The LA Times reports today that we’re spying on our new bffs, the Iraqi army:

Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army’s violent push into Basra three months ago.

This reminds me of one of those rocky romantic relationships that’s just about ready to go into the toilet.

The kind where one partner suspects that the other is cheating on him and then hires a private detective to track her movements.

Or takes the far less expensive option of stalking her all by himself.

We’re going to take a break here at AGS for a few days.

This means that I’ll get to see my family, ride the bike and catch up on my reading to celebrate American’s birthday.

Tish has been pretty busy with Uplift at Harding and Alan’s been working a lot so it’s been a typical summer for us - we’ve all been moving very fast in different directions.

As the joke goes, I knew it was time to go home the other day when I saw my picture on a carton of milk.

And as much as I like my AGS students, I suspect that their parents want them more than I do right now. After the break, we’ll have another three weeks together.

I gave my students a short assignment to read over the break, so I’ll give you one too.

Complete the following sentence with five words or less: “For me, the thing I appreciate the most about being an American is ___________________”.

(That’s you, not ME).

A story in the New York Times today reports that the American military trainers in Guantánamo Bay based an entire interrogation class on a chart copied from another source.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

I think this is probably the same manual they used when I was going through Naval aircrew survival training in 1977.

I remember being told to never get caught in a lie because your interrogators will make your life miserable.  On the other hand, it was okay to give misleading information up to the point where they conclude that you are an idiot.

That’s always worked for ME.

But as we prepare to celebrate 232 years of freedom, the last thing thing in the world I need to know is that my government has been imitating the bad guys all these years.

Somebody sent me a link to this YouTube video of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of American Empire: What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire.

It’s worth a look, even if you don’t agree with Zinn’s thesis. I am familiar with Zinn’s work, particularly his People’s History of the United States but I had never seen his work put together in this manner before.

His argument is comparable to that made by Noam Chomsky and other scholars that America behaves no differently from other empire-building nations, in spite of all the trappings of human rights and democracy promoted by our political leaders.

Professor Zinn’s view that what ultimately motivates nations to do what they do is based more on power than principle is hard to argue against. The fact that the prevailing paradigm for most of the history of the modern international system has been realism (realpolitik) rather than liberal-idealism confirms this. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of American foreign policy is that we are somehow “different” is that American hegemony is based on enduring principles of individual freedom rather collective greed.

It may be impossible for a great power to be both the policeman of the world and at the same time a genuine defender of liberal democracy. This is because one requires the use force and the other requires tolerance.

America can best be described as a work in progress.

Even the preamble to our fundamental law makes it clear that what we are all about is creating a “more perfect” union of states, ethnicities, religions, and economic classes.

As the poem by Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor puts it, America is a beacon to the world and most of us, no matter how our ancestors got into this country, are the children of huddled masses yearning to breath free.

Americans do amazing things - we feed the world, we educate the poor, we defend the defenseless.

We do some pretty dumb things too - the history as a nation is demarcated by a nasty civil war that was fought over the issue of slavery. On either side of that war, we’ve fought too many other unnecessary wars in the name of things like “Manifest Destiny” and the preservation of empire.

Perhaps our worst characteristic has been closing the door to this great county just as soon as we’ve stepped through it. At the same time, we’ve forced both Native Americans and imported Americans to fight for their rights at every turn. Too often today, we still tend to segregate ourselves by race and class.

Likewise, it has taken us too long to recognize the full rights of American women –it’s only been within my lifetime that women and minorities stood any chance of holding public office in significant numbers in this country.

This morning, if you’re lucky enough to call yourself an American, you can’t look at the history of this country and not be proud of what Americans have accomplished. In spite of the battles we’ve fought over sexism and racism, the results of the 2008 Democratic primary are the best sign that we’re getting better and still interested in creating a more perfect union.

Please take a moment today to reflect on the fact that nominating an African-American man to run for the highest office in this country — a position once reserved exclusively by law for property-owning white makes — is an amazing historical accomplishment.

I’m proud to call myself a Democrat today.

More importantly, I’m proud to call myself an American.

Visions of Humanity has released its Global Peace Index, ranking 140 nations in terms of their relative peacefulness.

