Horror at Fort Hood Inspires Horribly Predictable Islamophobia

. .  and so, it begins again.  Batten down the hatches . . . .  And the wing-nuts at Fox News have more grist for their mill.

The "Peace Process" - from "Yes We Can" to "No I Won't"

The "peace process" had been headed for the mortuary slab ever since George W. Bush's presidency (with his acquiescence in Ariel Sharon's brutalities at Jenin in the West Bank, his concessions to Sharon in the matter of Israel's retention of its illegal mega-settlements in the West Bank, and his double-teaming with Sharon to eliminate Yasser Arafat and then politically emasculate Mahmud Abbas).  Barack Obama's brave Cairo speech and post-inaugural "outreach" to the Muslim world were thought at first to signal a brand new day in US Middle Eastern diplomacy - the dawn of a new even-handedness that might finally bring Palestinians some semblance of justice and restitution after so many decades of dispossession and occupation.

Instead, Obama, his not-so-sure-of-speech Secretary of State  - she of the "unprecedented concessions" of Netanyahu, and the "Israeli capital" in East Jerusalem misspeak (this in an interview with al-Jazeera; luckily one of her aides caught it in time) -  and a Democratic Congress voting in lock-step with the demands of the Israel lobby have together brought all of the hopes crashing down.  Despite Hillary Clinton's brave words about her own toughness, about forging ahead, this piece by Glenn Kessler in today's Washington Post makes it abundantly and depressingly clear that the Obama administration now has zero leverage, and even less credibility, with which to accomplish anything meaningful in terms of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

What might this mean?

• huge disillusionment on the "Arab street" in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia - with consequent collateral damage to the leaders of those countries
• a perception among those same Arab leaders that they'd better abandon any hopes of the Obama administration acting as a fair dealer
• with Mahmud Abbas now sidelined, perhaps a strengthening of Hamas's appeal
• with negotiation obviously going nowhere, and Netanyahu determined to enlarge West Bank settlements and judaize East Jerusalem, new fuel for a new intifada in the West Bank
• with no lifting of Israel's blockade in Gaza, and - again - with negotiation going nowhere, fuel for Gaza's militants to launch attacks against Israel

And if new violence in the West Bank and Gaza are in the offing, let's not forget that the Israeli public by and large

•  supported the IDF's devastation of Gaza last December
•  are defiant of the world's condemnation of that operation (and of the UN's - and most of the world's - embracing of the Goldstone report, which documents that devastation), and
•  would now defy Obama to do anything about a crushing Israeli response to any new violence in Gaza or the West Bank.  (And why wouldn't they be ready to defy Obama, when they know that the US Congress - which is dominated by Obama's own political party - not only has their back, but would most likely cheer them on?)

Let's face it.  As far as the "peace process" is concerned, Obama has gone from "Yes we can" to "No I won't".  To be specific, he won't take the hard stance, make the hard decisions, needed if there is to be any just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.  That would entail more than singing kumbaya to the Arab and Muslim world, with whom Mr. Obama expresses such a strong tie.  That will also require saying NO to Israel.  No more weapons, no more financial support, no more settlements, no more diplomatic cover, no more Security Council veto of resolutions that criticize Israeli actions and policy, until Israel makes bona fide effort to create and support a viable, sustainable, fully sovereign Palestinian state.

That will take guts.  That will require taking a stand for justice, for fairness, for the right of occupied peoples to political self-determination, for the right of dispossessed people to have their grievances recognized and to receive some compensation of that dispossession.

That kind of guts also means a willingness to countenance defeat in the next political cycle.  So, in truth, Mr. Obama, yes you can achieve something truly meaningful, maybe world-changing, for Middle East peace if you have the moral courage to act.  No you won't (or at least you may not) get re-elected in 2012 if you do. 

Your stirring campaign speeches in 2008 led me to believe that you believe that some things are more important than elections. 

House of Representatives condemns Goldstone report

This act by my country's legislature shames me as an American. . . . and Abe Foxman has the chutzpah to call upon Richard Goldstone to repudiate his report.

