Okay, so the war in Iraq is over, according to Obama. This is because the Iraqis rejected . . . → Read More: The IMF wants me, plus, Iraq Who?]]> The latest scam spam in my inbox is a letter from a high-ranking official of the International Monetary Fund telling me to deal only with him in recovering my money from Nigeria. What is it with Nigeria?

Okay, so the war in Iraq is over, according to Obama. This is because the Iraqis rejected his energetic pleas to let him keep some troops in the country—”Okay, not 30,000. How about 10,000? 5? 3500? Okay, fine, we’re leaving, but don’t blame me if we have to come back in with guns a-blazing …”—rather than observing the exit plan humorously agreed upon by the Bush administration.

But even with that we’re not leaving, not if you count the 16,000-strong crowd manning the murder holes in the State Department’s gigantic downtown Baghdad bunker. By way of comparison, that’s almost as many people as staff every other US embassy in the world combined, minus Afghanistan.

US journalists by and large exhibit an astonishing lack of curiosity about the rationale behind the behemoth. Even discounting the enormous mercenary security force, the personnel equivalent of perhaps four Army brigades, the embassy will house roughly double the number of diplomatic (and spy) personnel as the next largest embassy, the swollen one in Kabul. Why? Especially when you consider that it’ll be years before any of them can leave the embassy without an escort from a bunch of the 10,000 or so mercenaries security folk.

It’s good that Obama didn’t simply ignore the agreement and keep as many troops in the country as he wanted. Members of the previous crime family running the government would no doubt have worked harder to find a way around the issue that ultimately scotched the occupation.

It’s sort of funny, though, that the Iraqi refusal to bow to US wishes and immunize US personnel against local prosecution for war crimes and other breaches of decorum should somehow redound to Obama’s credit in the eyes of the people who applaud him for getting the troops out. He didn’t want to end the occupation, and the only reason he did was because he couldn’t allow US troops to be held accountable for their actions by the people who are ostensibly meant to benefit from our presence, those being “The Iraqi People,” as in “Thanks to the sacrifice of our troops, The Iraqi People have a shot at [insert something that sounds nice here].”

The end of the occupation doesn’t mean an end to US military involvement in Iraq, of course. There’s quite a lusty little arms deal in the works, which the US Departments of War and State assure everyone won’t be used to any nefarious purpose by the various nefarious parties in government.

They know this because there remain 150 US military personnel in the country to monitor how the weapons are used, and they’ll rat out anybody among the Iraqis who does anything unwholesome with their American weapons. It’s the same human rights regime we’ve imposed so successfully upon Israel lo these many years. And the Saudis and so on.

America: Our guns have goodness built right in.

President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the . . . → Read More: If you really loved America, you would have died on 9/11]]> All of your woes can be traced to that one moment of missed opportunity.

President Obama said the day of the 9/11 anniversary that in the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Americans have preserved our values and our character. He’s right. America’s history is of a whiny, over-privileged, self-aggrandizing and self-victimizing bully, and the decade since 9/11 has been clarifying.

Of course that’s not what Obama meant. He meant that appearances to the contrary, America is not a nation of torturers, bullies, shrieking cowards and bomb-flinging xenophobes.  Not a nation that glorifies the work ethic while scorning the worker. Not a nation that worships the wealthy and demonizes the poor. Not a nation that saves its banks and leaves its ordinary citizens to fend for themselves in an economic wasteland.

I was living in Hawaii, 5000 miles from New York City, when the planes flew into the towers. Hawaii, even Honolulu, often seems to have little connection with the United States—more like a self-governing colony, possibly a dependent, but not a state. Most of the people I talked to about the attacks on the day and in subsequent weeks regarded them as horrifying and tragic but not as an assault upon themselves as citizens.

It was a distant disaster. Not so for everyone, of course, but for a lot of people. I remember reading a letter to the editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin from a woman, I think from Michigan, who had been forced to overstay her Hawaii vacation while the flights were grounded. She was resentful because so many businesses in Waikiki weren’t flying American flags in the tragedy’s wake.

Maybe that’s a product of Hawaii’s history, with barely more than a century passed since the forcible US annexation of the country, and less than a half century passed since statehood. Maybe it’s the prime chunks of real estate still occupied by the US military, who were, in even more recent memory, using a historically and religiously significant island for target practice.

The idea that the attacks were a response to US behavior seemed immediately plausible in a place where US behavior had recently been considerably less than ideal. Empires breed resistance; the difference between the US empire and ones that preceded it is that ours exists in a day when attacking the imperium on its home ground is relatively easy.

