How to Bring a War with Iran?

It's easy.  Just decide to do what Iraq's leaders just gave the go-ahead to (as reported in the WaPo): start negotiations with the US about keeping US military "trainers" in Iraq beyond the 31 December 2011 deadline.

What happens - if US "trainers" do indeed stay - when one or two of them get killed by Shii militias - you know, the ones that - we're being constantly told - are controlled and supplied by those nefarious Persians?  Will the Pentagon and the White House be content to simply chalk them up as sacrifices for the cause of Iraq's ongoing "liberation" and "democracy"?

Of course not.  American trainers will be walking bull's-eyes.  And you can bet that - assuming that the Iraqis go ahead with having trainers stay on - the Pentagon will be painting its own bull's-eyes on every Shii militia leader in Iraq, as well as on locations in Iran to which the CIA will have traced connections with those militias.  A cruise missile here, a drone attack there, an air-strike somewhere else . . . .  It won't take much to set off a serious encounter.

And Bibi will be beaming.

Former Bush Adviser: US Should Devise a SOFA with Afghanistan

At Bloomberg, Meghan O'Sullivan, a former Bush adviser (now at Harvard) who once drew kudos both for her policy prescriptions and her glamorous looks, weighs in on the impending Afghanistan withdrawal with a proposal that, IMO, seems all too clever by half: a Status of Forces agreement (SOFA) between the US and the Karzai government. 

In essence, it's a legally cute means of ensuring a long-term US presence in a country where (as O'Sullivan, as a so-called expert, ought to know) that presence is

• (1) arguably doing more harm than good in the country itself, and certainly among its people, who have had it up to their eyeballs with night raids and other high-handedness of the US military;
• (2) costing the US more than it can any longer afford, and
• (3) doing nothing to advance our relations with regional powers, especially China, Russia, and - yes - Iran.  Let's face it: Iran is a major regional power; Iran has every reason to aspire to such a status; and even if the ayatollahs were to disappear tomorrow and a liberal secular government come to power, Iranians are not likely to give up their country's nuclear aspirations or rush into the embrace of either the US or Israel - the two countries that the US would like most to see dominate the Middle East.

Obama needs to

• follow through on his pledge to withdraw US forces;
• ignore idiots like Lindsey Graham who demand that the US maintain permanent bases in Afghanistan (though only if the Afghans prove themselves worthy of such largesse); and
• quit thinking about US "force projection" overseas and focus instead on ensuring that American society and values move no farther down the chute of imperial overstretch.

He said it was time to focus on nation-building in the US.  Get 'er done.

Sparks for an Israeli Civil War? or a Third Intifada?

Two stories in Haaretz that grabbed my attention:
1. Israel's Supreme Court has ruled that the settlement "outpost" of Migron in the West Bank was built illegally, and that the government must remove it.

In the court ruling, the Supreme Court justices said that they recognize the difficulties surrounding the dismantling of such an outpost, which has already expanded to 50 families, but said this could have been avoided if the state had initially worked to better enforce the law and prevented the construction of Migron in the first place.

This is the first time the Supreme Court has ordered the state to dismantle an outpost in the West Bank, and the move brings the subject back onto the court's agenda. The decision to dismantle an outpost as large as Migron is likely to cause a political storm in the West Bank settlements.

2.  With a housing crisis provoking massive demonstrations, members of the Knesset are calling upon Mr. Netanyahu to alleviate that crisis by (can you guess?) . . . building more housing for Jews in the West Bank!

Forty-two cabinet ministers and MKs, all members of the Eretz Yisrael Lobby, signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, calling on him to solve the housing crisis that has swept up the country by building in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The ministers and MKs wrote in the petition that “in light of the housing crisis throughout the country, we, as members of Knesset and signatories, call on you [Netanyahu] and the government to consider all possible solutions, including the immediate housing of tens of thousands of citizens in Judea and Samaria, as well as Jerusalem.”

In the few previous instances when the Israeli government has expelled settlers from outposts, the scene was not pretty.  Soldiers were attacked; settlers were forcibly hauled away, angry, wailing, vowing to return.  And this was only a few years ago, but in the time intervening, the influence of hyper-religious groups and their rabbis has increased notably among the ranks of the IDF - enough so for the government to be concerned that orders to evict settlers might be refused. 

