Chippshots

New Threat to American Democracy: Special Ops Forces' William McRaven

2012-02-13T02:21:00.001-05:00

As reported in the NYT . . . Admiral William McRaven, head of US Special Operations Command, wants more leeway to deploy his people wherever he sees the need.

Adm. William H. McRaven . . . is pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy. The plan would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their war-fighting equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed.

It would also allow the Special Operations forces to expand their presence in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

So, in other words, what we're seeing is a push by a now almost heroic figure in the US military (remember: Special Ops include the Navy SEAL teams, currently at the top of the US's super-heroes list for the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden) to allow him to insert his guys anywhere across the planet in order to take out "bad guys" - all of this essentially under the radar (both literally and metaphorically speaking), with minimal accountability beyond Mr. Obama's Situation Room or the locked doors of hush-hush Congressional committees.

And this accords with so-called American values, how?

We've come a long way from the era of America's heroes being citizen-soldiers like Audie Murphy.

And, somewhere, George Orwell must be chuckling. 1984 is creeping up on us.

A New Crusade for US Militarists and Neocons: Syria

2012-02-10T12:46:00.001-05:00

The Bobbsey twins +1 of American militarism abroad now demand that the US provide military assistance to the Syrian rebels, and that Mr. Obama leave no option off the table.

I speak of course of GOP senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, along with Joe Lieberman - as reported by US News and World Report and Jim Lobe at IPS. Lobe also notes that some of the usual suspects among the neocons and liberal hawks - specifically, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic - are beating the drums for Western intervention.

Fortunately (and as Lobe notes as well), there's been some pushback from people who truly understand what's going on in Syria (but are also wise enough to admit that no one truly has a handle on what's going on). I recommend (among others) these pieces today from Patrick Seale (who puts it all in a much deeper historical perspective) and Marc Lynch (who lays out eloquently and cogently the reasons why arming Syria's rebels might be a very bad idea).

For that matter, as a partial template for what might transpire in Syria after any prospective NATO intervention, see this recent NYT report from Anthony Shadid about how Libya's militias continue to operate uncontrolled.

The country that witnessed the Arab world’s most sweeping revolution is foundering. So is its capital, where a semblance of normality has returned after the chaotic days of the fall of Tripoli last August. But no one would consider a city ordinary where militiamen tortured to death an urbane former diplomat two weeks ago, where hundreds of refugees deemed loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi waited hopelessly in a camp and where a government official acknowledged that “freedom is a problem.” Much about the scene on Wednesday was lamentable, perhaps because the discord was so commonplace.

Libya, of course, has fallen off most Americans' radar screens, having been assigned to the "we won" list and chalked up as an achievement for Mr. Obama's tenure as commander-in-chief. But a trail forward there has not yet been blazed.

And keep in mind that Syria is even more complicated internally, and has borders with other countries that have themselves been de-stabilized (hat-tip to Mr. Bush and our Israeli "allies") and could easily be pushed into renewed violence if Syria were to fragment. I speak especially of Iraq and Lebanon, of course, where the sectarian implications of a dissolving Syria could be particularly dire. (Tony Karon has a marvelous post at Time's Global Spin that pulls together the complexities of it all.)

The Nazi SS, US Marines, and Historical Amnesia

2012-02-10T10:38:00.001-05:00

In yet another public-relations coup for the US military, a very damaging photo is making the cyber-rounds, only weeks after the photo documenting some of our fun-loving boys pissing on the corpses of Afghan resistance fighters (AKA "Taliban"). (And, please, no more about the stress of combat as an excuse. A group-piss is hardly a knee-jerk reaction to stress. It took at least minimal planning, as well as group cooperation. It was also incredibly stupid. It invites reprisals against American military personnel - or Afghans who might be perceived as supporting them - by enraged Taliban fighters, whose traditional culture of warfare already included a no-holds-barred approach, including torture and mutilation of corpses - as Soviet soldiers posted to Afghanistan during the USSR's occupation there in the 1980s found out.)

This photo is even less arguably impromptu. It's a nicely planned and posed composition featuring Marine scout snipers in front of a US flag. Directly beneath it is a flag bearing the letters "SS" in a script that matches that used by the Nazi SS during World War II.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I checked out (at the link above), along with the report, the poll asking readers their opinion of whether it was OK for these Marines to do this. I voted "No; it was inappropriate", then clicked to see the results so far, to find that an equal number of voters indicated "Yes, it was OK" because the Marines might have been unaware of the symbol's associations. As someone suggested, perhaps they even thought it was cool that SS here could be interpreted as "scout sniper."

Are they kidding? Then, how did they happen to find this specific symbol - and make this flag - in the first place?! Obviously, some one (or more) of them had seen it before, and knew that it stood for the concept of "killer," at the very least. At worst (or at least worse), they might have known that it was a symbol often adopted to express white Aryan supremacy (as in this tattoo on the back of an Indiana Aryan supremacist)

That they wouldn't have known that this symbol wasn't, in fact, that of the most brutal arm of the Nazi war machine (and of the killing machine at Auschwitz and Dachau) beggars belief.

Yet, I remember all too well my shock at encountering the report of an incident at the Houston airport several years ago, when someone approached the public-address person and asked him/her to please page Herman Goering, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Adolph Eichmann - and, cluelessly, s/he did.

And that was followed by my even greater shock when I relayed this account, and mentioned these names - while projecting powerpoint images of their faces - before a classroom of about 40 students, only to see several faces looking on quizzically, and then hurriedly writing down these names.

Does that mean we ought to give these Marines, therefore, a pass? I say, NO.

But it does tell me (or, better, remind me; I cannot be surprised) that something has gone horribly wrong in how and what we teach our young people about history, and about how important it is that we never, ever forget some things - like what the SS, and the Nazis, were all about.

Niall Ferguson: Excited about Bombing Iran

2012-02-06T10:57:00.001-05:00

Read it here, if you can stand the smell. It's one thing to analyze the consequences of an attack on Iran. It's something of an entirely different order to do it so flippantly, and to wax on about Israel's hugely successful war of 1967 (which, in the long view, may well be seen as a pivotal moment that sent both Israel's future - and that of much of the Middle East - into inexorable decline). Then, to cap it off with what seems to be genine excitement to be on the "eve of some creative destruction"?

Quite awhile ago I'd come to the conclusion that Ferguson had gone from semi-serious historian to Western-supremacist polemicist. Now he looks - to me, at least - more and more a celebrity-driven fool.

For a polemic, yet much more humane essay on the idiocy of those who would have us all quivering before Iran's supposed existential threat to us all, I recommend instead this piece from Glenn Greenwald.

Netanyahu to Visit AIPAC Conference Next Month. Wow.

2012-02-05T15:03:00.001-05:00

As reported via ABC. Expect him to arrive with crates full of meat to lob to the awaiting - and adoring -- GOP/Christian Zionist faithful, and the vast majority of the US Congress. Expect Mitt, Newt, and Rick to await in humble attendance.

But if Obama has any guts, he will do no more than meet Bibi quietly - and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that any Israeli attack on Iran will be not only disavowed, but condemned, by the United States. Obama should also let him know that any further attempts by Netanyahu to insert the nonsense of Iran=Hitler=Second Holocaust into American electoral politics will be condemned - rudely - for the meddling charade that it is.

Much as Nikita Kruschev did with the young John F. Kennedy, for the last 3+ years, Netanyahu has played Obama like the proverbial drum (as some of us feared he might do even at the outset of his presidency). Well, in 1962 Kennedy had his Cuban missile crisis moment, which proved that he had the mettle to deal with the more experienced Soviet premier. Of course, in that crisis, the US Congress more or less had Kennedy's back. Mr. Obama will not have that luxury.

Indeed, in matters as serious as that of a supposed ally dragging his country into a potentially catastrophic war, no president ought to be reduced to standing on the outside while his Congress helps that ally tug at the drag-lines. But to such a sorry state have American politics now declined.

Robert Kagan Argues for Continued US Global Dominance

2012-02-04T21:52:00.001-05:00

Robert Kagan makes his case (here, at WaPo) for keeping cuts to US military budget as small as possible. Why? Because America is the indispensable nation - and only American hard power (he seems to scoff at Joseph Nye's "soft" stuff) can be trusted to police the trade routes and keep upstarts like India and China from claiming "spheres of influence" and dragging the world into chaos. Odd, isn't it, that a man who writes histories of the United States doesn't remember when another upstart during the early 19th century declared itself the possessor of a sphere of influence: most of the Western hemisphere. That Monroe Doctrine thing.

By the end of his essay, Kagan even makes a thinly veiled reference to the golden age of the Pax Romana, as if the US must remain the modern incarnation of that.

Puts me in mind of the words the Roman historian Tacitus put in the mouth of the ancient Briton chieftain Calgacus, who was characterizing the nature of Rome's empire - that Pax Romana of Kagan's golden memory:

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Or, for that matter, why not remember here the accounts of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, who describes how during the later 1st century CE, Rome devastated the city of Jerusalem, demolished the Second Temple of the Jewish people, killed thousands of the city's inhabitants, and forced thousands more into exile? By the way, isn't there some irony in the circumstance that the self-proclaimed descendants of those exiles - the modern people of Israel - have been, like King Herod the Great, the "client-state" enforcer of the Pax Americana as it was imposed in the Middle East. (I say self-proclaimed because the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has made a strong case that modern Israelis can't in fact make that claim; here's Tony Judt's comments on Sand's book.)

I'm surprised that Robert Kagan (and his brother and fellow hawk Fred) didn't pick up on this. They are, after all, the sons of a truly eminent historian of ancient Greece and Rome, Professor Donald Kagan.

Robert Kagan should think Vietnam - and Iraq, and Afghanistan; and maybe even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where literally the US made a desert and called it peace.

The Pax Americana sits poised to drop into history's proverbial dustbin. I don't expect most of the rest of the planet to shed many tears. If Americans ever wise up to people like Robert (and Fred) Kagan, maybe they won't need to, either.

Israel Bluffing its Way into Armageddon?

2012-02-03T18:31:00.001-05:00

With the warnings from Netanyahu and Barak about the Iranian "threat" and Israel's "necessary" resposne becoming ever more shrill and insistent, we've reached a truly scary place. If Gareth Porter's IPS report (which Juan Cole uses superbly as a springboard to jump all over WINEP, AIPAC et al.) is accurate, then the US has reached a point where it has no leverage whatsoever with the Israelis beyond saying that if they attack Iran, they're on their own.

Thing is, will they actually do it? And if they do, and Iran retaliates against Israel, will Obama be able to resist the wailing and howling from Congress and Christian Zionist pulpits across the US demanding that the US ride to the rescue?

Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett remain skeptical that Israel will actually launch an attack. But they also lay out what may be the political calculus among Bibi's crowd:

Israelis with access to the Prime Minister’s office tell us that Netanyahu and his inner circle have long believed that Obama is politically vulnerable. From this perspective, ordering an Israeli strike before the U.S. presidential election in November could seem the “smart” play: it would be very hard for Obama to try to distance himself from the Israeli action (something that, according to Ignatius, the Obama Administration seems to believe it can do) without seriously jeopardizing his re-election; at the same time, if Obama were to win re-election, it is better, from an Israeli perspective, to have this potentially unpleasant business of an illegal war against Iran out of the way before he is sworn in for a second term. (Recall that, the last time that the Israeli military invaded Gaza, it did so at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, to ensure that the campaign would be over before Obama was first sworn in.)

Professor Cole, on the other hand, reminds us that the wettest of Netanyahu's wet dreams is for the US to do the dirty work for Israel:

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Right wing, and their American backers in the Israel lobbies desperately want the US to go to war with Iran. Iran poses no real threat to Israel, but it does limit Israeli adventurism in Lebanon and elsewhere, and the Likud Party is all about no limits on its ambitions. Netanyahu and his American acolytes, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, keep rattling sabers, not because they likely intend that Israel will go to war with Iran, but to put pressure on Washington to do it for them. If you have never heard of WINEP, just take it from me; your representatives in Congress care what AIPAC organs think far more than they care what you think. WINEP poobah Dennis Ross put out a rumor that Obama was ready to strike Iran. This disinformation 1) put pressure on Iran; 2) put pressure on Obama and 3) legitimized before the fact any aggressive Israeli action.

According to Porter's report, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered to the Israelis the strongly worded message that the US will not back them in any attack on Iran. The Israelis insist, though, that they will make this decision only as they see fit. Yet as the Leveretts mentioned, Netanyahu knows that Congress, Fox News, and the Washington Post's editorial board have his back, and that a failure on Obama's part to rush to Israel's defense if Iran retaliates will surely cost Obama the election in November.

(Eli Clifton at LobeLog does indeed report a recent poll indicating that only 17% of Americans support military action against Iran. That's sort of reassuring - but you have to wonder how they'd feel if the Iranians had the audacity to actually fight back.)

So, is it all a bluff? Is it all theater? Perhaps. Leon Hadar noted recently , however, that Obama may have thought he was directing the play, but the players were starting to read from a different script. Sending Dempsey with a strong message to Israel may have been Obama's attempt to regain control.

Bibi, on the other hand, is probably remembering David Ben Gurion's famous dictum: "It's not what the goyim say that counts, it's what we do."

But if all Dempsey could say was that the US would not join in any attack on Iran, that still leaves a lot of room for Bibi's doing.

My op-ed posted at Juan Cole's "Informed Comment"

2012-01-30T12:00:00.001-05:00

With my thanks to Professor Juan Cole for providing me the opportunity to publish an op-ed at his marvellous site. I've also pasted it below:

Can Obama Prevail against a Romney-Netanyahu Ticket? – Robertson

Posted on 01/30/2012 by Juan

John Robertson writes in a guest column for Informed Comment

CAN OBAMA PREVAIL AGAINST A ROMNEY-NETANYAHU TICKET?

Paul Pillar and Leslie Gelb – both of them well-respected and largely mainstream commentators on US foreign policy – have recently published essays cautioning us all – and Mr. Obama especially – to step back, breathe deeply, ask tough questions, and get sound answers before launching a military strike against Iran. And as Gelb’s piece (excerpted below) cogently notes, the silly season of presidential campaigning is going to elicit (indeed, already has elicited) a lot of tough-guy, red-blooded American bellicosity from GOP candidates eager to bash Obama and score nationally televised debate points in mega-auditoriums crammed full of lustily cheering Republican worthies:

It doesn’t take a genius to see what lies ahead in our nation’s election year. Most Republican presidential candidates are saying that Iran will never get close to nukes if they’re in the White House. The candidates are outdoing one another in outrageous commitments to sound tough. Recently, Mitt Romney put it like this: “If we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon … If you’d like me as the next president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” And though we all know how careful Obama is, the dynamics of campaigns are bound to push him toward incaution to fend off charges of “weakness.” This is what happens to presidents in most elections.

One might be a bit reassured in all of this by the recent claims by Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak that Israel at this point has no intention of attacking Iran, and by recent indications that Obama’s people (including Sec of Defense Leon Panetta as well as the US intelligence establishment) have been pushing back (especially against Israel), hard, against the push to attack Iran.

But let’s also not forget that Mr. Netanyahu would like nothing better than to see Obama evicted – as ingloriously as possible – from the White House, and knows that when it comes to Israel’s interests, Congress has his back. It also stands to reason that, assuming that he becomes the GOP candidate, Mitt Romney – as Leslie Gelb notes – will continue to paint Obama as a temporizing coward unwilling to take on the Iranian leadership. (He will, of course, label the ever more stringent US-inspired sanctions against Iran as too weak a response.)

Moreover, Romney, whose social-conservative bona fides have been hammered by his GOP opponents, will be desperate to find an issue that will energize social and religious conservatives to line up behind him and flock to the polls come November. The obvious issue? Iran, and the “existential threat”/”second Holocaust” its nuclear program poses for Israel. Hyping that issue would rally to the side of this Mormon former governor of a northern liberal state (where he was also the architect of a predecessor of the reviled and despised “Obama-care”) millions of Israel-firsters - and especially, millions of white Christian-evangelical, largely southern conservatives who love Israel, have little faith in Barack Hussein Obama’s love for Israel (and, to a significant degree, cannot get their heads around the fact that a black First Family is occupying the White House).

And the “existential threat” issue is, of course, a dirge that Netanyahu has been wailing on the international stage for years, and that, Bibi knows, is a card that he – as well as AIPAC and other denizens of the Israel lobby – can play very effectively if he wants to influence the American electorate. . . . which he surely would love to do in 2012. Bibi wants Barack out of the Oval Office. Watch for him to reach out to Mitt, with both arms.

At that point, Obama may be hard pressed to resist the political expediency of a response that will entail ramping up the US military presence in the Persian Gulf, and the implied, but increasingly overt, threat to Iran.

At which point, Leslie Gelb, Paul Pillar, and millions of the rest of us will have to hope and pray that the Iranian leadership will step back, breathe deeply, ask tough questions, and get sound answers before lashing out with military action against the US, or Israel.

___________

John Robertson is professor of ancient Near East and Modern Middle East at Central Michigan University and maintains the Chippshots blog

Obama to Netanyahu: Tear Down This (Western/Wailing) Wall!?

2012-01-30T11:56:00.001-05:00

Via Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss - From the world of Christian Zionist Fantasyland (well, that'd be insulting Walt Disney) . . . OK, maybe LooneyTunes (no, wait - that'd be dissing Bugs Bunny). Well, whatever . . .

The depth and intensity of the Christian Zionist/Likudnik lobby's hatred for Barack Hussein Obama would be almost comical, it that hatred wasn't so scary - and didn't proceed from some self-proclaimed love for Jesus.

A Way Forward in Israel-Palestine? One State!

2012-01-29T17:12:00.001-05:00

I cannot recommend highly enough the essay that appears today at Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" site. Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled, two Israeli academics, rationally and succinctly conclude that the two-state solution beloved of the Clinton-Bush-Obama foreign-policy establishment (including Dennis Ross, the report of whose departure from the halls of the DoS seems to have been quite premature) is as dead as the proverbial doorknob.

Why? The settlements - and the settlers - of course.

That comes as hardly a surprise - except perhaps to Elliott Abrams, who has never relented in his opinion that the settlements are NOT the problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ought not be the centerpiece in any "peace process." Well, folks, the peace process is going nowhere, and has been a sham in what amounts to living memory for many Palestinians - and I'm hard pressed not to believe that Mr. Abrams' attempts to deflect attention from the settlements was nothing more than a holding action intended to give Netanyahu and his ilk all the time they needed to cement those "facts on the ground." You can bet that whenever Mr. Abrams passes, something nice will be named for him in Israel.

What Peled and Peled recommend is most certainly the only remaining course of action that (1) provides at least some modicum of fairness and justice for the Palestinian people, and (2) might ensure the future viability of a state called "Israel" that might still constitute, to some extent, a Jewish "homeland":

Instead of pursuing the mirage of a two-state solution, would-be peace makers should recognize the fact that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in fact constitute one state that has been in existence for nearly forty-five years, the longest lasting political formation in these territories since the Ottoman Empire. (The British Mandate for Palestine lasted thirty years; Israel in its pre-1967 borders lasted only nineteen years). The problem with that state, from a democratic, humanistic perspective, is that forty percent of its residents, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, are non-citizens deprived of all civil and political rights. The solution to this problem is simple, although deeply controversial: establishing one secular, non-ethnic, democratic state with equal citizenship rights to all in the entire area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

The stability of the future secular, democratic Israeli-Palestinian state would depend not only on it being truly democratic, but also on the strictest constitutional separation between state and religion. This should not mean forced secularization or placing restrictions on the free exercise of religion, but it does mean that the state will neither sanction nor subsidize religious activities and institutions, nor will it tolerate religious practices that are discriminatory towards women.

Gee. The equality of all citizens, no matter their religious beliefs. Separation of religion and state. No discrimination against women. Kinda sound like ideas that most Americans would think of as distinctly all-American, don't they? And these ideas are being propounded by two citizens of Israel.

So, why do I feel safe and secure in assuming that those red-blooded all-American boys Mitt, Newt, and Rick (and - OK, OK - Barack too) would reject this solution outright?

New "Advance" in US Drone "Capabilities"

2012-01-27T14:11:00.001-05:00

As reported in the LA Times, the US Navy is now testing a new drone with "capabilities" that raise serious questions, once again, about accountability.

The Navy's new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It's designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation's most difficult maneuvers.

What's even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone's ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

Although humans would program an autonomous drone's flight plan and could override its decisions, the prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.

"Lethal actions should have a clear chain of accountability," said Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist and robotics expert. "This is difficult with a robot weapon. The robot cannot be held accountable. So is it the commander who used it? The politician who authorized it? The military's acquisition process? The manufacturer, for faulty equipment?"

Sharkey and others believe that autonomous armed robots should force the kind of dialogue that followed the introduction of mustard gas in World War I and the development of atomic weapons in World War II. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the group tasked by the Geneva Conventions to protect victims in armed conflict, is already examining the issue.

"The deployment of such systems would reflect … a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities," committee President Jakob Kellenberger said at a recent conference. "The capacity to discriminate, as required by [international humanitarian law], will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system."

How Washington Feels about Egypt

2012-01-27T12:55:00.001-05:00

Posted by Issandr el Amrani at The Arabist is an insightful letter from Jon Alterman (director of the Middle East program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS]) that outlines the positions of two opposing camps in DC regarding hoped-for outcomes of Egypt's ever-in-flux political situation. I highly recommend reading the entire piece, but the positions boil down to those who want to see the military dominate the Egyptian government vs. those who favor broader political participation via properly empowering parliament and the army's standing down and returning to the barracks. Alterman places himself in the latter camp, but evidently felt compelled to write the letter to refute el Amrani's accusations that Alterman in fact belongs to the former camp by his alleged affiliation with a so-called SQL (status-quo lobby) that prefers the "stability" that had been ensured by the previous military-based regime of Hosni Mubarak (and presumably by SCAF's retention of power).

Perhaps CSIS's heaviest hitter, though, and probably CSIS's most recognizable public face, is Anthony Cordesman. Cordesman was indeed an occasional critic of some of the more bone-headed initiatives and outcomes of Bush-era neoconservatism. But customarily he has been of the pragmatist-realist school, most notably, that element of it that tends to perceive Middle Eastern developments through the prism of the necessity of safeguarding American interests by preserving American global military supremacy (a theme he expressed, for example, in this 2008 WaPo piece about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still "winnable"). And for decades, of course, American interests and supremacy in the Middle East have been linked umbilically (at least in the eyes of the Beltway establishment - which includes CSIS) with Israel's interests and regional military supremacy.

