The hanging of Saddam Hussein and the conditions under which it took place signal only one thing: the United States has lost control of the Iraq War. Our troops may stay in Iraq, but their mission will have changed and they no longer have the freedom to carry out missions that have not been approved by the Shiites who now control what remains of the country.There had been signs of this in recent weeks. For example, when an American with Iraqi ties disappeared when he decided to make a trip outside the Green Zone, our troops were ordered to stand down in their search for him. This past week under pressure from both Iran and the Iraqi government, U.S. troops released two Iranians they had accused of running guns and planning Shiite attacks. Last fall, General George Casey forced U.S. troops to release a sheikh they accused of being involved in death squads. The sheikh was an ally of Moktada al-Sadr, who increasingly seems to be calling the shots in Iraq.

From reports from various news sources, Saddam’s final hours appear to have been totally scripted by the majority Shiite government in Iraq. At the center of the conflict was the date of Saddam’s execution as well as the Muslim holy days that began yesterday. The official procedure for Saddam’s execution required a unanimous vote by the three-man presidential council composed of a Kurd, a Shiite, and a Sunni. A senior Bush administration official said the Kurds had called for a delay because they wanted to see Saddam prosecuted for crimes against them. It is assumed the Sunni official would have probably supported this, if only to delay the execution. But Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki would have none of this and signed the death sentence with only minimal input from the council and a great deal of browbeating. He issued a further statement to the Sunni minority warning that their hopes of ever returning to power were lost.

According to the New York Times, the pace of events left some of the American legal advisors working on the case stunned, according to one Western official. For all the guidance the Americans provided, in the end the dictator�s demise did not go the way they expected, the officials said. �It just goes to show that the Iraqis call the shots on something like this,� the official said. Given Maliki’s quick action, all Bush officials could do was to issue a weak statement saying they had no desire to seek a delay in the execution.

The interesting twist to all this is that Saddam was in American custody, so in order for the execution to be carried out he had to be handed over to the Iraqis, which they did in the early hours of the morning. That they did this knowing that Maliki had arm-twisted his council and also knowing that a major religious holiday was about to start, suggests that the calculated decision to hand Saddam over to Maliki represented a calculated wimping out at the highest levels of the Bush administration. In short George W. Bush capitulated to Maliki and al-Sadr.

This morning finds the administration back pedaling to recover some of their lost dignity and power. Stories are placing emphasis on the American negotiators in Iraq who worked with Maliki through the night to try to work out some kind of deal about how Saddam would be put to death.

The theme of today’s stories is that these local American officials were the ones who made the decisions, not people back in Washington. But one has to be incredibly naive to believe that the decision to execute Saddam was not made at the highest levels. Just to speculate, sometime late Thursday night or early Friday morning, the Bush inner circle in essence gave the green light to the negotiators in Baghdad to cut the best deal they could, but if Maliki insisted they were to go along.

Even more curious is the reaction of the American media. The San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times originally ran stories in the morning editions of their papers that carried details of Maliki’s actions and the reactions of Bush officials that are quoted above. In later accounts of the execution these details were omitted from the Times’ coverage. In fact when I wrote the post last night I had to rely on a print copy because the Internet copy had strangely been pulled. Other media failed to mention how far Maliki had gone.

Meanwhile evidence has surfaced indicating Moktada al-Sadr himself may have had a hand in the death of Saddam. According to recently released first-hand accounts of those who were there two guards uttered the name of of Mokatada directly at Hussein. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, asked Saddam about the killing of al-Sadr’s father, a crime widely attributed to Saddam. The answer could not be heard. Sources also say the guard detail for the execution was a “newly trained unit of the Iraqi National Police.” All of which makes one wonder if members of al-Sadr’s own militia did not do the job or were at least present.

This morning as transcripts of the infamous “cell phone pictures” are making clear, my late night hint was right on the mark. Several media sources now have identified some of the guards as militia members who deliberately taunted Saddam. In essence they have turned this sick murderer into a martyr. Only someone equally sick–read al-Sadr–could have masterminded such an atrocity.

The timing of the execution at the opening of the Muslim holy festival of Eid-al-Adha, particularly incensed many Muslims across the world. According to the BBC, Syrian Cabinet Minister Bouthaina Shaban took great objection to the timing. He said, “I think there is a large moral responsibility in doing it on such a holy holiday [Muslim festival of Eid-al-Adha] whether Christian or Muslim, there are moral things that one should do, and nobody is convinced that this is an implementation of justice…”

Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai also criticized the timing, “�We wish to say that Eid is a day for happiness and reconciliation. It is not a day for revenge,” Karzai told reporters at the presidential palace after offering an Eid prayer at Kabul�s main mosque early Saturday.

Even Iraqi officials found the timing of the event distateful. “According to the law, no execution can be carried out during the holidays,” said one official involved in the negotiations. “After all the hard work we have done, why would we break the law and ruin what we have built.”

