Ho hum

I noticed this, too.

It's inconceivable to me why, thus far, Reuters and the Associated Press haven't written up an article based on the NY Times' story about the Bush-Blair 31 January 2003 discussions. Besides an airing on broadcast TV, wire stories are probably the most important avenue for getting the news out to the larger public, typically through local newspapers.

By any stretch of the imagination, a story about the US President gumming up intentions to launch a war, in stark contrast to his public statements, and floating ideas to manufacture a pretext for invasion should be big news, even in these cynical times.

Break up

Patrick Cockburn delivers this less-than-cheery assessment and prediction in the LRB:

The moment when Iraq could be held together as a truly unified state has probably passed. But a weak Iraq suits many inside and outside the country and it will still remain a name on the map. American power is steadily ebbing and the British forces are largely confined to their camps around Basra. A ‘national unity government’ may be established but it will not be national, will certainly be disunited and may govern very little. ‘The government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,’ one minister said. The army and police are already split along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iranians have been the main winners in the struggle for the country. The US has turned out to be militarily and politically weaker than anybody expected. The real question now is whether Iraq will break up with or without an all-out civil war.

Most probably war is coming, but it will not be fought in all parts of Iraq. It will essentially be a battle for Baghdad between Sunni and Shia Arabs. ‘The army will disintegrate in the first moments of the fighting,’ a Kurdish leader told me. ‘The soldiers obey whatever orders they receive from their own communities.’ The parts of the country with a homogeneous population, whether Shia, Sunni or Kurdish, may well stay quiet. But in greater Baghdad, sectarian cleansing is already taking place. The place bears an ever closer resemblance to Beirut thirty years ago. The Shia Arabs have the advantage because they are the majority in the capital, but the Sunni should be able to cling on to their strongholds in the west and south of the city. The new balance of power in Iraq may be decided not by negotiations, but by militiamen fighting street by street.

Nothing earth shattering here, but I take the words of an experienced voice on the ground much more seriously than those chattering heads in some studio back in DC.

Poverty?

In the New Yorker, John Cassidy makes the case for shifting social scientific research and public policy from a preoccupation with absolute to relative poverty.

On Failed States

Chomsky talks about his new book with Democracy Now!. Good read, as usual.

Logos

There are a number of good essays in the latest edition of Logos, including an amusing exchange over Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah featuring the one and only Dershowitz.

Just passing along the reference. I only ran across this today.

More socialism, please

Ronald Aronson says that if the left is to regain any leverage within American politics, it's going to have to look beyond liberalism to socialism. I'll raise my glass to that.

Still preoccupied

* Murray Waas unspins the convoluted tale of how the Plame leak evolved out of a larger effort to shield Bush from accusations that he knew the WMD case against Iraq was weak, if not altogether bogus.

* "Sectarian violence has displaced more than 25,000 Iraqis since the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine," the Washington Post reports, "and shelters and tent cities are springing up across central and southern Iraq to house homeless Sunni and Shiite families."

* The Independent reviews some of the Lincoln Group's propaganda tactics in Iraq.

* See: Soldiers' Regrets.

* You can get Jill Carroll updates here. It's nice to hear she's been released without harm.

* What next for Israel? Neve Gordon says Kadima's victory will likely put "the peace process into reverse." What else is new...

* Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman wonder, "Is the Mainstream Media finally getting half the rigged voting machine story?"

* Bob Parry reviews the latest evidence of Bush and Blair's war crimes, which finally popped up in the NY Times this week.

* The UN Security Council has issued a statement calling on Iran to cease its nuclear enrichment activity, although its doubtful that further punitive measures will follow in coming weeks. Warren Strobel breaks down the story.

* Mark Weisbrot: "French students and workers seem to have a better understanding of these economic issues than their political leaders. Hopefully, the wisdom of the crowd will prevail." Related: What's the Matter with U.S. Organized Labor?

Democracy with the wrong people, again

The American love affair with "democracy" continues:

Senior Shiite politicians said today that the American ambassador has told Shiite officials to inform the Iraqi prime minister that President Bush does not want him to remain the country's leader in the next government.

It is the first time the Americans have directly intervened in the furious debate over the country's top job, the politicians said, and it is inflaming tensions between the Americans and some Shiite leaders.

The ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the head of the main Shiite political bloc at a meeting last Saturday to pass a "personal message from President Bush" on to the prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who the Shiites insist should stay in his post for four more years, said Redha Jowad Taki, a Shiite politician and member of Parliament who was at the meeting.

Ambassador Khalilzad said that President Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari to be the next prime minister, according to Mr. Taki, a senior aide to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite bloc. It was the first "clear and direct message" from the Americans on the issue of the candidate for prime minister, Mr. Taki said.

Oh, and get this:

The Americans have harshly criticized the Jaafari government in recent months for supporting Shiite militias that have been fomenting sectarian violence and pushing Iraq closer to full-scale civil war. Ambassador Khalilzad has sharpened his attacks in the last week, saying the militias are now killing more people than the Sunni-led insurgency.

There is growing concern among American officials that Mr. Jaafari is incapable of reining in the private armies, especially since Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric who leads the most volatile of the militias, is Mr. Jaafari's strongest backer.

Yes, yes. Those damn Shiite militias. Running roughshod over the country, as if it were almost like the realization of a nefarious plan.

Neoliberal resistance

This is an important essay by Michael Schwartz.

In it, he examines the standard narrative of how and why the the US military came to meet such stiff resistance to its occupation of Iraq. This wasn't the inevitable result of opening up a brutalized society after years of Baathist repression, he claims, but rather the direct consequence of American efforts to strip down and rebuild Iraqi society along neoliberal lines.

By trying to force "year zero" (in Naomi Klein's words), the Americans triggered massive protest early on in the occupation that tended to be countered with brutal suppression. This, in turn, sent a message to the Iraqis that America would only listen to force and encouraged people angered by austerity measures to take up arms.

As Schwartz puts it,

At first, many of the protests were peaceful, focusing either on local economic issues, or on general conditions that were worsening, not improving, after months of occupation. Typically, people demanded services and jobs from the CPA. It is now lost to history, but the run-up to the ferocious first battle of Falluja in April, 2004 -- triggered by the mutilation of four private security contractors -- actually began a full year earlier when American troops fired on a peaceful protest organized around a host of local issues, killing 13 Iraqi civilians. It was exactly this sort of ferocious reaction to peaceful protest that made the U.S. military such a factor in the stoking of what would become an ongoing rebellion.