Thomas Friedman on America's mercenaries

Friedman's essay in today's NY Times is in many ways on-target, and welcome:

we’ve fallen into a pattern of outsourcing some of the very core tasks of government — interrogation, security, democracy promotion. As more and more of this government work gets contracted and then subcontracted . . .  the public interest can get lost and abuse and corruption get invited in. We’re also building a contractor-industrial-complex in Washington that has an economic interest in foreign expeditions. Doesn’t make it wrong; does make you want to be watchful.

My questions:

• Where was all this concern six years ago?  The problem of mercenaries was already emerging . . . but TF was a big fan of Bush's war at first, so I guess he was content to number these guys among the American heroes who were "liberating Iraq" and building "democracy" there.
• Why no mention of the anti-American rage that the mercenary thugs of DynCorps, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater have provoked in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now even Pakistan?

Today's WTF moment

The NY Times reports on the "magic"of Iraqi bomb detection.  More of your tax dollars at work?

Hillary's pitiful damage control

Reports in both the New York Times and the Washington Post make it plain that, as far as her Arab interlocutors are concerned, Ms. Clinton really stepped in it with her comments about Netanyahu's "unprecedented" concessions on the West Bank settlements.  She has hastened to switch to damage-control mode, but the damage is done, and I'm not sure how much control is possible at this point.  She's gone from a smiling appearance with Netanyahu to a hurried, "no questions" meeting with Arab representatives.  The latter are angry, confused, and feeling betrayed (or, shall we say, "suckered") by an Obama administration that came on like gang-busters with it early outreach campaign, but that seems to be showing its true colors by casting Netanyahu (whose Foreign Minister, let's not forget, is overtly an anti-Arab racist) as a courageous peace-maker and by dissing the Goldstone report, in which a highly respected legal expert with deep ties to Israel documents the brutalities of the Israeli attack on Gaza last December-January. 

As reported in the Bloomberg News account,

Before Clinton tempered her earlier remarks, Amre Moussa, secretary-general of the 22-member Arab League and a senior Egyptian diplomat, told reporters he feared the peace process had been crippled by her comments in Jerusalem.
“I still wait until we have our meetings,” said Moussa, also in Morocco for the Forum for the Future conference. “But failure is in the atmosphere all over.”
“All of us, including Saudi Arabia, including Egypt, are deeply disappointed” by Clinton’s words in Jerusalem, he said. She left the impression that “Israel can get away with anything.”

And speaking of the Goldstone report  . . . let's not forget that a House resolution damning that report is about to be voted upon, and is sure to pass.  Does anyone else find it strange/irksome/scary/disgraceful that the Goldstone report is receiving more honest, critical scrutiny in the Israeli media than in the halls of Congress?

US occupation soldiers - from Cheesecake to Gung-ho

I couldn't help noticing this piece in today's Washington Post that contrasts US soldiers' living conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The soldiers in Afghanistan have had to deal with spartan conditions, rodent-infested quarters, and declining morale as so many have seen their comrades blown up.  Soldiers in Iraq, on the other hand, have had (as one soldier put it) "all the cheesecake you want," pizza delivery, many of the comforts of home (even better, I'm sure, for some of them).  But they profess themselves eager for the fight, wanting to get to Afghanistan so that they can kill the enemy.

Why does this remind me of practically every war movie I saw as a kid, as well as recent Iraq-wars books like Anthony Swofford's Jarhead or Evan Wright's Generation Kill?  From boot camp on, these young men are hyped-up to "get some" - whether the "some" have been krauts, or nips, or gooks, or charlie, or hajjis; they're the "enemy."  And (though not a combat veteran myself) I can imagine that much of this is necessary psyching-up as these guys face being put into harm's way.

Here's the rub.  These guys who are now in Iraq, professing frustration with their situation when they're not able to "kill the enemy," are being sent into an entirely different situation in Afghanistan where (according to the Petraeus/McChrystal counterinsurgency [COIN] doctrines) they're supposed to be, first and foremost, protecting the population, getting the locals to accept and even want their presence.  But again, what they've been trained to do is to engage and kill "the enemy."