The events surrounding Saddam’s execution testify strongly that the United States is no longer in control in Iraq. Who is in control is open to question, but if our government can no longer stand up to Maliki, al-Sadr and the Shiite militias who back them then it has lost any leverage it might have over the situation. It is ironic that as the war began, the United States talked confidently about a day when the Iraqi’s would call the shots. Now that that time has come, it is increasingly clear many of those shots are aimed in our direction.

As usual, the troops on the ground know exactly what is going down. In a rare display of candor by a senior American officer, Maj. William Voorhies pointed out in the December 28, New York Times, “I have come to the conclusion that this is no longer America’s war in Iraq but the Iraqi civil war where America is fighting.”

In the end, the death of Saddam Hussein may mark the nadir of American incompetence in Iraq. It may also mark the death of something far more important than a tin-horn dictator: it marks the end of any hope that this country can play a meaningful role in the Middle East or in world politics as long as George Bush and company remain in the White House. In fact, the damage may be so severe, that a new administration may not be able to untangle the mess, especially if it is Republican.

In timing the execution at the start of a religious holiday the Iraqis played us for a sucker, knowing the Muslim world–which already sees this country as anti-Muslim–would blame it on us, not Maliki. That we would allow ourselves to be placed in such a situation shows that the impact of the Religious Right on this administration must still be strong or else our foreign policy people are incredibly insensitive, stupid or both.

For all practical purposes the game is over. As Major Voorhies testified, the Iraqis–read Maliki, al-Sadr and the Shiites–now hold all the cards. A Republican Party that once berated Bill Clinton for allowing American troops to even conduct joint exercises with foreign troops in Bosnia now finds itself in the impossible position of having to explain American soldiers being bossed by Maliki. I cannot think of a lower point in American military history. When our commanders on the ground must scrap missions, modify them or even reverse them because Maliki says so, shows how low this nation has fallen.

It is one thing to ask Americans to die for “liberating” Iraq. It is quite another to ask them to die for Maliki and al-Sadr. Ironically when we left Vietnam people predicted there would be a blood bath. It never happened. My guess is that when we withdraw from Iraq Arab countries in the area will also not allow a blood bath to happen on their doorsteps or to those of their faith.

When I completed writing The Strange Death of Liberal America, I did not know how far the Republican Counterrevolution’s disregard for the level playing field and its four cornerstones would go. Now we have the answer. As a New Year dawns we need to reassert the primacy of Liberal America’s core values not only at home but throughout the world. When that rope snapped the neck of Saddam Hussein, something also snapped in America. Now it is time to bury the Counterrevolution as the Iraqis buried Saddam. This country and Iraq need to return to sanity.

This past week a genuine full-blown tempest broke out in blogdom. It represented one of those moments that makes blogdom such an interesting, novel and important place and yet also illustrates how far we have to go. The main point of the discussion focused on whether the Democratic Party should center this term’s campaign on the economy or the Iraq War. The outburst apparently was triggered by a Roll Call article that began, “Forced to play defense on national security for the third election year in a row, Congressional Democrats have been huddling in recent days to sharpen their attacks on the one issue they believe puts the Republicans on the run: the economy.”

Arianna Huffington wrote “The Dems are like a bunch of crack addicts who know that the stuff is killing them, but keep reaching for the pipe. The closer they get to Election Day, the more they desperately crave a hit of ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’. Repeat after me: It’s NOT the economy, stupid!” Mathew Yglesias added, “Pardon me while I go vomit. I mean, look, people who feel their economic circumstances are super-dire are going to vote for the Democrats one way or the other. They will, that is, unless they’re convinced that voting Democratic will get their family killed by terrorists.” Finally came Kos himself, “For the record, we heard this in 2002. We heard it in 2004. I gave the argument the benefit of the doubt those years. I think I actually bought it in 2002. But apparently our vaunted leadership in DC is incapable of learning lessons.”

All three of these are bloggers I respect. Their work first showed the Democratic Party–and the mainstream media– that there were people out there who were not being heard. But having said that, the past does not make them immune to criticism.

First, let’s remember our history. Have we forgotten that John Kerry elbowed his way onto the 2004 platform because the party bigwigs thought this war hero could take on the GOP on the war? Oh yes, please let’s also get our facts straight before popping off. The September 25th CNN poll shows: “The economy topped the list of respondents’ concerns, with 28 percent calling it the most important issue when deciding how to cast their ballots. Coming second was Iraq at 25 percent, followed by terrorism (18 percent), moral issues (15 percent) and immigration (14 percent).” and pardon me while I go vomit, but in my neck of the woods we don’t condescendingly make statements like “people who feel their economic circumstances are super-dire are going to vote for the Democrats one way or the other.” I’d suggest you give my fellow Minnesotan Winona LaDuke a call on that one up at the rez at White Earth–or just read her 2000 Vice Presidential acceptance speech. Taking people for granted is how you not only lose elections but people’s respect!

