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WHAT DID WE KNOW – AND WHEN DID WE KNOW IT?  
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Rebecca Gordon
June 11, 2024
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ This capacity to predict the future is beginning to feel a bit
déjà-vu-ish. It’s not too hard to foresee the approaching
catastrophe in Gaza. In our presidential election, we are facing the
potential elevation of a genuine instrument of fascism. _

Greta Thunberg speaks at the climate strike in front of the
Reichstag, Berlin, Sept. 24, 2021., (Stefan Müller, licensed under CC
BY 2.0 / Flickr)

 

A few days ago, my partner and I went in search of packing tape. Our
sojourn on an idyllic (if tick-infested) Cape Cod island was ending
and it was time to ship some stuff home. We stopped at a little
odds-and-ends shop and found ourselves in conversation with the woman
behind the counter.

She was born in Panama, where her father had served as chief engineer
operating tugboats in the Panama Canal. As a child, she remembered
celebrating her birthday with a trip on a tug from the Atlantic to the
Pacific oceans, sailing under an arch of water produced by fireboats
on either side.

“But that all ended,” she said, “with the invasion. It was
terrifying. They were bombing Panama City. The Army sent my family
back to the U.S. so we wouldn’t be killed. I’ve never been
back.” She was talking, of course, about the 1989 invasion of
Panama
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by President George H.W. Bush to arrest Manuel Noriega, that
country’s president. For years, Noriega had been a CIA asset, siding
with Washington as the Cold War played out in Central America. He’d
worked to sabotage the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN
guerillas in El Salvador who opposed a U.S.-supported dictatorship
there. And he’d worked with Washington’s Drug Enforcement Agency
while simultaneously taking money from drug gangs.

That a CIA asset was involved in the drug trade could hardly have come
as a surprise to that agency, given its own long history
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cooperating with drug merchants, but when journalist Seymour Hersh
broke the story of Noriega’s drug connections, the U.S. decided to
cut him loose and hardline neoconservatives like Elliot Abrams, one of
the architects of the Contra war
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Nicaragua, began pushing for an invasion. Abrams himself would
resurface in the second Bush administration, where he would become a
cheerleader for some of the worst crimes of the Global War on Terror.
He would bob up yet again like some kind of malevolent cork in Donald
Trump’s administration
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And then, in July 2023, perhaps in a fit of bipartisan amnesia,
President Joe Biden would nominate
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to serve on his Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

My partner and I told this woman that we remembered the invasion all
too well. In fact, we’d joined a group of demonstrators occupying
Market Street in San Francisco to protest it. But, I added, “Lots of
people in this country don’t even know that there _was_ an
invasion, or that hundreds of civilians died
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She nodded. “Nobody here knows about that. I’ve never met anyone
who does. It was just one crook fighting another and Panama got in the
way.” As we prepared to leave, she asked us, “Do you mind if I
give you a hug?” We didn’t mind. We were honored.

THE CURSES OF CASSANDRA

Speaking with that woman reminded me that those of us paying attention
had a pretty good idea what the invasion of Panama would look like.
After all, we’d followed the 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean
island of Grenada
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knew civilians would die. You could say that we predicted the obvious
before it happened, but no one in power seemed to believe us and,
after it happened, no one seemed to care.

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BUY THE BOOK
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Reflecting on those moments brought to mind the Trojan prophet
Cassandra, doubly cursed by the god Apollo both in her ability to
foresee the future and in the fact that no one would believe her. She
predicted the bloody and ultimately pointless Trojan War, but no one
listened to her. The truth is that neither Cassandra in Troy nor those
of us predicting the obvious outcomes of America’s follies today
really need divine gifts to see the future. All it takes is a little
attention to history and the present moment.

As I started to write this piece, however, something bothered me, like
a student raising an insistent hand in the back row of the classroom
of my mind. Wait, I thought, haven’t I written this before? And it
turns out that, in a way, I did — back in 2021
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of the 9/11 attacks. At the time, I focused on the rehabilitation of
Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had made a lonely run for president in
1968 on a platform opposing the American war in Vietnam. In those
days, opposing that war was considered naïve at best, treasonous at
worst. Today, almost everyone in this country who even remembers
Vietnam considers it a historic mistake, if not a moral catastrophe.