Many would find it difficult to reconcile that stance with what Alterman says he favors (and I most certainly hope to see) - the Egyptian army standing down and stepping aside in favor of representative democracy - especially when that democracy is to be underpinned by a parliament dominated (as Egypt's now is) by Islamists, many of whom (despite recent statements to the contrary) have little patience with Israel and are going to be accountable to an electorate that likely has even less patience.

It's nice to see Alterman distance himself somewhat from the kind of working assumptions that seem to motivate Cordesman (and for that matter, so many of CSIS's stable of experts).

EU Sanctions on Iran to Head Off an Israel-launched War?

2012-01-26T16:45:00.001-05:00

From Barbara Slavin at IPS comes a report that highlights US self-satisfaction with the EU's newly hardening stance against Iran, which recently culminated in harsher sanctions against Tehran, but that also suggests quite strongly that the EU's harsher approach reflects the extent to which the EU is essentially running scared before the Israelis' persistent threat to take military action and thereby plunge the region - and beyond - into a potentially catastrophic war:

European and U.S. experts on Iran cite the fear of a new war as a key reason for the EU decision.

"The French administration is worried about Israel attacking Iran this year," a French researcher, speaking on condition of anonymity because he advises the French government, told IPS Wednesday.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague, answering questions Tuesday in the House of Commons, said the new sanctions are designed to "to lead us away from any conflict by increasing the pressure for a peaceful settlement of these disputes."

The EU decision reflects Israeli success in pressuring both the United States and Europe. Israeli officials have repeatedly called for "crippling" sanctions against Iran, suggesting that might forestall their use of military force against Iran's nuclear facilities – and collateral damage in terms of sharply higher oil prices and increased regional instability.

There is particular concern that Israel might act in 2012 out of concern that Iran is nearing nuclear weapons capability and in the belief that the Barack Obama administration would be obliged to support Israel in a U.S. presidential election year.

Remarkable, isn't it? The supposed "light unto the nations" is able to hype what remains a non-existent existential threat into its own private casus belli, yet still feel confident enough of the good will (or, perhaps more accurately, domestic political realities) of the so-called "Great Powers" to blackmail them (us) into ramping up what already is amounting to an economic war that, frankly, is taking a much direr toll on the Iranian people than on the decision-makers of the Islamist regime. And all of this, over a nuclear program that the Iranians are, in fact, entitled to develop, as long as there's no proof that said program is being weaponized. As of this moment, there is no such proof. And quite frankly, given their history since 1980, which has included an invasion by Iraq under Saddam Hussein (who was supported by the US, whose navy effectively entered that war on Iraq's side with its actions in the Persian Gulf), followed by an invasion and occupation of Iraq by US-Anglo forces (during which the word in DC's halls of neocon wisdom was that real men go on to Tehran) - - how could anyone possibly blame them for wanting to possess a nuclear deterrent?

I have a proposal. The minute that it becomes plain that the IDF is indeed going to strike Iran and risk plunging us all into the abyss, the United Nations impose, immediately, economic sanctions of the harshest, most stringent kind on the state of Israel - and authorize all needed military action to induce the Israeli government to cease and desist in any military action against Iran.

Think that could ever happen? Naaaah.

But imagine if it did. Might that be just the kind of crisis that might, at long last, create the diplomatic leverage that might truly lead to a result that would benefit us all? I mean, specifically, the outlawing of all nuclear weapons in the Middle East - Israel included. (OK, the entire planet would be nice, but I'm willing to start off small.) Would that mean that the Arab countries would then turn against Israel and try to fulfill the Nasser-era pledges of driving the Israelis into the sea? I think not - and, at any rate, the UN (with the US and its allies) could surely pledge themselves to ensure Israel's security. But losing its nuclear trump card might force the Israelis to make some of those "painful concessions" that Netanyahu and his predecessors have so often talked about, but not make any serious effort to follow through:

evacuate all settlements from the West Bank
share Jerusalem with a truly sovereign Palestinian people
make some provision for at least a limited right of exiled Palestinians to a land where they have at least as strong and legitimate a birthright as the millions of Jews who emigrated there in the 20th century.

Might that mark the end of Israel as a "Jewish state." Perhaps. But might not the creation of a truly binational, or multinational, Israel/Palestine/whatever become a blessing for all involved? The Palestinians restored to their homeland; the Jews of Israel no longer imprisoned by the bunker mentality with which they now are afflicted. Indeed, might not the creation of such an Israel be a true "light unto the nations"?

More on the US Military's Threat to American Democracy

2012-01-26T15:50:00.001-05:00

Via Ezra Klein's daily Wonkbook (which links to this WSJ report - unfortunately, I'm not a subscriber) comes a brief report on the Pentagon's proposed budget. I wrote a few weeks ago about the dangers of an American military that will be operating increasingly under the radar and in a manner increasingly opaque as far as Congressional oversight - and public accountabilty - are concerned. Here's what Klein notes:

The Pentagon will roll out its budget today, report Adam Entous, Julian Barnes, and Siobhan Gorman: "The Pentagon plans to expand its global network of drones and special-operations bases in a fundamental realignment meant to project U.S. power even as it cuts back conventional forces. The plan, to be unveiled by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday and in budget documents next month, calls for a 30% increase in the U.S. fleet of armed unmanned aircraft in the coming years, defense officials said. It also foresees the deployment of more special-operations teams at a growing number of small 'lily pad' bases across the globe where they can mentor local allies and launch missions...Defense officials said the U.S. Army plans to eliminate at least eight brigades while reducing the size of the active duty Army from 570,000 to 490,000, cuts that are likely to hit armored and heavy infantry units the hardest. But drone and special-operations deployments would continue to grow as they have in recent years."

The Founding Fathers could never have imagined the extent to which global relations and military technology were to be transformed in the almost quarter of a millennium since 1776. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to believe that they would have approved.

Hey Newt, Remember Iraq?

2012-01-23T11:39:00.001-05:00

Peter Beinart "pens" at The Daily Beast a superb comment on GOP "amnesia" about the Iraq war, and about media's responsibility to hold to account people like Gingrich, Santorum and Romney, all of whom supported the invasion in 2003, and evidently believe even now that it was the right thing to do.

The extraordinary thing about today’s Iran debate is that being wrong about Iraq has barely undermined the hawks’ influence at all. In 2012, as in 2002, Republicans are driving the political discussion, and in 2012, as in 2002, Democrats are petrified about being seen as too soft. Once again the media, which did not cover itself with glory in the run-up to Iraq, bears part of the blame. To allow Gingrich, Santorum and Romney to saber-rattle on Iran, as they have in debate after debate, without forcing them to confront the consequences of their saber-rattling on Iraq, is professional malpractice. If I were John King—or his equivalent on another network—I’d force Gingrich to answer that question in every foreign-policy segment of every debate. Let’s see Newt demagogue his way out of that one.

(Beinart also mentions something I hadn't known: in a November debate, Gingrich said that if elected, he'd nominate John Bolton as his secretary of state. I can imagine few decisions that would be more damaging to US interests - and international respect for those interests (outside Jerusalem, that is) - than nominating this bullying, tactless, hard-Right neocon.)

That these same men can now bang the drum so insistently for military strikes against Iran and receive such lusty support from the GOP rank-and-file speaks volumes about the sad propensity for the American electorate to dismiss the past and move on to fix their collective gaze on the next shiny bauble that cable TV, You-Tube, or (metaphorically speaking) talk radio dangles before their eyes.

They might not have Iraq to so dangle (not that they care to anymore. "The troops" are outa there now, so what do we care, right?) Iraq's government seems to be well along the path toward dissolving, even as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki fashions the country into a police state (again) (according to a Human Rights Watch report - but reports of abuses by the Maliki regime have been appearing regularly, for months).

Thomas Friedman once noted (during the run-up to the 1991 Gulf war) that, before then, the US considered Saddam Hussein a thug, but at least he was "our thug." Saddam was, of course, no longer in "our" camp as of summer 1990 - and 23 years later (after what future historians - including yours truly in his forthcoming book - will likely term the US's Thirty Years War with Iraq), we invaded his country, got rid of him, and eventually helped install a new Iraqi leader, Nuri al-Maliki, whom George W. Bush sized up and touted as essentially one of "us."

Except now (actually, for a couple of years now), Maliki is likewise becoming a thug: detention, torture, demonization, secret police are all in his playbook. Yet Mr. Obama not cut the cord, nor will he - especially in an election season when GOP'ers who are already hammering him on his supposed weak-kneed response to the mullahs are also eager to label him as the president who "lost Iraq."

So, Maliki - like Saddam once was - is "our thug."

And if Iraq continues to boost its oil production, the US won't touch him.

Iraq's Thirty Years War?

2012-01-21T11:49:00.001-05:00

Paul Rogers (at Open Democracy) has another installment of what's become his "Thirty Year War" series, which he started at the onset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He predicted then - even as the neocon/neanderthal warbands were dancing in jubilation around their campfires - that Mr. Bush's Mesopotamian adventure might not pan out, and that its consequences might linger ominously and long , perhaps as long as 30 years.

Boy, was Rogers right. The US's military adventure went bust, and Iraq seems to be well along the road to busting itself up. Its government and politics are in turmoil. Even with oil production inching upward, its economy is in shambles, with no real prospects for a recovery rapid enough to alleviate the destitution and psychological trauma that the US occupation inflicted on tens of thousands of its people - most notably, perhaps, its young people. A recent WaPo report featuring the current research of Iraq historian Eric Davis details much of this, along with consequences that bode very ill indeed for the future of Iraq as a unitary nation-state:

Some young Iraqis say they are glad to be rid of Saddam Hussein but feel less safe — and therefore less free — than before 2003, a sentiment reflected in dozens of interviews in eight provinces.

They view their government as a pseudo-regime that deprives them of basic rights, and they worry that their peers are being lured into the ethnic, sectarian and partisan traps of their elders. They think the world is fixating on revolutions in other Arab countries while ignoring a rotting democracy in Baghdad and their generation’s struggle to live the freedom that was promised to them 81 / 2 years ago.

“Our generation has seen enough,” said Baghdad resident Mustafa Hamza el-Ebadi, 21, who will graduate this spring with a degree in communication and engineering and wants to move to the United States. “When we were kids, there were economic sanctions. When we were teenagers, there were bodies in the street. And now there is no space to live.”

About half of Iraq’s 33 million people are 19 or younger, and no Iraqi born since Saddam came to power in 1979 has known the country to be without war or dictatorship.

Iraqis in their late teens and 20s “grew up in a very dangerous climate” that did not foster a “civilian mentality,” according to Abduljabbar Ahmad Abdullah, dean of the political science college at the University of Baghdad.

“The political socialization of that individual is not correct,” Abdullah said over tea in his campus office in October. “Every student belongs to his clan, not his country.”

When Iraqis talk about the fate of the younger generation, they use expressions similar to “crossroads” and “tipping point.”

“We are at a very critical period, with the deterioration of security and the elevation of corruption,” activist Hanaa Edwar said at a September peace festival in Baghdad’s Zawra Park. “Elections are not enough. We need active participation from young people. They are not yet polluted by politicians. They need more than hope. They need to be empowered.”

Over the past year, Rutgers University political science professor Eric Davis has conducted multiple focus groups of hundreds of Iraqis between the ages of 12 and 30. Broadly speaking, they said that they view sectarianism as damaging to their future and that they prefer not to belong to a political party. Most said that their lives have improved “somewhat” or “not much” since the U.S.-led invasion but indicated that they would not leave the country if given the opportunity, according to discussions compiled by Davis, a former director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers.

The problem, according to Davis, is that the economic and political structures are rigged to exclude most Iraqis, especially the young. Iraq ranks No. 175 of 178 as one of the world’s most corrupt countries on a list compiled by Transparency International.

Young Iraqis “have strong scores for civic motivation but no institutional outlet for that — that’s very damning,” said Davis, who will publish his findings next year in a special report for the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Iraq is just beginning to grapple with the repeated traumas it has suffered. Of the 8,000 clients at the Kirkuk Center for Torture Victims — which opened in 2005 to serve victims of Hussein’s regime — one-quarter are now dealing with psychological issues related to trauma since the American-led invasion.

“Some teenagers have a kind of phobia of going out because they’ve been raised in an environment of car explosions and kidnappings,” said Yousif Abdulmuhsin Salih, the center’s project manager. “And if parents are not treated, they can transfer their psychological condition to their children.”

Violence and dysfunction are part of growing up in Iraq and, as a result, people fend for themselves, said a 29-year-old named Mohamed, who insisted his last name be withheld because he has worked for the U.S. military and fears reprisal.

Unfortunately, as Rogers' essay makes clear, the violence and dysfunction inside Iraq may well extend into the foreseeable future. As the American military presence has wound down, bombings have been increasing, and are being perpetrated all over the country - from Basra to Mosul. There's absolutely no reason to believe that's going to stop, even with Iraqi PM al-Maliki detaining (and reportedly torturing) dozens of "Baathist terrorists" (read: Sunni Arab political opposition).

And it's not exactly as if the threat of further destabilization at the hands of the US has evaporated. As Rogers makes plain, American boots are no longer on Iraq's ground (save those of those lovable, ubiquitous contractor/mercenaries) - but the US Navy has ramped up its nearby presence:

The carrier battle-group (that is, an aircraft-carrier supported by a flotilla) headed by the USS John C Stennis has now departed to Singapore and thence back to the United States, to be replaced by the Carl Vinson carrier-battle group. In addition, though, yet another such group headed by the USS Abraham Lincoln has joined the fifth fleet in the region. While described as a "routine" deployment, this means that the Pentagon plans to keep two carrier battle-groups in the region for at least until April 2012.

The target, of course, is Iran. Even though the Israelis are backing away a bit from their attack-Iran rhetoric, and the Obama people are downplaying the Iranian nuclear threat, many in the US are trying to counteract that by banging their drums even louder. The novelist Mark Helprin recently wrote (in the WSJ - surprise!) of Iran as a "mortal threat" to the US; and the GOP presidential candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul, who likely won't be staying in the race much longer) are vying to see who can sound the toughest on the mullahs.

None of these people seem to be taking into account what would be pottentially catastrophic consequences of an attack on Iran: the thousands of Iranian (mostly Shii) refugees who might stream out of the country, likely into the southern (mostly Shii) region of Iraq. Tens of thousands of Iranians make religious pilgrimages to Najaf and Karbala every year. If they returned as refugees, one might predict that they would be welcomed at first, but as they became a drain on southern Iraq's already struggling economy and governance - and people - the Iraq "democracy" that neocons continue to tout as what Fouad Ajami called the "foreigners' gift") might crumble into complete chaos.

In which, Prof. Rogers' prediction of a Thirty Years War might prove to have been much too conservative.

Israel's Very Own Taliban?

2012-01-19T14:53:00.001-05:00

The NYT on Israel's widening "seismic rift" between seculars and Ultra-Orthodox over the issue of women's public roles and rights.

And to this, Americans contribute how much of their tax dollars?

And for this, they get - what exactly - in return?

Marines Urinating on the Taliban

2012-01-14T11:36:00.001-05:00

This cartoon (from the Lebanon Daily Star) is - to channel the old adage - worth 1000 words:

When American "Values" Reached Their Nadir

2012-01-14T11:22:00.001-05:00

Vanity Fair has just published a lengthy, searing piece titled "Guantánamo: An Oral History." It ought to be read - and spread - by any American who cares about what we still like to think of as "American values."

The introduction sets the tone:

Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees at Guantánamo were imprisoned and interrogated, is today an abandoned site. The guard towers are empty, the weeds waist high. Banana-rat droppings litter the rotting floors. Newer prisons miles away hold the detainees who remain. And “remain” is the operative word. Although Barack Obama vowed to shut the facility down, the administration’s attempts to do so have been blocked by Congress, which refuses to authorize funds to transfer detainees to prisons on the U.S. mainland.

It has been an ugly, damaging experiment. The whole point of Guantánamo was to create a regime of incarceration and interrogation—including torture—that the law could not reach: a “legal black hole,” as the English court of appeal put it. Although the 45-square-mile naval base on the southern shore of Cuba is fully subject to U.S. writ—federal environmental laws even extend to iguanas, and killing one can bring a heavy fine—the Bush administration argued from the outset that Guantánamo was outside American legal jurisdiction, and that, in essence, its personnel could treat detainees as they wished. And they did, making the name “Guantánamo” a rallying cry throughout the Islamic world.

Quickly, the piece brings us to those early days post-9/11, when "American values" were held to the fire, and unfortunately emerged scorched and tattered. Witness this exchange between Bush-administration Dept of Justice people (including Alberto Gonzales):

January 12, 2002: A team of lawyers from the White House, the vice president’s office, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department flies to Guantánamo to observe the opening of Camp X-Ray.

Manuel Supervielle (jag lawyer) About a half an hour or 45 minutes into the flight, Mr. Haynes calls me up to the front. He just said, Hey, Manny, do you have a minute? So I went up to the very front. Mr. Haynes was standing up, kind of crouching over because the plane was small. I went over next to him, basically facing towards the back of the plane with him to my left, and Mr. Gonzales is directly in front of me, and Mr. Thompson was to his left, and then Mr. Addington, and then Mr. Taft, and behind them were other folks. John Yoo and some others. Mr. Haynes says, Hey, Manny, we understand that you’ve invited the I.C.R.C. [International Committee of the Red Cross] to Guantánamo. Would you care to explain why you did that? And they said, You need to turn it off. I said, I don’t think I can do that. They all looked at each other, and Mr. Haynes says, Well, you made the call. You call and tell them that it’s not an option, it’s not possible.

I said, If we cancel, it’s going to look bad. It’s going to look like we’re trying to hide something. At one point Mr. Gonzales said to me, he goes, Manny, by having the I.C.R.C. there, they’re going to report on everything they see. That stunned me, really. I said, Sir, first of all, the I.C.R.C. doesn’t report publicly on what they find. They report back to the detaining power. He says, How do you know that? I said, They have a 150-year history of doing that, a pretty well-established record.

The entire article oozes with this stuff.

That Mr. Obama has yet to close down Guantanamo has put a huge hole through the armor of shniy-bright virtue in which he clad himself in 2008. Shame on him.

But that Mr. Bush and his cohort can now live out their buffered, sweet lives, and not be daily shunned and cursed by the public they claimed to serve - or prosecuted for the war crimes that they most surely did spawn - speaks volumes about the myth that we still call "American values."

David Ignatius' Neat Idea to Avert War with Iran

2012-01-13T13:11:00.002-05:00

At a time when absolutely nothing to inspire hope is happening in re the Iranian nukes issue comes a worthy idea from David Ignatius in today's WaPo::

So here’s a proposal in this period of deepening crisis: The United States and Iran should explore the possibility of direct contact through the sort of back channel that nations use to communicate urgent messages — namely, their intelligence services. Through this contact, each side could communicate its “red lines” in the crisis — for the United States, the insistence that Iran’s nuclear program remain peaceful; for Iran, presumably, an end to sanctions and a recognition that Iran is a significant regional power.

My nominees for this back-channel contact would be two people who have been circling each other warily for the past half-dozen years: Gen. David Petraeus, director of the CIA, and Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. These two are said to have communicated indirectly in the past about red lines in the Iraq conflict, when Petraeus was commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Suleimani was de facto chief of Iranian activities in the country.

Frankly, that such a back-channel contact might not be up and running scares the hell out of me. Meanwhile, the rhetoric, and the facts on the ground, are being ratcheted up: terrorist assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist; Iranian demands for retribution and threats to engage in reprisals; the US moving more forces into the Gulf, as a McClatchy report describes:

U.S. officials are divided over how much to publicize the deployments. Regional allies tend to dislike public discussion about their cooperation with Washington. But the Pentagon wants Iran's rulers to understand that the U.S. still has adequate forces available in case of a crisis.

They include the Army's 1st Cavalry Division's 1st Brigade, which shifted to Kuwait from Iraq when the last U.S. forces left last month. The brigade, which has more than 4,500 soldiers and is equipped with tanks and artillery, has been designated a "mobile response force" for the region, according to Col. Scott L. Efflandt, the brigade commander.

A National Guard brigade from Minnesota has been in Kuwait since August, and a combat aviation brigade arrived in December. Another major unit is heading to Kuwait shortly, though officials would not provide details.

Another approach occurred to me this morning: a humanitarian mission of American and Israeli concerned citizens willing to go to Iran and set themselves up as "human shields" near Iran's nuclear installations. This would require, of course, the permission and assistance of the Iranian government. And once they were there, things could go wrong in various ways (like the Iranians turning them into hostages, or the Mossad picking them off).
But, as they say, desperate times sometimes require desperate measures.

Israel's Dangerous Game with Iran

2012-01-12T21:37:00.003-05:00

The NYT has a must-read that examines the dangerous game that the US and Israel are playing with Iran, but shines perhaps the brightest spotlight on Israel's resort to one of its most-used tactics, historically: assassination. In this instance, we're talking about assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.

As Glenn Greenwald has pointed it, what the Israelis are doing is terrorism.

And as two US experts point out in the NYT piece, the consequences down the line - for both Israel and the US - may be extremely dangerous.

William C. Banks, an expert on national security law at Syracuse University, said he believed that for the United States even to provide specific intelligence to Israel to help kill an Iranian scientist would violate a longstanding executive order banning assassinations. The legal rationale for drone strikes against terrorist suspects — that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies — would not apply, he said.

“Under international law, aiding and abetting would be the same as pulling the trigger,” Mr. Banks said. He added, “We would be in a precarious position morally, and the entire world is watching, especially China and Russia.”

Gary Sick, a specialist on Iran at Columbia, said he believed that the covert campaign, combined with sanctions, would not persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear work.

“It’s important to turn around and ask how the U.S. would feel if our revenue was being cut off, our scientists were being killed and we were under cyberattack,” Mr. Sick said. “Would we give in, or would we double down? I think we’d fight back, and Iran will, too.”

More perspectives on the danger - and stupidity - of the US+Israel current tactics are here. And Juan Cole speculates (with some evidence to back it up, to some extent) that the latest assassination might have been a combined production of the Mossad and the anti-Iranian-regime group known as the MEK (Mujahedin e-Khalq), both of which have an established track record of terrorist assassinations.

At least the US has condemned the most recent assassination. (It remains to be seen if the Israelis will get the message, but in an election season, don't expect Obama or Clinton to call them out on this.)

