More on Ethan Bronner's eulogy of Settler Extremist Hanan Porat

A few days after I'd posted on my disgust over the NYT's Ethan Bronner's fawning eulogy of West Bank extremist settler Hanan Porat comes a spot-on essay from Lizzy Ratner at Mondoweiss.  It deserves posting here in full - with the reminder that as the nation's supposed "newspaper of record," the New York Times has a long way to go in achieving some real balance in its reporting on Israel and Palestine.  And Bronner's ties to Israel are too well documented to rehearse here.

Late Wednesday night, after I finished devouring the Steve Jobs obituary on the New York Times website, my eye happened to catch the headline for another of the day's death reports: "Hanan Porat, Jewish Settlement Leader, Dies at 67." (Actually, my eye didn't so much catch the headline as was forced toward it by the Times's "Recommended for You" list, which has apparently pegged me as member of the all-things-Israel demographic, which is a whole other story ... sort of.)RetweetMy first reaction was disgust followed by a strong desire to register my protest by refusing to read. What was the Times doing running an obituary of a settlement leader, a founder of the extremist movement responsible for gobbling up dunam upon dunam of Palestinian land, for dispossession, violence, apartheid, and an ultra-nationalism so toxic it approaches fascism? If a leader of Hamas died, would the Times eulogize him too? It goes without saying that it would never grant precious death-page real estate to a human rights leader like Michel Warshawski or Raji Sourani.
But then curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the link which brought me, in a matter of seconds, to a 574-word Ethan-Bronner special capped by a photograph of a young and dashing Porat. Based on Bronner's homage, which is written in a tone that can only really be described as sympathetic-masquerading-as-neutral, here is what I learned:
* Hanan Porat was hot! "[I]n his prime, in the 1970s and ’80s, when the Israeli right began its political ascent, he was a fiery advocate of hard-line Zionism, cutting a handsome figure with a mane of thick dark hair topped by a knitted yarmulke," Bronner writers. And indeed, the man in the photograph, the one riding high above the shoulders of dozens of men, pants tight, plaid shirt loose, arms spread in ecstasy, looks like a 1970s god, a real-life Berger -- so much so that even now I can't help but wonder: could a guy that good looking really be that bad?
* Porat "establish[ed] Jewish communities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip."  Well, gosh, I like communities, communities are good, doesn't everyone want more communities in this atomized, go-it-alone world? In fact, I was part of a community once, during a semester I spent at an enviro-wilderness high school in Maine. It was cool. We quoted Thoreau and Whitman and kept a communal journal and shared food and clothes and secrets and had really intense, deep friendships.
* Porat "helped turn Israel’s religious settler movement into a powerful force" through the establishment of the aforementioned communities. Hm, a powerful force -- oh I get it, like Adele 0r Hank Greenberg or women!
* Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the only outside source quoted in the article (and gets quoted twice), really liked Porat, and Porat really liked the Land of Israel: "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Mr. Porat had 'dedicated his life to building up the land of Israel, and to educating generations of students about religious Zionism and loving the land of Israel and the Jewish people.'” Wow, what a warm and generous-sounding guy, so full of love and altruism. A true mensch!
* Porat was a" fervent advocate of Jewish power across the biblical land of Israel." How romantic, the biblical land of Israel. Good thing he wasn't advocating Jewish power across the contemporary land of Palestine.
* Porat helped found Gush Emunim, "which means 'the bloc of the faithful.'” Well, that doesn't sound that bad, does it? Sure, "gush" is an unfortunate word (rhymes with tush and mush and whatnot), but "bloc of the faithful" sounds pretty innocuous.
* Porat helped build a Jewish settlement in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron, "where the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs are said to be buried." Cool, sign me up for a tour! I want to see where the patriarchs and matriarchs are planted.
* Porat grew up on kibbutz Kfar Etzion, "which is on land that was later won by Jordan during Israel’s 1948 war of independence. He re-established the community after the 1967 Middle East war, when the land was conquered by Israel." Well, that sounds fair enough. I mean, we're just talking about land, right? First Jordan won the land, then Israel won the land, and since we're just talking about land, what's the big deal?
* The Etzion bloc that Porat helped found "is one of the large West Bank settlement blocs that Israel wants to keep in any deal with a future Palestinian state. One reason many Israelis consider it theirs by right is that it had been settled by Jews before 1948." I guess that means that Jews discovered the area, or at least developed it, and we all know: you discover something, you own it.
* The settlements Porat helped create "remain among the biggest obstacles to creating a Palestinian state." Bummer.
* Porat "is survived by his wife, 11 children and a number of grandchildren." Aw, how sweet, he was a dad and granddad -- and so prolific!
Now here's what I could have learned about Hanan Porat but didn't -- not from theNew York Times and not from the dozens of other mainstream publications that wrote about Porat's death:
* The settlements that Porat  helped found are illegal under international law, and their creation is widely consider a war crime, which would suggest that Hanan Porat himself is a war criminal.
* The settlements that Porat helped found, and the infrastructure of oppression that has been built up all around the settlements to keep them well-watered, bucolic, and "secure," has turned the West Bank into a land of bantustans and Israel into an apartheid state.
* The settlements that Porat and his movement helped found sit on hundreds of thousands of dunams of stolen land and consume as much as (and, at this point, most likely more than) 42 percent of the West Bank. In the process, settlers have forced thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
* The settlements that Porat helped found, and the system of "bypass" roads, apartheid wall, and checkpoints that accompany them, violate Palestinian human rights, including "the right of property, the right to equality, the right to a suitable standard of living, and the right to freedom of movement."
* The settlement that Porat helped found in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron is one of the most extreme, radical settlements in existence, a place where the occupation is its most foul, violent, and abusive.
* As Porat fully intended, the settlements are not merely obstacles to the creation of a Palestinian state, they have killed any hope and possibility of a true Palestinian state.
* Gush Emunim, which Porat helped found, was not merely the "bloc of the faithful," it was an extremist, messianic movement that gave birth to a "Zionist fundamentalism" that was aggressive and expansionist at best and violent and terroristic at worst.
* For all his alleged Talmudic brilliance and religious zealotry, Porat was a pretty bad Jew. As Nehemia Shtrasler wrote in a helpful op-ed in Haaretz, "The abuse in the territories [that Porat helped create and support] is also in total contradiction to the moral teachings of Israel's prophets - Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah - but Porat and his colleagues knew only the Book of Joshua."
* After Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 at a mosque in Hebron, Porat, who helped found the illegal settlement where Goldstein lived, was asked by a reporter to offer his thoughts on the massacre. His response: "Happy Purim."

