Priceless Comment on Israel's Blockade of Gaza

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?

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

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?

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?

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

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?

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?

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?

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

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?

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.