Doesn't it make sense that, at some point, the Iranians will find a way to retaliate? The Iranian press is already calling for vengeance against Israel.

If Tim Tebow were Muslim

2012-01-12T19:04:00.001-05:00

Marcus Cederstrom at Salon has an interesting counterfactual that shines an interesting perspective on the current "Tebowmania" surrounding the seemingly miraculous deeds of the young, hyper-Christian quarterback of the Denver Broncos. Cederstrom asks "what if Tebow were Muslim"? But Cederstrom uses that question as a springboard into recalling for his readers the shabby treatment that was accorded to one newly crowned heavyweight champion named Cassius Clay when he converted to Islam in the early 1960s.

And I remember very well indeed all the ruckus that surrounded the change from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali (which detoured first to Cassius X, a la Malcolm). I grew up in Louisville, Ali's hometown, while he was a promising local amateur boxer (whose bouts we could sometimes watch on a local-TV channel's Saturday afternoon show, "Tomorrow's Champions"), and was a huge fan of the young Clay when he turned pro and took on a string of what seemed like (a la Joe Louis) bums of the month (beginning with one Tunney Hunsaker).

But when he "turned Muslim" right after beating Liston for the title, Louisvillians were horrified, and angry (even before the kerfuffle over Vietnam and his refusing to be drafted) - and the national press turned on him, mocked him as a kind of stupid and impressionable "Negro" man-child who couldn't even pronounce "Ali" correctly. He only got a chance to become "the Greatest" because of the Supreme Court decision, which came after the country turned against the Vietnam war, and a younger generation of Americans were able to look past the Islam "thing" (something many Americans were able to do before 9-11) and count him a hero.

Cederstrom's essay (and some comments from a Facebook friend after I'd posted it to my "wall") also got me thinking about another counterfactual.

What if Ali hadn't missed those 4.5 years during what would have been the prime of his career? It was obvious to anyone who'd seen him fight before he was outlawed that when he came back, he wasn't the same fighter (and his manager, Angelo Dundee, said so as well) - not as fast, hands not as quick. He won his fights on savvy, and sheer will. But if his title hadn't been stripped, there was no one around then who could have defeated him. The late Joe Frazier's career might never have taken off, because the younger, quicker Ali would have disposed of him as a challenger. Ali might have retired before absorbing all those headshots (many of them from his three mega-fights with Frazier) that likely caused the infirmity that almost got him killed against Larry Holmes and has afflicted him to this day.

And I also have to wonder if the courts would have pressed so hard to strip his title if he'd remained simply Cassius Clay, the kid from Louisville (brash though he was - some called him the "Louisville Lip," or even - my favorite - "Gaseous Cassius") and not "turned Muslim."

As for Tebow? I have no doubt that if Tebow were Muslim and somehow expressing that on the field or in interviews with the same exuberance with which he now displays his Christianity, there'd be huge pressure on the Broncos' coach to bench him, on-field "miracles" or no.

More Torture Tales of the CIA

2012-01-12T17:11:00.001-05:00

Published at The Atlantic today, news of a Scotland Yard report that essentially backs up claims of a British citizen who says he was tortured by the Bush-era CIA as part of their "rendition" program.

The British government admitted today that a terrorist suspect whose case has drawn international attention was interrogated by U.S. officials and tortured during the two years he was held in Morocco.

The findings, resulting from an investigation by England's highest criminal prosecution agency, contradict the obfuscation, stonewalling, and denials by American officials about the case of the suspect, Binyam Mohamed.

At one point, the Obama Administration threatened to cut off intelligence sharing with the UK if a British court ordered the release of classified documents in the case.

Mohamed was picked up in Pakistan in 2002, and U.S. officials alleged that he had undergone training at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and was preparing to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the United States.

After 18 months of interrogation in Pakistan, the CIA secretly transported him to Morocco as part of the Bush Administration's "extraordinary rendition program," according to Mohamed's lawyers, a claim that appears to be corroborated by the flight records of the CIA-chartered planes. He was later taken to Guantanamo.

The CIA has never admitted that Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British citizen, was ever held in Morocco, and has routinely denied all allegations of torture.

An American military lawyer who represented Mohamed has said that the torture he endured makes waterboarding "look like child's play."

While being interrogated, Mohamed was hanged from a wall with his feet unable to reach the floor, according to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, a London-based human rights non-profit. Then, naked women were paraded before him.

On more than one occasion, Mohamed says, men in black masks and military trousers made cuts on his chest and genitals with a razor.

At one point, a woman in the group who spoke with an American accent arrived. She took pictures of his wounds, Mohamed told his lawyer.

In a legal action brought by Mohamed's lawyers while he was still in Guantanamo, a British court said two years ago that documents supported Mohamed's allegations -- but they were classified. Both the British and American governments objected to their release.

Meanwhile, Messrs. Bush and Cheney enjoy their retirements, with nary a worry about what would be richly deserved prosecution as war criminals. And the American people, for the most part, carry on, either clueless or uncaring - even on a day with more revelations of lusty Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters.

Friedman: Political Islam without Oil(?)

2012-01-11T15:17:00.001-05:00

Thomas Friedman, wondering how political Islam can flourish (specifically in Egypt) without oil, noting that Egypt has virtually none whereas two major states dominated by Islamists (Saudi Arabia and Iran) are able to survive as Islamist states because they have so much oil.

Oddly, no reference to Gaza (governed by a freely elected Islamist group, Hamas) or Turkey (governed under a freely elected Islamist party that admittedly professes loyalty to the secularist underpinning of the modern Turkish republic.

TF also claims that both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian salafist an-Nour party were "stunned" by their success in Egypt's recent elections. Seems a bit improbable that they were stunned. Anyone who's been paying attention would know that the MB's success, and even that of the salafists', was hardly unpredictable.

Dick Cheney Clone on Obama's "Weak" Middle East Leadership

2012-01-09T11:19:00.001-05:00

Today's LA Times features an op-ed from John Hannah (former national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and a senior fellow at the ultra-neocon right Foundation for Defense of Democracies) that excoriates Mr. Obama for the US's current "weakness" in the Middle East, where, says Hannah,

concerns run deep over the administration's lack of strategic vision, its instinct for retreat and its complicity in the unraveling of a benevolent imperium that has for decades underwritten the region's security.

To wit:

In a November article, a senior Middle East correspondent for the New York Times referred matter-of-factly to an Arab world "where the United States is increasingly viewed as a power in decline." Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, no enemy of the president, has reported from Riyadh on a new activism in Saudi Arabia's policy born of "the diminished clout of the United States." Indeed, Ignatius concludes that the Saudis consider Obama "a relatively weak leader" and no longer view the United States as a guarantor of their security — a "striking" shift in the kingdom's security doctrine, which had stood for more than 60 years.

So acute is the crisis of confidence that America's closest allies now openly question Washington's reliability and mettle. Months after Obama's rapid embrace of an Egyptian revolution that toppled the United States' most important Arab partner, Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Abdullah II was asked whether the region's leaders could still depend on the U.S. With shocking candor, Abdullah responded: "I think everybody is wary of dealing with the West.... Looking at how quickly people turned their backs on Mubarak, I would say that most people are going to try and go their own way."

No less remarkable was the alarm over U.S. policy that Bahrain's foreign minister expressed in October. Clearly unnerved by a deepening sense of U.S. irresolution, the Bahraini minister implored Obama to at long last push back against Iran's repeated provocations, including an attempted plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington: "We're asking the U.S. to stand up for its interests and draw the red lines.... How many times have you lost lives, been subject to terrorist activities, and yet we haven't seen any proper response. This is really serious. It's coming to your shores now."

Isn't it obvious here that Hannah is emulating the same tone-deafness that characterized Dick Cheney's view of the Middle East? Cheney never evinced any real sympathy for the aspirations of Middle Eastern peoples as opposed to their heads of state. US Middle East policy was, in the Cheney/Hannah view, all about projecting American power, safeguarding American interests (oil and Israel), and preserving stability - and during a time (up to around 2004, at least) when the US military was roundly perceived as all-powerful and all-conquering and the US economy was robust and growing.

Now it's 2012. The assumptions about US military omnipotence are toast; the US economy has teetered on the brink, and though perhaps moving slowly toward recovery, has retreated only a few steps from that brink, toward which a new shock (say, a war against Iran?) might push it again. But most importantly, the events of the Arabs Spring/Awakening (and, for that matter, the Green Movement in Iran) have shown that the ever more informed peoples throughout the region are no longer willing to suffer and be stifled indefinitely under autocratic regimes.

Yet it is just such regimes that Hannah cites as America's now disappointed allies:

the Saudi dynasty, which spends millions to perpetuate and disseminate an extremist version of Islam
the Hashemite dynasty of Jordan, whose Harley-riding king has impressed so many of us with his "cool" yet remains steadfast in staving off democratization
the Bahrain monarchy, where a Sunni rulership tortures and kills Shii citizens
until not that many months ago, the Mubarak regime in Egypt

It's to Obama's discredit that he was so slow to disavow Mubarak, and has been reluctant to step away farther from the current leadership in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Bahrain. But Hannah's critique only affirms the worst, and ultimately most short-sighted aspects of US policy in the Middle East.

Juan Cole on the Islamists' Emergence in Egypt's Elections

2012-01-08T21:04:00.001-05:00

Very interesting post by Prof. Cole, followed by some lively critiques and exchanges. All in all, far more robust and honest discussion than Thomas Friedman's essay in today's NYT, where he basically admonishes all of us to sit back and enjoy the show, because no one knows where it's going.

Dennis Ross' Way Forward in the West Bank

2012-01-08T11:11:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's WaPo featured a Dennis Ross essay that suggested a way forward for the "peace process": allowing Palestinians access to the stone quarries located in what the Oslo Accords designated Area C in the West Bank - areas that remain under control of the IDF. Such a move would perhaps boost the West Bank economy, as well as signal to the Palestinians that the current Israeli government ultimately has good intentions toward them and indeed looks forward to a negotiated overall settlement.

I'd be curious to hear reactions of current GOP presidential contenders (perhaps "pretenders" describes them more accurately) Rick Perry and Rick Santorum. In Perry's hyper-Christian view, God has already given the West Bank to Israel; in Santorum's, the IDF's control of the West Bank is akin to the US's subjugation of Texas and the American Southwest.

But what's especially telling in Ross's suggestions is that nowhere does he allude to the problem of Israeli settlement building (and settler violence) in the West Bank. Unless my re-scan of the text missed it, Ross nowhere even mentions the word "settlement." At least Elliot Abrams is honest (or at least open) enough (in what seems to me an idiotic take on the issue of the West Bank) to posit that Jewish settlements are not the real problem. But Ross seems to ignore them altogether, at least here.

Much to America's benefit, Dennis Ross is away from Foggy Bottom and the halls of the DoS. Unfortunately, he is once again safely ensconced at the Washingon Institute for Middle East Affairs (AIPAC's think-tank, for all intents and purposes), where he likely possesses an even bigger megaphone. At a beer garden in Prague several years ago, I witnessed a rowdy, inebriated German tourist pouring beer into a tuba-player's instrument (as he was playing it). Would that someone could do the same (metaphorically speaking) for Ross's megaphone.

Are Cooler Heads Prevailing in Bomb-Iran Debate?

2012-01-06T00:49:00.001-05:00

From Patrick Seale (in Gulf News) comes an argument that in both Israel and the US, those opposed to attacking Iran (most of them in the military and intelligence establishments) are prevailing in the debate surrounding the issue. (As one bit of evidence, Seale cites the departure of Dennis Ross from Obama/Clinton's Dept of State to the more hospitable environs of WINEP, AIPAC's Siamese-twin think-tank in D.C. That Ross left was a plus for American interests; that he went to WINEP should have spoken volumes to any who doubted that he was, in fact, one of Israel's chief negotiators in the so-called "peace process.")

But Seale also points out:

Even if none of the parties — Israel, the US and Iran — actually want war or seriously anticipate it, there is always the possibility that war might break out by accident. Targeting Iran’s Central Bank and threatening to boycott its oil exports, as some western nations are proposing to do, create a climate of hysterical nationalism that could trigger a clash. Iran has tried to call the West’s bluff by threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, but a serious attempt to do so could set the whole region on fire — which is almost certainly the last thing Iran or the US would want. In my view, not too much should be read into Iran’s recent naval manoeuvres in the Gulf, or its testing of new missiles. It has carried out such exercises in the past.

Containment and deterrence are clearly better policies than war-mongering. But they are not without difficulty. Establishing the rules of a system of mutual deterrence can be tricky. The first months, or even years, can prove dangerous until the system is perfected and the rules fully understood by both sides. For the scheme to be safe, a ‘hot line’ between the parties would need urgently to be established.

And, again, as I noted recently, the demonize-Iran rhetoric will be ratcheted up to the max as the November elections approach. Seale suggests that the point will be to win Jewish votes. Perhaps; but the far more valuable target will be the votes of those millions of Christian evangelicals in whose closed little minds Israel is the US's 51st state - and with the holiest landmarks, at that.

Seale's excellent piece is here.

Remember Libya?

2012-01-05T22:17:00.001-05:00

Tony Karon with an excellent analysis that reminds us that Libya, far from being a done deal and NATO shining hour, remains on the knife's edge:

The problem, of course, was that the Libyan rebels were never an army; they were patchwork of small local militia units, deserters from the regular army, and a smattering of former exiles with military experience. Moreover, the recognition extended by foreign powers to the NTC was far in advance of the extent to which Libyans, even many of those in the forefront of the battle to oust Gaddafi, were willing to accept its lead. The fact that the rebel leadership had not established an alternative power center meant that the collapse of Gaddafi also meant an effective collapse of state authority. The challenge now facing the rebels is to build a new state on the ruins of the old, and the first order of state-building business is establishing a monopoly on military force within its borders. The NTC is struggling to meet that challenge.

Read on here.

The Dangers of Obama's New Military

2012-01-05T18:06:00.001-05:00

Both the NYT and the WaPo run reports on Obama's announcement today of plans for a leaner US military, a direct consequence of billions of dollars of funding cuts necessitated by the recent economic downturn. Both the Army and the Marines will be downsized - but the Navy will retain all of its huge aircraft carriers, and the enormously expensive Joint Strike Fighter program will keep perking along (much to the relief of the Lockheed Martin corporation, its plant employees, and the congressmen of the states where those plants are located).

Not to be cut, however, are cyberwarfare programs, and - take special note - Special Forces, which have already become primary actors in US military ventures, especially in Afghanistan but also in places where we seldom are told about their doings. I speak, for example, of Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan - all places for which we have cryptic reports of Special Forces' activity. Their teams move in, do their thing, kill people, blow up villages, terrorize the locals.

We've come a long way from doughboys and GI's - the conscripted ordinary-citizen armies of World War I and the World War II "greatest generation." After the humiliation that was Vietnam, the Pentagon decided that the draft was politically messy (and the draftees militarily unreliable). Hence, the all-volunteer army of Desert Storm and down to the present - and with it, a new American militarism that spawned a cult of American Rambo-style warriors who could be sent off to fight faraway wars while the American public carried on.

And now, a new model - one that couples expensive high-tech weaponry with super-elite Special Forces whom the public will be set up (as, indeed, they already have been) to idolize as America's best. And, truly, didn't we see this coming when Mr. Obama took General David Petraeus - the most touted and media-savvy US military commander of this generation, hero of the "Surge," godfather of COIN - and set him up as the director (read, commander) of the CIA?

Yet these warriors, their officers - and the CIA officials who will run much of their show - will be completely unaccountable to the American public. Why? Because their missions will be - well - "special ops": secret, completely off the public's radar, classified, unreported (and unreportable) by the US and world media.

Iran, Israel, and the 2012 Elections: Be Very Afraid

2012-01-04T22:55:00.001-05:00

Holiday travels (and extremely limited internet access) have kept me from blogging over the last few weeks (anybody miss me?), and the impending start of a new semester (and a new graduate colloquium) is likely to limit blogging time even more. Too bad, because there's SO much to reflect upon, and to be concerned about: Iraq's possible fragmentation, Syria's lurch toward sectarian civil war, Egypt's halting progress toward democracy (and personally, I'm not holding my breath waiting for that one - but might consider holding my nose, because the situation there, quite frankly, stinks, what with SCAF's obvious determination to keep a choke-hold on the governing of that ancient land).

But it's Iran that seems to be grabbing the headlines, inciting the usual suspects in the US and Israel to bang the war-drums and providing lots of fodder for GOP campaigners eager to flap their cheeks about America's power and its God-given imperative to lead the world, and to protect Israel from those nefarious, mad Persian mullahs. Meanwhile, the US promotes sanctions that are pounding Iran's long-suffering people and sends warships to intimidate them. In effect, we're pushing Iran's leaders into a corner, and as Paul Pillar recently noted, making it extremely difficult for them to even meet us halfway.

The United States has made it almost impossible for Iran to say yes to whatever it is the United States is supposedly demanding of Iran. . . . A peaceful Iranian nuclear program—as Tehran contends that its program is—has broad and strong support among Iranians. Any feasible change in Iranian policies that could be the basis of a new understanding with the United States and the West would include a continuing Iranian nuclear program, very likely including the enrichment of uranium by Iran. The substance of any such understanding would involve technical details about inspections and safeguards. Such details would need to be negotiated. Feasible arrangements that would provide the minimum assurances to both sides could be negotiated, but they are unexplored. They remain unexplored because the United States has abandoned negotiations and has made its policy toward Iran solely one of pressure and sanctions.

Iranian leaders respond with bluster, including threats to close the Straits of Hormuz to oil shipping and warnings to the US to not send any more aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. Such defiance is, of course, music to the ears of GOP candidates eager to grab hold of a voodoo doll into which they can jam verbal spikes. Would that they might read and heed the comments of Geneive Abdo (at CNN), where she cites insider reports from Iran to the effect that Iranian bluster is essentially an attempt to save face in an increasingly precarious and highly charged situation.

Iran is not begging for a military confrontation. Its recent aggression is due, in fact, to its fear of a pending military attack. My sources inside the country say the circle of regime insiders around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei truly believes an attack is inevitable, perhaps even before the U.S. presidential election. Therefore, to save face at home and in the region, Iran’s saber-rattling has reached a fever pitch.

In order not to appear weak in light of the pressure coming from the United States, Iran is determined to show it maintains the upper hand, which it tries to demonstrate through its military exercises, threats and hostile rhetoric. But such behavior, which Iran believes demonstrates its strength and some in the United States view as aggression, should not be misunderstood as Iran provoking the United States to launch a military attack.

The more candidates running for election in the United States publicly endorse a military attack, and the more the Obama administration is forced to appear hawkish, the more the Iranian regime works to prepare for what insiders believe will be a hit on the country’s nuclear facilities if not the population.

Yet come summer, as the campaign speeches and debates heat up and the GOP accuses Mr. Obama of trembling before the Iranians and leaving the door ajar for a second Holocaust, the bomb-Iran rhetoric will become even more fevered, as will the responses from Obama.

And, mark my word, Mr. Netanyahu will jump on this. He will reach out to his amen chorus in Congress, zap Barack whenever and however he can, and likely impose on Obama the necessity of taking some politically expedient, but strategically damaging, action against Iran.

And don't be surprised to see, in the months ahead, Netanyahu brazenly grab more of East Jerusalem and announce new settlement construction in the West Bank. Obama won't do a thing to stop him.

Frustrated and humiliated, Iranians and Palestinians will be pushed even deeper into their respective corners. Their options will be to cower under the barrage . . . or to lash out in desperation.

Be very afraid.

On "Unknown Knowns"

2012-01-01T11:26:00.001-05:00

From Geoffrey Wheatcroft (in the NYT), some sage advice as we ring in a "new year" . . .

COULD there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.”

He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns... there are known unknowns ... there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns.”

What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow.”

Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State. Ireland merely happened to offer an extreme case, where “everyone knew.” They just chose to forget that they knew — about the way that Irish banks ran wild, how easy credit fueled a monstrous explosion of property prices and speculative house-building. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, “The boom is getting boomier,” preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust.

Beginning in 2008, the skies were lighted up by financial conflagrations, from Lehman Brothers to the Royal Bank of Scotland. These were dramatic enough — but were they unforeseeable or unknowable? What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea? An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it.

Or recall how we were taken into the Iraq war. That was the origin of Mr. Rumsfeld’s curious words 10 years ago. When he murmured about “things we do not know we don’t know,” he was touching on the unconventional weapons that Saddam Hussein might — or might not — have held.

In a sense, Mr. Rumsfeld was more right than he realized. Those of us who opposed the war may be asked to this day whether we knew what weaponry Iraq possessed, to which the answer is that of course we didn’t. Nor, as it transpired, did President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld or Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

But that was the wrong question. It should have been not “what weaponry does Saddam Hussein possess?” but “Is Saddam Hussein’s weaponry, whatever it may be, the real reason for the war, or is it a pretext confected after a decision for war had already been taken?” The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it.

Then there was another unknown known: the likely consequences of an invasion. Shortly before it began, Mr. Blair met President Jacques Chirac of France. As well as reiterating his opposition to the coming war, Mr. Chirac offered the prime minister specific warnings. Mr. Blair and his friends in Washington seemed to think that they would be welcomed with open arms in Iraq, Mr. Chirac said, but that they shouldn’t count on it. It was foolish to think of creating a modern democracy in an artificial country with a divided society like Iraq. And Mr. Chirac asked whether Mr. Blair realized that, by invading Iraq, they might yet precipitate a civil war.

This has been described in a BBC documentary by someone present, Sir Stephen Wall, a Foreign Office man then attached to Downing Street. As the British team was leaving, Mr. Blair turned and said, “Poor old Jacques, he just doesn’t get it,” to which Sir Stephen now adds dryly that he turned out to get it rather better than “we” did.

At that time, Mr. Chirac was reviled in America, and his career has just ended in disgrace, with a court conviction for embezzlement. But who was right about Iraq? All the calamities that followed the invasion were not only foreseeable, they were foreseen. And yet for Mr. Blair, as well as Washington, they were unknown knowns.

One more such, bitter as it is to say so when many people have been ruined, was the Bernard L. Madoff fraud. For years, his investors gratefully and unquestioningly accepted returns that were strictly incredible. Loud warning voices sounded. Harry Markopolos, a former investment officer, exhaustively back-analyzed Mr. Madoff’s supposed figures by computer. He spent nearly nine years repeatedly trying to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that these figures were not merely incredible but mathematically impossible. And still the S.E.C. chose to unknow it. Leos Janacek wrote a harrowing opera called “The Makropulos Affair”; Peter Gelb at the Met should commission someone to write “The Markopolos Affair” as a fable for our times.