Yet, a failure to follow through on the Supreme Court's decision - or worse, a decision to heed the advice of those MKs demanding more West Bank housing - will completely put paid to any hope of a viable deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

And, again, the scene will not be pretty.

On America's Need for a War Ceiling

Tom Engelhardt in the LA Times: well said!

 

Tom Engelhardt: What about a war ceiling? - latimes.com

consider the actions of elected officials in Washington. America's credit rating is in danger of being downgraded, jobs are disappearing, infrastructure is eroding, homeownership levels are falling rapidly, foreclosures are sky-high, times are bad, and even the president admits that the political system designated to make things better is "dysfunctional," yet Congress and the president remain committed to guarding those global ramparts, fighting those wars, and continuing to build and feed a massive national security complex — larger than anything ever imagined when the U.S. still faced a nuclear-armed superpower enemy.

Tell me: What's wrong with this picture?

Americans have been focused on raising that debt ceiling, as onscreen countdown clocks ticked away to disaster. In the process, few have asked the obvious question: Isn't it time to lower America's war ceiling?

A New Notch in the Tea Party's Belt?

In the wake of the new deal arrangement between the White House and Congress after the delaying of the debt-ceiling crisis (tough to say that any conflict here was actually resolved), it's not entirely easy to identify big winners and losers.  Perhaps Obama scored a win in at least not having to deal with the reality of a debt default, but no account I've seen yet casts him in the winner's role.  In fact, the dominant view seems to be that he caved (Andrew Leonard at Salon calls it a "surrender") to the pressure of Tea Party extremists hell-bent on taking down the entire federal government if they didn't get their way.  Joe Nocera of the NY Times puts it plainly:

the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

The new arrangement to avert the debt crisis commits the federal government to cutting spending by about $2.5 over the next 10 years.  One would think the Tea Partiers would be happy about this; but instead, they went to Fox News to complain that it wasn't $4 trillion.  At any rate, such massive cuts - when not balanced with some kind of tax increases (which were indeed NOT included in the deal) - are going to inflict huge pain on the American people, especially the poor and the middle class, as well as those of us approaching retirement who may be depending on those so-called "entitlements" for which so many of us have been paying Social Security taxes for decades.  And the deal does nothing to address what is by far the most important problem: growing the economy.  Again, Nocera:

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending. Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.

And as Leonard noted, there are no tax increases in this deal; all cuts.

Obama has long maintained that revenue increases that would partially balance out any cuts to entitlement programs must be part of any deal. But there are no revenue increases in this deal. And it is surely a pipe dream to imagine that Democrats will be able to include any new revenue increases in further negotiations. After what we've seen so far, first in the government shutdown drama and now in the debt ceiling fight -- when Republicans hold firm, Democrats give in. The pattern has been set.

The only possible good I see coming from this - and from the Tea Party - is the result that over the next 10 years, military spending will likely be cut, and deeply - although, as the NY Times notes, the cuts to "security spending" will amount to only $5 billion in 2012, and it's quite possible that the Pentagon might not absorb any of that (something that one commentator referred to as "political kabuki')  - all of which may help Obama avert accusations, in an election year, of not providing enough support to "the troops." 

But  some in the Tea Party recognize that, over the longer haul, the US can no longer afford its huge military spending, including - and especially - its policy of "force projection" across the entire planet.  People like Andrew Bacevich have been reminding us all of the need to rein in America's hyper-drive for global dominance, for years.  But with this new fiscal mandate of cutting spending, some of the neocon blowhards of the Bush administration are again wailing like new Cassandras.  As Jim Lobe at IPS notes, William Kristol and John Bolton are shocked and despondent that the US perforce can no longer be the biggest and toughest guy on the block.  Kristol goes so far as to call the deal "the best day that China ever had"; Bolton,

whose analysis bounced all around the right-wing blogosphere Monday – was no less hyperbolic, calling the possible military implications of the deal no less than "catastrophic". "Make no mistake, this deal, by risking massive defense cutbacks, potentially points a dagger at the heart of our national security," Bolton, who now sits at the American Enterprise Institute, warned.