How a Secret U.S. Memo Made the Legal Case to Kill an American Citizen

To their credit, the NY Times lays out and confronts pretty directly the threat to civil liberties that was implicit in Obama's decision to assasinate Anwar al-Awlaki without trial.

The memo, written last year, followed months of extensive interagency deliberations and offers a glimpse into the legal debate that led to one of the most significant decisions made by President Obama — to move ahead with the killing of an American citizen without a trial.

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans believed to pose a terrorist threat.

The Obama administration has refused to acknowledge or discuss its role in the drone strike that killed Mr. Awlaki last month and that technically remains a covert operation. The government has also resistedgrowing calls that it provide a detailed public explanation of why officials deemed it lawful to kill an American citizen, setting a precedent that scholars, rights activists and others say has raised concerns about the rule of law and civil liberties.

The article goes on to provide the administration's various justifications for asserting that Awlaki could be, as it were, legally exempted from the various rights and protections normally accorded an American citizen under the Constitution.

It will, of course, be very interesting to see how this plays out for Obama in the upcoming election season.  Will his liberal progressive base see this as one more reason to back away from the man who had been their great hope for America's future?  Can a Republican leadership that tends to line up on the side of public security outweighing individual liberties in the quest for "victory" in the "war on terror" still find a way to tar Obama with the label of hypocrite (as Dick Cheney has done) for a decision that, some will argue, was made on grounds as legally expedient as those conjured by the Bush-Cheney bunch to permit torture and waterboarding?

We all knew that the upcoming election campaigns were going to be vicious and messy.  The killing of Anwar al-Awlaki under such a dubious legal pretext means that the messiness has been amped up a notch or two.

But more important, when our government can move from secret drone warfare to eliminate Taliban militants (along with untold civilian "collateral damage" to the use of such methods to assassinate US citizens, we've all been moved farther down a slippery, and exceedingly dangerous, slope.