The more I blog the more it reminds me of high school with its cliques who talk only to each other and don�t even make eye contact with the rest of us passing in the hallways. So I decided to see what other bloggers were saying�the ones who don�t appear on talk shows or have big budgets or the right connections.

I decided to use Technorati–a service I have mixed feelings about–which ranks us all the way the Q index tracks the popularity of Hollywood stars and other public figures. It at least provided me with a doorway to find fellow bloggers, although it took awhile to find some of them because like the average high school student they don�t have long lists under their yearbook pictures. Here are two samples–and believe me–there are more out there.

In Iraq or The Economy: Stupid Edition chicago dyke wrote, “Honestly, I don�t know why it’s so hard to walk and chew gum at the same time. I think the strategy should be the economy sucks because the Republicans have spent all your money on a failed war at the expense of every domestic issue you can imagine, but what do I know.”

“Smart, Sassy, and Liberal,” definitely showed she is all three. She wrote, “No one in the Democratic party is saying what we should be: Iraq is not an easy answer. Removing troops is not an easy task and while we hope for a quick resolution, we must work to resolve the situation so that it doesn’t become a nightmare in the near future. That is why the Democratic party has no message. No one in this party wants to say what is unpopular within the party. No one wants to have the guts to stand up and say, this is wrong and we should fix it, fix it correctly, and then move on.”

In essence neither the Roll Call Democrats nor the royalty of blogdom have it right-the Democrats have lost every national election since 2000 because of one thing–values! People like George Lakoff and Thomas Frank and myself have written books trying to get the Party to see this, but it keeps passing over the heads of some bloggers. The GOP does well because you can pick any issue and probably guess what they will say because you know their values. You can’t do that for the Democrats. As long as the Party keeps “triangulating” what it thinks will win, it will look like opportunists without principles.

What do we stand for? I told someone who had a conniption about my characterization of Ned Lamont that I could write a paragraph in less than half an hour that would link the war, the loss of civil liberties and, yes, the economy with the values outlined in The Strange Death of Liberal America.

Now here is where I am going to get red-faced. In all those posts about the war I did not see anything about values. My son’s best friend is in Iraq right now. We don’t know if he has adequate body protection or armor for his Humvee. We don’t know what he is supposed to be doing or why? He doesn’t know why he is stationed where he is and what place that has in our larger strategy about the war. In short, he has no idea what his mission is other than making sure he and his unit get back alive. If you are going to evoke the war in Iraq then for God’s sake talk about it human terms, not as some “issue.” If you want to read what I think is a masterpiece about values and the war read Liberal Jarhead’s post “The Nature of the Job” in Bring It On!

George Lakoff deserves the lion�s share of the credit for putting the values issue on the table. Now Democrats need to have a serious conversation about values–all of us.

Technorati Tags: Kos, HuffPo, the economy, values, Iraq War, The Strange Death of Liberal America , John Kerry, George Lakoff, Democratic Party, CNN, Democrats, Republicans, GOP, Arianna Huffington, 2002 election , 2004 election , it’s about values, stupid!

With both parties jousting about whether or not to add more troops to Iraq, as much as many would like to see it, it does not look like an immediate withdrawal is in the cards. Right now some Democrats such as Joseph Biden are positioning themselves against the troop increase, but there are some other cards the Democrats could play that would put the GOP and the Bush Administration in an awkward position.

First, there is the issue of how are we going to pay for those extra troops and where will they come from? Not many communities want to see another repeat of the extended months that were added on to the tours of duty for many National Guard units. Others feel their Guard units have already contributed enough. In addition, the military is near the breaking point in terms of troop strength.

Even if we can somehow find a reasonable solution to where the troops will come from, more troops in Iraq will require additional funds for logistical and other support. If the Democrats were smart they would make any increase in troops budget neutral. And if they really wanted to go for broke they would not support any increase in troops without a corresponding rollback of the Bush tax cuts.

The Democrats have failed to play this card ever since the war began. They could have made the original authorization for Iraq dependent on rolling back the tax cuts, but failed to do so. With the war going badly, domestic needs such as relief for Katrina becoming even more pressing this is a perfect moment for the Democrats to press the equity issue. All they have to do is stand up and say that in tough times, the burden should be shared by all. Right now it is not. This would really set them up for the presidential campaign if they pushed it hard enough.

The second card to play is the issue of the troops themselves. In what is rapidly becoming the longest war in American history, the American people and the Iraqi people still have not been told what is the chief objective of this war. President Bush accuses his critics of wanting to “cut and run” but at the same time he has failed to provide a clear statement of what success in Iraq means. If, as he says, we stay “until the job is done,” what is “the job?” What is “done?”

If we are going to add 50,000 or so troops to Iraq, then the Democrats should insist on a clear statement of purpose as to what these troops will be doing. This is nothing less than any business would ask in hiring new people or any homeowner would ask of someone contracting to put a roof on their house.