In fact, in 2003, the occupation response to protests was forceful, almost gleeful, repression. Top officials of the CPA and the U.S. military command considered these demonstrations, peaceful or not, the most tangible signs of ongoing Baathist attempts to facilitate a future return to power. They therefore applied the occupation's iron heel on the theory that forceful suppression would soon defeat or demoralize any "dead-enders" intent on restoring the old regime. Protests were met with arrests, beatings, and -- in any circumstances deemed dangerous to U.S. troops -- overwhelming, often lethal military force. Home invasions of people suspected of anti-occupation attitudes or activities became commonplace, resulting in thousands of arrests and numerous firefights. Detention and torture in Abu Ghraib and other American-controlled prisons were just one facet of this larger strategy, fueled by official pressure -- once a low-level rebellion boiled up -- to get quick information for further harsh, repressive strikes. In general, the Iraqi population came to understand that dissent of whatever sort would be met by savage repression...And each act of repression convinced more Iraqis that peaceful protest would not work; that, if they were going to save their lives and those of their families, a more aggressive, belligerent approach would be necessary.

His conclusion:

Certainly, an alien army entered Iraq, destroyed that country's sovereignty, and stoked nationalist resentments. But major media outlets in this country have lost track of the fact that what also entered Iraq was an American administration wedded at home and abroad to a fierce, unbending, and alien set of economic ideas. By focusing attention only on the lack of U.S. (and Iraqi) military power brought to bear in the early days after the fall of Baghdad, they ignore some of the deeper reasons why many Iraqis were willing to confront a formidable military machine with only small arms and their own wits. They ignore -- and cause the American public to ignore -- the fact that there was little resistance just after the fall of Baghdad and that it expanded as the economy declined and repression set in. They ignore the eternal verity that the willingness to fight and die is regularly animated by the conviction that otherwise things will only get worse.

The Israel Lobby?

Here's Noam Chomsky's widely anticipated response to the Mearsheimer and Walt paper on the Israel lobby.

As one would expect, Chomsky throws some cold water on their thesis.

The reality of the situation, he claims, is the inverse of their argument: US policy makers latched on to Israel early on as a device that would help project American power into the Middle East and secure better control (critical leverage) over the region's energy reserves. Chomsky dates this back to well before the '67 war. In other words, the Israel lobby, broadly defined, didn't drag the US into supporting Israel, but rather grew up alongside the realization of Israel's strategic importance. In part, this explains why support for Israel permeates the "intellectual-political class."

His second major point is that the Israel lobby, while powerful, is dwarfed by other lobbies that play a much more significant role in crafting US policy, namely the energy and weapons industry. Any study that doesn't contrast the influence of all of these lobbies is essentially useless, he argues.

New White House Indictments?

Rove and/or Hadley might have indictments coming down over the next month or so from the Plame investigation, according to Jason Leopold.

Kadima wins

Kadima won the Israeli election, but with a smaller margin of victory than most expected. Likud lost badly.

Here are some details from Chris McGreal's Guardian story:

According to exit polls last night, Kadima won up to 32 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Labour has about 21, Yisrael Beiteinu 14 and Likud 12. The balance of seats is mostly held by religious and nationalist parties. The turnout, at 63%, was the lowest in Israel's history.

Mr Olmert's likely coalition partners are Labour and two smaller parties. He may also turn to the Pensioners party, which has never before held seats in parliament but is estimated to have won eight in an apparent protest vote.

The election was widely regarded as a referendum on Mr Olmert's commitment, backed by Labour and the left, to unilaterally withdraw from large parts of the West Bank, to remove tens of thousands of Jewish settlers while retaining the main settlement blocks, and to carve out a border using the West Bank barrier. Likud, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, and other parties on the right argued that pulling out of Palestinian territory would be a victory for terrorism.

MIA On New Civil Rights Movement

Earl Ofari Hutchinson asks the "old civil rights" groups: where the hell are you on the immigration debate?

Last Abu Ghraib images to be released

The ACLU should soon be getting the last photos and videotapes of the Abu Ghraib abuse, which the Pentagon was trying to block from public view.

As a reminder, this is the material that supposedly contains evidence of rape at the prison.

Report of 'massacre' angers Iraqis

Did the US military "massacre" a number of civilians (ranging from 17-37, according to widely divergent claims) at the Mustafa Mosque in Baghdad over the weekend?

Scott Peterson of the CS Monitor says the truth doesn't matter; the damage has already been done.

Links

'Busy. To keep things flowing, here are some links for today.

* Do you have lingering doubts about the official 9/11 narrative? What’s your HOP level?

* So the sleeping giant awakens. Good to see. Some quality background material on the immigration "debate," here.

* The NY Times finally reports on one of the "Downing Street Memos." This particular one first surfaced in the British media last month. Plus, Greg Mitchell provides the missing context.

* The US military is accused of "massacring" at least 22 at the Al Mustafa mosque in a heavily Shiite Baghdad neighborhood, which is causing all sorts of ripples in Iraqi politics. Meanwhile, investigations into the November Haditha killings and the March 15th Abu Sifa (Ishaqi) killings by US troops continue.

* Still looking for some semblance of debate on the Israel lobby, but I'm not holding my breath. Also, Israeli elections are tomorrow. Ha'aretz has full coverage.

* Anatol Lieven offers some useful advice to the neocons, aggressive nationalists, and, yes, the lovable CMLs: cut it out, already!

Weekend reading

* According to the Boston Globe, Dubya reached into his bag of tricks again by issuing another "signing statement" following the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act earlier this month. It'd be nice for someone to call Dear Leader on this habit, which essentially elevates him to the level of king.

* New scientific research suggests that global sea levels could rise by 20 feet by 2100. The study is published in a special report for Science.

* Who Is Killing New Orleans? asks Mike Davis. The answer: a whole lot of people, including think tankers, local politicians, GOP reps, contractors, and developers. There's a number of people trying to save New Orleans, too, but their efforts are going largely ignored in the media.

* American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains as bankrupt as ever, claims Remi Kanazi.