Again, to channel the words of the current orchestrator of that drone warfare, CIA chief David Petraeus, tell me how this ends.

 

Iraq's Continuing Uncertainties

WaPo reports today about frantic preparations the US State Dept is making to take over the bazillion enterprises that the US military had been running in Iraq.  The military is slated to depart Iraq completely by 1 January.  Iraqi leaders say they'd like a few thousand US troops to remain as trainers (and, I assume, a kind of last-ditch praetorian guard in the event that things begin to spin out of control - which is not beyond the realm of possibility).  But they also insist that US troops that might stay must not be immune to prosecution in Iraqi courts for any misdoings.  There have been, of course, more incidents of misdoings by US troops in Iraq than one can count.  (Indeed, has the US military even been keeping a count?).  Sec Def Leon Panetta asserts, no immunity, no US troops.  But no Iraqi politician who hopes to maintain any public support - or fend off assassination - is going to agree to such immunity.
That will leave the job of protecting US State Dept installations and assets in Iraq in the hands of private contractors, whose many acts of brutality and high-handedness in Iraq have been documented copiously.  As the WaPo report makes clear, the State Dept is completely overmatched by the many responsibilities now confronting it, including supervising contractor cowboys and watching over the flow of US funds - billions of dollars of which have already been lost to fraud and corrupt administrators, American and Iraqi.
To be able to once again stand on its own two feet, the Iraqi government desperately needs the revenues from oil production, which remain the only significant contributor to its treasury.  But a national oil law to govern the allocation of those revenues within Iraq has yet to be worked out - and the security of the oil wells and pipelines themselves remains iffy.  Other reports today (like the following from China's Xinhua news agency) make that clear:

Two explosions hit oil pipelines overnight in Iraq's southern province of Basra and temporarily halted crude oil production, an oil official said Saturday.

"The oil production in the southern Rumaila oil field has been temporarily stopped because of two explosions late on Friday night, " the official from the state-owned South Oil Company told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. He said the incidents were apparently acts of sabotage that struck the pipeline network which transports oil produced from southern Rumaila oil field to Zubair area, the source said.
One of the blasts occurred in the desert area near the town of Safwan in the southwest city of Basra, some 550 km south of Baghdad, and the second one hit the network at al-Qrinat area, not far from the site of the first blast, the source said.

"Iraqi firefighters put out the fires on Saturday morning and started to repair the damaged pipelines in cooperation with one of the foreign oil companies," the source said without naming the company. . . .The explosions came four days after Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul- Kareem al-Luaybi announced that Iraq's oil production hit 2.9 million barrels per day (bpd) and will reach three million bpd by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, Iraq politics remain as discombobulated as ever.  Reidar Visser on the current disarray - and inefficacy - of Iraq's parliament:

Iraqi politics remains in its usual messy state. Everyone shouts they will agree to anything that is in accordance with the constitution. (Few of them know what is actually in it.) Ammar al-Hakim garners widespread praise for a supposed initiative of five principles for dialogue that have nothing substantial to them. (This is precisely why everyone thinks they are wonderful.) The Kurds declare that Maliki has agreed to implementing the Arbil agreement. (Again.)
There is a real danger that the Iraqi parliament is becoming unable to reach decisions except on matters that are so petty and insignificant that few will notice anyway. Arab Spring enthusiasts in search of a model democracy please look elsewhere.

Sayonara, Sarah Palin

Someone once said that Timing is Everything.

Sarah Palin's entry onto the stage of American politics and celebrity (which are now more intertwined, almost co-terminous, than ever) in 2008 was exquisitely - albeit accidentally - timed.  The Democrats trot out a shiny bright, progressive (OK OK, perhaps pseudo-progressive, now that we know him better), African-American candidate to run against the record of a monstrously failed George W. Bush presidency.  His handlers aware that their candidate needed the political equivalent of a 6-pack of Red Bull to revv up their changes, John McCain brought aboard Ms. Palin.

Lo and behold, she turned out to be the incarnation of the wettest of wet dreams for the Republican base: cheerleader-cute, even hot; brassy; energetic and energizing.  She was also very White (from one of the Whitest of the 50 states), yet married to a high-school sweetheart who was also part-Eskimo/Inuit and a man's man; she could aim and fire a shotgun (and from a helicopter or plane, no less!) and dress a carcass as well as any man; and she practiced a brand of Jesus-is-Lord, Israel-must-reign Christianity that won her the fealty of the amped-up hyper-Christian Zionists who dictate American politics these days.