And speaking of the Boltons and Kristols, let me close with a note (and recommendation) about other worthies of their era, men who (like them) the US ought to have shunned and (figuratively, at least) exiled years ago for their abject failure to serve their country as law-abiding, morally upright servants.  I speak of Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, two of the Bush-era DoJ officers who created so much running room for Bush, Cheney et al. to do multiples ends-around to skirt international law and, in consequence, brought the US's moral standing to a nadir from which, honestly, it has hardly begun to rise under Obama. See Dalia Lithwick's  (at Slate) piece about her participation at the Aspen Security Forum, where she moderated a discussion among several panelists on the issues of torture and detention as practiced by the US.   Yoo insisted on referring to "aggressive interrogation," not torture - and lamely insisted that since no one in the US is really upset about our drone attacks, then what's the big deal about water-boarding or other stuff he made legally OK?  (That's a very sad point there.) 

And then, reflect on how many Americans have already forgotten - if they ever indeed knew - who Gonzales and Yoo are, and what they were part of: not only torture, rejection of international law, and skirting legal and constitutional principles in order to empower a boy emperor, but also the brutal planetary "force projection" for which people like Kristol and Bolton bloviated so successfully on the boy emperor's behalf.

I detest the Tea Party - but to the extent that they may help the US come to its senses about its self-assigned prerogative to run the Earth, I have to be thankful for them as well.

Debt-Ceiling Death Spiral. . . While Tea Party Cheers

For days I've been trying to avoid looking too closely into the particulars of the ever weirder crisis of the impending deadline (2 August) for raising the US government's debt ceiling.  Just an especially overblown attack of Congressional diva-ism and histrionics, thought I.  They'll get it done, somehow.  Besides, there are much more important issues to keep on top of (or at least try to) - the continuing Arab "spring" (or is "uprisings" a better term for what's happening; less hopeful, less certain of a happy outcome), Europe's examination of conscience in the aftermath of the Oslo massacres, the US's ramping up of rhetoric against the nefarious Iranians who are hell-bent on ruining our glorious exit from Iraq . . . .

But enough is enough.  Paul Krugman's essay in today's NYT lays it squarely on the line: the nation's economic well-being and reputation are being held hostage by Republican extremists (those pesky Tea Partiers) who, quite frankly, would love nothing better than to see the edifice of "big government" come crashing down over the heads of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and the man who happened to become the first African-American - and with an Arab middle name, no less! Talk about a two-fer.  How the pieces are to be put together again, they truly could care less.   For they will have restored government to "We the People" - that is, real Americans just like themselves - non-elite, salt of the earth, xenophobic, intellectually myopic, (almost entirely) white and Bible-lovin' Christians.  But the damage they would incur - have indeed already incurred - seems beyond their feeble imaginings.

But the world is watching, and worried - and speaking out.  As the NYT also reports, China has laid into the US with some harsh admonitions,

“The ugliest part of the saga is that the well-being of many other countries is also in the impact zone when the donkey and the elephant fight,” the state-run news agency, Xinhua — considered the propaganda arm of the Communist Party — said in an opinion piece Friday, referring to the standoff between Democrats and Republicans.

Xinhua said the “irresponsible” brinksmanship in Washington risked “strangling the still fragile economic recovery of not only the United States but also the world as a whole.”

Japan has expressed concern as well, albeit a bit more tactfully.  Wall Street watches anxiously, though with the (comforting?) assumption that if the Dow falls 500+ points a la the 2008-2009 financial markets meltdown, Congress will (as it did then) step up and do the right thing - or at least do something, which is more than it's done in the current crisis.

For a perspective from Europe, note the blunt take from The Independent in London:

The Treasury and the state governments will, of course, put together contingency plans this weekend for short-term financing, albeit in secrecy. But in the absence of a congressional
agreement, even if the Fed staggers on, the price will still be heavy. The possible consequences of no deal include loss of America's triple-A credit rating, a run on money markets, a rise in interest rates and nervousness among holders of dollars throughout the world, China especially. Beijing has been the world's largest purchaser of US Treasury bonds in recent years. In that case, we can also forget President Obama taking a lead on questions beyond America's borders, such as Israel-Palestine, the Arab Spring or climate change. This will necessarily be a much more inward-looking America.

Do Tea Party Republicans care? Not necessarily. Sarah Palin's famed ignorance of foreign parts is a plus to her supporters, a sign of her American First values. Beyond loving Israel and hating Iran, the Tea Party doesn't have time for "abroad", or what it insists is alarmist talk about a default. Ms Palin has dismissed it as an "Obama drama". The omens do not look good.