In a very different kind of scandal, not everyone at Penn State, and certainly not every fan, knew what had happened in the showers. But quite enough was known by people who could have acted. They chose instead to unknow. And so to another classic unknown known, the euro. The recent summit in Brussels turned into a silly melodrama, with a British prime minister, David Cameron this time, once more playing the pantomime villain. But Mr. Cameron was right, if for the wrong reasons, to oppose the European Union’s latest frantic (and doomed) plan to prop up the euro.

If truth be told (but it so rarely is!), the euro cannot work and could never have worked. That is, a single currency embracing countries as diverse in social culture, productivity, work practices and taxation as Germany and Greece, or the Netherlands and Portugal, is economically impossible without much closer fiscal and financial union — which is politically impossible. Anyone could have known that at the time the euro was introduced, but for the rulers of the European Union it was their very own unknown known.

“The Cloud of Unknowing” is a medieval classic of mystical writing, and unknowing still hangs over us. It will be a happier new year if we can dispel some of that cloud, try to unknow less, and know a little more.

‘Blue bra girl’ atrocity: Egyptian military police more than brutal (VIDEO) — RT

2011-12-18T20:29:00.000-05:00

It's truly difficult to watch a video such as this, but too many Americans have been numbed by the sanitized brutality of video games, pro wrestling or "Survivor," or the inane stuff that MTV (?) broadcasts on "Ridiculousness" - where "contributors" send in "hilarious" videos that often show people either injuring themselves, or getting injured in unexpected ways (like the toddler who was sent flying by a break dancer's wayward kick).

This, on the other hand, is real brutality, inflicted viciously on completely defenseless people (in this instance, a young Egyptian woman who had come to Tahrir Square - perhaps to protest, perhaps to witness - does it really matter?)

It's obvious that even with the protests of January and the elections of November in Egypt, and even the empowering of a new government in Tunisia, the Arab Spring is budding out, but a long way from blooming.

‘Blue bra girl’ atrocity: Egyptian military police more than brutal (VIDEO) — RT

Netanyahu declines to pen New York Times op-ed

2011-12-16T14:55:00.001-05:00

As reported in the WaPo:

A senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the leader has refused an offer to write an opinion piece for the New York Times, accusing the paper’s opinion pages of anti-Israel bias.

The unusual public refusal appears to reflect the hardline Israeli government’s increasingly prickly relations with much of the outside world.

In a letter to the Times published in The Jerusalem Post website, Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer says the prime minister decided to “respectfully decline” penning an opinion piece. He says past op-ed articles in the Times have “vilified” Israel and “constantly distort the positions of our government.”

Poor, sad, picked-upon Bibi has taken chutzpah to a new level. For the last several decades, the NYT has had Israel's back. Yes, it does indeed publish a range of opinions on Israeli actions and policies, but this is the same NYT op-ed page that once had William Safire defending Israel no matter what, that still has Thomas Friedman constantly reminding us that, yes, Israel does mess up, but those Persians and Arabs (with the exception of those Arabs who, like Salam Fayyad or Anwar al-Sadat, are willing to make nice with Israel) are meshugga.

And it's the same NYT whose principal journalist on the job in Israel, Ethan Bronner, is closely tied to the Israeli establishment. His son served in the IDF; and during that time, the NYT refused to reassign Bronner to another post. And get this (from Wikipedia):

In September, 2011, a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review revealed that in 2009, a year after becoming Jerusalem correspondent for the New York Times, Bronner had joined the speakers bureau of one of Israel’s top public relations firms, Lone Star Communications. Lone Star Communications arranged speaking events for Bronner and took a commission on his fee, as well as pitched stories for him to cover. The revelation resulted in an number of articles commenting on conflicts of interests and impartiality and caused Bronner to end his relationship with Lone Star Communications.

Nonetheless, Bibi decides that the NYT is simply too hostile a venue for him to publish an op-ed.

Not that I feel a need to complain to the NYT about that. But you can bet that a lot of subscribers will - and that Krauthammer and Fox News will hammer the NYT, con gusto.

Iraq, Fubar: What the US Leaves Behind

2011-12-15T23:28:00.001-05:00

From Kim Sengupta in The Independent, a reminder of another of the myriad ways in which Boy George's Iraq Adventure left the country fubar (if you don't know, that's military shorthand for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition):

Not far from where the speeches were taking place lay grim evidence which refuted the claims that the Americans were leaving behind a land of stability and prosperity. More than 8,000 people are living in squalor in a field of mud and foetid water, with huts made of rags and salvaged pieces of wood.

The residents of Al-Rahlat camp are among 1.3 million refugees in their own country; families driven out of their homes by the sectarian violence spawned by the war. Another 1.6 million fled Iraq for neighbouring states, mainly Jordan and Syria. Those in Syria, with its escalating violence, are now having to seek another place of safety.

There is a third group who are particularly vulnerable – around 70,000 people who worked for the US military. They were promised the offer of refuge in the US, but little has been done fulfil the pledge. Barack Obama, while campaigning for the White House four years ago, berated the Bush administration over the issue, saying: "The Iraqis who stood with us are being targeted for assassination, yet our doors are shut. That is not how we treat our friends." In 2008 Congress passed a bill for special immigration visas to be issued for 25,000, but only 3,000 have been processed during Obama's presidency.

Around 450,000 of the IDPs (internally displaced persons) are living in the worst conditions, crammed into 380 street settlements scattered around the country. They have little or no access to clean water, sanitation or medical care. Many of these people, deemed to be illegally squatting, cannot get the documents necessary to register for welfare relief or take up jobs, or enrol their sons and daughters in schools. The tension and claustrophobia of such an existence has led to psychological problems, especially among children. Domestic violence is rife.

She continues with specific case studies. Well worth reading, and reflecting on . . . .

As is this piece by her Independent colleague Patrick Cockburn about the "superpower not strong enough to set Iraq on course."

Panetta: "Those lives were not lost in vain."

2011-12-15T10:45:00.001-05:00

Thus did US SecDef Leon Panetta proclaim today in Baghdad, where he publicly declared the War in Iraq to be over.

It's over indeed for the US. (Indeed, for thousands of Americans more caught up in Facebook and "American Idol," it barely mattered to begin with. They partied on.)

Thomas Ricks noted only a few years ago that Iraq's troubles were nowhere near ending, and that we might be closer to the middle of Iraq's war than to its end. I fear that he may have been right. Regardless of the assertions by Panetta and others that Iraq is now stable, there's still way too much there that's not:

Maliki has become a Saddam-lite, and as the US completes its pullout and various demons begin to crawl out of the woodwork, he will likely decide to emulate the departed dictator ever more.
Saboteurs are blowing up Iraq's pipelines with relative impunity - and the question of who's going to help Iraq extract the oil remains vexed, at best.
Kirkuk remains up for grabs, as does much of the Arab-Kurd frontier north of Baghdad.
Various Iraqi provinces are expressing a growing desire for federalist-style autonomy vs. a centralized state. (See #1)
Syria's blooming civil-sectarian war will surely spill over into Iraq.
Iraq still faces a huge problem with internal refugees.

I could go on.

Hey, GOP. Wanna Marginalize America Even Further?

2011-12-11T19:18:00.001-05:00

Then make the clown otherwise known as Newt Gingrich your presidential nominee.

At a time when the US is struggling to keep itself relevant in a rapidly changing Middle East, Gingrich - evidently a front-runner now in many of the polls measuring support for possible GOP presidential nominees - surely has managed to alienate most of whatever friends the US had on the "Arab street." As Michigan's senator Carl Levin commented, “Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match.”

Paul Woodward provides great commentary, and all the links you need, at War in Context.

Ashura Bombings in Iraq - and Afghanistan

2011-12-06T10:56:00.001-05:00

The last couple of days in Iraq - and in Shia communities across the Middle East - have been marked by the commemorative activities of Ashura, which remembers the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali (grandson of the prophet Muhammad) and his small band of followers at the Battle of Karbala in 680, a pivotal date in the process whereby Shiism distinguished an identity separate from that of the majority Sunni.

But in Iraq, Ashura has brought this year - as in every year since the US invasion in 2003 - numerous bombings by Sunni extremists who set off bombs that maim and kill dozens of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Shia pilgrims who process to Karbala and other Shia shrine-cities in Iraq.

(And also reported today: Ashura bombings in Kabul and Mazar-i-sharif in Afghanistan that have also killed dozens of Shia there.)

The NYT's report of one of the latest bombings notes that one bomb exploded very near a mosque in Babil province associated with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered and followed marja-i-taqlid ("source of emulation" - i.e., spiritual guide) among the world's Shia today - and perhaps the single most politically influential figure on what one might call Iraq's Shiite "street." It was his ability to bring millions of Shia onto the street in protest that forced the US to agree to elections to determine a new Iraqi government.

I shudder to imagine the horrors that even an attempted assassination of Sistani might bring to Iraq. Remember, the Sunni-Shia civil war that consumed so many thousands of lives in Iraq from 2006 on was kicked off by Sunni extremists bombing another of Iraq's great Shia shrines, the golden-domed al-Askari shrine in Samarra (where the mosque's rebuilding stirs Sunni-Shia antagonisms).

As the deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq looms ever closer (even as withdrawals from Afghanistan are announced), it's certain that Iraq remains a very "unfinished" situation - but that it is not in the power of the US to "finish" or "fix" Iraq. It never was. Bush was warned in 2002, and he ought to have known better.

Historians will hold him - and the Dick Cheneys and Condi Rices of the time - to account - but the great American people have moved on to whatever new shiny baubles the 24-hour news cycle serially dangles before their eyes.

And, we can be sure, within months after the last US soldier is out of Iraq, as bombings and assassinations continue, and the ineffectual Iraqi parliament dithers and stalls, oh-so-many still clueless Americans will be scratching their heads, incredulous, wondering: "Gosh, we liberated those people. Why can't those Eye-rack-ee's just get along?"

Israel and American Jews: WTF Was Bibi Thinking?!

2011-12-03T10:51:00.001-05:00

The NYT reports that Israel's Ministry for Immigrant Absorption wised up (though hardly in the nick of time) and removed from its website several video promotions that did nothing whatsoever to "promote" good feeling between Israel and the majority of American Jews.

One video advertisement shows a Jewish elderly couple distraught that their Israeli granddaughter in the United States thinks Hanukkah is Christmas. Another shows a clueless American boyfriend who does not get why his Israeli expatriate girlfriend is saddened on Israel’s memorial day. A third shows a toddler calling “Daddy! Daddy!” to his napping Israeli expatriate father, who finally awakens when the child switches to Hebrew: “Abba!”

For many American Jews, the Israeli government-sponsored ads, intended to cajole Israelis living in the United States to come home, smacked of arrogance, ignorance and cultural disrespect of America. Jewish groups in the United States expressed outrage, saying they were causing a rift with American Jews who support Israel. On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aborted the campaign.

The ads — short videos and billboard posters — were intended to touch the sensibilities of Israeli expatriates and tap into their national identity, according to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, which oversaw the campaign.

But critics said the ads implied that moving to America led to assimilation and an erosion of Jewish consciousness. The Jewish Federations of North America called them insulting. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the videos “heavy-handed, and even demeaning.”

Israeli officials defended the desire to encourage Israeli expatriates to return, but the reaction of American Jewry, a crucial mainstay of support for Israel, clearly caused alarm.

“We are very attentive to the sensitivities of the American Jewish community,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu. “When we understood there was a problem, the prime minister immediately ordered the campaign to be suspended.”

The ads were placed by the Ministry for Immigrant Absorption, headed by Sofa Landver, who immigrated to Israel from Russia in 1979. She belongs to the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party led by Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. The party takes a hard line on the peace process with the Palestinians and advocates exchanging parts of Israel heavily populated by Arab citizens for Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank.

A spokesman for the ministry, Elad Sonn, said no insult had been intended; the ministry “respects and cherishes” the American Jewish community, and “we wish to apologize to those who might have been offended.”

There's a weird disconnect here that leaves one almost breathless. Netanyahu can come to the US, waltz onto Capitol Hill, be lionized by both houses of Congress (the majority of whose members have publicly sworn their fealty to Lord Bibi), and be reassured that they've got his back. But then, he (or his government; I wonder how well informed he was about those videos before the ministry posted them; still it's on him, ultimately) has the chutzpah - and, frankly, the gross stupidity - to run videos that clearly demean American Judaism. (Let's be real: it take a lot to get Abe Foxman to speak so critically of the Israeli government.)

A lot of Americans are - and will remain - clueless about all of this. And I suppose that it might take a lot more than this for Pastor Hagee and those "good Christians" who have signed on with CUFI to turn away from Bibi. (After all, the welfare of Israel and American Jews concerns them only to the extent that ensuring it might hasten the Second Coming, at which point they're all toast, according to Christian scripture.)

But at a time when (as SecDef Leon Panetta has lamented recently) Israel has become dangerously isolated both regionally and globally - and is on the verge of becoming isolated even worse (with the emergence of anti-Israel Islamist parties - and allies of Hamas - in the Egyptian political forefront) - Bibi couldn't have picked a worse time to alienate so many thousands of citizens of the country that (rightly or wrongly) has shielded it, at the UN and in the court of international opinion.

Hillary's Chutzpah: lectures Pakistan for no-show at Bonn Meeting

2011-11-30T12:05:00.002-05:00

Only days after a US airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, Ms. Clinton has the chutzpah to lecture the Pakistani government for deciding to boycott the upcoming meeting in Bonn about Afghanistan.
Clash Between NATO and Pakistani Forces Defused - NYTimes.com

“Frankly, it is regrettable that Pakistan has decided not to attend the conference in Bonn, because this conference has been long in the planning,” Mrs. Clinton said in Busan, South Korea before flying to Myanmar on Wednesday.
“Pakistan, like the United States, has a profound interest in a secure, stable, increasingly democratic Afghanistan. Our gathering in Bonn thiscoming Monday is intended to further that goal.”

America as Middle East's Wallflower

2011-11-21T12:29:00.001-05:00

The last couple of days have been chock-full of events and reports that make it clear: as far as the Middle Eastern "room" is concerned, the US has gone from 2-ton gorilla to wallflower.

OK, OK - "leading from behind" in Libya was perhaps an exception to that. But as far as the US is concerned, Libya is so "yesterday." And don't be surprised if Obama/Clinton work hard to distance themselves from the ever messier situation there, as the militias who fought and suffered (especially at Misrata) to eradicate Qaddafi now are proving reluctant to play nice with the Provisional Government. Even if Libyans now seem ecstatic to see Qaddafi gone, the US may soon look back to his era as the good old days when Libya was stable, and ruled (however badly) by the devil we knew.

And as Patrick Cockburn points out, Libya was a cakewalk compared to finding some solution to the bloody mess in Syria, where (as Anthony Shadid has pointed out) sectarian war is blooming. American/Western supremacists (like Lee Smith at Billy Kristol's the Weekly Standard) are calling out Obama, and calling for imposing a no-fly zone. More realistic commentators (like Doug Bandow at the National Interest) point out the hubris of any proposed American attack on Syria. Odd that Kristol's writers promote ousting a regime that Israel's leaders fear to see vanish (again, Bashar is that devil they know).

Egypt is now in its third day of liberal+Islamists protests against the military junta that imposed its control after ousting Mubarak. The elections there - which were set to begin this week - are imperiled. Liberal/progressives may want them held up anyway, as the Muslim Brotherhood stands ready to dominate them. In any event, it's all beyond the US's ability to control events. And if the SCAF junta is ousted somehow, and a government more responsive to popular will takes charge, the US will be largely reduced to the role of a window shopper with nose pressed to the glass, looking in, but most assuredly from the outside, even as such a government takes steps to distance itself from Israel - and the 1979 peace treaty - even more.

Same goes for Iraq, where the mess that George W. made in Mesopotamia gets even messier as US troops continue a withdrawal much lamented by Kaganites and other neocons. The US military's departure from its base near Kirkuk has ratcheted up tensions between the militaries of the Baghdad central government and the Kurdish Regional Government - while (bless their hearts) our intrepid entrepreneurs at ExxonMobil have stirred the pot even more by signing oil production deals with the Kurds, despite the fact that Iraq's government has yet to conclude a national oil law that will govern the distribution of oil profits. Leave it to US Big Oil to undermine the efforts of US troops who teamed with Arab and Kurd forces over the last couple of years in order to promote cooperation between them. The same corporations who poured big bucks into the election campaigns of the Bush-Cheney team that got so many American soldiers (and Iraqi people) killed in Iraq while helping install "democracy" (or did they?) under Maliki and his predecessors now thumb their noses at that same (still fledgling) government, whose own prospects (Exxon knows) hinge on Exxon's participation in developing the southern Qurna oilfields.

And now (as Nicholas Pelham suggests), is America's most steadfast pal in the Arab world - king Abdullah II of Jordan - poised for a fall?

Elizabeth Monroe once wrote of Britain's "moment in the Middle East" as spanning 1914-1971. It may not be premature to plan a companion piece, on America's moment, 1945-2011.

The New "Arab Awakening"

2011-11-18T09:54:00.001-05:00

Soon after they began in Tunisia and then spread to Egypt and across much of the Arab Middle East, the political uprisings to demand political rights, basic respect for human dignity, and better social and economic conditions came to be referred to as the "Arab Spring." (A recent essay by Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy suggests that the term may have been coined, in fact, there.) Unfortunately, the "spring" metaphor opened the door to various and sundry commentators (many of them naysayers) to ruminate about the "Arab fall" and, recently, the "Arab winter" as demonstrators have been opposed, even killed, in countries like Bahrain and Syria, and, of course, Egypt, one of the "Arab spring's" hearths, where broad popular demands for change and free elections are being thwarted by a deeply entrenched class of high-ranking military officers who seem determined to sustain the almost 60 years of military control of the Egyptian state (as well as the wealth they've built up in the process).

But for months, the astute, prolific analyst and commentator Rami Khouri has been encouraging us to take the long view - to recognize and anticipate that the uprisings of the last year mark only the beginning - an "awakening" - in the process of the empowerment of Arab peoples. Khouri is channeling here, of course, the title of a celebrated book by George Antonius, published in the 1930as, that came to be regarded as an important signpost in the "awakening" of the pan-Arabism that reached its zenith with the meteoric rise of Gamal Abdul Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s. But the "awakening" of which Khouri speaks entails a long process, surely to suffer setbacks and interruptions, that, in his view, inexorably will lead to the establishment of a true sovereignty across the Arab world. That sovereignty will be founded on popular will, in a region that up to now, and even now in many countries, has featured governments - regimes, really - disconnected from their citizens (who barely merit that characterization; "subjects" might be more accurate, even if governments featue leaders with titles like "president") yet maintained in power by a West that has long valued stability, access to the region's petroleum, and the enabling of the region's baddest boy (the state of Israel) over the rights, dignity, and prosperity of the locals. As one of Khouri's latest essays notes,

Today, the Arab world is moving in a new direction. We may be witnessing the first tangible impact of the Arab uprisings, citizen revolts and revolutions on those Arab elites that still control most governments in the region. Arab regimes may be starting to pay attention to the sentiments and values of their people, who reject the killing of civilians that has taken place in Syria since March.

Khouri spotlights a development that, he hopes, marks for the Arab peoples an important re-rousing from their tortured slumber: the re-fashioning of the long-mocked Arab League as a meaningful, empowered instrument of Arab unity and purpose.

The other fascinating new development we see before our eyes is the continued rebirth and reassertion of Arab sovereignty, will and influence within the Arab world, after decades during which the incompetent and politically derelict Arab states largely surrendered their regional security and ideological functions to foreign powers.

The Arab League is now making decisions whose consequences are ricocheting around the region. Consequently, Israel, Iran, Turkey and the U.S. are responding to Arab initiatives, rather than ordering the Arabs around, as they had for decades. The Arab Awakening continues.

And as when any of us has been asleep too long, awakening can be very slow; nor will it look pretty along the way. Our heads fall back to our pillows; we take mini-naps, feel irritable and cranky, ask our spouses and friends to be patient with us, and we resort to the series of jolts that sequential cups of strong coffee provide. But in time, we are fully roused, awake and alert, dressed and geared up for action, ready to write the stories of our new day.

The Arab Awakening of which Khouri writes will likewise need the occasional nap and will tax the patience of friends. And it will be punctuated by cups full, not of strong coffee, but of the blood of heroes and martyrs.

But Khouri enjoins us to indeed be patient, for once fully awakened, the great Arab people will be poised to pen a saga that may captivate us all.

The Things That Wouldn't Leave

2011-11-18T00:43:00.001-05:00

Slithering back onto the political stage, your favorite neocon heroes. Be very afraid.

Bush-Era Iraq Hawks Counsel Republican Presidential Hopefuls

By Gopal Ratnam and Tony Capaccio - Nov 18, 2011

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Herman Cain are turning for national security advice to former officials in the George W. Bush administration, including some who pushed hardest for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The former officials include Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Robert Joseph, a White House National Security Council aide during Bush’s first term and later a State Department official.

Feith, Bolton and Joseph were in the Bush camp that favored U.S. unilateral action and was “skeptical of engagement” with allies as well as foes such as North Korea, said James Mann, a foreign policy scholar at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

In Bush’s second term, with the nation still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pendulum swung back toward engagement. The return of the unilateralists to Republican inner circles “in that sense, it’s going back,” said Mann, who wrote 2004’s “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.”

The contenders in the Republican presidential primary field have attacked President Barack Obama’s foreign policies. They say Obama showed weakness by not leading the allied air campaign in Libya, where the U.K and France played prominent roles, and not being tough enough on Iran to stop its nuclear-weapons efforts.

‘Greatest Failing’

Iran is Obama’s “greatest failing from a foreign policy standpoint,” former Massachusetts Governor Romney said at the Republican foreign policy debate Nov. 12 at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He called for U.S. military action if measures such as economic sanctions and covert operations aren’t successful in thwarting Iran.

Obama’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq have been criticized by most of the candidates even though the deadline was set by Bush in a 2008 agreement with the country. Obama announced the withdrawal Oct. 22 after the U.S. and Iraq failed to reach an accord to assure immunity for a residual U.S. force there.

“The idea that a commander-in-chief would stand up and signal to the enemy a date certain of which we’re going to pull our troops out I think is irresponsible,” Texas Governor Perry said Oct. 30 on “Fox News Sunday.” Perry also called for cutting off foreign aid to countries that oppose U.S. policies.