* American bases in Iraq are finally getting some media attention. See Jim Lobe's analysis, along with an article from the LA Times and a blog entry by William Arkin.

Bad dog!

Disinfopundit

I hardly ever do this, but sometimes I get so annoyed that I can't help myself. Bruce's post put me over the edge.

Apparently Instapundit has been getting a lot of flack for an old comment of his, so he decided to strike back at the "antiwar left" by cobbling together a post that lectures folks for gloating about the war, even though that's precisely what he did. He also implies that the predictions of the antiwar side were completely off base in regards to the Iraq conflict.

In all, the post is not worth noting, except for the fact that I think it betrays the feelings of those who still cling to the Iraq war as a noble venture worth supporting, even to this day. It also exhibits the rather callous views of a ridiculously influential blogger who I think sees the war like some kind of game of Risk.

I started cutting into it, and this is what I came up with. I tried to excise what we might deem, fairly, as relevant or coherent statements. Insty doesn't approach this subject sans snark, but I think it's serious enough for me to.

Some people like to call this a "Fisking," but I will dare not besmirch the name of someone with the bravery and insight of Robert Fisk. It's a riposte. Take it or leave it.

IP: "Did the antiwar left want us to lose?...Quite a few did, and some even admitted it...and the steady stream of self-satisfied gloating I get from antiwar lefties whenever there's bad news about Iraq, hardly evidence a desire to see America do well, either."

What would winning the war entail? On one level, the US did win the war, if by war you mean the initial incursion. The regime was displaced rather quickly.

The trouble is that the US is losing (lost?) the occupation, and Iraq has not been rehabilitated to anything closely resembling that which was envisioned by western acolytes.

Personally, I will admit that "winning the war" was never a priority for me. Frankly, I don’t even know what winning the war would have meant. Iraqis and Americans living in peace and prosperity today? Sure, sounds good, but I never thought the war had a remote chance of realizing that.

The war itself was a massive crime. The truth of the matter is that once the bombs were launched, we all lost. It’s hard to see any real victors in this whole affair, besides, maybe, those who have gorged themselves at the trough. Or Iran. Or Islamists, "radical" and otherwise.

Lastly, the obvious point, as alluded above: who the hell is Insty to get up on his high horse today about gloating, particularly when he's just been called on it?

IP: "Civilian casualties were, in fact, far lower than predicted."

What’s the prediction here? The two major estimates that I recall came from MEDACT (50k+) and the CASI-leaked UN estimate (100k/400k). Those figures don't seem unreasonable to me now, by any means.

The best study we have of deaths from the war – not casualties – is still the Lancet survey, which approximated 98k "excess deaths." Back in late 2004. Nearly 1.5 years ago. The figure today is undoubtedly higher. Extrapolating the findings, Andrew Cockburn estimates it’s up to about 180k now, with a ceiling as high as 500k.

Yes, pro-warriors attacked the Lancet survey hard, but their criticisms were typically shallow. They accomplished their task, though. The study has been marginalized to such a degree that few bother to cite it and, when they do, they invariably throw up the "controversial" disclaimer. The only figure of Iraqi war deaths you see frequently mentioned is the IBC number, which is a huge underestimate.

Mind you, this doesn’t even take into account all the casualties – meaning people injured or maimed in the war. If you have anywhere between 100-500k killed, can you imagine how many people have been injured? Do you want to?

IP: "In fact, as I noted in the post from 2003, the antiwar predictions generally turned out badly. But don't take my word for it. Here's an excerpt from Gateway Pundit's (GP) roundup on that topic:"

GP: "German politicians predicted: 'Millions of people in Baghdad will be victims of bombs and rockets.'"

In so far as the entire city was bombarded by bombs and missiles, this is accurate. If the intention of the German commenter was to suggest that millions would be killed in Baghdad, it's safe to say that didn't happen. However, I can't find the quote in its original context, so I'm doubtful about it's rendering in the GP post.

GP: "Ted Kennedy predicted: "A war on Saddam might also cause an unprecedented humanitarian crisis with an estimated 900,000 refugees, a pandemic and an environmental disaster as Saddam lit the oilfields on fire."

Predicted? How about Ted Kennedy cited these warnings, which were coming in from the more prominent refugee agencies and UN auxiliary offices. Granted, at the outset of the war oil fires were hardly a problem, as far as I recall, and the refugee crisis was not nearly as severe as feared.

I'm not sure why Mr. Kennedy deserves to be taken out to the woodshed for merely citing these predictions, though. You'd expect people to cite authorities when deliberating something as serious as launching a "pre-emptive" war.

GP: "The UN predicted...'It is also likely that in the early stages there will be a large segment of the population requiring treatment for traumatic injuries, either directly conflict-induced or from the resulting devastation. Given the population outlined earlier, as many as 500,000 could require treatment to a greater or lesser degree as a result of direct or indirect injuries.'"

There’s perhaps a willful effort here to misread "casualties" for "deaths." Again, that prediction doesn't seem unrealistic now, whatsoever. (See above)

GP: "Ted Kennedy also predicted: 'The U.S. could run through "battalions a day at a time" and that the fighting would look like "the last fifteen minutes of 'Private Ryan.'"

Cuing my broken record: why we should persecute people for relaying the opinions of other informed sources is beyond me -- in this case, from within the US military (!). Maybe this didn’t happen from March – April 2003, but I wouldn’t gloat over that now. The US has been, by all accounts, chewing through its military equipment and personnel at an alarming rate over the past three years. Plus, many battles have been far worse than anything Spielberg has put on film, particularly Fallujah I and II, to name the obvious examples.

IP: "Although each fatality is a tragic loss for America, this is still one of most successful military campaigns the US has ever fought."

Huh? By what measure? Nobody doubted the American military, in all its ~$400 billion/year glory, would be able to overrun Iraq. Did the toppling of the regime happen faster than most predicted? Yes, but that’s in large measure because Hussein’s military didn’t put up much of a fight and receded back into society. By all means, then, go ahead and cheer the initial campaign as successful.

IP: "I should also note that despite predictions of 50,000 casualties in the initial invasion, three years later we're at less than 5% of that. And U.S. casualties are falling as Iraqis pick up the load."