Answers like “help train Iraqi troops” should be attacked for their vagueness just as you would ask a roofer why he was going to charge you $10,000? What type of training will these troops be doing? Has this training been used successfully elsewhere? What was our experience in terms of the number of troops we could reasonably expect to train in those cases? Other answers such as “provide support” or “reinforce existing troops” also should not be allowed to stand. They will need to be spelled out as to exactly what these troops will be doing and why.

Finally, we need to demand that the President define in quantifiable terms what the goals are for these troops. If they are to be used to train Iraqi soldiers, how many will they have trained and by when? What will we use as criteria to assure that these Iraqi soldiers have properly “graduated?” This war has gone on too long without specific answers to these questions.

No business, no public organization and certainly not any government agency from the city level on up would be allowed to not state what its targets are in quantifiable terms. CEO’s lose their jobs for not meeting sales, marketing or stock goals. Agency heads also lose their jobs for not meeting the goals that had been set to resolve the issues facing them. And every American who has a job knows all about performance evaluations.

But strangely enough we have not asked our president to tell us what every personnel manager asks of their employees: what are your goals and how do you propose to meet them? With this administration demanding “accountability” from schools and welfare programs, the American people need to demand accountability for Iraq. What equivalent to No Child Left Behind will we use to judge progress in this war that has no purpose?

Again the ball is in the Democrats’ court. Even more, this is a values issue they can get great mileage from if they play it right. The question is will they finally get some spine or will we see more of the same. A lot of lives depend on the answer.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,

The line stretches for a block, a cross-section of humanity whose only common characteristic is that each person carries a box, a plastic bag, or even several boxes and bags. Each holds a dream unfulfilled, a deep desire that had been dashed by cultural cold water.

The most common reason for standing in line was a size, a color, a style that testified that the giver either did not really know the recipient of the gift, did not have the courage to ask or investigate for the needed information, or had roundly failed the final exam of cultural knowledge because they paid little attention to those around them, or rarely picked up a newspaper, a magazine, watched television or listened to the radio.

With each melancholy shuffle the line slowly moved forward with an uneven jerking, like an overloaded freight train. Meanwhile, intelligence passed back from the front lines. They gave the word that you needed a receipt, that the box still had to be in its original shrink wrap, or that certain items were simply verboten.

At the head of the line, inspectors perused each package with more zeal than the average airpost security guard, while their colleagues thoroughly interrogated each hopeful subject, until, if those making the return were lucky, they were handed the equivalent of a home mortgage application to be filled out in triplicate, complete with intimate details and that all important “Why?” If the nervous petitioner gave a creative answer–the one that would finally spring open the doors–they would virtually skip away from the line like a prisoner whose life sentence had been commuted.

But the line also held a deep, dark secret for more often than not, those boxes held not the failure of a consumer but a failure of the market: a fad that never took off, a marketing campaign that failed miserably, and behind it all a failure of intelligence and imagination by those enlisted to know such things. Their surveys, focus groups, and data banks had become as useless as a two-bit magic wand picked up at a dollar discount store.

Even deeper, in a back corner of the American consciousness lay an analogy, unspoken, unarticulated, perhaps even only subconsciously understood. But if they were to close their eyes and search their minds they would come face to face with an anger, fear and disappointment much deeper and more volatile than the mere disappointment of receiving an inappropriate gift.

Perhaps among the unstylish clothes, the useless appliances, the awful bric-a-brac someone in that line held a box that contained one of the biggest toy failures of the past several years, one so spectacularly inappropriate that it had gone from being a joke to something grim and ominous–a box with George W. Bush in a flight suit just like the one he had worn that day he swooped onto the deck of an aircraft carrier to proclaim that the war in Iraq had been won.

KB toys created the George W. Bush Elite Force Aviator action figure in 2003. A site selling the figure online gives the following description:

This collectible doll stands 12-inches tall and comes dressed in a full flight suit, helmet, goggles, breather, and tanks that are identical to the ones George Bush wore when he landed on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln . . . His flight outfit features pouches, pockets, straps, buckles, and all the accessories of an original. A flip open front panel reveals the full speech the President gave during his historical visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on its inside, while the front of the box displays the 12-inch articulated figure behind a clear plastic pane. This item does not talk.

That last line should have been a giveaway. At the time KB toys came out with their toy (the use of the word �doll� was hotly debated), it inspired some of the blogosphere’s finest moments, including satirical Cheney figures along with an empty box for an “AWOL George.” Peacecandy.com satirized the “Dishonest Dubya” lying action figure doll. Here was what Common Dreams said:

It’s true. It’s real. The Bush action figure is a genuine serious item and not, as you would fully expect, a joke, not a parody, not necessarily meant to be a gag gift you would give to your favorite rabid pro-military war aficionado to make them cheer and stroke the flag and sigh wistfully for a time when men were men and Uzis were legal.