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman and Texas Representative Ron Paul support the Iraq withdrawal.

‘Decades’ Old Policy

Republican hopefuls advised by the Bush veterans conflate toughness with unilateral U.S. action, said Paula Newberg, director of the Institute for Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington.

On complex issues from the Arab Spring to China’s rising wealth, they don’t show “anywhere near the kind of nuance that’s required and have instead returned to a recap of foreign policy of decades earlier.”

Voters, while focused on the economy more than foreign policy, still want to know that a candidate is able to handle the hypothetical 3 a.m. crisis phone call in the White House --a prospect which candidate Hillary Clinton used in a 2008 primary ad against Obama. A stumble, like Cain’s response to a question on Libya in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, may resonate with voters.

In October, Romney announced a slate of 23 national security advisers and another group of 17 experts on specific subjects.

Romney’s Team

Romney’s advisers include Joseph; Cofer Black, a former head of Central Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism center and executive of the security firm Blackwater, now Xe Services; Meghan O’Sullivan, a Bloomberg View columnist and former White House official who oversaw Iraq and Afghanistan policy; Eliot Cohen, director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a former counselor at Rice’s State Department; Dov Zakheim, the former Pentagon comptroller; and John Lehman, Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary.

While a number of Romney advisers are associated with the Bush administration’s wars, Zakheim this year wrote a critical assessment of Afghanistan reconstruction as well as of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Perry Advisers

Perry’s list of informal advisers includes Feith; Bolton; Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and later ambassador to Afghanistan; and Daniel Blumenthal, former Pentagon international security affairs director for China and Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the campaign who asked not to be named.

Victoria Coates, a former research associate to Rumsfeld and an art historian, is a Perry foreign policy adviser, and Emily Domenech, a former Pentagon trip planner, is a defense adviser, the campaign said Nov. 2.

Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, did not respond to questions on advisers. Perry spokesman Mark Miner said the candidate consulted various people and declined to confirm advisers’ names.

Cain, former chief executive officer of the Godfather’s Pizza Inc. chain, has consulted retired ambassadors and defense officials including Bolton. He had a 90-minute breakfast meeting in New York with Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, the candidate’s spokesman, retired Navy Commander J.D. Gordon.

Extending Reagan

Cain’s world view is “an extension of Reagan’s philosophy of peace through strength and clarity,” and he intends to lay out his views soon in a white paper, Gordon said. A Pentagon public affairs officer from 2005 to 2009 and a spokesman on Guantanamo Bay detention operations, Gordon said he was also Cain’s main foreign policy adviser.

Perry plans to make a foreign policy speech in the near future, spokesman Miner said in an e-mail.

“I’m fairly regularly in contact with” the Perry campaign and “have met Perry more than once,” Feith said in a telephone interview. They’ve discussed Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as “things like the relationship of strategy to the defense budget,” Feith said.

Feith, Bolton, Khalilzad, and Cohen were among 10 so-called neoconservatives who were national security officials in the Bush administration, Jeffery Record, a professor at the Air Force War College, wrote in his 2010 book “Wanting War -- Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq.”

Overthrowing Saddam Hussein “became a neoconservative mantra during the 1990s that culminated in the U.S. invasion,” he wrote.

Faulty Intelligence

As the Pentagon’s policy chief Feith, set up separate cells within the department that cited links between Iraq and al- Qaeda, as well as evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the CIA doubted. Subsequent investigations found no proof of either and concluded that Feith’s information came from the Iraqi National Congress and other exile groups seeking U.S. help to overthrow Hussein.

A February 2007 Pentagon Inspector General report criticized the actions of Feith’s cells as “inappropriate” because they didn’t “clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community.” In his book “War and Decision,” Feith called the conclusion a “misguided notion” because the briefings were meant to critique other intelligence and not to replace it, he wrote.

Joseph was a member of a “White House Information Group” that coordinated a pre-war white paper called “A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Nuclear Weapons.”

‘Not Strong Enough’

It was never published after five drafts, in part because Joseph considered it “not strong enough,” a White House spokesman told the Washington Post in an August 2003 article. Later inquiries concluded that Hussein’s quest for nuclear weapons had been moribund.

As Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control, Bolton was part of the “politics of persuasion” that stressed “the most sensational” intelligence scenarios, according to an Atlantic Monthly article by former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack.

Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, has “spoken to a number of those running,” his aide Christine Samuelian said. He hasn’t endorsed any candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, she said.

Joseph and Bolton also opposed Bush’s second-term diplomacy with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program.

Public opinion polls show Obama gained on foreign policy after launching a covert mission that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and supporting the popular uprising that toppled and killed Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.

Obama Critique

Seeking to undermine Obama’s strength, Romney’s October foreign policy white paper said the president is “threatening to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” in Iraq and faulted him for making “apologies for America in speeches delivered in France, England, Turkey and Egypt.”

In a July article in Commentary, Feith criticized the Obama doctrine because it “emerges from the conviction that in the post-George W. Bush world, the United States cannot and should not exercise the kind of boldness and independence characteristic” of post-World War II foreign policy.

The article has been “the topic of some discussion” between Perry and his advisers, said Feith, who added said he doesn’t know whether Perry embraced those ideas.

Mann, of Johns Hopkins, said that Obama’s challengers, lacking enough material to criticize his foreign policy, “have fallen back on the old Republican trope” about a Democratic administration being weak and apologizing to the world.

Bibi Smooches Abbas!

2011-11-16T22:00:00.001-05:00

Well, at least in this Benetton ad. Keep hope alive!

A Visit to Hebron

2011-11-14T11:48:00.001-05:00

A serendipitous discovery via visit to Roger Cohen's tweet-land . . . a damning, must-read essay from the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland about his recent visit to the West Bank city of Hebron, where the IDF has rendered the center of the city effectively Arab-rein in order to isolate and defend the small community of Jewish settlers there. The stench of anti-Arab racism is overwhelming:

What I saw there would shock even those who think they know all there is to know about Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. The centre of a city of 175,000 people has been utterly emptied, its streets deserted, its shops vacant, thanks to a policy the Israeli army calls "sterilisation" - ensuring the area is clear and safe for Hebron's 800 Jewish settlers.

In what was once a throbbing market district, a place teeming with life, successive restrictions have been placed on Hebron's Palestinian population. A map shows purple roads where no Palestinian cars are permitted, yellow roads where no Palestinian shops are allowed to open and red roads where no Palestinians are even allowed to walk.

I watched an old man, a bag of cement on his shoulder, ascend a steep bypass staircase because his feet were forbidden from going any further along the road. Those unlucky enough to live on a red road have had their front doors sealed: they have to leave their own houses by a back door and climb out via a ladder.

All this has made life so impossible that an estimated 42 per cent of the families who once lived in this central part of town have now moved out.

What they have left behind is eerie. Israelis can walk freely down streets that are barred to Palestinians, surveying the shuttered shops that have been covered with some of the most vile graffiti I have ever seen. The familiar "Death to the Arabs" is there, but so is "You have Arabs, you have mice," the words covered up, but still legible. Perhaps most shocking are the Stars of David, daubed on Arab shopfronts and doors. To see that cherished symbol used to spit in the eye of a population hounded out of their homes is chilling.

All right, some will say, Hebron is an extreme case. Not according to my guide, Yehuda Shaul, a kippah-wearing army reservist who served two long tours in Hebron and who now works with the Breaking the Silence movement which, via the new Yachad organisation, has shown several Anglo-Jewish Zionist youth leaders and synagogue activists around the city. Shaul believes that Hebron simply reveals the reality of the occupation in an intense, distilled form.

But let's say Hebron is too much to stomach. Contemplate instead the bill that would formally make Israeli democracy subordinate to the state's Jewish identity, altering the nation's Basic Law and elevating, in the words of the Knesset's legal adviser, Eyal Yinon, "values such as national strength, honour and Jewish identity, even at the expense of values...such as freedom of expression, the right to equality and minority rights".

It would be consoling if this proposal to turn Israel into a kind of Jewish Prussia - high on nationalism with democracy an afterthought - had at least come from the far right, with no prospects of success. But behind it is Avi Dichter of the supposedly centrist Kadima party.

Or visit the ultra-orthodox Mea She'arim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, where the streets themselves now have a mechitza, men walking on one side of the barrier, women the other. That is until they get on a bus, where the women are required to sit at the back, leaving the seats at the front for the men.

The point is that if the Israel we love is the Jewish, democratic state established in the Declaration of Independence then we need to fight for it. It is under threat and not only from the usual suspects, the hostile media and the "delegitimisers". It is also threatened from within, by Israel's own actions. Put simply, if we are true friends of Israel we would take on those who would transform the country into a place most pro-Israeli Jews in Britain would not even recognise.

And by the way, I also recommend Roger Cohen's piece today on "containing and constraining Iran," not bombing it.

Assad on the Outs with the Arab League. Now What?

2011-11-13T11:39:00.001-05:00

As widely reported, the Arab League (in a move that, as Juan Cole notes, is largely symbolic) has suspended Syria from membership - and infuriated Syrians have attacked the Saudi embassy in Damascus in reprisal. To borrow from Iraq's ancient history (the episode of Belshazzar's feast, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible and memorialized in Rembrandt's famous painting), the writing is on the wall in re Bashar al-Assad's fate. Prof. Cole suggests, with good reason, that Bashar ought to take a lesson from Libya.

By taking a lesson from Libya, I assume he means that Bashar ought to get out while the gettin’s good.

But where might he go where he might feel (a) reasonably safe and secure, and (b) out of the reach of the ICC? Who would host him? Maybe Iran? But would he be content, as a supposedly secular Baathist, to live under the umbrella of a religious Islamist regime in a predominantly Persian milieu?

Maybe Iraq, where President Nuri al-Maliki has been supportive of Assad and his Alawi (quasi-Shia) ruling family? But would Maliki’s already conflicted political supporters look kindly on sheltering a Baathist? Or would Bashar's father Hafez’s conflicts with Saddam Hussein years ago (under Hafez al-Assad, Syria supported the US-led coalition against Saddam's Iraq during the 1991 "Desert Storm" war) trump the Baathist connection?

And can you imagine how Obama/Clinton – and their detractors – might react to Maliki sheltering Bashar?

Isolating Syria: Be Careful What You Wish For

2011-11-12T22:22:00.001-05:00

The Arab League has voted to suspend Syria - a move that will isolate Bashar al-Assad even more in the region and beyond. As WaPo notes,

until now, Arab states have indeed seemed hesitant to criticize Syria. The Arab League did not meet to discuss the spiraling violence until August, five months after the protests erupted, and Saturday’s measures came only after weeks of deliberation, deadlines and unfulfilled promises by the Assad government.

The slow response contrasts with the swift measures taken to suspend Libya weeks after the February uprising, opening the door to the adoption of the U.N. resolution that authorized NATO airstrikes and helped bring about Moammar Gaddafi’s demise. The United States cited the Arab censure of Libya as being instrumental in determining its decision to support military action.

International military intervention in Syria is still considered a remote possibility despite repeated calls by protesters for NATO to enforce a no-fly zone. But the lifting of Arab “cover” will make it harder for Russia and China to justify their vetoes of tougher action, including possible sanctions, at the U.N. Security Council, said Shaikh.

Turkey, which has repeatedly condemned Assad but taken no concrete steps against him, may also be encouraged to fall in line with the rest of the region and adopt economic sanctions that could have a significant effect on its neighbor’s economy, he said.

Assad can count on the support of Iran as well as neighboring Lebanon, whose government is controlled by the militant Shiite Hezbollah movement. Fears of triggering a regionwide war in which Iran and Hezbollah spring to Syria’s defense are among the reasons why world powers have been reluctant to intervene.

The Shiite-led government in Baghdad, which abstained in the vote, is concerned that regime change in Syria would destabilize Iraq’s delicate sectarian balance, and it has shown no inclination to support measures against Assad.

Of the countries that either voted against the suspension (Lebanon and Yemen) or abstained (Iraq), two have Shia majorities - and the third - Yemen - has a significant Shia minority, but probably voted against because President Saleh is on the way to being run out on a rail just as Assad is; one dictator standing by another. (And frankly, President al-Maliki of Iraq is steadily creeping into the dictator ranks himself - as much as the US touts Iraq as a model democracy for the putative "new Middle East."

But we really have no idea what a post-Assad Syria is going to look like, except that Syria's Sunni Arab majority - especially the more Islamist elements among them - are going to insist on better representation in any new government. That will worry Iraq's Shia majority, still triumphant but paranoid after the termination of so many decades of Sunni rule - and it may not sit well with Iraq's Kurds (not to mention Syria's own substantial Kurdish population).

It's entirely possible that Syria will spin out into sectarian warfare, at least in some regions. And some in the West - and Israel - may find themselves wishing for the good old days of the Assads, pere et fils.

On This Veteran's Day -- WAKE UP, AMERICA!

2011-11-11T13:33:00.001-05:00

I, for one, am old enough to remember (as a young boy) when Veterans Day was still called Armistice Day, in commemoration of the agreement of 11 November 1918 that ended the shooting of the "Great War" - though only after tens of thousands of doughboys (and, literally, millions of their British, German, French, Russian, Ottoman, and Anzac brothers-in-arms) had died often agonizing deaths, most of them in miserable trenches.

I grew up on post-World War II movies (and played backyard war games) that celebrated American GIs - especially heroes like the tiny Texan Audie Murphy (who went to his death in an airplane crash still tormented by nightmares of his combat experiences), reviled the Germans (and Italians) they fought, but reserved a special (unequivocally racist) scorn for the "Japs" (or "Nips") and, in movies like "Pork Chop Hill," slightly later, the Chinese who for a while overwhelmed American forces in the UN "police action" that came to be known as the Korean War.

But ever since the mid-1960s, I've seen my government shove hundreds of thousands of young American men (and, in recent decades, women) into the maw of horrific combat in faraway places, to fight wars where the US had no business going in the first place (in Vietnam, and Iraq) and/or tried to achieve a "victory" that was simply beyond its capacity (in Vietnam and, especially, Iraq and Afghanistan). In the process, more tens of thousands of young Americans killed, maimed, disfigured, or emotionally scarred (like my brother-in-law Tony, a wonderful man whose brow beaded in sweat when, only months ago, he recounted for me - after years of never speaking about it, at least to me - his personal horrors of Vietnam combat).

So, on this Veterans Day 2011, I thank Tony, and honor his service and his sacrifice. And I also thank, and honor the service, of my students Tim, Matt, Marshall, and Greg, all of whom laid their lives on the line in Iraq.

But I also don't want my government shovelling any more young Tony's into that gaping Great White Shark maw of Useless War. . . .

which is exactly where they're going to be headed if those now beating an ever louder tattoo to drum up war have their way. I speak of those like Billy Kristol, other neocon worthies like Gordon Chang, as well as rodeo clowns like Rick Perry (whose intellectual agility has been on display for weeks on national TV. Really, Texans, you made this oaf your governor?! This is the best you people can do?!) - and now, the GOP "moderate" Mitt Romney (Greg Scoblete at Compass provides the actual wording. At least Romney can quote Latin. I suppose the closest Perry ever got to that would have been from reading names on the Texas Rangers' roster.) And let's not forget Netanyahu's cheerleaders at AIPAC - all of them intent on riling up Congress' blood lust against Bibi's new Hitler, those nefarious Iranians.

From M. J. Rosenberg - a commentator who professes a love for Israel as Israel was originally meant to be (which is not what it has now become; see Gershom Gorenberg's just released book - ) comes today an exhortation that we honor American veterans on this Veterans' Day by rejecting the continuing calls to go to war with Iran.

To put it simply. An attack on Iran by Israel or the United States would embroil the Middle East in war, would threaten the world's oil supply and economy, would likely unleash a massive missile attack by Hezbollah on Israel, would jeopardize 100,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East, would solidify the Iranian regime's waning support among the population, and still would delay the Iranian nuclear program by only 2-3 years.

Insanity.

So what's to be done about Iran?

An attack will not deter whatever motivation Iranians may have for a nuclear bomb. In fact, an attack is one way to ensure that the Iranians do get a bomb (to protect themselves from future attacks). And further sanctions, which AIPAC has made a litmus test for campaign support, will only hurt ordinary Iranian citizens without affecting the nuclear program.

No, there is only one way to deal with Iran and it is the one we have never tried: unconditional, comprehensive negotiations.

No, not the kind of baby step talks both sides occasionally propose, but real negotiations that puts everything on the table: Iran's nuclear program, Israel's refusal to sign the NPT, Iran's threats against Israel and its unremitting hostility to it, Iranian support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, U.S. attempts to overthrow the Iranian regime and our support for the assassination of its civilian scientists, and Iran's role in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only comprehensive negotiations will end the Iran crisis without plunging the region, and possibly the world, into war. Only successful comprehensive negotiations can provide both Israel and Iran with the confidence to get off a course that could lead to mutual destruction. Nothing else will work and everything else has been tried. There is no alternative to diplomacy. Period.

Indeed.

The US's "Clean" Exit from Iraq

2011-11-11T00:31:00.003-05:00

As reported in the NYT.
We're closing down "Camp Victory" - and none too soon.
But please begrudge me an observation on a rather myopic comments by an Army "historian" (whose impartiality about the US adventure in Iraq will, I'm so sure, be impeccable). The man is quoted as saying:

“We’re not taking anything that the Iraqis had. We are only taking stuff that we put in, we utilized, and when we didn’t need it anymore, we took it home.”

Well, golly, Mr. Army Historian, before we went in, at least 100,000 Iraqis (some say closer to a million) still had their lives, and thousands more had all their limbs, both eyes, and a measure of sanity. They also had homes, and even livelihoods.
They also had a lot more of the remnants and records of their history. But, that's OK. Being the swell people that we are, we've boxed a lot of it up - like the records of its Jewish community, and the records of the Saddam era - and we're keeping it in storage for them. (Well, on the other hand, there are all those ancient cylinder seals that keep popping up on eBay.)
But, hey, other than that, it's all good, right. Like they always told us in that paramilitary organization known as the BSA (Boy Scouts of America), our job is to leave it better than we found it.
And I'm so sure the people of Iraq would agree that we did that.
Aren't you?

Stephen Walt on the "Special Relationship"

2011-11-09T18:03:00.001-05:00

At a time when Israeli officials have gone to a full-court press on the need to squelch the "existential threat" and impending "new Holocaust" that is Iran, and pundits are scribing sky-is-falling stuff in the wake of the IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program, comes a much needed analysis from Stephen Walt. Using a recent report from WINEP (officially an "academic" think-tank arm of Israel's propaganda machine) that preaches the gospel of Israel as indispensable ally of the US, Walt examines the "special relationship" more closely. Nothing all that new especially, but as some commentators try to bull-rush the US into attacking Iran, what Walt writes needs to be read, and disseminated, and discussed.

Some of the essence:

the real question is not whether the United States derives certain benefits from cooperating with Israel, just as it derives benefits from cooperating with other allies. Rather, it is whether the current "special relationship" of unconditional U.S. support is in America's national interest.

The answer is no. For one thing, B&S overstate some so-called benefits -- such as military technology developed in Israel -- by failing to mention that U.S. military aid paid for lots of it instead of being given to U.S. firms. But more importantly, many of the strategic benefits that B&S describe would still be available if the United States had a normal relationship with Israel. After all, if our interests are as closely aligned as B&S maintain, it would still be in both countries' interest to share some types of military technology, to share some intelligence information, and to coordinate responses to common problems like WMD proliferation or counter-terrorism. But if we had a normal relationship, then U.S. leaders would also be free to criticize Israeli policies that don't make sense and that are not in the U.S. interest, like the continued expansion of settlements and the denial of Palestinian rights. And in a normal relationship (i.e., akin to those we have with other democracies), U.S. leaders would be free to use U.S. leverage to try to get Israel to change policies with which we disagreed.

Second, B & S understate the costs of the special relationship by a wide margin. They do this in part by ignoring or downplaying issues such as Israel's sale of advanced U.S. technology to adversaries such as China, and by its extensive espionage efforts inside the United States. But their main error is to dismiss the impact of the special relationship on our terrorism problem. They devote a single sentence to this crucial issue, saying that "U.S. support for Israel is not the primary-and probably not even the dominant-reason Islamist terrorists target the United States." This line of argument has been a familiar lobby talking point since 9/11, but it is at odds with the enormous body of evidence suggesting that U.S. support for Israel was a key cause (though not the only one) of our terrorism problem.

For example, the architect of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef, mailed letters to several newspapers taking credit for the deed and demanding that the United States terminate aid to Israel. According to Steve Coll's prizewinning book Ghost Wars, Yousef also told the U.S. agents who flew him to the United States after his arrest in Pakistan that his reservations about killing innocent civilians were "overridden by the strength of his desire to stop the killing of Arabs by Israeli troops." According to Coll, Yousef "mentioned no other motivation during the flight and no other issue in American foreign policy that concerned him."

Similarly, an abundance of evidence confirms that the issue of Palestine was important to the late Osama bin Laden, and from very early in his political career. Family members have testified that he was troubled by this issue as a young man, and it is a prominent theme in his earliest political statements. As Max Rodenbeck of the Economist wrote in a review of two books on bin Laden's writings: "the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden's speeches."

As for 9/11 itself, the 9/11 Commission noted that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed -- whom it described as the "principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" -- was primarily motivated by the Palestinian issue. In the commission's words: "By his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel." The commission also reported that bin Laden intervened several times in the planning process for the 9/11, in (11 in = 27.9 cm) an attempt to link the attacks more closely to U.S. support for Israel.

To be sure, terrorists like bin Laden and KSM had other grievances as well -- such as U.S. support for Saudi Arabia and for the Mubarak regime in Egypt -- but these issues are not unrelated to the "special relationship" with Israel. As both Trita Parsi and Ken Pollack have shown, the Clinton administration's strategy of "dual containment" (itself the brainchild of WINEP co-founder Martin Indyk), was adopted in good part to reassure Israel. Dual containment led the United States to keep large numbers of troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s, and their presence there is one of the key reasons that bin Laden turned his attention to attacking the United States.

Thus, the special relationship contributes significantly to our terrorism problem-and to all the costs associated with the war on terror-by two separate pathways. And it is one reason why former president Bill Clinton told one audience that solving the Israel-Palestine conflict would "take about half the impetus in the whole world -- not just the region, the whole world -- for terror away ... It would have more impact by far than anything else that could be done."