Again, casualties vs. deaths. The US military is at ~2,300 deaths today, but casualties are in the several tens of thousands. DoD formally estimates about 17,000, but the figure is far higher than that -- yes, even higher than 50,000.

IP: "The 'Arab Street' didn't rise (the Iraqi insurgency, which is a mixture of foreign fighters and Ba'athist holdouts hardly counts, and there weren't riots and insurrection elsewhere in the region, as was predicted -- apparently, we neglected to publish cartoons, which seem to incite more unrest than invasions)."

This is silly. Maybe you didn’t see mass chaos in Arab capitals, but the anger towards the invasion has not been hard to find. The central accusation of the antiwar movement on this front, as I recall it, was that the invasion would turn the Arab world against the US (even more) -- not that Riyadh or Beirut would burn to the ground. The former has indeed happened, as the most relevant polling from the Pew Center has shown.

Additionally, not too much is known about the Iraq insurgency. But of what we do know, foreign fighters play a small role (Cordesman’s study, the best there is, estimates them at around 4-10%) and the "vast majority" of the identified foreign fighters were radicalized by the war itself. In other words, the American invasion created them out of thin air.

Lastly, it's worth acknowledging that the "home grown" insurgency is rather diverse. It’s not just composed, as we’re constantly told, of Baathist "remnants" or "dead-enders." We’re talking about ex-military members, the unemployed, religious radicals, and, generally, people who have been severely alienated in some way. There are a lot of what we might call "good, honest" people in the insurgency who have taken up arms against an unjust occupation.

IP: "I had actually planned not to rub this in -- the "antiwar" movement has shrunk to such a pitiful remnant of its not terribly impressive former self that it hardly seems worth it. But, hey, ask and ye shall receive."

In actuality, the anti-war movement encompasses a broad swath of the country today. As everyone knows, public opinion has turned decisively against the war. You may not see bodies in the streets today at the same level as you saw before the war (a regrettable and scandalous fact), but that’s in large measure because people are not clear about what’s the best option for the US and Iraq right now. Personally, I advocate immediate withdrawal, but I’m sympathetic to those who sit on the fence about whether troops should be "out now."

More to the point: if you want to mock the antiwar movement for its small numbers, then by what evaluation do you measure the diminishing numbers of people who still support the war or, at least, think the war wasn't a mistake?

IP:"As for the French oil merchants and Russian arms-deal creditors, or the strained efforts at moral equivalence, well, nothing's happened to change that...Yep. Today's antiwar movement: tools of the international oil companies and arms traders. They used to say that kind of thing about war supporters, of course, but that's just another example of the way things have gone all topsy-turvy of late."

This is one of my pet peeves. I don't understand why we should castigate France and Russia for being greedy and self-interested in their dealings with Iraq. You can cite "oil-for-food" graft as being lucrative for their business and oil interests, but the kickbacks and skimming were probably more lucrative for American interests.

At base, the idea that we should take on its face the implied criticism that France and Russia were acting greedily and deceitfully while the Americans had purer motives is absurd.

Also, if you’re going to repeatedly denounce the UN corruption in Iraq, for the sake of consistency I think it would behoove you to show at least some relative concern about the corruption that has characterized the war and occupation, what's been called potentially the "greatest corruption scandal in history."

Beyond what's above, I don't have much to say. I find it rather curious that someone would choose to defend their war stance by saying, in essence, "I was closer than you in my predictions over the period March - April 2003, even though the war has proceeded in a manner since that I never foresaw or expressed much interest in." It might be a good way of scoring cheap political points, but it doesn't do much for our general dialogue about the war now, does it?

The reality of America's gulag

The Road to Guantanamo. Pretty sickening, I'd say.

On the footpath to transfer

Ha'aretz:

Sixty-eight percent of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in the same apartment building as an Israeli Arab, according to the results of an annual poll released Wednesday by the Center for the Struggle Against Racism.

The "Index of Racism Towards Arab Palestinian Citizens of the State of Israel," conducted by Geocartographia, revealed on 26 percent of Jews in Israel would agree to live with Arab neighbors in the same building.

Forty-six percent of Jews would refuse to allow an Arab to visit their home while 50 percent would welcome an Arab visitor. Forty-one percent of Jewish support the segregation of Jews and Arabs in places of recreation and 52 percent of such Jews would oppose such a move.

There's been a lot of ink spilled about the alleged resurgence of a "new anti-Semitism" in recent years. The typical charge is that criticism of Israel today has stepped over the line and is simply a cover for base hatred of Jews. The more cynical among us have then used the threat of the "new anti-Semitism" to beat back any negative remark about Israel as having malicious intent: criticism of Israel, you see, cannot come about because one abhors racism, but rather because it's a front to hide one's racism towards Jews. It's damn near the perfect racket.

To make things worse, when polling unearths racist viewpoints well within the mainstream in Israel, it's as if we're not supposed to notice. Or, even further, we're supposed to sympathize with the traumatized racists who have been forced to put up with the "crazed violence" of the Palestinians' intifada.

Commenting on the poll above, Jonathan Cook sees ominous things ahead as it betrays the likely maneuvers of the Kadima party, which is the expected winner of next week's elections in Israel.

If elected, Cook contends that Kadima will likely adopt a platform of "reciprocal separation," which essentially boils down to the logic that "if Israel is making sacrifices in Gaza and the West Bank by 'expelling' settlers from their homes, then the Arab minority currently living in Israel should expect to pay a similar price."

Needless to say, this would be a monstrous development, but I wouldn't be surprised one bit to see it enacted and fawned over by the international media, like the Gaza withdrawal was, as a "bold" gesture to reach a "peaceful settlement."

War with a smily face

FAIR: "It looks like we're in for another round of 'The media only report the "bad news" from Iraq."

Criminal

When you put it this way, then the only reasonable option for the United States at this moment is impeachment.

Melting away

French labor rises

It is telling that whenever labor starts to get a bit testy, the corporate media tends to go and hide. I haven't been able to find any decent coverage of the French protests over the past week, outside of reports that tend to fixate on the burning of cars and "violence."

Initially spearheaded by students, the protests against new labor restrictions by the French government have been picked up by the larger labor movement, with a general strike planned for next Tuesday.