A bit more than three years later, she's done.

Turned out that Ms. Palin was all hat, no brains.  The signs were there from the get-go, for anyone to see if they simply took the time - and cared enough about the future of the USA - to look closely.  She couldn't identify for Katie Couric the newspapers she read.  She was woefully ignorant of history or international affairs (but claimed front-line expertise because, she said, she could see Russia from the farthest shores of Alaska).

But none of that mattered to her devotees.  And that says it all about the parlous state to which the Republican base has declined.  Surely there are still some moderate, reasonably sensible Republicans out there; they're Mitt Romney's core support, and biggest hope.  But Sarah Palin did so well, and hung around as long as she did, because she epitomized what have become the values of the GOP base: whiteness, hyper-Christianity, SEC football, Toby Keith (or Hank Williams, Jr.) country music, America-uber-Alles, gospel-according-to-Limbaugh - and a world view that boils down to "pointy-headed intellectual 'elites' can go f*ck themselves, because only "real people" like us know what's best for America."

And in the end, as she exited the stage of electoral politics, Sarah's timing was way off.  Her announcement was hugely upstaged by the news of the death of Steve Jobs, a man who contributed more to the life and future of the US - and the planet - than a thousand Sarah Palins ever could have.

And a final irony for Sarah to ponder: Mr. Jobs was the biological son of one of those nefarious Arabs whom Sarah (for Israel's sake) loved to hate, a man from Syria whose girlfriend gave their baby son up for adoption, and who himself wound up becoming a university professor - one of those pointy-headed intellectuals.

Sayonara, Sarah.  If you truly care about the good of the country, go back to your Alaska deep-freeze - and give your fans a chance to forget you - and, perhaps, to wise up.

Iran, Israel, and the US: A Perfect Storm Building?

Some recent reports - from a variety of fronts - point to a frightening concatenation of developments that suggest that it might not take much to tip the Middle East - and beyond - into huge turmoil, with Iran pinned as the culprit, or else Iran lashing out against what it might see as the inevitability of an attack.

The Iranian leadership, of course, is at odds within itself, with the ongoing struggle between the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the alleged "crazy" who, in fact, seems to have lost much of his influence after losing a series of internal skirmished with Khamenei.  That kind of internal disarray, with hard-line religious ideologues pitted against those (like Ahmadinejad) who favor some kind of outreach to the West, does not lend itself to consistently pragmatic decision-making in times of crisis. (One might remember Japan's situation on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack.)

And on the external front as well, this is most surely a time of crisis for Iran:

• Although its ally in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad, continues to hang onto power and has evaded UN sanctions, he is nonetheless being hammered hard by the US and its allies, but perhaps most tellingly, by his erstwhile ally, Mr. Erdogan of Turkey, who has vowed to join EU countries in imposing his own sanctions.  And if Assad goes down, Iran's influence among the Arab countries will likely take an enormous hit.
• Mr. Netanyahu continues to rattle his saber - the size of which was recently expanded significantly with Obama's decision to provide Israel with 55 bunker-buster bombs of the kind necessary for any success in a future Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear installations.
• The Saudi government is trying to pin Iran with the blame for recent uprisings in the oil-rich eastern Saudi provinces, where live the majority of Saudi Arabia's minority Shiite population.  As Patrick Cockburn notes in The Independent, this will surely have gotten the attention of the US, which "as the main ally of Saudi Arabia, is likely to be alarmed by the spread of pro-democracy protests to the Kingdom and particularly to that part of it which contains the largest oil reserves in the world." 
• Finally, both Iran's and Israel's navies have been asserting their presence in the Red Sea, the main corridor through which oil tankers pass en route to the Suez Canal and destinations west.  That the US views unrestricted access to the Suez Canal, Red Sea, and Bab el-Mandeb (the narrow opening where the Red Sea joins the Arabian Sea) as a strategic necessity goes without saying.
• Then, for good measure, add to this combustible mix a US Congress that has as much as sworn its fealty to Mr. Netanyahu, along with a US president, about to re-enter what he himself has referred to as the "silly season" of election politics, who is struggling in the polls and dare not come down too hard against anything Netanyahu might do - including authorize an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear installations - or more.      