Third, B/S also overlook the fact that some of the problems for which Israel's help is useful are also problems that Israel helped create or exacerbate. Israel has been a useful asset for some counter-proliferation activities -- such as the bombing of a Syrian reactor site and the development of the STUXNET virus that infected Iran's enrichment facilities -- but Israel's own nuclear arsenal (which it developed in defiance of U.S. pressure) is one reason why countries such as Syria or Iran are interested in WMD in the first place. And instead of putting pressure on Israel to join the NPT or get rid of its own nuclear arsenal, the United States has consistently blocked efforts to raise this issue within the International Atomic Energy Agency, even as it has been moving heaven and earth to isolate and sanction states such as North Korea or Iran. Unfortunately, the obvious double-standard displayed on this issue has made that diplomatic effort significantly more difficult.

Fourth, B&S are silent about the other burdens that the special relationship imposes, burdens that would be substantially lighter if the U.S. had a normal relationship with Israel. Just think of the amount of time and effort that U.S. presidents and their advisors have spent on this issue over the past several decades, not to mention that vast amount of attention expended on the fruitless post-Oslo "peace process." As UN Ambassador Susan Rice admitted earlier this year, dealing with Israel-related issues at the United Nations is "a significant part of my job. It's not the majority of my time ... [b]ut it is never the smallest piece. It is always there ... It's a lot." Needless to say, her ability to advance other items on the U.S. foreign policy agenda would be enhanced were she not spending so much effort to putting out fires on Israel's behalf.

Furthermore, a normal relationship would not require the United States to veto literally dozens of U.N. Security Council resolutions that were critical of Israel's occupation, including resolutions that are in fact consistent with stated U.S. policy. Nor would it require the United States to expend political capital pressing other states to oppose initiatives such as the recent resolution permitting the Palestinians to join UNESCO. And in a classic case of cutting one's nose to spite one's face, that decision triggered an lobby-inspired law requiring Congress to cut off funds to any UN agency that recognized the Palestinians. Here's what U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) had to say about that issue (my emphasis):

"This could be catastrophic for the U.S.-U.N. relationship. This could be the tipping point. . . There's a lot of bipartisan support for cutting off funding to any political U.N. organization that would do this . . . .What you are going to do is eventually lose congressional support for our participation in the United Nations. That's what's at risk here. That would be a great loss. I don't think that's in our near-term or long-term interest, but that's what's going to happen, that's where this thing is headed."

What Graham is saying, in short, is that the "special relationship" leads to decisions that are not in America's interest. But you wouldn't know that reading B&S.

Fifth, B&S's claim that unconditional support for Israel does not preclude close ties with Arab states is misleading, as well as increasingly out of date. Countless surveys of Arab opinion confirm that U.S. policy is deeply unpopular throughout the Arab world, and President Obama's steady retreat from his original Cairo speech commitment to "two states for two peoples" has driven the U.S. image in the region to a level even lower than it was under George W. Bush in 2008. This situation does not prevent some Arab states from working with Washington, but it makes it politically costly for them to be openly associated with the United States.

Why does this matter? In the past, the United States was able to ignore Arab opinion because its primary strategic relationships in the Arab world have been with authoritarian regimes whose policies did not reflect the opinions of their citizens. The Arab awakening in 2011 has rendered this aspect of U.S. policy untenable. The final outcome of these upheavals is unknown, but most Arab states are likely to become significantly more responsive to public sentiment than heretofore. This is obviously true in the case of any new Arab democracies, but even surviving autocrats are likely to govern with a greater fear of mass upheavals and with greater responsiveness to the views of their citizens. If the United States wants the policies of Arab states to be congenial to its core interests, therefore, it will have to make its own policies more congenial to Arab peoples, and not just a handful of potentates.

Although the recent demonstrations in the Arab world were inspired primarily by local concerns and not by anti-Israel or anti-American sentiment, U.S. support for Israel and its tolerance of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians remains a powerful source of popular Arab animus. Nor should we forget that leaders such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt were despised in part because they were seen as subservient to Washington and complicit in Israel's blockade of Gaza. As Turkey's behavior under the AKP government illustrates, governments that become more sensitive to public opinion are likely to favor policies more at odds with traditional U.S. policies. In particular, we can expect these states to be less willing to accept the status quo in the West Bank and Gaza and to be less deferential to Washington's preferences. And that means that the cost of the "special relationship" is going to go up, not down, and B&S's call for ever-closer cooperation with an increasingly isolated Israel is a recipe for the progressive erosion of U.S. influence.

Finally, B&S never ask where this whole situation is headed, and whether the "special relationship" is good for Israel itself. The window of opportunity created by the Oslo Accords in 1993 has closed, and it is now abundantly clear that the United States cannot be an effective steward of the peace process while maintaining a "special relationship" with one side. So there isn't going to be a two-state solution, and once this reality becomes unmistakable, the United States will have to figure out which of the available alternatives it is going to support. Should the United States bind itself ever-more-tightly and unconditionally to an increasingly hardline Israel, even if that state continues to treat its Arab minority as second-class citizens and denies its Palestinian subjects on the West Bank all political rights? Should Washington instead press Israel to adopt the principle of "one person, one vote" throughout the territory it controls, thereby hastening the end of a "Jewish state?" Or should it continue to turn a blind eye to the steady expansion of settlements and the continued evictions, home demolitions, and coercion that this policy requires?

It is hard to see how unconditional U.S. support for this approaching train wreck is in Israel's interest, let alone America's. A better approach would be to treat Israel like a normal country and have a normal relationship with it. In other words, make U.S. support conditional on Israel's conduct and limited to those areas where our interests are genuinely aligned. In other words, deal with Israel the same way we deal with other democracies around the world. Unfortunately, organizations like WINEP were created to keep the special relationship alive and to prevent U.S. leaders from pursuing a more sensible course, even when our current approach is increasingly harmful to the United States and Israel alike.

OOOPS! Kuwait: No plans to host more US troops

2011-11-07T11:39:00.001-05:00

from the AP. This may put a twist in some shorts at the Pentagon . . .

Kuwait: No plans to host more US troops
(AP) – 3 hours ago
KUWAIT CITY (AP) — A top Kuwaiti official has thrown doubt on American proposals to station at least 4,000 additional soldiers in the Gulf nation following the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq at the end of the year.
Sheik Jaber Al Mubarak Al Sabah, who is also defense minister, was quoted Sunday as saying there is no plan to increase U.S. troop levels in the country.
It was not immediately clear whether this was Kuwait's final word to the Pentagon or a suggestion that nothing is yet resolved and negotiations are in progress. The reference to the issue of U.S. troops was mentioned as part of a lengthy statement on a variety of issues.
A rebuff from Kuwait would be a significant blow to U.S. efforts to boost the numbers of forces in the Gulf, where the U.S. and its Arab allies fear Iran's expanding military reach. Earlier this month, U.S. officials said the Pentagon hoped to shift at least 4,000 soldiers from Iraq to Kuwait at the end of the year, pending a final decision by military planners and Kuwaiti leaders.
Sheik Jaber was quoted by the official Kuwait News Agency as saying that Kuwait will be used only as a transit point for forces, including those leaving Iraq. Kuwaiti officials could not be reached Monday to elaborate on the comments.
Thousands of U.S. troops have been in Kuwait since the 1991 war that drove Iraqi forces out of the oil-rich Gulf state. A decade-old agreement has governed the number of U.S. troops in Kuwait, but it is believed to expire at the end of this year. That would open the possibility of talks on all provisions for U.S. forces in Kuwait.
The proposed relocation of troops to Kuwait is part of a still-developing Pentagon strategy that ends the Iraq war but positions a strong U.S. force just across the border. It also fits with wider U.S. attempts to challenge the growth of Iran's ground and naval forces.

Iran's Growing Influence in Iraq

2011-11-07T10:21:00.001-05:00

The AP (in WaPo) explores the growing influence of Iranian "soft power" (without using that term) in Iraq, from Iranian yogurt on store shelves to Iran's supplying energy to Basra. The report also notes, of course (it's become de rigeur in the US media) Iranian support to anti-US Shii militias there. (And it's refreshing to see a WINEP expert - Michael Knights - quoted as saying that Iran's influence in Iraq is "overblown." WINEP's people tend to mirror the Likud's tone - that Iran is a horrible, terrible, existential threat that needs to be crushed.)

The report also provides some useful, and important, historical grounding by reference to the horrors of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, which killed hundreds of thousands on both sides. Yet, mystifyingly (or am I being naive?), the report focuses exclusively on the impacts of Iranian shelling on Iraqis - including the very sad story of the Iraq bride killed during an Iranian bombardment of the northern city of Mandali.

Nowhere is mentioned the fact that the war was launched by Saddam Hussein, who sent Iraqi forces into Khuzistan (the oil-bearing, predominantly Arab region of southwestern Iran) in hopes of overthrowing the then nascent Islamic Republic - and gaining control of a major portion of Iran's vast oil reserves.

Nor, of course, is it mentioned that the US supported Saddam throughout that war.

Truly mystifying (?) is Americans' complete inability to understand (a) the impact of all of this on Iranians' views of the United States' honor and trustworthiness, as well as (b) Iran's determination never to allow Iraq - and especially a Sunni-dominated Iraq - to emerge again as a threat.

Priceless Comment on Israel's Blockade of Gaza

2011-11-05T22:20:00.001-04:00

A comment from "Diane" at Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog, on his post in re Israel's Strangulation of Gaza:

Percentage of households in Gaza that are food insecure: 61%

Percentage of Palestinian children in Gaza who are stunted from malnutrition: 15%

Complaining that Gilad Shalit was “poorly nourished” because his diet was “primarily Gazan”: Priceless.

Priceless, indeed. Also, chutzpah. The article to which she refers appeared at YNet News. The Israelis complained that he was forced to eat too much hummus.

Seriously? You couldn't make this stuff up.

Richard Goldstone's Latest Climbdown: No Apartheid in Israel?

2011-11-05T11:16:00.001-04:00

For reasons that commentators have yet to divine fully (but that surely relate to the post-facto abuse he took - including exclusion from his grandson's bar-mitzvah), Richard Goldstone has been trying to climb down from his celebrated (or infamous - depending . . .) "Goldstone report" on the Israeli devastation of Gaza in the (truly infamous) "Operation Cast Lead" of 2008-2009. This week, the NY Times published his latest apologia for Israeli policy, in which he rejects as "slander" accusations that Israeli policy entails a version of the apartheid regime formerly applied to black Africans in white-dominated South Africa.

No one - including I - is going to challenge Judge Goldstone's fundamental decency, including his heroic role in undermining apartheid in his South Africa homeland. But several commentators have called him out for his parsing of words and straw-man arguments in making his case. Paul Pillar (at The National Interest) lays it out:

Earlier in his piece Goldstone refers to a definition of apartheid in the 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court. The core of that definition is “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” Even though these words describe exactly the current situation in the West Bank, Goldstone uses two strained arguments to contend that it does not. One is that the roadblocks, the walls, the restrictions on movement, and all the other aspects of the oppression and domination are a response to Israelis feeling threatened by terrorism. This is a dangerous and open-ended rationale, because almost every group of oppressors has used a threat from the oppressed group as justification for its own actions—at least as a public rationale, and often reflecting a genuinely felt threat. Many Afrikaners certainly felt threatened by the black majority in South Africa.

Goldstone's other argument is that the arrangement in the West Bank is not intended to be permanent; Israel, he says, has agreed “in concept” to a Palestinian state. But concepts do not displace realities. After forty-four years of the reality of Israeli occupation, how much longer will concepts suffice? Indeed, introducing the idea of Israeli concepts makes the comparison with South Africa all the more appropriate. Insofar as Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has given any indication of his concept of a Palestinian state, it looks a lot like the bantustans of South African apartheid. Underlying all this is the reality that Goldstone does not mention at all: the continued Israeli colonization of occupied territory that has now reached half a million settlers and is intended to create facts on the ground that will be the basis for making some version of the current arrangement permanent.

It is appropriate to look beyond the present to the future in discussing the use of the term apartheid, because in addition to describing the current situation it can fairly be used to assess the choices Israel must make when facing the reality of demographic trends. Over the long term, Israel cannot be a Jewish state and retain all the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River and be free and democratic. If it chooses in favor of the first two, it will be an apartheid state indefinitely. In thinking about the future, we also should remember that apartheid in South Africa ended—not just as a “concept,” but as a reality. But Israel has still not produced an F. W. de Klerk (and the Palestinians have not produced a Nelson Mandela).

Apartheid has such significance in the history of South Africa—and because of the importance of that experience, in the history of human oppression generally—that it is understandable if a South African would be sparing in applying the term to other situations. Maybe out of respect to South Africa, any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian situation could eschew the term and instead say “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” But that's twelve words rather than one. And if the one word fits—as it certainly does in this instance—it will be used, and appropriately so.

Jerome Slater (at his "On the US and Israel" blog, which I heartily recommend as a source of informed, astute, eloquent analysis) likewise takes Mr. Goldstone to task:

Goldstone wishes to distinguish between Israel’s policies within its own borders, towards the Israeli Arabs, and its policies in the occupied territories. Inside Israel, he asserts, “there is no apartheid,” and “nothing there comes close” to the international legal definition of apartheid: “systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group…”

True, the situation of the Israeli Arabs is not nearly so bad as that of the South African black population under apartheid—but (as others have pointed out) the argument is a straw man, since few if any serious critics of Israel have claimed that its policies and behavior towards its own Arab minority—as opposed to those in the occupied territories—is equivalent to apartheid. Nonetheless, while Goldstone concedes that there is too much “de facto separation" between the Jewish and Arab populations, and some Israeli “discrimination,” he ignores the proven facts that the Israeli Arabs are distinctly second-class citizens, systematically denied equal economic, social, cultural, and increasingly even legal rights.

“The situation in the West Bank is more complex,” Goldstone allows, but—and this he obviously believes is his trump card—“there is no intent to maintain an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by oneracial group” (my emphasis), a “critical distinction” in Goldstone’s view, because “South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority,” whereas “by contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.”

Here and elsewhere, close attention must be paid to Goldstone’s language: characteristically he asserts something that is clearly designed to give a certain impression, but at the same time, if read literally and the ambiguities are ignored, might provide him with an out when he is challenged on the facts, allowing him to claim he has been misunderstood.

In the first place, one may suspect that Goldstone's emphasis on the racial component of apartheid--as opposed to systematic oppression that may not be essentially racial in intention--is designed to support the argument that Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians does not constitute apartheid. Even if not, of course, it doesn't necessarily follow that Israeli oppression is less onerous than was that of South Africa--or indeed, even worse, as a number of former South African antiapartheid activists have written.

Perhaps my suspicion of Goldstone's true intentions in this case is mistaken--but surely not in other cases. For example, consider again Goldstone's bald statement that “Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters”--a perfect example of a statement that is literally true but in all essentials a lie. Yes, Israel has agreed to the “concept” of a two-state settlement, but as every serious observer of the conflict understands, not the reality. Further, of course, the statement is clearly designed to convey the impression that it is only the Palestinian refusal to negotiate that is blocking a settlement—another lie embedded in a perhaps technically and narrowly true statement.

In another example of Goldstone’s polemical techniques, he writes: “The security barrier was built to stop unrelenting terrorist attacks; while it has inflicted great hardship in places, the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered the state in many cases to refute it to minimize unreasonable hardship.” You almost have to admire the technique, for in one literally true statement it tells three lies.

First, as everyone knows, another and probably the main purpose of the “security barrier” was to grab more Palestinian land and to protect the illegal Jewish settlements beyond Israel’s accepted boundaries. Second, if the Supreme Court “in many cases” ordered a change in the route of the barriers, it follows that in other cases--probably most other cases--it has refused to do so. Third, in any event the Israeli government and military have often ignored Supreme Court rulings or "interpreted" them in such a way as to essentially defeat their purpose.

In characterizing the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Goldstone also makes technically true statements that nonetheless embody false symmetries and conceal the real truths. For example, he characterizes the conflict as one in which there “are claims and counterclaims,” where “attacks on one side are met by counterattacks from the other,” where there is “hostility and suspicion on both sides,” and in which Israel “sees” its behavior as “necessary for self-defense,” whereas the Palestinians “feel” oppressed. No realities then—no Israeli oppression, no Palestinian victimization, just conflicting perceptions.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, Goldstone clearly wishes to provide an excuse for Israel's occupation and repression of the Palestinians when he writes that "Israel, unique among democracies, has been in a state of war with many of its neighbors who refuse to accept its existence. Note that he doesn't say that Israel "is" in a state of war, just that it "has been;" yet he says Israel's neighbors "refuse"--as opposed to "refused"--to accept its existence. The characteristic trickery is obvious: if he had put everything in the past tense, that would lead to the conclusion that Israel would no longer have any excuses—even assuming that in the past it had--for its occupation and repression of the Palestinians. So, there's scarcely any doubt that Goldstone once again is being deliberately misleading---and that's a polite way of putting it.

Surely Goldstone knows the facts. Israel's closest neighbors are Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. The Israeli-Egyptian conflict ended
with the 1979 peace settlement, and the Israeli-Jordanian conflict ended in 1994--in any case, both conflicts were not primarily over any refusal
to accept Israel's existence. For the last thirty years, Saudi Arabia has been attempting to settle the overall Arab-Israeli conflict on terms which not only fully accept the "existence" of Israel but call for full normalization of diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and the Arab world--and all 20 states of the Arab League are now on record as supporting the Saudi plan. As for Lebanon, of course it is Israel which has engaged in repeated massive attacks on that country, not the other way around.

More "Terrorists" Killed by US Joystick Aces

2011-11-04T20:10:00.001-04:00

If you haven't read this piece in today's NYT about the wondrous achievements of our marvelous drones and their oh-so-outstanding "pilots," you should. And you should then forward it to your friends, your students, whomever.

Here it is, in its entirety.

November 3, 2011

For Our Allies, Death From Above

By CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH

London

LAST Friday, I took part in an unusual meeting in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

The meeting had been organized so that Pashtun tribal elders who lived along the Pakistani-Afghan frontier could meet with Westerners for the first time to offer their perspectives on the shadowy drone war being waged by the Central Intelligence Agency in their region. Twenty men came to air their views; some brought their young sons along to experience this rare interaction with Americans. In all, 60 villagers made the journey.

The meeting was organized as a traditional jirga. In Pashtun culture, a jirga acts as both a parliament and a courtroom: it is the time-honored way in which Pashtuns have tried to establish rules and settle differences amicably with those who they feel have wronged them.

On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.

The next day, the jirga lasted several hours. I had a translator, but the gist of each man’s speech was clear. American drones would circle their homes all day before unleashing Hellfire missiles, often in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. Death lurked everywhere around them.

When it was my turn to speak, I mentioned the official American position: that these were precision strikes and no innocent civilian had been killed in 15 months. My comment was met with snorts of derision.

I told the elders that the only way to convince the American people of their suffering was to accumulate physical proof that civilians had been killed. Three of the men, at considerable personal risk, had collected the detritus of half a dozen missiles; they had taken 100 pictures of the carnage.

In one instance, they matched missile fragments with a photograph of a dead child, killed in August 2010 during the C.I.A.’s period of supposed infallibility. This made their grievances much more tangible.

Collecting evidence is a dangerous business. The drones are not the only enemy. The Pakistani military has sealed the area off from journalists, so the truth is hard to come by. One man investigating drone strikes that killed civilians was captured by the Taliban and held for 63 days on suspicion of spying for the United States.

At the end of the day, Tariq stepped forward. He volunteered to gather proof if it would help to protect his family from future harm. We told him to think about it some more before moving forward; if he carried a camera he might attract the hostility of the extremists.

But the militants never had the chance to harm him. On Monday, he was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile.

My mistake had been to see the drone war in Waziristan in terms of abstract legal theory — as a blatantly illegal invasion of Pakistan’s sovereignty, akin to President Richard M. Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970.

But now, the issue has suddenly become very real and personal. Tariq was a good kid, and courageous. My warm hand recently touched his in friendship; yet, within three days, his would be cold in death, the rigor mortis inflicted by my government.

And Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile — most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile.

Clive Stafford Smith, an American lawyer, is the director of Reprieve, an organization that advocates for prisoners’ rights.

Would Obama Attack Iran?

2011-11-04T19:51:00.001-04:00

Interesting analysis from David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy, whose relatively fair-minded appraisal of Obama's achievements in re foreign policy stands in stark (and welcome) contrast to the palpable hatred that drips from the (metaphorical) pen of Charles Krauthammer. (Krauthammer has shown himself to be viscerally anti-Obama, in the most execrable sense of that term. That the Washington Post gives him space to rant as he does only highlights the growing quality gap between its team of commentators and that at the NY Times.)

Rothkopf's major point is that it would be unwise to count out (as so many have) the possibility that Obama will launch a US strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, although he seems convinced that if Obama were to do so, domestic politics would not influence his calculations, much less constitute his chief motive. Rather, Obama would do so out of a conviction that Iran must not be "allowed" to develop nuclear weapons - the underlying assumption being that Iran's leadership is so unpredictable (read: irrational Muslim fanatics) that the risks would simply be too great, and that Iran's acquisition of such weapons would spur a nuclear-arms race across the region.

Seems to me that Rothkopf is (a) buying into the "mad mullah" stereotype that neocons love to spotlight, and (b) is way too far out ahead of any realistic pace for Iran's progress toward such a goal - assuming that that is indeed their goal. The current wisdom seems to be that the about-to-appear report from the IAEA will bring some pretty damning evidence to bear on that score (here's the CSM's take). Whatever may be the reality of all that, Rothkopf writes as if there's a real chance that a US military strike won't produce any unmanageable consequences; that the diplomatic and other blowback can be contained:

While an attack on Iran's nuclear weapons facilities almost certainly would produce a spike in oil prices, those prices would stabilize if the attacks were successful and did not produce a protracted war. Further, with the world economy in a slump, prices are feeling less upward pressure anyway these days. However, if Iran gained nuclear weapons, it might trigger a kind of uncertainty that would be protracted and would have a longer-term effect on oil prices.

But doesn't this fly in the face of the fact that Iran is depending on developing its oil industry and exporting its oil in order to build its economy and infrastructure? Moreover, China is hugely invested in Iran's oil. If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, doesn't it stand to reason that it would want to reassure the world that its purpose in doing so is not (as Netanyahu and his Christian Zionist allies insist) to "wipe out" Israel or hold global oil supply hostage, but rather to deter the kind of aggression that Saddam launched against it in 1980 (and that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians), and that Bush-era neocons like Richard Perle so blatantly threatened it with only a few years ago? Since 2003, Iran has found itself ringed by the military of a nuclear-armed United States (as well as a nuclear-armed Pakistan and India - and, for that matter, Russia, a country that was Iran's nemesis going back to the days of the Qajar shahs of the 18th-20th centuries) and threatened with attack by another, very aggressive regional power - Israel - that has its own powerful nuclear force. That the West cannot bring itself to grasp the fact that Iranians have been living for so long with the threat of attack, and might want their own nuclear deterrent for the simple reason of security, speaks more to rampant Islamophobia than to an honest attempt to engage with Iranian insecurities.