Truly.  But if I could choose one good thing that might come from all of this, once it's all played out . . .   I return to Paul Krugman, who reminds us that much of the responsibility for this nonsense can be laid at the feet of those mainstream journalists who have taken the mantra of "fair and balanced" (and please, never mind Fox News) to mean that there are always at least two sides in any such conflict, and both sides have some claim to merit.  (He notes the joke, now current, that says that if one side came out with a statement that the earth was flat, then the paper would report that "two sides differ on shape of the Earth.)  This drive to achieve centrism, as he calls it, only hastens us down the road to ruin - and in the current circumstances, shields us from the truth.  As he puts it.

making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Remarkable Photoblog of Iraqi Victims of War, in Recovery

Some of the images here are graphic, and very distressing.  But as the photojournalist himself noted, one must face head on the realities of this war - and the consequences of Mr. Bush's opening of Iraq's Pandora's Box.  Iraq isn't over.  "We" didn't "win" (pace John McCain).  But the Iraqi people surely did lose.

You think not? Then check out this NY Times piece, about Iraqis fleeing to Syria.  We read daily of Syria's turmoil - and turmoil, there is - but for many Iraqis, Syria is an oasis, a refuge from the continuing horrors that afflict much of Iraq, and that may get worse again before they ever get better - which is not to say, get good, which is nothing close to a certainty.

And there's no chance for Iraq to reshape itself as it still may need to, and on its own terms,  unless the US gets out of Iraq, by the deadline, and for once and for all.  Doug Bandow's essay nails that, and hard:

From start to (almost) finish, the Iraqi operation has been a tragic fiasco. The United States invaded to seize nonexistent WMDs. American forces destroyed the country’s system of ordered tyranny, turning the country into a bloody charnel house, killing hundreds of thousands and forcing millions to flee. Washington’s occupation transferred democracy to Iraq without the larger liberal culture necessary for democracy to thrive. U.S. intervention empowered Iran while destroying Baghdad’s ability to control its own borders.

Yet President Obama wants to stick around, meddling in Iraq’s domestic affairs and defending it in foreign matters.

The United States should not have invaded Iraq. Washington can’t undo the ill effects of the war, but it can avoid the costs of a permanent occupation.

America’s job in Iraq is done. The Iraqis should be left in charge of their national destiny. All U.S. troops should be withdrawn. Washington should stop collecting increasingly dangerous dependencies for its empire.

Amen.

Hope for a More Just Israel?

In Haaretz, an essay from Adam Chandler details  how growing dissatisfaction with the current Israeli regime has led many progressive Jews, especially in the US, to turn their backs on Israel.  

Chandler notes especially

"a report released in June by Repair the World, a trans-denominational Jewish nonprofit, focused on volunteerism and social activism. The report describes how "millennials" - the organization's label for Jewish Americans ages 18-35 - recently ranked "Israel/Middle East peace" 10th on a list of social action causes with which they identify.  "For millennials, Israel is less important than animal rights and the environment," [one prominent commentator] noted.

Chandler sees much room for hope, with the persistence of a thriving literary, artistic and intellectual culture in Israel that may spark a resurgence of a Zionist left that will be more conducive to fairer dealing with the Palestinian Arabs both inside Israel and in the West Bank.  I'd like to share that hope, but it seems to me that anti-Arab racism has become too deeply rooted in Israeli society - including the Knesset, and especially among the West Bank settlers - and among the American Christian Zionists who support the settlers' agenda.

Fox News: Should We Starve Syrians into Submission?

Posted at the Fox News site by George Russell (Fox News executive editor) is a report seemingly intended to skewer the United Nations for its decision to extend several of its programs in Syria.  Russell seems to be horrified that, at a time when the US and "other Western democracies" have imposed sanctions on the Asad regime to pressure it into stepping down, the UN is moving ahead to continue to provide assistance that will be administered through the government of Syria.  How dare they! 

Russell's stance jives quite well, of course, with that of frequent Fox News commentator - and former US ambassador to the UN - John Bolton, whose disdain for the UN - especially while he was an official in it - has never been in doubt.  Bolton never made a secret of his belief that the UN needed to be gutted as punishment for its failures to promote US hegemony across the planet.

Striking in Russell's piece is his admission that a large proportion of the UN's assistance to Syria is economic - much of it related to providing food and medical care.

Most of UNFPA’s [U.N. Population Fund] current programming, according to an agency spokesman, even while becoming more focused on emergency issues during the current crisis, focuses on maternity care and health, as well as contraceptive and “reproductive health care.”. . . .