In that piece, I also pointed to editorials 20 years after 9/11
celebrating Representative Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to
vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF,
in the wake of those attacks. That AUMF authorized the use of “all
necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations,
or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed,
or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
It permitted the 2001 invasion and disastrous 20-year occupation of
Afghanistan and served as legal cover for the equally disastrous 2003
invasion of Iraq. In 2021, press outlets that had once excoriated Lee
for her vote were praising her for her courage and foresight. I
imagine that, 20 years later, that praise was small comfort to her or
any of the thousands of Cassandras who predicted that the U.S. would
fail in Afghanistan — as it once had in Vietnam — or to the
millions who knew (because the evidence
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Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and so filled the streets of
the world to protest that illegal and ill-judged war.

I ended the piece with a meditation on three young “Cassandras”
— climate activists Greta Thunberg of Sweden, Vanessa Nakate of
Uganda, and Martina Comparelli of Italy, who had traveled to Glasgow
for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. “Your
pressure, frankly, is very welcome,” Italy’s then-prime minister
Mario Draghi told them. “We need to be whipped into action. Your
mobilization has been powerful, and rest assured, we are listening.”

“For the sake of the world,” I wrote then, “let us hope that
this time Cassandra will be believed.”

You’re probably not surprised that the world has not acted to
forestall the future foreseen by those young Cassandras. Today, Italy
has a far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who complains
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other European right-wingers about the “ultra-ecological
fanaticism” she considers a threat to her country’s economy.
Meanwhile, just like the 10 months before it, April 2024 was globally
the hottest on record
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a trend that shows no sign of abating. In fact, as I write this,
temperatures topping 127 degrees Fahrenheit
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record) present a threat to human life
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India and Pakistan.

Nor have our own right-wing politicians been willing to recognize the
truth of the crisis humanity faces. Consider, for example, the
Republican governors of Florida
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two states recently ravaged by heat
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weather
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who not only have refused to recognize the climate reality in front of
them, but have actively prevented measures that could mitigate global
warming’s effects on working people in their states. Both governors
have, in fact, signed laws _prohibiting_ local governments from
requiring employers to implement heat-safety measures for their
workers. Not to mention the brazen “quid-pro-quo” meeting
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Trump had with top oil executives where he demanded a billion-dollar
bribe for his election campaign, in return for wiping out Biden-era
climate regulations.

WHAT ELSE DID WE KNOW?

Well, there’s_ _Palestine.

I’ll admit to having felt a surge of hope when Israel and the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed the 1993 Oslo Accord.
That long-ago agreement between then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and
PLO chief Yasser Arafat began a lengthy, ultimately fruitless series
of negotiations over the fate of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,
areas seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
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I remained hopeful, but I should have known better.

Hanan Ashrawi (long one of my personal heroes) did know better. In
1991, she’d been part of the Palestinian delegation to what came to
be known as the Madrid Conference, convened by Spain at the behest of
American President George H.W. Bush to try to find a way forward for
the Palestinians and Israel. Other attendees represented the
governments of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. What Ashrawi, a
brilliant politician, scholar, and activist, didn’t know was that
the process would also spawn secret talks between Israel and the PLO
from which she and other Palestinian leaders would be excluded. Those
talks culminated in the Oslo Accords (named for the city where they
were negotiated).

Ashrawi immediately spotted a fundamental problem with those Accords,
embodied in their first product, a letter of “mutual recognition”
between the state of Israel and the PLO. “When I saw the letter, I
was furious,” she told
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September 2023. Why? Because while the PLO formally recognized the
state of Israel, and Israel, in turn, recognized the PLO as the
official representative of the Palestinian people, the letter said
nothing about the establishment of an actual Palestinian state. It
did, however, allow the PLO’s leadership to return from exile,
something they had long desired.

In that interview, Ashrawi also said:

“I told Yasser Arafat that this agreement does not give him the
basis for sovereignty or genuine access to the right to
self-determination, that this is a functional administrative
agreement… He was furious: ‘What, do you want an alternative
leadership? Do you want the PLO not to return? That’s the whole
point.’ I said the goal is for you to return freely, as a sovereign
leadership.”

“One hates to be a Cassandra,” she added, “but unfortunately, I
was 100 percent right.”