There he is, all faux manly and squinty and artificially buffed up, his gull-wing ears toned down and the thin-lipped brow-furrowed monkey confusion so common to his scrunched little face apparently erased by expert doll craftsmen and/or a drunken 50-cents-an-hour sweatshop employee somewhere in China.

Today those times seem almost quaintly innocent. The jokes came easier and sounded more sophomoric in days before Iraq had ceased to exist as a nation, before Abu Ghraib and the latest suicide bombing, before the sizzling fuse we had lit in Iraq threatened to blow up the entire Middle East. Even twelve inch action figures are no longer funny to those who satirized them and no longer meaningful to those Bush supporters who bought them.

Even the most die-hard Republican has long since gone beyond that silly public relations move, one that even as clumsy a person as Dick Nixon would have never consented to carry out. Yet I don’t think even the bloggers that made fun of the Bush “action figure” could have predicted how incompetent this administration would become. This truly has become the “Toy Presidency” with lilliputian figures maneuvering armies over entire countries as if they were plastic figures on a living room rug.

The “rugged leadership” the action figure supposedly represented has become not only the increasingly scary situation in the Middle East, but North Korea, Afghanistan, and domestic incompetence that cannot even clean up a hurricane but wants to build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Little did the person who coined the phrase “outside the box” dream that it might come to apply to a presidency in which the so-called “leader of the free world” would behave like a twelve-inch toy.

That in three short years this nation could have gone from the absurdity of issuing an “action figure” of our president dressed in a flight suit (try to imagine any other president–any–who would have let such a ridiculous move take place) to a commander-in-chief with some of the lowest popularity ratings in history because of a war that has spiraled so far out of control that no “Elite Force Aviator” could straighten it out stands today as the single greatest reversal of fortune, the biggest bungle of any American president. It was almost as though the war WERE being run by some plastic figure who “does not talk,” at least with any leader or nation in a region on the brink of the first international conflict since the father of this toy president served in World War II.

Unfortunately while we can return our action toys, returning a president becomes more difficult. Yet the line of people wanting to do just that continues to grow. Those manning the equivalent of the Congressional return desk should have quite a year.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,

Pfc. Lori Piestewa

A Native American and the first US female soldier to die in Iraq

(PHOTO COURTESY EL PASO TIMES/RUDY GUTIERREZ)

For the last two weeks George W. Bush has spent virtually all his time meeting with various groups about the Iraq War. When asked at the end of last week if he had reached any conclusions he gave a typical Bush answer�shifting the blame to someone else. He said he preferred to wait to announce any change in strategy until his new Secretary of Defense had more time to get used to his new job and study the issue.

This one may rank up near the top of all-time Bush excuses. Suppose this had happened during any other war. For example, what if in the middle of World War II, FDR said he needed time to decide what he was going to do next because his new Defense Secretary needed more study time. Abraham Lincoln fired generals who insisted they needed more time to study the situation. But here we have the leader of a country that supposedly has been receiving up-to-the-minute intelligence about Iraq for six years and we still can�t decide what to do because now we have a new cabinet member, one who supposedly was picked because he could help with this problem.

Think if this happened in any other job. A new worker shows up and says, sorry I can’t really make any decisions because I need time to learn my job. If you’ve read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed you know that doesn’t happen in the world of low wage workers. They’re expected to show up the first day and sort clothes by some intricate system that is probably understood by fewer people than have information on Iraq.

But what really irks me about George’s newest excuse is that while all these meetings have been taking place, our president and his GOP Congress have pretty much ignored the country they are supposed to be leading. The Republicans appear to have crammed the nation’s problems, both foreign and domestic into a closet, locked the door and handed the key over to the new Democratic Congress. Like ten-year-olds who think they have pulled a fast one they sit there off to the side, snickering, as they wait for the Democrats to unlock that door and have that mess come flying out in a chaotic jumble.

In essence we will be going from a Do Nothing Congress to a Do Something Congress over which sits smirking George himself waiting to throw that veto pen like a dart at anything that does not meet up to his Counterrevolutionary principles. And behind it all lurks the mess of Iraq, which threatens to turn this country into the same sectarian skirmishing that has engulfed Baghdad and Fallujah and other Iraqi cities.

Rather than convene committees about Iraq I would suggest perhaps he convene a group to study why after over a century we still have not lived up to our commitment to Native American people, whose land we occupied and supposedly �administered� just as we are doing in Iraq.

Former Green Party vice-presidential candidate Winona LaDuke likes to ask audiences if they can name five or even ten of the indigenous nations of North America. My guess is that if she were to ask the question today, most Americans could probably name more Iraqi factions than they could Native American nations.