The World Food Program, for example, which operates more as an emergency relief agency, has three different programs in Syria offering assistance to just under 669,000 people. . . .

Asked directly by Fox News to confirm the most recent U.N. program extension in Syria, a spokesman for UNDP [United Nations Development Program] sidestepped the question, noting instead that “U.N. regular operations have slowed down significantly due to the situation on the ground,” as have UNDP operations.

Otherwise, he said, “U.N. agencies are providing humanitarian support in response to the crisis including providing health and child protection services, food and nutrition, hygiene kits and psychosocial support.” Additionally, “other joint activities with direct impact on the vulnerable and poor are continuing though at a much slower pace.”

Among those continuing activities are a joint UNDP and UNFPA program to “monitor the social aid fund of cash assistance to Syrians living below the poverty line,” and a six-agency effort to provide health and education services, food and jobs in six of the poorest villages in Syria.

The social aid fund in particular is not a small item. According to documents examined by Fox News, the “Social Welfare Fund” that UNDP monitored under the now-extended UNDAF was intended to dispense $192 million a year between 2008 and 2012. . . . .

In other  words, the UN is doing for Syria what is has been doing across the planet, for decades: providing humanitarian assistance to peoples who need it most.  (And as someone who spent two weeks in Syria 20 years ago, and spent more than a week working with local villagers in eastern Syria, I can attest that the need is there, and it is substantial.)

But in the eyes of Fox News, the UN must be castigated, because:  "In all cases, . . .  U.N. agencies work closely with Syrian government agencies, which can range from the health and education ministries to such entities as the Ministry of the Interior, which among its tasks includes control of security forces."  Moreover, "according to U.N. Coordinator Ahmed’s February report to his boss, the Secretary General, the entire UNDAF program that has now been extended had “weak monitoring and evaluation systems, which made comprehensive assessment of U.N. achievement in Syria very difficult.”

What Russell is conjuring up here in order to outrage us is the old specter of "dual use," in a somewhat different application.  In this instance, it's the fear that UN resources might somehow be diverted to the benefit of the Asad government.  In an earlier incarnation, it was applied as a rationale for depriving millions of Iraqis needed chemicals and infrastructure for their water, sewage, and medical systems during the era of UN-imposed (and US-led) sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime between 1991 and 2003.  The alleged concern then was that Saddam might divert these materials to producing his "weapons of mass destruction" (the same kind of weapons, by the way, that the US essentially winked at when Saddam used them against Iran in the 1980s - but that's a tale for another time).   As Joy Gordon and others (such as Andrew Cockburn) have revealed, though, the US used this dual-use doctrine to wage an "invisible war" that cost millions of Iraqi lives - especially among children and the elderly - via disease and malnutrition during the sanctions era.   It also gravely damaged the US's moral standing (especially when Sec of State Madeleine Albright told "60 Minutes" that the cost had been "worth it").

One would hope that the US public diplomacy mainstream - and its propagandists, like Fox News - would have taken a lesson.  But here we have the executive editor of Fox News (for whom the moral standing of the US is never an issue, because the US's elevated moral standing is, by definition, unassailable),  essentially arguing that the UN should quit providing  humanitarian assistance that is vital to hundreds of thousands of Syria's people; that, in effect, the UN ought to be obligated to join in on the sanctions that "the US and other Western democracies" have imposed on Syria. 

The recent actions of the Asad regime are, by and large, despicable.  Yet, as of this moment, the Asad regime is still the officially recognized government of Syria in the eyes of the world - including the US, and Israel.

And, last time I checked, the UN Charter does not stipulate that the UN's mission is to enforce the dictates - or sanctions - imposed by the "US and other Western democracies."

A Rare Voice for True Democracy from the Israeli Government

The speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, has spoken out against recently enacted Israeli laws that discriminate against Arab Israelis.

Hard-liners in parliament have passed a series of laws in the past year that were seen as anti-Arab. One law requires non-Jewish immigrants to take a loyalty oath. The law does not apply to Jewish immigrants, who automatically receive citizenship under Israel's "Law of Return."
Earlier this month, parliament passed a law that would punish Israelis who call for boycotts of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Critics said the law, which allows those targeted by boycotts to sue for damages, infringed on the right to free speech. Opponents have already challenged the law in the Supreme Court. . .