As usual, the only quality, consistent coverage of developments like these comes from the socialist press. See, for example, the myriad of articles over at the Socialist Worker.

I'm hoping the American labor movement is taking note of what's going on across the pond. Yeah, don't laugh...

Deaths down, casualties up

You might have heard that US military deaths in Iraq are down recently, the implication being that as Iraqi forces have "stood up" American forces have been able to take on less dangerous tasks.

That doesn't give you the whole picture, though. UPI's Martin Sieff explains:

U.S. mainstream media reports have focused only on the numbers being killed. But over the past eight months, we have repeatedly emphasized in this column that the far larger numbers of U.S. troops wounded, especially those wounded too seriously to return to active duty, represent a far broader and more statistically significant figure of the scale of insurgent activity and the degree to which it is succeeding or failing to inflict significant casualties on U.S. forces.

The total number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq through Tuesday, March 21 since the start of U.S. operations to topple Saddam Hussein on March 19, 2003, was 2,319, according to official figures issued by the Department of Defense, a rise of 49 in the past 39 days or an average of just over 1.3 killed per day.

The good news is that this is a more than 60 percent improvement on the rate of 3.1 killed per day in early February. And it is a 350 percent improvement on the 33 U.S. soldiers killed in only seven days from Jan. 11 through Jan. 17, an average of 4.7 soldiers killed per day.

The bad news, however, is that in the 39 days from Feb. 11 through March 21, 616 U.S. soldiers were injured in Iraq, an average of 15.8 per day. This was more than twice as bad as the Feb. 4-10 period when 47 U.S. soldiers were injured at an average rate of just under seven per day. And it was also more than 36 percent worse than the rate of the five-day period from Jan. 30 through Feb. 3 when 58 U.S. soldiers were injured, according to the DOD figures, at an average rate of 11.6 per day.

Sieff also comments on the trend recently observed (and, perversely, applauded in some circles) that when Iraqis focus on killing each other in reprisals and outbursts of sectarian violence it keeps American troops out of the crosshairs of the insurgency.

Problem is, Sieff says, that hasn't happened:

These figures should also be seen in the context of another trend in the Iraqi conflict. Since the destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque in Samara last month, for the first time Iraqi Shiites have started reacting in a popular, violent manner on a broad scale against the Sunni community.

This might be expected to distract the Sunni Muslim insurgents from focusing on targeting U.S. troops and, indeed, just a few days ago USA Today reported a trend we have been monitoring and documenting in this column for almost four months -- the number of attacks and casualties inflicted on U.S. forces has been decreasing somewhat while the insurgents have turned with increasing ferocity first on the new Iraqi security forces and, since January, against Iraqi civilian targets.

However, as we noted above, the capability of the insurgents to go on waging attacks on U.S. forces and increasing the number of them they are injuring has not diminished, it has increased: The insurgency is therefore clearly growing in its capabilities as it has been able to inflict far worse punishment on the Iraqi Shiite community while maintaining or even increasing its rate of casualties inflicted on U.S. troops at the same time.

...There is not the slightest indication that current U.S. strategy and tactics in Iraq are diminishing the popularity and capability of the insurgency. It continues to grow in its tactical capabilities against both U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians.

Fading Republic

Here's part two of Tom Engelhardt's interview with Chalmers Johnson. Like I did with part one, I'll excerpt the best parts below.

Johnson continues on the military's relationship to the rest of the government:

The military is out of control. As part of the executive branch, it's expanded under cover of the national security state. Back when I was a kid, the Pentagon was called the Department of War. Now, it's the Department of Defense, though it palpably has nothing to do with defense. Hasn't for a long time. We even have another department of the government today that's concerned with "homeland security." You wonder what on Earth do we have that for -- and a Dept of Defense, too!

The government isn't working right. There's no proper supervision. The founders, the authors of the Constitution, regarded the supreme organ to be Congress. The mystery to me -- more than the huge expansion of executive branch powers we've seen since the neoconservatives and George Bush came to power -- is: Why has Congress failed us so completely? Why are they no longer interested in the way the money is spent? Why does a Pentagon budget like this one produce so little interest? Is it that people have a vested interest in it, that it's going to produce more jobs for them?

On the "accomplishments" of Bushism, and the potential consequences:

From George Bush's point of view, his administration has achieved everything ideologically that he wanted to achieve. Militarism has been advanced powerfully. In the minds of a great many people, the military is now the only American institution that appears to work. He's enriched the ruling classes. He's destroyed the separation of powers as thoroughly as was possible. These are the problems that face us right now. The only way you could begin to rebuild the separation of powers would be to reinvigorate the Congress and I don't know what could shock the American public into doing that. They're the only ones who could do it. The courts can't. The President obviously won't.

The only thing I can think of that might do it would be bankruptcy. Like what happened to Argentina in 2001. The richest country in Latin America became one of the poorest. It collapsed. It lost the ability to borrow money and lost control of its affairs...

[If something like that happened] All of a sudden, we would be dependent on the kindness of strangers. Looking for handouts. We already have a $725 billion trade deficit; the largest fiscal deficit in our history, now well over 6% of GDP. The defense budgets are off the charts and don't make any sense, and don't forget that $500 billion we've already spent on the Iraq war -- every nickel of it borrowed from people in China and Japan who saved and invested because they would like to have access to this market. Any time they decide they don't want to lend to us, interest rates will go crazy and the stock exchange will collapse.

We pour about $2 billion a day just into servicing the amounts we borrow. The moment people quit lending us that money, we have to get it out of domestic savings and right now we have a negative savings rate in this country. To get Americans to save 20% of their income, you'd have to pay them at least a 20% interest rate and that would produce a truly howling recession. We'd be back to the state of things in the 1930s that my mother used to describe to me -- we lived in the Arizona countryside then -- when someone would tap on the rear door and say, "Have you got any work? I don't want to be paid, I just want to eat." And she'd say, "Sure, we'll find something for you to do and give you eggs and potatoes."

A depression like that would go on in this country for quite a while. The rest of the world would also have a severe recession, but would probably get over it a lot faster.

More on Bushism:

What does this administration think it's doing, reducing taxes when it needs to be reducing huge deficits? As far as I can see, its policies have nothing to do with Republican or Democratic ideology, except that its opposite would be traditional, old Republican conservatism, in the sense of being fiscally responsible, not wasting our money on aircraft carriers or other nonproductive things.