In her 2000 acceptance speech, LaDuke painted of picture of life on what many Native Americans call the “rez,”

Now let me tell you about some real people. Native Americans are the poorest people in the country. Four out of 10 of the poorest counties in the nation are on Indian reservations. This is the same as White Earth. My daughter�s entire third grade class with few exceptions is below the poverty level. The only choice those parents have with any hope — with 45 percent unemployment — is to work at the casino at about six bucks an hour.

Six years later, not much has improved–just as it hasn’t in New Orleans after Katrina, in rural communities facing the impact of Counterrevolutionary policies and in inner cities that have been visited by Republican leaders less than they have visited Baghdad.

This past February, two Native American soldiers who came back from Iraq told the truth. Former Army specialist Gerald Dupris, 22, described his mother’s neighborhood inside the Cheyenne River Reservation in Eagle Butte, S.D., as “a lot worse than what I left in the military in Iraq.” He went on to say people:

should realize that a lot of Native veterans return home to worse than what they left. They should realize what we’ve done for this country, and give back to the Native reservation.

Another Native American soldier, Staff Sgt. Julius Tulle, told a story of how when they arrived in Iraq many American troops complained about the rations, the living conditions, not being able to shower, watch television or access the Internet. The Navajo soldiers had not trouble adapting, Tulley said, “We were used to it. I thought, ‘What are you complaining about?’ . . . What they missed, it was nothing to us.”

Chester Carl, chief executive officer of the Navajo Housing Authority in Window Rock, Ariz. Indians “are over there sacrificing their lives to improve the lives of our enemy, yet they come back to conditions that are worse. There are no jobs, there’s no housing.”

Meanwhile the Bush Administration cut funding for Native American housing and education. The irony of this is that, as in past wars, Native Americans have served in the military far beyond their percentage of the total population. According to defense Department Statistics, Native Americans make up 1% of the population and 1.6% of the military.

That the poorest people in this country should be willing to give up their lives for a misguided war even while their own country spends less on them than it does on Iraq, says a great deal about the importance they place in the value of service. Now if the Republican Party- the party of “values”–happened to adopt those values how different things might be for all Americans–and Iraqis.

Judging by its age and the fact that it was a wood desk, one could reasonably surmise that it had lived through one of the most tumultuous and important revolutions in American history, a time when this country finally decided that all of its children deserved an equal education. Along with the decision of Brown v. Board came another equally important principle�that diversity in our classrooms was not only desirable but also absolutely fundamental to education in a democracy.

Back when that desk was still in service the code word was integration, but in the intervening years that word has fallen out of favor, in part because it was originally intended to apply to racial diversity in the classroom. In 1956 few of the Supreme Court justices who supplied the majority in the Brown decision could have imagined today�s classrooms where there may be as many as two dozen native languages spoken, representing twice any many different cultures. The faces of the children in America�s classrooms today are the faces of children around the world, children whose parents came here to find a better life just as did my parents and the parents, grandparents and relatives of all Americans.

While it has not been without its rough spots Liberal America�s ideal of educational equity may, above all, be our best hope, our national trump card, for surviving the global economy of this new millennium. Yet this December, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments that would undermine this country�s cornerstone of educational equity and take us back to the days of that wooden desk.

Ostensibly at issue were the plans used by two school districts, Louisville and Seattle, to insure classroom diversity. The plans of both districts had grown from Brown v. Board. In the wake of Brown attorneys and civil rights leaders began to turn from the educational segregation of the Old Confederacy to the segregation of the North where zoning regulations and a host of other policies helped to preserve neighborhoods and schools that were as segregated as any in Mississippi.

Louisville and Seattle were among two of the cities ordered to end this segregation. After many years both cities had managed to stem the white flight that had first accompanied the desegregation decree with a variety of imaginative programs and solutions. By the time both districts were viewed as having accomplished the goals set by the courts, both districts had actually rebounded so that a majority of the residents not only approved of the plan but enthusiastically supported it. Carole Haddad, a white parent, was so incensed by the original Louisville desegregation plan that she ran for school board as an opponent of the plan and won. Today, she has had a complete change of heart,”I’ve come a long way and taken a big turn since then, the parents really like it,” She says of the current plan.

But some parents were not happy and more pointedly, right wing legal organizations that had fought Brown from the beginning hung around the fringes of school districts like hungry predators looking to pick off the weak and the infirm. Given that most desegregation decisions in the nation�s inner cities have involved plans that sometimes do not give white children their first choice in schools, it seemed only a matter of time before someone would file a suit against a school district alleging “reverse discrimination.”

“Reverse discrimination” is this generation’s code word that has replaced the Dixiecrat whining over “states’ rights” and “freedom of choice” that twisted basic morality along with elementary logic to sustain a system where one race could dominate over another either by legal trickery or when that did not work, the kind of perverted violence that left Emmitt Till’s beaten body in the river, weighed down by a cotton gin fan tied with barbed wire, wire that symbolized the how the “political machine” of the racists imprisoned every African American.