• Bad news: We’re #97.
• Worse news: That’s +7 from last year (the lower the number, the more peaceful you are)
• Good news: I don’t live in Sudan (#138), Somalia (#139) or Iraq (#140).
• Even better news: Our neighbor Canada (#11) is very peaceful and they’re ripe for the pickin’.

The index’s methodology is discussed here.

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair. - Arnold Toynbee

I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball. - Gerald Early

Several years ago, I participated in a weekend exercise with a group of high school students at a church in Nashville designed to teach us something about global poverty.

We fasted, prayed together and read stories that were intended to get us to think more seriously about poverty and how Christians should respond to it.

I still use some of the things I learned that weekend in my international relations and developing nations courses to illustrate the North-South gap in terms of resources and standards of living.

I think my favorite recent statistic in this regard is the $36 billion that Americans spend on weight loss products and services each year. While many of us struggle with our weight, much of the world’s struggles just to stay alive.

For most of the people who will read my blog today, the recent doubling of the cost of rice and other crops is an inconvenience but for the majority of people in this world, it’s devastating and life threatening.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life in the twenty-first century that we are no closer to figuring out why so many people are barely getting by while so may of us live in unprecedented prosperity.

Why is this the case? I struggle with the answer to that question every semester as I’m concluding my IR classes with a chapter on economic development but I’m starting to realize that the answer is not going to be found in a textbook.

It may be found in this parable I read as part of that fasting weekend many years ago. I have long since lost the original but I think it went something like this:

One morning, the citizens of a large, walled city woke up to discover a large pile of clothes and food outside the city gate. The food was enough to feed everyone in the city for an entire day and the clothing was better and finer than anything they had ever worn.

The city’s political and religious leaders quickly concluded that the food and clothing were a blessing from the Lord and a clear indication that their city was the best city in the world. So they ate all the food and threw away their old clothes in exchange for the new ones.

The next day, they discovered a new pile of food and clothing and concluded once again that it was a blessing from the Lord in appreciation for their love for him. So, they threw away their day-old clothes and ate all of the food.

This went on for several years. Eventually, the citizens of the town started to put on weight and their landfills became clogged with clothing that had hardly been worn. All the while, the people continued to think of themselves as “blessed” and prosperous because they loved the Lord so much.

One day, the Lord arrived in the town to much excitement. Everyone wanted to let him know how much they loved him for being so good to their town. “We really didn’t need all that food and clothing you left for us each day but you gave it to us anyway”, they said. “You must really love us”.

When the Lord saw how healthy and well dressed they were, he sadly said, “You are correct, I love you very much. But you never realized why I did this for you. I gave you more than you needed because I thought that of all people in this world, you would be the ones most willing to share those blessings with others who don’t have as much. In that way, you would have helped them and and really worshiped me the way I want to be worshiped.”

It seems to me that if America were in fact the Christian nation we claim to be that there would be no need for government welfare or foreign aid.

Instead, the prosperity that has made America a great nation would be unselfishly shared by the people God seems to have blessed the most with people who not been as fortunate.

God has blessed America. Let’s do more to show Him that we know the reason why.

Submitted for your consideration: Meet King Joe (1951).

Back in the day, when Harding University was really in the business of promoting Americanism and free enterprise, the American Studies Institute produced a series of cartoons designed to illustrate the superiority of American capitalism.

Here’s what you may learn from this cartoon:

• Americans are superior to foreigners but it has nothing to do with race or religion.
• The strength and efficiency of American workers is a result of technology.
• The difference between a rich person who contributes nothing to an economy and a poor person who contributes nothing is more than just a corn-cob pipe a a jug of moonshine.
• Investment makes a worker’s labor worth more because he produces more (not less, as argued by the labor theory of value).
• Chinese workers look funny.
• You should have invested in Jo Jo Hosiery in 1951.
• At one time, Americans owned 54% of the world’s radios, practically all of the refrigerators in existence and held a near monopoly on the world’s bathtubs.

Thus making us the most informed, coolest and finest-smelling workers on the planet.

Long time readers of the blog will remember that I uploaded another one of these productions, Make Mine Freedom, to YouTube about two years ago.

I loaded a higher-quality version of that cartoon yesterday — you may want to re-adjust your links if you’ve been using it.