In other words, way too many flashpoints for comfort - and at a time when the Iranian leadership is feeling increasingly up against the wall both at home and abroad and is lashing back with increasingly strident rhetoric.  Trita Parsi's recent LA Times essay notes this (and Tony Karonpicks up on Parsi's essay as well), as well as the unfortunate fact that the US and Iran are not talking with each other, nor do they have any established channels for communication.

As Parsi notes:

This has led to a collapse of statecraft and an increase in bluster that could prove quite dangerous. One small spark could cause a conflagration.
The U.S. military leadership is rightfully worried about this situation. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, has repeatedly raised the lack of communication between the United States and Iran as a major concern in the last few weeks.
"We are not talking to Iran so we don't understand each other," Mullen said last month. "If something happens … it's virtually assured that we won't get it right." The lack of communication has planted seeds for miscalculation, Mullen argued. And miscalculations often lead to dangerous escalations.

A recent piece at the Atlantic by Patrick Disney puts much of this into a broader historical perspective - the possibility of nuclear confrontation that existed between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and how close the two sides came (not only during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, but as recently as the Reagan era) to horrifically destructive launches of their nuclear weapons because of blurred communications and misread intentions.  He concludes:

Without an official dialogue, the U.S. and Iran struggle to avoid miscommunication, deescalate crises, or build trust in the diplomatic relationship. U.S.-Iran relations extend little further than trading rhetorical barbs -- in much the same way that Reagan eschewed dealing with the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, often preferring speeches to summit meetings. Contrast this with the U.S.-China relationship, which consists of multiple nodes of direct contact through trade, finance, and exchanges, and it's easy to understand why few observers worry about a U.S.-China miscalculation or miscommunication spiraling out of control as happened with the Soviet Union in 1983. Yet the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently warned of just such a clash breaking out between the U.S. and Iran in the Persian Gulf.

The way things are going now, the above outcome, in which mutual misunderstanding leads Iran to believe its best course is to go nuclear, is highly predictable and, therefore, should be avoidable. Washington can't do much to convince Iran to make unilateral concessions, but it can tailor its own policies to account for Iran's predictable response. That means understanding the risks of a backlash when engaging in provocative actions like cyber warfare and sabotage, and making careful calculations about whether we stand to gain more from the policies we choose than the risk of it blowing up in our face.  The current policy of sanctions, sabotage, and assassinations is on course to hand Iran a pretext for building nuclear bombs, whether or not that was Tehran's plan all along. 

"Wipe Israel off the Map"?

Kudos to the WaPo's Glenn Kessler for having the guts to take a closer look at the badly mistranslated comments of Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who, according to many hyperventilating pro-Israel commentators, was said to have proclaimed that Israel should be "wiped off the map" - that is, destroyed via military action, including (as so many - hyperventilating even more - have insisted) by a nuclear strike using those nuclear weapons that the nefarious Persians surely - oh so surely - must be developing just with that aim in mind.

From his examination of Ahmadinejad's actual words - and those of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which Ahmadinejad was referencing, Kessler concludes:

“Wipe off the map,” in other words, has become easy shorthand for expressing revulsion at Iran’s anti-Israeli foreign policy. Certainly attention needs to be focused on that — and Iranian behavior in the region. But we’re going to award a Pinocchio to everyone — including ourselves — who has blithely repeated the phrase without putting it into context.

OK, not a complete coming-to-Jesus moment, but it's the best you're going to get from a commentator working at one of the mainstream national dailies.

I imagine the WaPo's Jennifer Rubin must be wincing, and planning a response.

Libya Blowback at the UN

Lots of moaning and hand-wringing this morning about Russia and China's UN Security Council vetoes of sanctions against Syria (see NYT here; AP reports on EU reactions here), although Mr. Erdogan says that Turkey and like-minded countries will impose sanctions of their own.  But as Paul Pillar notes at The National Interest, (1) the BRICs did not support the sanctions resolution, and (2) blame for those vetoes can to some extent be laid at the feet of NATO.