“States’ rights” and “freedom of choice” in the Till case meant that a group of white neanderthals could torture to death an African American teenager for supposedly mouthing off to a white woman. “States rights” meant that the jury could find the murderers innocent even though several courageous witnesses connected them to the crime.

“Reverse discrimination” has become a similar code word for nastiness. No longer do we have the overt violence that murdered Emmitt Till, we have more sophisticated ways of discriminating agi8anst people of color. All the arguments about reverse discrimination usually fail to point out one crucial fact–if the schools themselves were equal in every city there would be no issue with reverse discrimination.

The problem in most inner city districts is that some buildings are a national embarrassment with decaying facilities like bathrooms that work only intermittently, textbooks with pages missing, and none of the fancy technology and other learning resources that can be found in any rich suburban district. The other whispered problem with reverse discrimination is that some white parents do not want their children to go to school with people of color.

These prejudices lay in the shadows when the Supreme Court met to hear oral arguments in the Louisville and Seattle cases, and judging by the comments of some justices this court may be about to take us back to the days of that wooden desk. The case was an odd one to begin with. The chief counsel for parent Crystal Meredith was a local Louisville lawyer named Teddy Gordon.

He had originally taken the case, but as it wound its way up through the court system everyone expected him to step aside and let one of the conservative luminaries take his place. Instead Gordon, who admitted he had never even been inside the Supreme Court Building, decided to argue the case himself. This is a bit like a local stock broker managing the merger of two billion-dollar corporations. Legal blogs and SCOTUS watchers had a field day with this �amateur� going toe to toe with the likes of Scalia, Souter, Breyer and colleagues.

This is where the politics get interesting. The Bush Administration feared this “amateur” would make such a mess of the case that the Court would either throw it out or rule in such a way as to make future cases more difficult. In an attempt to bail out Gordon Solicitor General Paul Clement joined the case on an amicus basis. Even more interesting, Gordon originally asked that Clement be given ten minutes of his time and the Court instead gave him fifteen–an obvious slap in the face. Bit this still failed to phase Gordon.

The verbatim oral arguments are available online in PDF form for those who wish to read them in their entirety, but suffice it to say, Gordon’s performance was confusing to say the least, but more interesting were the remarks made by the justices themselves which must have had former justice and Brown attorney Thurgood Marshall turning over in his grave.

The quotes that follow are from the oral arguments. I quote them at some length to give you a flavor for where this country may be headed in terms of its education system.

CLEMENT: And I do think that in this context, I mean, there is an independent constitutional value in not having these kind of express racial classifications drawn.

JUSTICE BREYER: It seems to me from what I read, that there is a terrible problem in the country. The problem is that there are lots and lots of school districts that are becoming more and more segregated in fact, and that school boards all over are struggling with this problem. And if they knew an easy way, they’d do it. So I don’t know whether this is exactly the only way to do it or not. I do know courts are not very good at figuring that out. And I guess that’s why the Court previously has said it is primarily up to the school district.

JUSTICE SOUTER: The objective is fine. The important thing is simply to hide the ball.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Does this case present the story where the meaning of Brown versus Board of Education is you can never take race out of politics?

JUSTICE SCALIA: Easy. Easy. Take a school district that is overwhelmingly minority. And -overwhelmingly black, if you will. And a school board that reflects that. And in which by reason of residential patterns, the white schools, despite the same expenditure of money, same level of teaching and everything else, the white schools are better schools. And the school board could decide we would like our race to get into those better white schools. Not because we want mixing. We just want, want them to get into those schools. Wouldn’t that be a situation in which the board could then come up with a — you know, these good schools ought to have 80 percent blacks in them? I would not consider that a benign objective.

MR. MELLEN (School Board Attorney): But the board feels and it feels very strongly based on conversations that board members and staff people have had with other school districts that have tried race-neutral measures including Charlotte Mecklenburg, Wake county and San Francisco — that race-neutral measures alone will not do the job and the experience in those districts indicates that they will not do the job.

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Do you think that there’s something of an anomaly there, that you have a system that is forced on the school, that it doesn’t want it, works for 25 years, and then the school board doesn’t have to keep it any more, but it decides it’s worked rather well, so we’ll keep it. What’s constitutionally required one day gets constitutionally prohibited the next day. That’s very odd.

As you can see some of the arguments advanced are quite scary. Contrary to the South’s contention before Brown that “separate but equal” schools were acceptable, Justice Scalia seems to be saying that separate but unequal schools are OK. He would turn back the clock not half a century but a century or more. Then there is Justice Souter’s comment about “hiding the ball” and Solicitor General Clement’s remark that “there is an independent constitutional value in not having these kind of express racial classifications drawn.”