In Afghanistan, of course, the "enemy" comes largely from the same local population that they're supposed to be protecting.  And that population historically, from Alexander's Macedonians, to the 19th-century Brits, to the Soviet troops in the 1980s, has never welcomed foreign troops.  The locals have risen against them, fought them tenaciously, brutally.  (The mutilations inflicted on captive Soviet soldiers by Afghan resistance fighters are legendary, and horrific.)

To reiterate a comment made by General Petraeus early on during the Iraq mess: "Somebody tell me how this ends."

On Israel's "unprecedented" concessions: Hillary needs to talk to her husband

Trying to get the "peace process" (lol) restarted, Hillary Clinton speaks of the "unprecedented" concessions that Mr. Netanyahu is willing to make in regard to West Bank settlement building.  For Mr. Netanyahu, any such "concessions" may indeed be unprecedented, although he did budge a teensy bit in the Wye Accords.

But she really ought to talk to Bill about this.  Have him refresh her memory about some of the truly unprecedented developments that took place on Bill's watch in the White House - like at Camp David, or the Taba talks.  The deal that Ehud Barak proposed to Yasser Arafat was never the sweet deal that it was made out to be (read Robert Malley and Hussein Agha on that), but it was a damn sight better than what Netanyahu is talking about.

David Brooks calling out Barack Obama

That most manly of commentators, David Brooks, lets his neocon slip show in today's essay.  He's consulted all the other manly men, the retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, etc., those "who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan,"  to solicit their views on the president's handling of Afghanistan policy.  Says Mr. Brooks, they all admire the president's intellect, but

they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

Why don't you just say it, Brooksie?  What you're really asking Obama to do is show that he has balls. 

So that's what this is really about?  Guts?  Determination?  Not letting that oh-so-slippery intellect get in the way of real manliness?

I've never been a huge fan of David Brooks, but I'd always hoped that he felt this kind of stuff to be beneath him.  Disappointing.

An Iran conundrum

The merry-go-round of negotiations with Iran keeps spinning . . . and where it stops . . .?

Haaretz reported this morning that Israeli PM Netanyahu now likes the proposed deal with Iran  - whereby Iran would ship as much as 75 percent of its current stock of low-enriched uranium to Russia (and then on to France) for processing and eventually returned to Iran for use in its medical reactor.  (The idea is to buy time to make a longer-term deal with Iran, by getting the supply of enriched uranium out of the country and thus retard any putative progress toward weaponization.)  But now, the NY Times reports, Iran is going to reject that deal, which puts a huge ding in Obama's "engage-Iran" momentum, at least for the time being, and will have the war-hawks in Congress and the punditry screaming "there they go again" (and maybe Tom Friedman has another "screw 'em" essay in store for us?).

Iran's president, Mr. Ahmadinejad, is still touting cooperation with the West, but the real corker here is (as Robert Dreyfuss reports) that the West's Iranian darling, Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the focus of the post-elections reform movement there, is blasting Ahmadinejad for his earlier support of this proposal.  In Moussavi's view, Ahmadinejad (the Iranian whom so many Americans just love to hate) is caving to the US and jeopardizing many years of hard work and discovery by Iran's scientists.

So all of a sudden, the man in whom US hopes for regime change in Iran were being invested is coming across as harder-line than Ahmadinejad on the nuclear-program issue. 

"Finishing" in Iraq

Thomas Friedman asserted this morning that the US needs to "finish" Iraq.  I would argue that it's not for the US to "finish" Iraq; it's not in our power to do that.  And this NYT report makes it clear that, to the extent "finishing" Iraq means ensuring its security, Iraq may be well beyond anyone's power to finish.

Garrison Keillor . . . and more on Matthew Hoh's resignation

This story was broken by the Washington Post yesterday, but Glenn Greenwald provides links to a pdf of Mr. Hoh's letter of resignation, as well as other related reports and analysis.

Also, the excellent Garrison Keillor, in his usual special and "above-average" way, weighs in: bring the troops out of Afghanistan. (The preceding link is to the Salon publication of it, but the NY Times has it as well.)