The unfavorable turn in the Security Council proceedings, however, can partly be blamed on the Western governments' own missteps. The resolution did not get the backing of any of the BRICS, which besides China and Russia also include Brazil, India, and South Africa. The BRICS pointed out that the earlier Western-proposed Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force in Libya was supposedly about protecting endangered civilians but turned into a prolonged NATO intervention aimed at overthrowing the Libyan regime. The BRICS say they do not want something similar to happen with Syria. The BRICS have a point. Even if a NATO military intervention in Syria is unlikely, a similar bait-and-switch seems in the making with sanctions. The vetoed resolution hints at sanctions if the Syrian regime does not change its behavior, but Western leaders (including President Obama, after much hullaballoo on this subject in Washington) are talking about changing the regime, not just changing behavior. So the failure this week at the Security Council is partly a price Western governments are paying for two mistakes. One is a disingenuous resolution (and equally disingenuous rhetoric) about their intentions in Libya, and another is confusion about the purpose of sanctions (a topic I have addressed previously, with reference not only to Syria but to other target countries such as Iran).

It is hard enough to get the Russians and Chinese to cooperate on worthwhile multilateral actions. It is too bad when Western governments give them rationales and reasons to cooperate even less.

Death of a Bigot

I'm more than a little repelled by Ethan Bronner's fawning obit for a man who contributed so much to the misery of the people of Palestine.

I speak of Hanan Porat, who just died (age 67) of cancer at his childhood kibbutz.  Bronner writes of Porat's advocacy of "hard-line Zionism, . . .cutting a handsome figure with a mane of thick dark hair topped by a knitted yarmulke."  He then goes on to write of Porat's seemingly heroic role in helping to found Gush Emunim, whose members assert the right of Jews to colonize the West Bank as the "land of Israel" promised to them in the Bible.  And within the West Bank, as Bronner details, Porat was instrumental in establishing a colony of Jewish settlers in the heart of Hebron.

But not a word from Bronner about the misery those Hebron settlers specifically - and the Gush Emunin phenomenon more generally - have caused West Bank Palestinians, not to mention the Israeli government, which has had to station IDF troops in Hebron to "protect" people like Porat.  The Hebron colonists have made themselves infamous as gun-toting, arrogant, anti-Arab bigots who rampage through Arab shops and markets, insult the locals, etc.  Note this recent piece from Haaretz characterizing recent settler riots there as a "pogrom" against the Arab residents.  (The term "pogrom", by the way, is customarily reserved for the vicious anti-Jewish riots in Russia during the last years of the tsars.  Haaretz, to its credit, used that word intentionally, to make a point.)

And as for the Christian Zionists who surely will mourn Porat's passing . . . how quickly they forget Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, where he proclaimed "Blessed are the peacemakers."  All in all, Porat was the antithesis of that.  In fact, there aren't many individuals who contributed more than did Porat to obstructing the possibility of peace.

After Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, Dick Cheney Wants Apology from Obama

As reported in the WaPo . . .  Bush's V-P Dick Cheney, speaking with CNN's Candy Crowley, feels that after signing off on the assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by CIA drone missiles, Mr. Obama ought to apologize for to Mr. Bush for being so critical of the "enhanced interrogations" (i.e., waterboarding) that his administration resorted to.
Perhaps Mr. Obama ought to have expected such accusations of hypocrisy - and he surely left himself wide open for them when he gave the go-ahead for an operation that, one could argue quite justifiably, was illegal - except for the fact that Obama stole another page from the Bush/Cheney playbook by having administration lawyers concoct a legal brief that "legalized" this act.  (John Yoo must be laughing - and expect to see some broadside from him in the wake of all this.)
Juan Cole has it right: Awlaki should, at the very least, have been tried in absentia before Obama took such an action.  

It is, however, difficult to see in what way al-`Awlaqi could be configured as a soldier in an enemy army with which the US is actively at war. He was an American citizen of Yemeni extraction (and dual citizenship), living in Yemen. That he was an American is not very relevant to this issue. You can be an American and still be an enemy combatant, as with the German saboteur born in the US, who was sentenced to death as an enemy combatant after WWII for sabotage in the early 1940s. But the United States is not at war with Yemen, and al-`Awlaqi is not in the Yemeni military anyway. The idea that, legally speaking, the US could be at war with small terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda strikes me as a non-starter. A rhetorical flourish such as the “war on terror” is not a legal statute or article in the constitution. The killing of al-`Awlaqi differs from that of Usamah Bin Laden because in the latter case a US expeditionary force was confronted with someone who appeared to be going for a weapon, whereas al-`Awlaqi was simply targeted. . . .