Unlike Arafat, Ashrawi had been living under the Israeli occupation
and understood how it worked. Not having experienced the occupation in
person, the exiled PLO leadership, she understood, simply couldn’t
imagine Israel’s true intentions.

In truth, it took no Cassandra-like clairvoyance to see what would
come of the Oslo agreements. Twenty years earlier, then-Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon had made Israeli intentions perfectly clear, explaining
his plans
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the occupied territories this way: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich
of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement in between the
Palestinians and another strip of Jewish settlement right across the
West Bank so that in 25 years’ time neither the U.N. nor the U.S.,
nobody will be able to tear it apart.”

Another major feature of Oslo was the creation of the Palestinian
Authority, the entity empowered (and funded) by Israel to administer
the occupied territories alongside the Israeli Defense Forces. This,
too, Ashrawi had resisted when, “way back in the 1980s,” the
Israelis offered a similar arrangement “and we refused; we said we
are not collaborators. I remember telling the military governor at the
time that we are quite capable of running our lives, but we will not
work under you.” When the PLO agreed to the formation of the
Palestinian Authority in 1993, Ashrawi understood all too well that
the new entity’s institutional survival, and (not incidentally) the
jobs of its many employees would eventually come to depend on how well
it served the occupation.

It’s not surprising then that, drawing on the insights of people
like Ashrawi, some of us predicted a version of Israel’s endgame for
Gaza back in 2005 when Ariel Sharon’s government announced its plan
to “disengage” from that strip of land, granting to the
Palestinian Authority the duty to run what has since come to be known
as the world’s largest open-air prison
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AND WHEN DID WE KNOW IT?

This capacity to predict the future is beginning to feel a bit
déjà-vu-ish. Right now, it’s not too hard to foresee the
approaching catastrophe in Gaza. Indeed, at my own university and
across the country and the world, even in Israel
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students are desperately trying to prevent a genocide already in
progress. While the “grownups” debate
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legal definition of genocide
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continue to point to the murderous reality still unfolding in Gaza and
demand that it be stopped before it’s too late.

There are enough dangers looming right in front of us that you don’t
need second sight to realize how bad it is. In addition to the clear
and present dangers of climate change, not to mention the potential
for a new global pandemic
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there’s another foreseeable horror looming over this country, which,
despite blaring sirens and flashing lights, the mainstream media seems
unable to quite believe is real. Ignoring the clanging alarms, many
media outlets continue to treat the 2024 election season as just
another contest between two equally legitimate political parties.

The reality is entirely different. In this year’s presidential
election, we are facing the potential elevation of a genuine
instrument of fascism. I think it’s appropriate to characterize
Donald Trump as an “instrument” of other people’s ideology,
because I suspect that he personally has neither the knowledge nor the
attention span to elaborate any political theory or coherent plan for
the future. His previous presidency was, in fact, marked by chaotic,
instinctive stabs in the direction of whatever target presented itself
– or was presented to him by those seeking to influence his
decisions. The world is probably lucky that the people surrounding
Trump then were a greedy, self-serving lot.

We wouldn’t be that lucky in a second Trump presidency
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It doesn’t take a prophet to imagine what such a regime might look
like. All you have to do is dip into the 887-page _Mandate for
Leadership_
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Heritage Foundation has prepared for his future presidency. It lays
out an explicit vision of an authoritarian government serving the
interests of the wealthy, one likely to unfold under the auspices
of Project 2025 [[link removed]], a step-by-step plan
to replace our democratic government apparatus with
Heritage-vetted-and-trained political functionaries.

We don’t need Cassandra to predict that future. All we need to do is
pay attention to what’s right in front of us right now.

_[REBECCA GORDON, a TomDispatch regular
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taught for many years in the philosophy department at the University
of San Francisco. Now, semi-retired from teaching, she continues to be
an activist in her faculty union. She is the author of Mainstreaming
Torture
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and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes
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_Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon. Cross-posted with permission. May not
be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
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* 2024 Elections
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* Donald Trump
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* Fascism
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* 9/11
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Gaza
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* Palestine
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* Israel
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* Oslo Accords
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* PLO
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* Climate Change
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* Climate Crisis
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* Cassandra
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* Panama
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