New Quaker Notebook

On Tuesday, the Republican National Convention announced that it's named the telecommunications company Qwest the "Official Communications Provider" for its 2008 convention in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in September.

You may recall that in 2001, six months before the attacks of 9/11, Qwest refused a National Security Agency (NSA) request to participate in a warrantless surveillance program to data mine the phone records of American citizens. Quest was the only company to refuse. Last month, the Senate passed its own version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) renewal bill, permitting more warrantless government eavesdropping on Americans and granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies (specifically AT&T, which helped write FISA, and Verizon) which handed consumer data over to the government without court order. The House version, thankfully, is currently going nowhere, as representatives continue to discuss the immunity provisions desired by the Cheney-Bush White House.

So why would the GOP want Quest to handle telecommunication services for it national convention? I think they don't want anyone to have unfettered access to their phone calls and networks, much like the rest of us.

Alternatives to the Complex

In an interview with Karl Rove on Fox News Sunday yesterday, Chris Wallace asks Rove to respond to the Barack Obama's charge that the money we are currently spending in Iraq is "money that we could be spending here in the United States, rebuilding our infrastructure, building schools, sending kids to university." Rove's answer is revealing. He says:¹

ROVE: Well, Obama—it's a good argument for Obama, but I'm wondering where it goes, because it really is a very neo-isolationist argument. It basically says, you know, "We should not be involved in the world because of the consequences to the budget here at home."

Well, we were not involved in the world before 9/11, and look what happened. Look at the cost to the American economy after a terrorist attack on the homeland. We lost a million jobs in 90 days after 9/11.

If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the control of Iran, don't you think $200 a barrel oil would have a cost to the American economy?

So you know, it's a cute thing in a primary. I'm not certain over an 8-month general election that you can make the argument that we ought to take a look at every foreign policy commitment in the United States and measure it on the basis of the number of dollars that we've got there.

I happened to be in Los Angeles on Monday, and somebody had heard Obama say this to me, and they were Democrat, and at dinner they said, "I'm worried about that, because does that mean he's going to be looking at our support, for example, for the state of Israel and looking at it in terms of what could we be doing at home with those dollars?"

And it was a nice line, but I'm not certain how durable a line it necessarily is.

To become neo-isolationist or not is plainly a false dichotomy. In a world of black and white, it would make sense to talk about the either/or of America's involvement in the world, but our world isn't colored in this way and such talk ignores the many reasons why we would want to be involved in the world: providing economic relief, extending fair trade opportunities, making friends with our neighbors, laying the moral groundwork so that American Christians may offer the Gospel as a real alternative to the cycle of violence and terror.... The list is long, but surely not as long as the list the Busheviks are currently checking off, as this administration extends its militant hegemony in support of powerful corporate interests, promotes lying as a government policy, spies on its citizens using illegal methods, encourages torture and extraordinary rendition and unlimited detention, eliminates opportunities for fair trade, makes enemies of our neighbors, and effectively destroys the moral groundwork upon which good Americans have relied in presenting their face to the world.

Of course war is a good thing for an industry which makes the means for war. I'm sure someone was in the slingshot business two thousand years ago; now it's assault rifles (M16A2 rifle, M-4 carbine, AK-47 and variants), automatic weapons (M-249 SAW), machine guns (M-240, MP-5), grenades (M67 fragmentation grenade), missiles (FIM-9 Stinger, TOW missile, guided, cruise, ballistic), mortars (M-252, M-224), anti-tank weapons (M136 AT4, SMAW, Dragon, anti-tank mines), anti-personnel mines, drones, and all the other explosives (large, small, nuclear, non-nuclear) that can be shot and dropped from aircraft or launched from ships. To this list we could add bullets, bulldozers, humvees, and all the other equipment not made in the USA. I don't pretend that such a list is at all exhaustive, but it's large enough to fathom the extent of this industry, and the corporations that supply it.²

A "neo-isolationism" isn't the answer here, but we can get to the answer through an inward-looking reflection on what we as a nation see ourselves becoming in a global economy and how we can do more good than the evil we are perpetuating now. As for Rove's $200-a-barrel oil fright tactic, that's just silly. One wants to use the president's own words in this context.³ It's silly because we should be looking way past the oil industry for our country's tottering energy foundations. Even Saudi Arabia is planning for it, as they move their resources into solar energy.⁴

1. "Transcript: Karl Rove on 'FOX News Sunday'," Fox News, Sunday, March 02, 2008. Watch the video segment here.
2. See a partial list of companies at Army Technology. Relevant here is a 2003 CNN Money article on the new military industrial complex by Ian Mount, Matthew Maier, and David Freedman; "Military-Industrial Complex Revisited," in Harvard Political Review Online, May 27, 2007. See especially the piece on the military-industrial complex at Sourcewatch.org. And this doesn't even include the Pentagon's new ray gun.
3. "Fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again." See "Remarks by the President on Teaching American History and Civic Education," White House News Release, September 17, 2002.
4. "Oil giant Saudi to become solar power centre: minister," AFP, March 1, 2008.

No FISA for You!

Alternatives to the Complex

Bush Presidential Library Designs