a world without weapons of mass destruction. Since then, he has continued to work towards that goal—holding nuclear summits in Washington and South Korea—with mixed results. The summit in Seoul for example, dissolved into squabbles between the US and Russia, and did little to advance a nuclear weapons-free agenda. (The New York Times called it "a most undiplomatic pileup.") Reports early this year indicated that Obama was considering reducing the US nuclear arsenal, but likely not until further talks with the Russians some time in 2013. (...)

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. ~ Bertrand Russell

I've often found this guys thoughts interesting.

J. Krishnamurti on The Causes of War

"To put an end to outward war, you must begin to put an end to war in yourself."

War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday life, is it not? War is merely an outward expression of our inward state, an enlargement of our daily action. It is more spectacular, more bloody, more destructive, but it is the collective result of our individual activities. Therefore, you and I are responsible for war and what can we do to stop it? Obviously the ever-impending war cannot be stopped by you and me, because it is already in movement; it is already taking place, though at present chiefly on the psychological level. As it is already in movement, it cannot be stopped- the issues are too many, too great, and are already committed. But you and I, seeing that the house is on fire, can understand the causes of that fire, can go away from it and build in a new place with different materials that are not combustible, that will not produce other wars. That is all that we can do. You and I can see what creates wars, and if we are interested in stopping wars, then we can begin to transform ourselves, who are the causes of war.

Continued... http://www.rainbowbody.com/newarticles/krishnawar.htm

My ATM receipts now tell me, beneath my checking account balance, that the North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union SUPPORTS THE TROOPS!  The classical music station I listen to runs a dedication to “the men and women of our armed forces, who work so hard to protect us; without their sacrifices, none of our freedoms would be possible.”

When I browse for information about public universities in North Carolina, an ad pops up showing a young man in camouflage combat fatigues, holding a laptop computer.  The text of the ad reads, “Advance Your Military Career with an MBA.”  The ad is for an online MBA program at the University of North Carolina.

A few months ago the home page of my university, NC State, greeted viewers with an image of a young man in the cockpit of a U.S. air force fighter jet.  The text, as I recall, was to the effect that NC State is training tomorrow’s leaders today.  The fall issue of the university’s alumni magazine ran an adoring profile of army general Ray Odierno, a 1986 graduate.

The local weekly independent newspaper, which fashions itself as alternative and leftish, runs a feature called the “social activist calendar.”  Events are grouped under headings such as Community, Environment, Politics, Government, and LGBTQ.  In a recent issue, four events were listed under Troop Support.

Though the requests have abated lately, for a time earlier this year cashiers in grocery stores and gas stations consistently asked if I wanted to donate a dollar to support the troops.

The above are examples of what can be called micro militarism: pro-military practices squeezed into small cultural spaces.  Any one such practice might seem trivial.  Yet on the whole micro militarism does much to normalize militarism on a large scale. (...)

To maintain support for militarism on a large scale, people must be propagandized.  They must be made afraid of alleged enemies abroad; they must be told, as often as possible, that the U.S. is, unlike all other empires in history, concerned only about promoting freedom and democracy when it uses military force; they must be led to see military service—of which the essence is obedience, not courageous independence—as noble and heroic.

Some of the cultural practices through which this management of consciousness occurs are easy to see.  The martial-spirited national anthem is sung en masse before sporting events.  Military jets are flown over crowded stadiums.  College basketball games are held on air force bases and aircraft carriers.  Films and TV shows (e.g., “Stars Earn Stripes”) celebrate the skill and virtue of U.S. soldiers.  G.I. Joes and other military toys fill whole aisles in big box stores.

Micro militarism is harder to see.  An individual instance can look like nothing more than an expression of support for people who have given several years of their lives, and perhaps their entire futures, for national service.  The intentions behind many acts of micro militarism are good.  But intentions do not determine consequences. (...)