Perhaps the capstone on this bizarre day in court was attorney Teddy Gordon arguing in his final summary that the case may be the beginning of the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream. To hear the words of Dr. King twisted like this was to affirm that the Counterrevolution intends to turn the world upside down. Maybe we will all be back to sitting at the equivalent of wooden desks again.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,

I just returned from a four-day trip to watch my son play in a college basketball tournament near Chicago. Along the way, while there and on the way back we stayed at what I call Gasoline Ghettos–those villages of motels, restaurants, and other tourist traps that now line the outskirts of virtually every major city, since that�s where our government decided to route the Interstate highways that are our main ways to get from here to there, unless we are packed into what passes for a seat on some about-to-be-bankrupt airline.

Before becoming disabled, I used to travel a lot, but I finally grew tired of what every serious business traveler knows as the “where am I now” syndrome that comes from staying in motels that all look the same no matter where you are so that one morning you wake up, look out the window and for a minute you have to think to remember where you are. So I started looking for bed-and-breakfasts or anything that wasn’t a chain. Once I stayed in a local motel so bad that in the morning there was a small snow drift inside the front door. But I knew exactly where I was.

When I started writing The Strange Death of Liberal America, I decided that each chapter would begin with a description of a place–a real place–because I felt one of the more insidious developments of the Republican Counterrevolution was that it was rapidly taking away the local and the unique. Everything is now owned by a chain and if everything is owned by a chain that makes all of us mere cogs in the wheels that those chains move.

Critics as far back as the late Lewis Mumford have been writing about the dangers of homogenization but I don’t think it really hit home until this trip. Because of my disability this is the longest trip I have taken away from home in five years and the only way I was able to manage it was to rig up a bed by folding down the rear seats. I told my wife I wanted one of those semis with the super-size cabs that have room-sized spaces behind the front seats so I can intimidate the SUVs who seem to think they own the road.

It was my son who actually made the most ominous observation to me. He is now in his fourth year of playing college ball and has taken a lot of road trips, all of which involve staying at Gasoline Ghettos. Rather than taking the team bus back he came home with us for what will be a short Christmas before the season starts again. This morning when we got up we were making our own breakfast in one of those ubiquitous breakfast buffets that every motel now features right down to the same equipment and brands of cereal.

While my wife and I muddled through what for us was unfamiliar territory, he had a plate full in less than two minutes. When I asked him his secret, he said, “They’re all the same. After four years you get so you can do it in your sleep.” Then he told us that the night before after a particularly embarrassing loss their coach refused to buy them dinner and instead went to the grocery store and bought bags of cold cuts and bread. The players decided they wanted to eat as a team so they proceeded to take over the motel lounge until the manager threw them out saying the lounge was for guests only. They protested they were guests (in fact the team probably buttered their bread fairly well the two nights they were there), but the manager would have none of it.

In Strange Death I wrote about the impact of the chains on intellectual creativity, particularly the media chains that have made being an innovator like Elvis or a Louis Armstrong or any kind of rap or hip hop artist an endangered species because they threaten that eternal soundtrack that runs in supermarkets, telephone hold backgrounds, motel lounges, and restaurants. Until my son talked about life on the road, I didn’t really realize how corporate chains have insinuated themselves into our minds.

Most Americans now live in suburban developments where the houses are churned out by computers and look the same whether in New York or Georgia or New Mexico. When we travel, we stay in a Gasoline Ghetto. In between we may listen to CD�s also turned out by the same conglomerates or one of those programmed radio stations owned by the likes of Clear Channel. Local or individual character is rapidly becoming extinct. You literally don�t know where you are.

What does this have to do with Liberal America or events like the Iraq War? Think Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s warning that a very clever Michael Moore turned into Fahrenheit 9/11. But Moore missed the deeper message�although it does not diminish the power of his movie�that is, if you live in an environment of physical sameness, sooner or later it will metamorphose into an environment of intellectual sameness. Gasoline Ghettos become intellectual ghettoes, for the minds no longer stimulated by the unique, the unusual, the imaginative lose the power to imagine. They atrophy the way any muscle atrophies that is not used.

Atrophied brains lead to people who are easy to manage, people who are willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt. Even more, those who protest or even engage in the intellectual equivalent of my son�s basketball team eating in the motel lounge will swiftly be dismissed.

On the way back I stopped and did an interview with Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive (thanks Matt). Several weeks before he had conducted an interview with Greg Palast, a journalist who lives in Great Britain. Greg was the first to break the story that exposed the purging of the 2000 Florida election rolls weeks BEFORE the election. NO ONE on this side of the pond picked up his story. Even the Democratic Party ignored it. Palast�s point was that it is become increasingly hard for voices such as his to be heard. It is also becoming tough for publications such as the Progressive�which has a long and distinguished history�to survive.

We need to do all we can to insure that such independent voices do not die. This is also where the blogosphere comes in. Right now it is the only outlet for some of us. We need to fight to be sure it does not become the equivalent of a Gasoline Ghetto dominated by the equivalent of chains. Because when it does guess who will be wearing the chains?

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,