A few years ago, New York Times resident moron Tom Friedman allowed as how Americans had collectively gone nuts after 9/11. Certainly he did, and a lot of other people did, but not everyone. Anyone who didn’t go nuts, though, and went public with their sanity, could count on being scorned and marginalized and bullied by the hysterics and cowards who came into their own on that day.

God has taken center stage. The first words Obama spoke at the ceremony were a fragmentary quote from Psalms: “The Bible tells us — “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

The full line is “For his anger endureth but a moment; in His favor is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Linking 9/11 to God’s wrath is something one might, a few years ago, have expected more from Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson and less from Barack Obama. But here we are.

Obama closed his speech as he began it, reprising the quote from Psalms and saying, “With a just God as our guide, let us honor those who have been lost, let us rededicate ourselves to the ideals that define our nation, and let us look to the future with hearts full of hope.”

Obama is not a careless orator, or a thoughtless one. Bookending the speech with quotes from the Bible, ending it with a shoutout to God as the guide for our nation, wasn’t an accident. It was an homage to the fundamentalist conception of a Christian nation, and it’s the last thing anyone listening, of any religion or none, should have wanted to hear.

But here we are.

If 9/11 was, as so many people wish it to have been, the fuel for this country’s terrible beauty, then let’s mark it as that. Let’s make a monument of an endless loop of the towers standing on that clear day and then hit and then tumbling down upon the dead, and sell tickets so the fools who wish for some sort of glory arising from the day can fling themselves on the eternally smoldering rubble and hope that their deaths may one day precipitate the same kind of homicidal desperation among the people whose fears and anger matter in this land.

Thank you, good night and God bless this Blog.

Updated 9/24 to resolve a point of theological distinction: originally I described the opening line as including a quote from a Christian psalm.

Ron Suskind, the journalist and author who introduced the world to the phrase “reality-based community,” has a new book out about the Obama administration’s handling of our ongoing Troubles. The Associated Press acquired a copy of it and, somewhat peculiarly, gave it to their ace entertainment reporter, . . . → Read More: President Obama blames bank policy failures on President Geithner]]> The perils of a co-presidency become plain.

Ron Suskind, the journalist and author who introduced the world to the phrase “reality-based community,” has a new book out about the Obama administration’s handling of our ongoing Troubles. The Associated Press acquired a copy of it and, somewhat peculiarly, gave it to their ace entertainment reporter, Anthony McCartney, for an initial review. McCartney nails the lead.

A new book offering an insider’s account of the White House’s response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks.
…
The book states Geithner and the Treasury Department ignored a March 2009 order to consider dissolving banking giant Citigroup while continuing stress tests on banks, which were burdened with toxic mortgage assets.

In the book, Obama does not deny Suskind’s account, but does not reveal what he told Geithner when he found out. “Agitated may be too strong a word,” Suskind quotes Obama as saying. Obama says later in the book that he was trying to be decisive but “the speed with which the bureaucracy could exercise my decision was slower than I wanted.”

Let’s break this story down a bit.

Obama: Tim, I want you to look at busting up a giant bank for me.

Geithner: No.

Obama: Alrighty then. Moving on to our next item …

Lots of people are saying this is just another measure of Obama’s weakness, but I’m thinking it’s just another measure of the extent to which Obama gets the results he wants while his supporters get to blame those results on some object of their scorn. “Oh, SNAP! The president was sabotaged by his then-new but still-employed-three-years-later treasury secretary!”

The outrage is thundering down the plains as we speak. I can feel it in my bones.

Obama came into office as a Wall Street creature. His economic advisers were mostly drawn from the banking world. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, made $16 million in two years as an investment banker and is a favorite son of the financial sector. His first chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, opposes government involvement in health care, helped repeal the depression-era Glass-Steagall law that outlawed banks from insane financial speculations for more than six decades, and was a disciple of Robert Rubin—another big gun in the Glass-Steagall assassination, a former Goldman Sachs board chairman and Citigroup CEO, and former Clinton treasury secretary. And his treasury secretary, Geithner, a Rubin and Summers protégé, had turned two blind eyes to our impending doom when he ran the New York federal reserve bank.

In other words, the banks and Wall Street have been managing economic and financial policy for the current administration since before it was the current administration. Obama hired these guys. One assumes he had his reasons, just as the banks had theirs for supporting his campaign.

This isn’t to say that Obama wants the economy to suck and Wall Street to reign supreme and untouchable. He doesn’t want the economy to suck.

Not, mind you, that the banksters didn’t have considerably more than a finger in the Bush administration’s pie; only that things didn’t get any more subtle come January of 2009.

Bonus irony: Obama describes himself as a policy wonk. Maybe that’s true. But the men and policies he chose to fix the mess he inherited are prominent among the creators of it. Maybe he should try wonking a little farther from home.