But the officials of this administration are radicals. They're crazies. We all speculate on why they do it. Why has the President broken the Constitution, let the military spin virtually out of control, making it the only institution he would turn to for anything -- another Katrina disaster, a bird flu epidemic? The whole thing seems farcical, but what it does remind you of is ancient Rome.

If a bankruptcy situation doesn't shake us up, then I fear we will, as an author I admire wrote the other day, be "crying for the coup." We could end the way the Roman Republic ended. When the chaos, the instability become too great, you turn it over to a single man. After about the same length of time our republic has been in existence, the Roman Republic got itself in that hole by inadvertently, thoughtlessly acquiring an empire they didn't need and weren't able to administer, that kept them at war all the time. Ultimately, it caught up with them. I can't see how we would be immune to a Julius Caesar, to a militarist who acts the populist.

...I don't see the obvious way out of our problems. The political system has failed. You could elect the opposition party, but it can't bring the CIA under control; it can't bring the military-industrial complex under control; it can't reinvigorate the Congress. It would be just another holding operation as conditions got worse.

Now, I'll grant you, I could be wrong. If I am, you're going to be so glad, you'll forgive me. [He laughs.] In the past, we've had clear excesses of executive power. There was Lincoln and the suspension of habeas corpus. Theodore Roosevelt virtually invented the executive order. Until then, most presidents didn't issue executive orders. Roosevelt issued well over a thousand. It was the equivalent of today's presidential signing statement. Then you go on to the mad Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson, whom the neocons are now so in love with, and Franklin Roosevelt and his pogrom against Americans of Japanese ancestry. But there was always a tendency afterwards for the pendulum to swing back, for the American public to become concerned about what had been done in its name and correct it. What's worrying me is: Can we expect a pendulum swing back this time?

On that note, I think it's time for a drink...

Silence

Paul Woodward on the recent Mearsheimer-Walt paper about the Israeli lobby:

If the participation of the Dean of the Kennedy School of Government can't open up and legitimize this debate [about the US-Israel relationship], it's hard to imagine what it might take to stir faint-hearted liberals into action -- but this is no time to remain silent.

In recent years, the slogan, "What did you do in the war?", has been used to good effect by many antiwar campaigners, yet as the U.S. and Israel continue gearing up to take on Iran, how many of those same campaigners if asked, "What did you do to challenge the influence of the Israel Lobby?" would now have nothing to say?

Regular readers are probably sick of my posting about the I/P conflict, and will know where I stand on this issue. It's disappointing, to say the least, that few people seem willing to run with it.

Cold Warrior in a Strange Land

There's a lot of good stuff in this interview with Chalmers Johnson, who's finishing up his next book on American empire. Some key excerpts below.

On his moment of epiphany, when it became clear that the US was not going to disarm after the Soviet Union fell, but rather search out (and manufacture) new enemies:

The chief question that came to mind almost at once, as soon as it was clear that our part of the Cold War was going to be perpetuated – the same structure, the same military Keynesianism, an economy based largely on the building of weapons – was: Did this suggest that the Cold War was, in fact, a cover for something else; that something else being an American empire intentionally created during World War II as the successor to the British Empire?

Now that led me to say: Yes, the Cold War was not the clean-cut conflict between totalitarian and democratic values that we had claimed it to be. You can make something of a claim for that in Western Europe at certain points in the 1950s, but once you bring it into the global context, once you include China and our two East Asian wars, Korea and Vietnam, the whole thing breaks down badly, and this caused me to realize that I had some rethinking to do.

On the true purpose of the military-industrial complex:

I'm always amazed by the way we kid ourselves about the influence of the military-industrial complex in our society. We use euphemisms like supply-side economics or the Laffer Curve. We never say: We're artificially making work. If the WPA [Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression] was often called a dig-holes-and-fill-em-up-again project, now we're making things that blow up and we sell them to people. Our weapons aren't particularly good, not compared to those of the great weapons-makers around the world. It's just that we can make a lot of them very rapidly.

On empire and bases:

Empires are defined so often as holders of colonies, but analytically, by empire we simply mean the projection of hegemony outward, over other people, using them to serve our interests, regardless of how their interests may be affected.

So what kind of empire is ours? The unit is not the colony, it's the military base. This is not quite as unusual as defenders of the concept of empire often assume. That is to say, we can easily calculate the main military bases of the Roman Empire in the Middle East, and it turns out to be about the same number it takes to garrison the region today. You need about 38 major bases. You can plot them out in Roman times and you can plot them out today.

An empire of bases – that's the concept that best explains the logic of the 700 or more military bases around the world acknowledged by the Department of Defense. Now, we're just kidding ourselves that this is to provide security for Americans. In most cases, it's true that we first occupied these bases with some strategic purpose in mind in one of our wars. Then the war ends and we never give them up. We discovered that it's part of the game; it's the perk for the people who fought the war. The Marines to this day believe they deserve to be in Okinawa because of the losses they had in the bloodiest and last big battle of World War II.

I was astonished, however, at how quickly the concept of empire – though not necessarily an empire of bases – became acceptable to the neoconservatives and others in the era of the younger Bush. After all, to use the term proudly, as many of them did, meant flying directly in the face of the origins of the United States. We used to pride ourselves on being as anti-imperialist as anybody could be, attacking a king who ruled in such a tyrannical manner. That lasted only, I suppose, until the Spanish-American War. We'd already become an empire well before that, of course.

After being asked to comment on the American "one-legged empire," where "just about everything has become military":

That's what's truly ominous about the American empire. In most empires, the military is there, but militarism is so central to ours – militarism not meaning national defense or even the projection of force for political purposes, but as a way of life, as a way of getting rich or getting comfortable...Most empires try to disguise that military aspect of things. Our problem is: For some reason, we love our military. We regard it as a microcosm of our society and as an institution that works. There's nothing more hypocritical, or constantly invoked by our politicians, than "support our boys." After all, those boys and girls aren't necessarily the most admirable human beings that ever came along, certainly not once they get into another society where they are told they are, by definition, doing good. Then the racism that's such a part of our society emerges very rapidly – once they get into societies where they don't understand what's going on, where they shout at some poor Iraqi in English.