Rivlin did not get into details on the specifics of the various bills, but said Israel must find the proper balance between being the Jewish state and being a democracy that respects everyone's rights."You can't have Israel as a Jewish country without it being a democratic country," he said. "It has to be a democratic state."
Rivlin lamented the charged atmosphere that often pervades the parliament. Debate between Arab and Jewish lawmakers sometimes devolves into nationalistic rhetoric. Last week, parliament revoked some privileges of an Arab lawmaker who joined a pro-Palestinian flotilla last year that tried to breach Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Of course, he's a member of the Likud, so as far he's concerned, the West Bank belongs to Israel. Nonetheless, that he expresses concern for the rights of Israel's Arab citizens, and for the future of Israel as a democracy (if that is indeed what Israel can still claim to be), is refreshing - if not altogether reassuring - at a time when anti-Arab sentiment among the general Israeli population is at perhaps an all-time high.

AIPAC and the Israel Lobby Getting Results

From the JTA, report of a proposed bill that would shut down the PLO office in D.C. if the Palestinian leadership moves ahead with recognition of a Palestinian state by the UN General Assembly in September.

the bill also requires the president to certify that "the Palestinian Authority is not attempting to establish or seek recognition at the United Nations of a Palestinian state outside of an agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians" . . . .

Congressional appropriators had repeatedly warned the Palestinians that their push for statehood recognition at the United Nations in September would have repercussions.

Restrictions on Palestinian aid take up 10 pages of the 186-page bill, and the language has the backing of Democrats and Republicans, who otherwise are sharply divided over the Republican majority's introduction of cuts in assistance to other parts of the world and of bans on assistance to family planning clinics that provide information on abortions.

One new restriction bans aid to any Palestinian government "that results from an agreement with Hamas." That's much broader than existing language, which bans aid to any government that has Hamas ministers. It would seemingly count out assistance to the government of technocrats that Palestinian leaders have envisioned as the result of a unity agreement with the terrorist group, although this provision includes a broad presidential waiver.

The bill also keeps assistance to Israel at $3.075 billion -- a provision that also has the backing of both parties, as does Iran sanctions language.

When it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, our Congress shows itself, once again, unable to think outside the box with which AIPAC and the Lobby have enclosed it.  No room for discussion.  No room to even consider that the Palestinians have been forced to the UNGA because the "peace process" has become a joke.

The WaPo reported today that US officials are confident that al-Qaeda is on the verge of destruction.  But such actions by Congress are the kind of idiocy that keeps pumping life - and new recruits - into the ranks of jihadists worldwide.

America as a Third-World Nation?

Some interesting observations from Judy Bachrach at World Affairs:

there are, it seems, certain hardcore definitions of what it means to be a first-, second-, or third-world country. These are readily available on a helpful website, which quotes the Encyclopedia of World Geography. . . .

A third-world nation, it turns out, is “generally categorized as poor with unstable governments.” A key factor, we are told, is “the lack of a middle class—with impoverished millions in a vast lower economic class, and a very small elite upper class controlling the country’s wealth.”

Also: “Most third-world nations have a very large foreign debt.”

Now, let’s examine all this. Last year, the United States had over $14 trillion in debt—$4.4 trillion of it held by foreign governments, which certainly sounds “very large” to me. China, once considered a second-world country, currently owns about $892 billion of American debt; and Hong Kong, which is basically part of China these days, has about $138 billion in US securities. Iran, on the other hand, has only around $13.5 billion in external debt; and Ecuador almost as much. So who among these countries would we qualify as third-world?

What about poverty, another big indicator of third world–dom? Two years ago, 43.6 million Americans were categorized as poor, up from 39.8 percent a year earlier. Even worse: About 19 million Americans now live in extreme poverty. Meanwhile, according to the Los Angeles Times, the number of millionaire US households has climbed 15 percent in one year—to 4.7 million. (Quote from Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC: “The recession is going to end up accentuating the inequalities of income and wealth…”). What he means is: the middle class is becoming ever-smaller. What he also means is that a tiny elite seems to be controlling much of US wealth.

And now let’s get to that last indicator of third world status: by which I mean unstable government. Let’s imagine a country where the House Speaker walks out on debt ceiling negotiations. Where the president openly complains that this same legislator refuses to return his calls. Where nothing is safe any longer, and no one knows when or if a job/corporation/bank/state government is going to dissolve. Or a once all-powerful nation is about to default.

Now that’s what I call third-world.