Impending Israeli Attack on Iran?

2011-11-04T13:41:00.001-04:00

Juan Cole says no; but in doing so, he also spotlights the danger of talking up such an attack:

No one knows if [Netanyahu and Ehud Barak] are just trying to create a threatening environment for Iran, in hopes of intimidating Tehran on a range of issues, or if they are preparing Israeli public opinion for an actual strike. The problem with talking big to scare an enemy, if that is the tactic, is that the talk can spiral into action whether one likes it or not. (This mistake was probably what got Gamal Abdel Nasser into the 1967 war: Israeli hawks such as Moshe Dayan took advantage of his saber rattling to launch an attack, which could be portrayed as preemptive.)

There do indeed seem to be some sane minds in the IDF upper hierarchy (with "sane" being synonymous with opposed to attacking Iran), and as JC also notes, a lot of the current saber rattling may be a pressure tactic to try to force the Iranian leadership to back off its nuclear program. But the fact of the matter is that we've crossed into some weird territory here.

Almost half the Israeli public seems OK with an IDF strike on Iran's nuclear installations. (One of Cole's commenters references a recent essay by Norman Finkelstein claiming that the Israeli people are suffering from a kind of mass derangement. I haven't seen that piece, but much of what I've been reading over the last couple of years tells me that it wouldn't be that difficult to make such a case.)

Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, seems to be feeling the heat from sanctions, growing popular dissatisfaction with his regime, and the ongoing internal struggle between his hard-line supporters and those of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. MA has steadily lost ground, and clout; but it's worthy of note that outside Iran, this man who's been castigated as a half-crazy extremist seems to be perceived increasingly as more open to the West and more liberal-minded in his approach to gender relations than is his boss, who's been clamping down in such matters. (And note the recent imbroglio over the Iranian soccer team members whose "grab-ass" on-field celebrations may bring them a whipping by Iran's morality defenders.) My point here is that leaders under relentless pressure - especially of a quasi-existential nature (who knows how far Netanyahu might be willing to go in an IDF strike against Iran?) - will sometimes react unpredictably, and dangerously. Which allows me to segue to . . .

America's silly season of presidential campaigns and elections. We now have an embattled Mr. Obama, fighting for his own continued political existence, who's being savaged by both moderate and extremist Republicans for his alleged weaknesses on the international stage: "losing Iraq" (or so says the ever-fearful, predictably delusional Mr. Krauthammer today), "leading from behind" in Libya, being overly pusillanimous against Syria's Bashar al-Assad, coddling those upstart Turks, letting Pakistan diss the US so badly, and . . . God forbid, failing Israel by trying to get Netanyahu to stop building colonies in the West Bank, by not preventing Mahmud Abbas from taking the case for Palestinian statehood to the UN, . . .

. . . and, by coddling Iran. At a time when the US economy is perhaps just beginning to revive (big news today that unemployment rate has dropped, atop earlier news that a double-dip recession seems unlikely; all bad news for the GOP), Obama's alleged failures in supporting Israel by not playing hardball with Iran are going to be rising to the top of GOP debaters' talking points. Fox News, the WSJ, the neocons at National Review, Weekly Standard, and the Council on Foreign Relations -- all of them have begun to heat up the rhetoric about the existential threat that Iran supposedly is, not only to Israel, but the planet.

Obama will need to respond. We can only hope that the mainstream and progressive Democrats, and thoughtful independents, who formed the core of his support in 2008 will stand by him if he tries to hold the line against the Bomb-Bomb-Iran bunch. If they don't, Obama will have a powerful US fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf. If the polls look bad, might he resort to some kind of "limited tactical strike" against Iran? Or might he use that fleet to cover the IDF - and the Israel itself - in the wake of an IDF attack on Iran?

Israel and the US Congress: Funny If It Wasn't So Potentially Catastrophic

2011-11-03T21:57:00.001-04:00

Two reports today that ought to give pause to anyone still hoping that the US can salvage some modicum of respect on the international stage. And in each case, it's our Congress' slavish devotion to Netanyahu's hard-line doctrines and to their constituents' absurd sense of "what the Bible commands" that are setting us all up for potential catastrophe.

From the AP's Matthew Lee comes an analysis highlighting the rudderless quality of Obama's Middle East policies - and it's not so much that Obama has let go the rudder as it is the GOP refusing to let him come with 20 feet of it. It was bad enough lo those many months ago when Bibi slapped down Barack's demand for a settlement freeze in the West Bank, only to see Congress rush to the support, not of the American president, but the prime minister of Israel. Now the situation has become completely out of hand.

Israel acted, announcing that it would accelerate housing construction in east Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state, and the West Bank. It also at least temporarily halted the transfer of $100 million in taxes that it collects on behalf of the Palestinians. Again, the U.S. response came in words only, with Carney and Nuland speaking from the same script to say that Washington was "deeply disappointed" by the steps.

Now, hamstrung in an uncertain budget and pre-election season by a Congress that refuses to censure Israel and is eager to punish the Palestinians for their U.N. aspirations, the administration is caught in a diplomatically weak and awkward position.

It could threaten to withhold the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid it provides the Palestinian Authority each year if the Palestinians don't stop their U.N. push. But it won't because it doesn't want to destabilize Palestinian institutions or endanger security gains the Palestinians have made and even the Israelis have applauded. In a bizarre twist, the administration has sought help from Israeli officials in lobbying Congress not to cut Palestinian aid, even as Israel itself is withholding tax money the Palestinians need to run their government.

It could try to threaten to withhold some of the roughly $3 billion in assistance that the U.S. provides to Israel each year if the Israelis don't halt housing construction in disputed areas or make some other gesture to the Palestinians. But Congress won't hear of it and such a step is politically unpalatable for a president seeking re-election next year.

The administration could forcefully press Congress to waive the ban on U.S. funding for U.N. agencies that recognize Palestine, arguing that it puts American and Israeli interests at risk. But, fearing a backlash from conservative lawmakers already intent on slashing foreign aid and operations spending, it cannot push the matter too hard. So once again, it is in the odd position of looking to Israel for help, urging Israeli officials to tell U.S. lawmakers that America's presence in U.N. bodies is important, especially because the U.S. is often Israel's sole ally in such forums.

It is beyond pathetic - indeed, one might deem it treasonable - that the American president has been reduced to the position of having to beg Israel's leaders to intervene with his own Congress in order to give the president even a sliver of ability to take actions necessary to safeguard American interests. And we're talking about the same Israeli leaders who embarrassed Obama and his vice-president over the settlements issue, and who now have authorized the ramping up of settlement construction despite US protests. And as those settlements go up, over Obama's protests, it's the US - and Obama, the most identifiable symbol of the US abroad - who will be blamed for letting it happen.

And meanwhile, all the talk in Israel now is about the impending airstrike on Iran's nuclear facilities (and, for all we know, Iranian cities, government buildings, mosques - who knows?). The consequences of such an attack have been laid out for years by sober-minded experts, including higher-ups in the Israeli military. No matter: Bibi and Barak (the other Barack, the one named Ehud) are beating the war drums. Yet at a time when diplomacy with Iran - a mechanism for clarifying intentions and averting possible regional war and nuclear disaster - would seem to be most crucial . . . .

There goes Congress again. Read M. J. Rosenberg's Huffington Post essay on how AIPAC's war with Iran bill has passed the House of Representatives.

The point of the Israeli threats is to get the United States and the world community to increase pressure on Iran with the justification that unless it does, Israel will attack.

Naturally, the United States Congress, which gets its marching orders on Middle East policy from the lobby which, in turn, gets its marching orders from Binyamin Netanyahu, is rushing to do what it is told. (If only Congress addressed joblessness at home with the same alacrity and enthusiasm.)

Accordingly the House Foreign Affairs Committee hurriedly convened this week to consider a new"crippling sanctions" bill that seems less designed to deter an Iran nuclear weapon than to lay the groundwork for war.

The clearest evidence that war is the intention of the bill's supporters comes in Section 601 which should be quoted in full. (It is so incredible that paraphrasing would invite the charge of distorting through selective quotation.)

What Rosenberg goes on to quote ought to be read by every American citizen who cares about America's good name (whatever that might even be anymore):

c) RESTRICTION ON CONTACT. -- No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that -- (1) is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran; and (2) presents a threat to the United States or is affiliated with terrorist organizations. (d) WAIVER. -- The President may waive the requirements of subsection (c) if the President determines and so reports to the appropriate congressional committees 15 days prior to the exercise of waiver authority that failure to exercise such waiver authority would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States.

If I might channel John McEnroe? . . . .

ARE YOU SERIOUS?!!!

The president of the US would not be allowed to contact Iran's leadership, even during this period of rising crisis, unless he first came to Congress - hat in hand, as it were - to get its permission?!! Unless he came before Congressional committees now run by the likes of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen?!!! Rosenberg lays it out, masterfully:

To call this unprecedented is an understatement. At no time in our history has the White House or State Department been restricted from dealing with representatives of a foreign state, even in war time.

If President Roosevelt wanted to meet with Hitler, he could have and, of course, he did repeatedly meet with Stalin. During the Cold War, U.S. diplomats maintained continuous contacts with the Soviets, a regime that murdered tens of millions and, later, with the Chinese regime which murdered even more. And they did so without needing permission from Congress. (President Nixon was only able to normalize relations with China by means of secret negotiations which, had they been exposed, would have been torpedoed by the Republican right.)

But all the rules of normal statecraft are dropped when it comes to Iran which may, or may not, be working on developing a nuclear capacity. Of course if it is, it is obviously even more critical that the American government officials speak to Iranian counterparts.

But preventing diplomacy is precisely what Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Howard Berman (D-CA), leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee which reported out this bill, seek. They and others who back the measure want another war and the best way to get it is to ban diplomacy (which exists, of course, to prevent war).

Think back, for example, to the Cuban missile crisis. The United States and the monstrous, nuclear armed Soviet regime were on the brink of war over Cuba, a war that might have destroyed the planet.

Neither President Kennedy nor Premier Khrushchev knew how to end the crisis, especially because both were being pushed by their respective militaries not to back down.

Then, at the darkest moment of the crisis, when war seemed inevitable, an ABC correspondent named John Scali secretly met with a Soviet official in New York who described a way to end the crisis that would satisfy his bosses. That meeting was followed by another secret meeting between the president's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and a Soviet official in Washington. Those meetings led to a plan that ended the crisis and, perhaps, saved the world.

Needless to say, Kennedy did not ask for the permission of the House Foreign Affairs Committee either to conduct secret negotiations or to implement the terms of the deal. In fact, it was decades before the details of the deal were revealed.

It is this latitude to conduct diplomacy that the lobby and its cutouts on Capitol Hill want to take away from the White House. And it's latitude that is especially essential if it is determined that Iran is trying to assemble a nuclear arsenal.

This is so far beyond the realm of politics-as-usual as to be almost Kafkaesque. American foreign policy is now held in thrall to the power of a lobby that is arguably acting as an agent of a foreign country. And that lobby is able to hold that power because it has the full-throated support of a well-organized and financed quasi-messianic Christian Right that simply refuses to countenance any rational perspective that suggests that the Biblical "history" just might not be an appropriate basis for the guiding of US foreign policy.

A few decades from now, when it's all come crumbling down and the US is struggling to extricate itself from the rubble, I can only imagine how foolish - or impotent - those who come after us will find us to have been.

Will Maliki Send Troops into Tikrit?

2011-10-29T21:34:00.001-04:00

According to this McClatchy report, Iraq president Nuri al-Maliki has a major crisis on his hands.

The council of the Iraqi province of Salahuddin, meeting in Tikrit (birthplace of Saddam Hussein - and the great Crusade-era hero known to Europe as Saladin), voted to declare the province a separate region within Iraq. In other words, they now claim the same semi-autonomous status that's obtained since even before the 2003 invasion for the northern Kurdish provinces that together form the Kurdistan Regional Government. The Kurds insist on maintaining that status (and would rather have complete independence, if balloting taken several years ago is any indication), and for good reason, given their treatment at the hands of the Arab-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein (and his predecessors).

Salahuddin province is mostly Sunni, and was the heartland of Sunni support for Saddam. Maliki leads a predominantly religious Shii coalition in a government that is dominated by the Shia, who are not about to allow a resurgence of Sunni political power in Iraq. Maliki is trying to tar all of Salahuddin's Sunni as Baathists, and terrorists. But he dare not allow this quasi-separatist initiative to gain momentum.

Unless the council backs down, Maliki will have to move forcefully against them, to squelch the entire movement before it gets rooted and spawns offshoots. That, in turn, is likely to elicit a response from what remains a well-armed and angry Sunni opposition in Salahuddin and beyond, including Anbar province and cities like Fallujah. Reuters reported yesterday that thousands of Sunni in Anbar had protested the Maliki government's recent round-up and arrest of Baathists (read: Sunni). Iraq expert Reidar Visser has pointed out that Baathists and terrorists are not the same thing. He has also noted that what the Salahuddin provincial council has done is unconstitutional.

I'm not sure that, in today's Iraq, any of that matters. Maliki has made it clear that when it comes to ensuring his hold on power, he has no compunction about taking extraordinary action: arbitrary arrest and detention, as well as harsh interrogation (i.e., torture). In an essay strikingly, but aptly, titled "Welcome to Malikistan," Visser notes:

Maliki clarifies that what Salahaddin is not really a declaration of a federal region, since this is not legally possible. This is correct, and thankfully the electoral commission has also contributed on a clarification on the subject, underlining that the governorate can only make the first step towards the creation of a federal region and not simply declare it. But what follows is complete nonsense. Maliki says the government will reject the request for a referendum because it “is based on a sectarian grounds, intended to offer protection of Baathists, and on other unclear grounds”!

This comment by Maliki is tantamount to pissing on the constitution. As long as they stay faithful to the procedures laid down in the law for forming regions, Iraqis can create federal regions for whatever reasons they want. No one has the right to enquire about the motives as long as the modalities are done correctly. If Maliki wants to change that – and there are good reasons for restricting federalism options so as to avoid a constant string of useless federalism attempts – he must work to change the constitution.

It is a sorry sign of the state of play in Iraq that both opponents and proponents of the Salahaddin federal region are now making up their own laws.

At a time when the official US boots-on-the-ground military presence in Iraq is about to end, the portents are not good.

The IDF: Israel's Army, or God's?

2011-10-29T14:40:00.001-04:00

From the pages of Haaretz, several reports on the growing influence of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish beliefs and regulations within the Israeli military. Not exactly new, but now being exhibited more and more brazenly - as, for example, when female cadets were compelled to stand apart from their male counterparts:

The hundreds of women soldiers who angrily left Simhat Torah celebrations in the south after they were made to crowd into a small area away from male celebrants are the latest victims of a worrisome trend toward ultra-Orthodoxy in the Israel Defense Forces. There had already been incidents where male soldiers refused to serve under female instructors and officers, and women have been segregated at a training school's swimming pool. Another time, officer candidates left a ceremony because women were singing.

During the IDF's main Sukkot holiday event, organized under the banner "we build the people's army in a spirit of unity," women were segregated in an offensive way, as though this were a remote ultra-Orthodox social hall and not an official army event held with civilian participation in the area of the Eshkol Regional Council. This was incredibly insulting. Many of the participants were not religious, and apart from those who enforced the wrongheaded segregation policy, the religious celebrants were also taken aback.

Apparently a few religious extremists were not satisfied that the women were dancing separately and took the initiative to move them to a separate area. Yet senior officers in the Gaza division, including Brig. Gen. Yossi Bachar and IDF Chief Rabbi Rafi Peretz, stood idly by and did not intervene on the women soldiers' behalf. How can it be that a few extremists who seek to turn Jewish law into an instrument of crude segregation can lead two top IDF officers by the nose? Or do these officers disavow responsibility when it comes to actions offensive to women soldiers?

Yossi Sarid chips in, noting that Ultra-Orthodox segregation of the sexes has been rampant in Jerusalem, and has even begun to pop up in New York City:

The trend toward ultra-Orthodox extremism that has been gripping religious soldiers takes on a particularly fanatic cast when it applies to women. In recent years the IDF has created unprecedented opportunities for female soldiers, and women soldiers are now promoted in elite units and combat roles based on their abilities. But aggressive religious isolationism belies these new realities and undermines the status of women soldiers who serve in all roles in the IDF.

The distance between the Israel Defense Forces and Mea She'arim is getting shorter. Although that ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem doesn't have any draftees, its spirit hovers over the ranks. In both places there is a separation between women and men, between masculine and feminine areas, while the High Court of Justice says this is forbidden. How very nice of it to do so.

And why shouldn't they expand the boundaries of separation if the gender-segregated buses continue to operate - young men in front and virgins in back - and the government subsidizes this gender-based apartheid. In New York too there was a report this week about a segregated bus line, and the mayor immediately declared: "Private people: You can have a private bus. Go rent a bus and do what you want on it."

It's clear that New York will mend its ways before Jerusalem, because the shtreimel-wearing shebab bow their heads before the authorities, and only here will they raise their heads. For from Zion shall exclusion come forth, for in Jerusalem ethnic and gender-based purification is taking place, women are disappearing from the public space, erased from ads and billboards. And the mayor fires his deputy for daring to turn to the courts to avenge the honor of her sisters.

"Don't judge someone until you've stood in his shoes," and we are trying to reach it, if not the place itself, then nearby. It's very hard to be a Jew who both guards his homeland and strictly observes the commandments; it's hard to be a brave soldier when there are so many Jewish Delilahs around.

It's hard to see 6-year-old child Liliths studying together with boys their own age; the holy community of Beit Shemesh is already working to change the situation. And it's hard to be a bagger standing behind the female cashiers at the supermarket, who stand or sit, and sometimes bend over, may God preserve them, and us.

Even religious Zionism has fallen victim to ultra-Orthodox fanaticism. More educational institutions are separating the sexes, and religious Zionism's youth movement is also trying to save young souls. It would be preferable for Bnei Akiva's girls to wrap themselves in black rags like the Taliban.

The modesty brigades go outside the walls, and now they're attacking the kibbutzim. I couldn't believe a friend who told me about Kibbutz Ashdot Ya'akov (Ihud ), which recently held a Simhat Torah celebration in strictly Orthodox style - men in one place, women in another. Who will remove the dust from the eyes of the pioneer women who chiseled stones on the Tzemah-Tiberias road, who with the sweat of their brows cultivated the vegetable garden at the Kinneret farm? Had there not already been so many eulogies for the kibbutz movement, another one would have been added here.

Never has the status of women in Israel been so high, and never has it been so low. A woman is the president of the Supreme Court, while women head the protest movement and two political parties, with a third on the way. The day will come when they are asked to sit in the balcony of the Knesset, like in the synagogue. Male MKs won't protest their marginalization too loudly for fear that pious rabbis will attack them in their sermons.

And bear in mind the continuing racist, religion-based attacks by Jewish settlers on Arab communities in the West Bank, as well as the rulings of one rabbiwho proclaimed that even Gentile babies could be killed in defense of Jews.

This is not the Israel of the 1950s and 1960s, which was established and governed by a predominantly liberal-secular-socialist Ashkenazi (European) political class. These were, of course, the same men and women who authored the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs from their towns and villages, as well as the "Iron Wall" mentality (as so carefully and fully documented by Avi Shlaim). Nonetheless, they would have been shocked (as are most American Jews) by the racist, hyper-puritanical tone that's been emerging in Israeli society and the IDF over the last 20 years.

Not shocked, unfortunately, are so many thousands of Christian Zionists who pack the pews of so many thousands of American Protestant congregations - the ones who hope to see a war involving Israel that will usher in Armageddon and the Second Return of Jesus, that man of peace and love.

Well, if this report from the Washington Times is accurate, they may get it - the war, that is. Is it possible that Mr. Netanyahu approved the prisoner exchange for Gilad Schalit in order to clear the decks for an Israeli military strike on Iran? Indeed, Amir Oren wrote (in Haaretz, as paraphrased by the WT):

Although the prime minister failed to make any enduring mark on history during his previous term or so far during his present term, Mr. Netanyahu may see Iran as an opportunity to achieve his Churchillian moment, Mr. Oren wrote. "The day is not far off, Netanyahu believes, when Churchill will emerge from him."

Libya: Divvy It Up and Take the Oil?

2011-10-29T13:05:00.001-04:00

Does this (Lawrence Solomon in Financial Post) remind anyone else of post-World War I European divide-and-control in the Middle East -- and use the oil wealth as we see fit?

Who should get Libya’s fabulous oil and gas wealth, an amount that could be equivalent to several million dollars per Libyan? With NATO leaving Libya Monday, the West should prepare for the aftermath. The coming chaotic months will see infighting, and perhaps a renewal of civil war, among the many rival tribal and ideological groups. The West should now consider whether to influence — or impose — a just resolution.

If the West takes a hands-off approach, Libya is likely to fall into the hands of another strongman, as all Arab countries have in the Middle East. Does the West want another Gaddafi to control these riches? Or should the riches be divvied up among Libya’s many tribes? Should Libya — a new country conjured up by Western powers 60 years ago — even exist in its present form? Or should some other borders be created, to better reflect the traditional lands and cultural differences of its indigenous populations?