If people want the United States to be able to declare war on non-governmental organizations that maintain private armies and so are para-statal, we need new statutes or perhaps a constitutional amendment.So, although US courts tend to defer to the executive on military actions abroad, I just can’t understand under what constitutional provision al-`Awlaqi was killed. If it wasn’t done constitutionally, then it was wrong. . . .  By simply blowing al-`Awlaqi away, the US government deprived him of his sixth amendment rights to trial before a judge and habeas corpus. Note that the German saboteur with American citizenship executed after WW II was tried first. Likewise, enemy combatants in US custody, such as those at Guantanamo, were declared by the US Supreme Court to have the right of habeas corpus. So that Newt Gingrich thinks al-`Awlaqi was a traitor or a terrorist (and this a rare case where I agree subjectively with the Newtster) is irrelevant to his legal status. Unless a judge has pronounced him to be those things after a trial, he was not as far as the US constitution and the US government is concerned.

I highly recommend the entire piece, here.
Awlaki was a propagandist for al-Qaeda, not an operative.  To assert that he represented an imminent threat to the US is a bit of a stretch.  And, as noted here, by the ever-spot-on Anthony Shadid and David Kirkpatrick, his assassination drew barely a yawn across most the Arab countries, for whom the US's campaign against al-Qaeda is little more than a sideshow, a footnote to what they view as the hugely more important issues and developments that comprise the "Arab Spring" - and that include the destructive - and illegal - Israeli decision to build more housing for Jewish colonists in East Jerusalem.
But, finally, why can't they leave poor old Dick Cheney alone?  In late 2011, American politics features few more pathetic figures than an old man, soon to be laid in his grave, going to that grave protesting that he and his boss were right all along in invading Iraq, and in waterboarding, "renditioning," and torturing scores of people, many of whom committed no graver offense than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Frankly, it disgusts me that Ms. Crowley sought to interview him.  He has nothing of value to say, no constructive input to contribute to our foreign-relations dialogue.  And to bring him once again into the public spotlight only reminds people across the planet of the boneheadedness of Bush's policies and decisions, and reminds some of them that, indeed, the US does deserve some payback at their hands.

Thomas Friedman's "Extra Mile"

Ah, the ever-flowing fount of cynical wisdom that is Thomas Friedman.

In today's NYT, TF pans the UN speeches of Messrs. Obama, Abbas, and Netanyahu - but in his belief that it's Israel thta has the most to lose in the current impasse, he suggests that Mr. Netanyahu go the "extra mile" for the cause, not so much of peace, but of Israel's security and international standing:

Given these stakes, here is what a farsighted Israeli government would say to itself: “We have so much more to lose than the Palestinians if all this collapses. So let’s go the extra mile. Abbas says he will not come to peace talks without a freeze on settlement-building. We think that is bogus. We gave him a 10-month partial freeze and he did nothing with it. But you know what? There is so much at stake here, let’s test him again. Let’s offer him a six-month total freeze on settlement-building. What is six months in the history of 5,000-year-old people? We already have 300,000 settlers in place. It is a win-win strategy that in no way imperils our security. If the Palestinians still balk, they will be the ones isolated, not us. And, if they come, who knows? Maybe we cut a deal.”

That so many Americans can accept as a legitimate international-affairs columnist a man who strives more for catchy phrasing that deep analysis is worrisome - and depressing - in itself.  But I'm staggered by the blatant cynicism here.  A six-month total freeze?  Because, after all, Israel has succeeded in planting 300,000 settlers in occupied territory?  (And actually, the number is much higher; I believe TF omits from his count the number of colonists Israel has planted in East Jerusalem - where, yesterday, it approved 1100 new housing units, much to the dismay of the EU (along with a tellingly puny complaint of "not helpful" from Hillary Clinton).

Has Friedman now joined the ranks of the Elliot Abramses of the commentariate?  You know, the "experts" who insist that the whole issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem  is bogus?  Are they blind? No.  I suspect that they are more than happy to be complicit in what has been, since 1967, the creeping - and blatantly illegal - Israeli annexation of land that represented the last hope for the creation of a viable Palestinian state and at least a partial fulfillment of long-stymied Palestinian nationalism.  