On the military budget:

The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a GDP the size of the state of Louisiana and Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped us.

Militarily, we've got an incoherent, not very intelligent budget. It becomes less incoherent only when you realize the ways it's being used to fund our industries or that one of the few things we still manufacture reasonably effectively is weapons. It's a huge export business, run not by the companies but by foreign military sales within the Pentagon.

This is not, of course, free enterprise...This is state socialism and it's keeping the economy running not in the way it's taught in any economics course in any American university. It's closer to what John Maynard Keynes advocated for getting out of the Great Depression – counter-cyclical governmental expenditures to keep people employed...

This illustrates what I consider the most insidious aspect of our militarism and our military empire. We can't get off it any more. It's not that we're hooked in a narcotic sense. It's just that we'd collapse as an economy if we let it go, and we know it. That's the terrifying thing.

November Haditha killings

I probably should have mentioned this in the context of the post about the alleged executions in Ishaqi last week since both stories mesh well.

In any case, the US military is investigating a November incident in Haditha. Marines are accused of conducting revenge killings against 15 civilians (23 were killed, in all). The military initially claimed that the civilians were killed in a bombing aimed at the American convoy and the ensuing firefight, but that explanation looks rather dubious at the moment.

According to the AP:

A videotape taken by an Iraqi shows the aftermath of an alleged attack by U.S. troops on civilians in their homes in a western town last November: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.

An Iraqi human rights group condemned the bloodshed in the town of Haditha, saying Tuesday that it could be "one of dozens of incidents that were not revealed."

The video, obtained by Time magazine and repeatedly aired by Arab televisions throughout the day, also showed bodies of women and children in plastic bags on the floor of what appeared to be a morgue. Men were seen standing in the middle of bodies, some of which were covered with blankets before being placed in a pickup truck.

...The allegations against the Marines were first brought forward by Time, though the magazine noted that the available evidence did not prove conclusively that the Marines deliberately killed innocents.

The magazine said it obtained the video, taken by a Haditha journalism student inside the houses and local morgue, two months ago.

A U.S. military statement in November had described the incident as an ambush on a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol that left 15 civilians, eight insurgents and a U.S. Marine dead in the bombing and a subsequent firefight. That statement said the 15 civilians were killed by the blast, a claim residents denied.

A low priority

NY Times:

Nearly seven months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and forced out hundreds of thousands of residents, most evacuees say they have not found a permanent place to live, have depleted their savings and consider their life worse than before the hurricane, according to interviews with more than 300 evacuees conducted by The New York Times.

The interviews suggested that while blacks and whites suffered similar rates of emotional trauma, blacks bore a heavier economic and social burden. And even as both groups flounder, most said they believed that the rest of the nation, and politicians in Washington, have moved on.

"I don't think anybody cares, really," said Robert Rodrigue, a semiretired computer programmer who has returned to his home in the suburb of Metairie. "New Orleans is kind of like at the bottom of the country, and they just forget about us."

Put another way, "Every bomb dropped in Iraq explodes on the Gulf Coast."

Censure?

(by Kirk Anderson)

"Playing football with bricks of $100 bills"

Can't these fools focus on what's important? Like, you know, "UNSCAM"...

Related broadcast from the BBC, here.

Media's Waterloo

Robert Parry: "without doubt, one of the uncounted casualties of the Iraq War is the death of the Watergate myth, the notion that Washington journalists are heroes fighting for the public’s right to know and protecting the U.S. Constitution."

Quotable

Richard Reeves:

If God really made us so much better than other people, we would have been able to beat the South Koreans and Mexicans in the opening rounds of the World Baseball Classic last week.

Besides the pithiness, Reeves commentary is worth reading for serious reasons. William Greider -- channeling the NYT's David Sanger -- offers similar thoughts.

Iran, Iraq Crises Converge

Gareth Porter outlines some of the potentialities of Iran and the US entering into discussions to quell the Iraq situation.

If Americans decided to engage in talks, they will undoubtedly want to separate the discussions about Iraq and Iran's alleged nuclear program. However, that will probably be impossible, according to Porter:

Although the administration seeks to keep cooperation with Iran over the crisis in Iraq separate from its strategy of isolation of Iran, the evolution of the Iraq crisis may make such separation impossible. The discussions on Iraq will have to involve various political formulas which the United States and Iran could both support. Iran would be asked to help sell the militant Shiite parties on a settlement plan with unpalatable compromises for those same parties.

If the Iranians become more deeply involved in the internal negotiation in Iraq, and the usefulness of their role becomes widely recognised, it will certainly be more difficult for the United States to resist political-diplomatic pressures to talk with Tehran about the larger issues threatening the peace of the region -- Iran's nuclear programme and the U.S. efforts to isolate and destabilise the regime.

It's going to be interesting to see whether hardliners on the US side can scuttle any dialogue. Either way, this could be a very important development in the coming weeks.

What poverty?

One way to get rid of poverty in the US is to make it impossible to quantify. That's ingenious.

Let me also remind you that the conservative "colorblind" assault that raged throughout the 1990s had the very same goal.

By getting rid of measures that differentiated socioeconomic achievement along avenues of race and ethnicity, the hope was that the means by which to identify poverty and inequality would essentially disappear. Then, we could all go back to living in that nice little fantasyland where there was no deprivation in the good ol' US of A. Gut the welfare state completely, hand out copies of Friedman/Rand, and we'll all live happily every after.

(via professor kim)

Permanent bases

The AP stumbles across one of the elephants in the room: permanent US military bases in Iraq (and beyond).

In short, the article makes the obvious point that it's absolute folly to think the US is going to pull up roots after pouring so much money and material into constructing a number of massive outposts.

The Case for Impeachment

Harper's recently posted an excerpt of Lewis Lapham's March essay that laid out the case for Dubya's impeachment.

You can now read the whole thing online, here.

Remove the blinders

Class and (real) history.

Learn them. Learn them well, says Howard Zinn.

(via mousemusings)

Plight Deepens for Black Men

NY Times:

Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.

Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.

Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Anyone have a good explanation -- or, dare I say, justification -- for what's in bold?

If not, I guess I'm going to have to fall back on my consultation of Christian Parenti's work.