W
This immense country — the fourth largest in Africa, in area equivalent to 25 Irelands — had but one million people on its independence day in 1951, when the United Nations merged together one French and two British-administered territories to create Libya. Few among those one million had any notion of nationhood — they largely hailed from nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, some 20 tribes among them of various racial stock, typically with fierce allegiances to their own clans and little else.
The three territories that became Libya had few economic prospects at the time — they were believed to have no commercial supplies of oil or water — making them a cost to their British and French masters. To rid themselves of these costs, these Western powers, with UN approval, installed a local dignitary as king and walked away.
Prior to the Second World War, the territories had been colonized by Italy’s Fascists. Prior to the First World War, they had been colonies of the Ottoman Turks, who had taken them from the Arabs, who had taken them from the Romans, who had taken them from the Greeks. “Libyans” had never ruled themselves.
Today, Libyans still have little notion of nationhood. Shortly after Libya’s creation, Esso (now known as Exxon) discovered oil, making Libya a prize worth seizing. Gaddafi then overthrew the monarchy that the UN had created and dismantled parliament, political parties and all other institutions that might challenge him. Over his 42-year rule, he used Libya’s wealth, as Arab dictators often do, to buy off some tribes and oppress the rest. Today no tradition of democracy exists in Libya, except as vestiges of tribal governance, which Gaddafi also attempted to destroy.
Libyans, by any credible measure, are ill-prepared to govern themselves, and some minorities may prefer to live apart from the dominant Libyan tribes. The Tuareg in the country’s remote southwest, for example, call themselves “the free people” and live up to their name: These dark-skinned people from the Saharan interior are famed for having fought the French Foreign Legion and other colonizers in the past; today they oppose the interim leaders that NATO and the West have empowered in Libya.
Fortunately, the United Nations has a mechanism to deal with people such as the Tuareg, and immature states such as Libya — the United Nations Trusteeship System. After the Second World War, this system oversaw the transition of 11 territories to self-determination. Each transition was unique, because the local circumstances were unique, but they all had as their goals the promotion of domestic development, along with international peace and security. In some cases, self-determination took the form of outright independence, as with the Cameroons; in others, it involved a merger, as with Togoland, which joined the Gold Coast to become Ghana; in still others, it involved separation, as with Ruanda-Urundi, which voted to divide into the two sovereign states of Rwanda and Burundi.
In the case of Libya, a UN trusteeship that gave its peoples a say over their own destiny could well see a split-up of the country. The country might divide into the three parts that existed prior to independence, or into a larger number of sovereign states, as the various tribal groups considered their cultural and economic self-interest.
Decentralization is likely to be positive in financial terms because under the highly centralized Gaddafi dictatorship, as with most dictatorships, the economy stagnated. His decision to expropriate the foreign-owned oil industry in favour of an inefficient and corrupt state oil company all but halted development of one of the world’s largest, cleanest, and lowest-cost reservoirs of energy — most of Libya’s vast energy potential as a result remains unexplored and untapped.
The UN trusteeship could also dispense reparations by using part of Libya’s oil wealth to compensate Gaddafi’s victims. These exist in good number domestically, in the tribes and political prisoners that he ruthlessly subdued, and externally too, in the neighbouring countries he attacked. The trusteeship could also compensate the Libyans forced to flee the country, both the political refugees and Libya’s once sizeable Jewish community, which was forced to leave en masse, its property expropriated.
Finally, reparations could also include the US$1-billion to US$2-billion that NATO spent to liberate the country from its tyrant. If compensated, NATO countries would more readily intervene in other tyrannies, and the tyrants, knowing this, would less readily send their tanks in against their own people.
The alternative to giving Libya’s people the right to determine their future is bleak. The interim leaders — chiefly a trio associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda — have strongly held views, as do those NATO defeated on their behalf. But NATO leaves at 11:59 p.m., Oct. 31.

The "Existential Threat" of those Mad Mullahs

2011-10-28T19:36:00.001-04:00

OK, OK, so the worthies who published this Islamophobic screed in Haaretz didn't call them "mad mullahs" - but they do make reference to Iran's " irrational Shiite clerics." Close enough.

Sad to say, the authors include two former major honchos of the US military hierarchy: Admiral (ret. ) Leon "Bud" Edney, former vice chief of U.S. naval operations; NATO supreme allied commander, Atlantic; and commander in chief, U.S. Atlantic Command; and Lt. Gen. (ret. ) Thomas G. McInerney, former vice chief of staff, USAF; deputy chief of staff for operations and intelligence; and vice commander in chief, HQ, U.S. Air Force in Europe. Regrettably, the editors of Haaretz provided them cover to disseminate a pseudo-legalistic apologistic essay that attempts to wash the US's hands of any moral or legal culpability should it decide to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran.

Their rationale appeals to some of the most standard, even hackneyed assumptions [see my italicizing below] about Iran's leadership and what it might be capable of:

The United States is presently the only country that has the operational capability to undertake a successful preemptive mission to remove Iran's covert and illegal nuclear weapons program. In the best of circumstances, such an expression of anticipatory self-defense would be broadly multilateral, and endorsed by the United Nations. But we don't yet live in the best of all possible worlds, and even now, the most likely alternative - if there is not an American defensive strike on Iran - would be a fully nuclear Iran, led by irrational Shiite clerics. Should this alternative be "selected," America would need to clarify persuasively that its response to any attack on the United States or its vital interests in a Middle East where nuclear weapons are now proliferating would be instant and overwhelming.

In world politics, irrational does not mean "crazy." It indicates, rather, that national self-preservation is valued less than certain other leadership preferences. With Iran, these preferences would be associated with various core religious beliefs and expectations.

There can be no foreseeable nuclear balance of terror in the Middle East. In the not-too-distant future, Iran could well justify using nuclear weapons against "infidels" or "apostates," whatever the expected retaliatory consequences. In such conceivable cases, nuclear deterrence would be ineffective. Iran would become a suicide-bomber writ large; in other words, a "suicide-state."

"Suicide-state." Gee, that's catchy. (Ooooh, I know, I know!! How about "kamikaze kountry"?)

I'm not making this stuff up.

How about these two red-blooded American heroes get back on their meds, head back to the golf course - whatever it takes to get themselves out of the limelight before they incinerate whatever's left of the reputation for clear-thinking of a Pentagon establishment that has undeniably self-immolated over the past 10 years. (And take your Purdue professor pal with you.)

What Lies Ahead for Libya?

2011-10-28T10:30:00.001-04:00

Anne Applebaum in the WaPo has the smart response: Don't ask me. I can't blame her for the dodge either. But as she writes about what she's seeing in Benghazi, it's obvious that Libya could go in a bazillion different ways. Much of the rest of the world will be intent on gettting its oil production back on line. Its other resources - especially its people, and perhaps its beach shoreline - are waiting to be developed; oil may bring money to do that.

But who's going to be the guide; run the show, and how? Truly, nobody can say. Let's hope the Libyan people can bring to the task some measure of fortitude (which, given all they've endured, they surely have, in spades) and patience (remains to be seen, but I'm not betting the ranch on that virtue being very abundant among a people tired of poverty and stagnation). What they can't bring to the task is a real foundation to build upon, or a template to model, because Qaddafi left no semblance of either.

So, Libya . . . . A bonanza in the making? Or a bleeding carcass about to be ripped apart?

Applebaum's right. No one can say.

Thomas Friedman Skewered in New Book

2011-10-28T09:50:00.001-04:00

Nice to see that someone has finally sat down with all of Thomas Friedman's columns since the 1990s, analyzed them thoroughly, and held them up for some well-deserved - and much overdue - scrutiny. From Jadaliyya, a portion of a conversation with Belen Fernandez, author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work:

I was of course already familiar with the general characteristics of Friedman’s writing—hubris, clichéd jingoism, Orientalism, favoritism of Israel, self-contradiction, a severe handicap in the realm of metaphor construction, reduction of complex phenomena to simplistic and baseless theories. However, reviewing three decades of his work made it clear just how frightening, as opposed to simply laughable, it was that such a character had accrued three Pulitzer Prizes and risen to the position of journalistic icon at the US newspaper of record.

Though in earlier decades Friedman was often constrained to writing about innocuous topics, such as “Iowa Beef Revolutionized Meat-Packing Industry” (published in the New York Times in 1981), his post-1995 incarnation as a foreign affairs columnist—or, in his words, as a “tourist with an attitude”—has intermittently evolved into a license to prescribe military onslaughts and collective punishment, generally in the Arab/Muslim world, in obvious violation of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting such practices.

Consider, for example, his decree in a column published a few days prior to Israel’s devastation of Jenin in 2002 that “Israel needs to deal a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.” Or consider his suggestion during Operation Cast Lead in 2009 that Israel should repeat the strategy it employed in Lebanon in 2006, when the IDF supposedly achieved “the education of Hezbollah” by “exact[ing] enough pain on [Lebanese] civilians…to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

As Foreign Policy aptly notes in its justification for awarding Friedman slot number thirty-three in the 2010 list of the FP Top 100 Global Thinkers: “Friedman doesn’t just report on events; he helps shape them.”

Indeed. And not for the better, I would submit.

Ms. Fernandez devotes attention as well to Friedman's first major book, From Beirut to Jerusalem - which, I now shamefully confess, I adopted as required course reading for the first iteration (mid-1980s) of my undergrad survey course on the history of the Middle East from Muhammad to the Present. Although I was the creator of the course, I was then just beginning to get some footing in the material I was teaching. I also was mystified when told later that two of my students (both of them Muslims) had gone to my department chair to complain that I was having the class read a book that, in their estimation, was so biased.

Of course, it didn't take me long to figure out why. But bear in mind, I was at the time (like millions of other Americans of my generation) still laboring under the impression that the movie Exodus (starring Paul Newman, Sal Mineo, etc., with John Derek - perhaps most famous as later the hubby of short-term hottie starlet Bo Derek - playing the role of the only English-speaking, "good" Arab) was a gem of history-based movie-making that might be suitable for classroom screening as a reliable depiction of the events of 1947-1949.

Yes, I was indeed that naive, and that stupid - but I never did screen Exodus for that course. But I might, someday - but for reasons for which its producer (or Leon Uris, who wrote the book upon which the movie was based) never intended.

And if I knew where those two former students were now, I just might send them a personal check to refund them the money I made them waste on buying Friedman's book.

Meanwhile, Ms. Fernandez's book just might be worth a look.

The Tunisia Elections: Will the West Accept the Results?

2011-10-26T13:23:00.001-04:00

Rami Khouri on the Tunisian elections as marking a new "birthday" for the Arab world: the birth of real democracy there. (And, sorry, all you neocons: Iraq does NOT count; nor will any democracy that the US and pals install - that is, impose.)

But can the US and pals handle what's going to be in the offing?

There is already much discussion of the implications of the Islamist party Ennahda winning the most votes, and the possible coalitions it may form with other leading vote-getters, such as the secular leftist parties, the Congress Party for the Republic and Ettakol, or the center-left Progressive Democratic Party.

The emphasis on the American and other Western media on Ennahda’s performance is understandable, in foreign lands where Islamists are feared in large part because they are not known. Ennahda and its coalition partners will now be subjected to the greatest test that any political group can experience: the accountability of incumbency. They must deliver what the Tunisian electorate demands, in terms of economic growth, jobs, social justice, security and that long absent sense that this and other Arab governments exist to serve their people above all else. If the governing coalition delivers what the citizenry expects, it will be voted into power again and again, as we have witnessed in Turkey over the past decade.

The West, led by Israel and the United States, made a terrible mistake in 2006 when many countries refused to deal with Hamas after it won the election in Palestine. The same thing happened in 1992 when the FIS Islamist party won the elections but was barred from taking office due to an army coup, leading to a brutal civil war that saw nearly 200,000 Algerians killed. Now the world gets another chance to react more rationally to an Arab Islamist party that has won a free election and says it wants to strengthen Tunisia’s secular democratic system. The really significant event Sunday in Tunisia was not the victory by Ennahda, but rather the triumph of the combined concepts of pluralistic electoral democracy, republicanism and constitutionalism.

The legitimizing factor that has made all this possible, in the span of just nine months since the overthrow of the dictator, has been the ongoing popular participation of hundreds of thousands of Tunisians, who followed up the initial removal of the former regime by repeatedly taking to the streets, the media, and the political space they opened up to demand that the core aims of the revolution be achieved. This is the new and historic factor that many of us in the region have been pointing out for months, and that is now more evident: These historic transitions to more honorable, credible and accountable governance systems will succeed because an empowered, activist citizenry demands this, and will keep working to ensure that it happens.

Neither promises nor threats will prevent success. The twin core demands of the Arab citizen now being born across the region – social justice and genuine constitutional reforms – drive this ongoing process of historic rebirth. They set down their first roots in Tunisia last Sunday.

Rest assured: Islamists will dominate the new Tunisian democracy. They will not look kindly on an Israel that has bullied and brutalized so many Muslims, and for so long. Nor will they rush into the embrace of a US that does not begin to distance itself from an Israeli regime led by hard-core, maximalist Zionists (one of them, Avigdor Lieberman, demonstrably a racist bigot).

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and other Congressmen bought and paid by AIPAC will rant and make threats. The "experts" at WINEP and Brookings will pen scarifying reports. Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann will stir the pot.

Obama has professed himself the standard bearer for a new American approach to encouraging democracy and human rights in the Middle East. (Hell, he even got a Nobel Peace Prize for it!) Well, the ball's about to be passed to him again.

Will he man up?

Speaking Again of Leverage . . . in Iraq

2011-10-26T12:57:00.001-04:00

Spencer Ackerman at Wired, reminding us all that the withdrawal of US regular combat forces from Iraq by 31 December does not signal the end of US-perpetrated violence in that country. Why's that? It's because the US's chief war-fighting force - the CIA, with all those drones and led by the US's most ballyhooed (now retired) general, David Petraeus (Saint David of the Surge) - is hardly pulling out; and, because what amount to three private armies of mercenaries will be attached to the US diplomatic missions at Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.

These are the same lethal, trigger-happy cowboy-clowns who shot up Baghdad's Nisoor Square in 2007, killing 17 Iraqi bystanders. They now become the State Department's own little militia. And if past practice still holds, if one of them misbehaves (as in, "lights up" one of the locals), the US will whisk him out of the country, and not give a rat's ass about what Iraqis may say.

Ackerman concludes:

It’s a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it’s being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective. . . .

So far, there are three big security firms with lucrative contracts to protect U.S. diplomats. Triple Canopy, a longtime State guard company, has a contract worth up to $1.53 billion to keep diplos safe as they travel throughout Iraq. Global Strategies Group will guard the consulate at Basra for up to $401 million. SOC Incorporated will protect the mega-embassy in Baghdad for up to $974 million. State has yet to award contracts to guard consulates in multiethnic flashpoint cities Mosul and Kirkuk, as well as the outpost in placid Irbil.

“We can have the kind of protection our diplomats need,” Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough told reporters after Obama’s announcement. Whether the Iraqi people will have protection from the contractors that the State Department commands is a different question. And whatever you call their operations, the Obama administration hopes that you won’t be so rude as to call it “war.”

Obama's Lost Leverage on the Global Stage

2011-10-26T12:10:00.001-04:00

The NYT's Thomas Friedman pens what's on the whole a reasonably well-argued essay on how Mr. Obama has done much better on achieving the Bush/Cheney "war on terror" objectives than Bush/Cheney did (and let's not forgotten Condi, America's then embattled brainiac/Barbie doll secretary of state); has bungled Afghanistan/Pakistan; and has little leverage to use, owing to American economic decline and reliance on Middle Eastern oil (a very big drum that TF bravely keeps banging - and God bless him for it.)

But his myopia kicked in when he then wrote:

Obama’s frustrations in bagging a big, nonmilitary foreign policy achievement are rooted in a much broader structural problem — one that also explains why we have not produced a history-changing secretary of state since the cold war titans Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker.

The reason: the world has gotten messier and America has lost leverage. When Kissinger was negotiating in the Middle East in the 1970s, he had to persuade just three people to make a deal: an all-powerful Syrian dictator, Hafez al-Assad; an Egyptian pharaoh, Anwar Sadat; and an Israeli prime minister with an overwhelming majority, Golda Meir.

To make history, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, by contrast, need to extract a deal from a crumbling Syrian regime, a crumbled Egyptian regime, a fractious and weak Israeli coalition and a Palestinian movement broken into two parts.

Actually, even if Kissinger et al. were "cold war titans" at a time when US-Soviet relations called the tune for global geopolitics, Kissinger's lopsidedly pro-Israel intervention in the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war was part of a long history of such pro-Israel decisions on the part of the US. Those decisions relentlessly undercut the US's leverage in the eyes of the people who - in this era of the "Arab spring" - are now beginning to count perhaps the most in the Middle East: the once disdained (and, as far as the US was concerned, largely ignored) "Arab street" (and add to that now the Turkish and Iranian streets).

Of the three presidents whose tenures those three Secs of State reflect, only George H. W. Bush (with Baker as his Sec State) dared take a stand (in 1991) against Israeli colonization of the Occupied Territories. (And it cost him on the American "street": that the victor of the 1991 Desert Storm war against Saddam went down to defeat vs. Bill Clinton in Nov. 1992 was due in no small part to Bush's threat to retract loan guarantees if Israel did not curb its colonization of the West Bank.) Throughout that time, the US was content to make protecting Israel's interests one of the lynchpins of its Middle East policy. And it played ball with dictators of the ilk of Hafez al-Assad and Anwar al-Sadat in order to achieve that goal. The vaunted 1979 Camp David Accords that Jimmy Carter spearheaded (and for which Sadat became a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) got Israel a treaty with Egypt and got the Sinai back into Egyptian hands, but it essentially hung the Palestinians out to dry. In the years to follow, the US played ball with Sadat's successor, the president/dictator Hosni Mubarak, and with Syria's president/dictators Assad (pere et fils) whenever it furthered Israeli interests.

So now, those dictators are gone or (probably) going. And as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi have found out, the Arab street, previously discounted as all "bark," turns out to have a nasty "bite." Its denizens have long, deeply seared memories - of US support for dictators who ruined and tortured them, and for an Israel that has killed thousands of them (on the streets of Beirut as well as Ramallah). Since 2001, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan have killed tens of thousands of them on the streets of Baghdad and Basra, Kabul and Kandahar. And in the process, a largely Islamophobic American public that let itself be whipped into a frenzy of misguided revenge in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 have reveled like triumphant crusaders in the gore of thousands of Muslims its military - with the blessing of its Congress - has killed worldwide.

Slowly, but inexorably, the dictators are passing from the Middle Eastern scene, to be replaced (one fervently hopes) with representative democracies. As reports pouring in from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria have made abundantly clear, the new democracies and their parliaments will be brimming with political Islamists of various stripes; and (at least relative to the regimes they will replace) they will be much more attuned, and responsive, to the "street," with its charnel-house memories.

On that street, the USA will have little leverage indeed. And Mr. Friedman ought to chalk up that lost leverage, in significant part, to those State Department "titans" of the Cold War yesteryear.

John McCain: Bomb-Bomb . . . Syria?

2011-10-24T01:16:00.001-04:00

It happens in every profession, every walk of life. One hangs in, hangs on, beyond the span of one's usefulness. Begins to cross that thin, faint line that separates old-school from old-age, lovable codger from danger to the cause he claims to love.

I give you, Senator John McCain:

With NATO bombing of Libya set to end, U.S. Sen. John McCain on Sunday raised the possibility of some kind of military attack on Syria, where the government of Bashar Assad has been accused of brutally cracking down on protesters.

“Now that military operations in Libya are ending, there will be renewed focus on what partial military operations might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria,” McCain (R-Ariz.) said at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Jordan. “The Assad regime should not consider that it can get away with mass murder. Kadafi made that mistake and it cost him everything.”

Mercifully, Mr. Obama is finally about to extricate the United States from the colossal strategic blunder that was the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The American adventure in Afghanistan has reached a point perhaps best compared to a clogged commode in which the turds resist the inexorable erosion from the water's flow, only to be dislodged and flushed forever down the pipes. The American digression into Libya now smells like a rose, its blooming from the fertilizing blood of local rebels; but the petals are likely to begin dropping within days.

The relatively new ethnic/sectarian confection that is Iraq must now do whatever it must do. (Can we please step back and remember that "Iraq" is less than 100 years old - a drop in the bucket of the millennia that went into the making of what was Babylonia for 2000 years? "Iraq"'s warranty may be about to expire.) Those who accuse Mr. Obama of "losing Iraq" (now that he has announced that all US troops will be withdrawn from there in less than two months) need to remember that (those proponents of how "the Surge worked" notwithstanding) the US never "won" Iraq in the first place. In the "Middle East," the US is the new kid from the block on the other side of town. The Iranians are the next-door neighbors who've been standing in the parlor forever. They're not going anywhere, and for the US to think that it can make them step outside, walk down to the sidewalk, and never come back is beyond stupid.

In other words, it's time for the US to exit, stage left, and get its own act together - especially at home - before it even thinks about riding to the rescue anywhere else in the Middle East.

And John McCain now tries to rattle the US sabre against Syria - even though the scabbard is empty?

Go home, senator. Put on lots of sunscreen. Stick to the shade.

And remember that your time in the sun gave you cancer - and got a lot of Americans killed, in the cause of a "victory" that was never theirs to win.

The Racist Violence of Jewish West Bank Settlers

2011-10-19T16:10:00.001-04:00

A disgusting, disheartening, enraging report from David Schulman at the NYRB blog, about a brutal attack by the Jewish settlers of the West Bank settlers at Anatot on a local farmer and his wife (and on members of an Israeli peace group) when the farmer tried to visit his land (land that even the Israeli courts ruled was legally his). Didn't matter to the settlers - or to the security forces accompanying them, who simply didn't intervene.

On the morning of September 30, the activists accompanied him to the rocky hillside that is still nominally his; they were carrying with them a Palestinian flag. The Anatot settlers seemed to have known ahead of time about the visit, and within minutes, a large contingent of them—estimates range from 60 to 100—arrived and attacked the group. First they cracked open Yasin’s head and attacked his wife, breaking her ribs, and then they beat the Israeli activists with clubs and rocks. Many were injured; four were hospitalized (Yasin himself is still recuperating), and, as usual, some activists—in this case three of them—were arrested (generally, settlers are above the law). There were uniformed Israeli police there—some were present on the scene ever before the attack began—who made no effort to stop the assault. There is no question that the attack was premeditated, and its scale was impressive. Cameras documenting the violence were smashed by settlers and police; vehicles belonging to activists and Palestinians parked nearby were savaged.

And it is, of course, racist hooligans such as these who know that they can act with such impunity when the Netanyahu/Lieberman duovirate and a right-wing Knesset, a US Congress bought-and-paid-for by AIPAC and the Israel lobby, a vote-hungry Barack Obama, the pro-Israel propaganda machine that is Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, and those millions of so-called Christians who would be overjoyed to see every last Arab removed from the "Holy Land - when people such as these have your back, you may believe you can do whatever you want.

That Israeli society as a whole will tolerate, even embrace, acts such as this, even as Israel's leaders pursue policies that have left Israel basically friendless, isolated, in the Middle East, can only mean that at some point, quite possibly in the near future, when some match lights up the tinderbox, there's going to be a terrible, terrible reckoning.