And the cynical prescriptions of Thomas Friedman reflect a view of Middle Eastern affairs that is focused almost entirely, and exclusively, on Israel's security, rather than on any desire for the justice that the Palestinians deserve, and must be accorded - and soon - if Israel is indeed to have any security, much less any longer-term existence.  Let's face it.  With

• an Israeli regime that features a bluntly spoken racist-fascist foreign minister and that is apparently happily in thrall to settler extremists and ultra-religious elements
• a Turkish government that is recreating itself as the neo-Ottoman shield, standard-bearer, and potentially avenging sword for the Arabs (Erdogan as Saladin?)
• a populist neo-Arabism - its burgeoning supporters linked by shared sense of ethnicity, grievance, and core Muslim values, by Facebook and Twitter, and by a resurgent anti-Americanism born of too many years of US myopic focus on Israeli interests (and too many years of the American military - or its proxies - humiliating or slaughtering fellow Muslims)

Israel is both isolating itself (along with an America rapidly becoming too enfeebled to ride to its rescue) and narrowing its options to either somehow turning to a very new and brighter page in its relations with its neighbors, or else death-marching to Armageddon (the original site of which - Megiddo - lies within the modern state of Israel).

And with such cynical prescriptions, Thomas Friedman may someday be remembered as one of the many escorts along that march.

Dennis Ross Strikes Again

From the LA Times, word that a special policy paper crafted by Dennis Ross (commonly known as Israel's lawyer during the "peace process") and a sidekick was the "last straw" in impelling Mahmoud Abbas to present recognition of Palestine to the UN:

Shaath, speaking in Ramallah on Saturday, said the U.S. paper Hale and Ross had presented to Abbas when they met him at his headquarters and that was supposed to get him to decide against going to the U.N. has actually increased his resolve to go.

“It was the last straw” that got Abbas to take the decision in favor of going to the U.N. to ask for membership, Shaath said. “It seems that it [the paper] was designed to be rejected,” he said.

The American paper, Shaath said, was worse than a statement the U.S. had wanted the Middle East quartet -- the U.S., the U.N., Russia and the European Union -- to adopt two months ago and which the quartet members had then rejected.

The U.S. paper, he said, referred to the controversial settlements Israel had been building on Palestinian land occupied since 1967 as “demographic changes.” This, he said, would actually legalize the settlements, which the entire world, including the U.S., had so far considered as illegal.

Immovable Object (Pakistan) Deflects a Very Resistable Force (USA)

In Time mag, former CIA analyst Robert Baer on the dilemma of US-Pakistan relations and why the Pakistani military is not going to back down:

At the core of the problem stands a simple proposition: Pakistan doesn't trust us with Afghanistan — and from Islamabad's perspective, not without cause. We took a strategic decision to invade a country central to their national-security doctrine without seriously consulting them, preferring to think in terms of an Afghanistan of our dreams. Nor did we take into account their strategic interests and the proxies through which they have pursued them. The Soviet Union made the same mistake when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

 

Having failed to prevail a decade later, we now have two choices, neither of them particularly attractive to Washington. We can attempt to destroy the Haqqani base in North Waziristan by invading Pakistan. But to do that effectively would require more troops than we currently have in Afghanistan. Doing so would obviously destroy whatever relations we still have with Pakistan, with profoundly dangerous consequences in Afghanistan and far beyond.

Alternatively, we could hash out a settlement with Pakistan, which would inevitably mean accepting the Haqqanis and easing out Karzai in any political settlement to the conflict. Such a deal would also potentially bring in Afghanistan's other neighbor with real strategic interests in the country — Iran. Iran can be unpredictable, but it's by no means certain it would accept true Pakistani-American collusion in Afghanistan. In the mid-'90s, Iran was all but at war with the Taliban, and if Iran isn't consulted on a settlement, it could play the spoiler.

 

Accepting Pakistan's postconflict agenda and backing off on the Haqqanis at Karzai's expense is too bitter a pill for Washington to swallow in an election year, so we'll muddle through for another year. But when the U.S. finally leaves, don't be surprised to see the Haqqanis in Kabul.

 

And as for the Haqqani "network's" influence, and the Pakistani military's ties to them (and why they're not about to sever them, no matter how much Mike Mullen huffs and puffs, or Lindsey Graham rattles his ever-brandished saber), see this recent report in the NYT.