Three years

I'm not sure which is more harrowing: Patrick Cockburn's latest dispatch from Iraq, or Riverbend's solemn review of three years of "occupation and bloodshed."

And then, well, there's this:

Iraqi police have accused American troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid last Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The villagers were killed after American troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers' animals and blew up the house, the document said.

I suppose that would explain why earlier reports noted that the kids were killed by headshots.

Letter of the Law

Warrantless wiretapping is oh so last week.

The Bush junta, ever upwardly mobile in their search for new crimes to perpetrate against the Constitution, has moved on to justifying and engaging in warrantless physical searches, according to US News & World Report.

The "Black Room"

The NY Times has fleshed out some more details on "Task Force 6-26," an "elite Special Operations forces unit" that trapsed around Iraq rounding up people in a vain search for the mythical Zarqawi beginning in early 2004. Once captured, the detainees would be taken back to one of Saddam Hussein's old military bases -- which the Americans converted into a camp -- where they'd be typically beaten, humiliated, and tortured. We learn that the Americans even "used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball," according to the Times' account. Much of the worst stuff, mind you, happened after the initial Abu Ghraib revelations.

While this is the first major, substantive article on the Task Force, which has been floating around in news stories and DoD memos for a few years, the story unearthed is really an old, familiar one: in a desperate attempt to get intelligence on the insurgency in Iraq, the US military authorized -- and indeed facilitated -- abusive actions, black bag ops, torture, and, generally speaking, mini Gestapos to go around terrorizing anybody who might -- just might -- have some knowledge of the insurgency.

That many of the same tactics of "intelligence gathering" migrated from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to Bagram, and now to this shadowy base at Camp Nama, should make it glaringly obvious (as if it weren't already) that all of the torture and abuse the Americans have committed during its "war on terror" are a direct consequence of policy, reaching to the highest levels of the Pentagon and White House. Put that "Bad Apples" defense on ice, for good.

Seize the day?

Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, in a familiar refrain: Iraq's a mess, granted, but where are the Dems?

Jingoism or Legitimate Concerns?

Stephen Zunes peers behind the DP World ports controversy.

Lurking underneath the anti-Arab racism and the shameless opportunism of American politicians (mostly Democrats, in this case) lie a few relevant issues, he claims, but they're generally marginal when one steps back and looks at the big picture.

Dead kids "foreign fighter facilitators"

Mike Whitney with the question of the day: "What goes through George Bush’s mind when he sees the dead bodies of Iraqi women and children loaded on the back of a pickup truck like garbage?"

The coming fall

Looks like Kevin Phillips is predicting in his next book that America is, well, fucked by that holy trinity of religious mania, peak oil, and fiscal irresponsibility.

(via cursor)

The Lobby

Make sure you read John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's dissection of the Israeli lobby's undue influence on American politics.

Crawling toward the mirage

Bob Herbert: Give peace war reality a chance.

A good show

Go figure. "Operation Swarmer" looks like it was meant entirely as a PR exercise. I'm shocked.

$10 billion a month

What a waste:

U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan will average 44 percent more in the current fiscal year than in fiscal 2005, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said.

Spending will rise to $9.8 billion a month from the $6.8 billion a month the Pentagon said it spent last year, the research service said. The group's March 10 report cites ``substantial'' expenses to replace or repair damaged weapons, aircraft, vehicles, radios and spare parts.

It also figures in costs for health care, fuel, national intelligence and the training of Iraqi and Afghan security forces -- ``now a substantial expense,'' it said.

In all seriousness, I'd appreciate hearing from someone who could justify this sort of expenditure while contrasting it with the infrastructural underinvestment that has been chic in the US for nearly thirty years.

Israel's Raid

Jonathan Cook examines why Palestinians are so pissed off about Israel's raid on a Jericho jail on Monday (which, btw, killed two).

The assault was launched, purportedly, to snatch Ahmad Saadat, the assassin of Israeli politician Rehavam Zeevi.

As Cook explains,

Zeevi, head of the Central Command in the late 1960s and early 1970s, personally developed and managed Israel's brutal regime in the newly occupied West Bank. After retiring from the battlefield, he waged a relentless war against "the Arabs" on the political front. His Moledet party, founded in the 1980s, advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Greater Israel--in other words, from Israel and the occupied territories.

His thinking became so acceptable after the outbreak of the intifada that he was appointed tourism minister in Ariel Sharon's first cabinet. Maybe Sharon thought that, with Zeevi for company, he really might start to look like a man of peace.

Zeevi's killing by gunmen in a Jerusalem hotel in 2001 was about as close as the Palestinians have managed to get to emulating an Israeli-style targeted assassination--with the difference that, in the Palestinian operation, no bystanders were killed.

Israelis were, and still are, horrified by the killing of Zeevi, with most taking the view that the Palestinians broke all the rules of engagement in targeting an elected politician. That neatly ignores the point that Zeevi's death was retribution for Israel's earlier assassination of a widely respected Palestinian politician, Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

But what is sauce for the goose was never going to be sauce for the gander.

Indeed. Cook goes on to lay out why the assault struck such a nerve within Palestinian society, sparking protests, kidnappings, and assorted violent outbreaks. It all stems from the symbolism of Saadat's imprisoment, he says:

To prevent his [Saadat's] targeting for assassination by Israel, and in the vain hope of winning a reprieve for Yasser Arafat from his effective house arrest in Ramallah, the Palestinian leadership brokered a deal with Britain and the United States in 2002. The two countries agreed to provide monitors to guarantee Saadat's confinement in the tiny West Bank town of Jericho, in the sun-baked lowlands of the Jordan Valley.

Four years later, on Tuesday morning, Britain reneged on its understandings with the Palestinians and quit Jericho, but not before telling Israel it was going. As if waiting for its cue, Israeli armour rolled into Jericho at once to capture Saadat and a handful of other wanted men.

To Palestinians, the British broken promise, as well as the hasty exit from Jericho and apparent collusion with Israel, all smacked a little too painfully of other episodes of British foreign policy in the Middle East. There were echoes of 1956 and London's pact during the Suez Crisis with Israel on the invasion of Egypt. And there were echoes too of 1948, when Britain hurriedly abandoned Palestine, though not before it had effectively fulfilled the Balfour Declaration's promise of creating a Jewish homeland by allowing hundreds of thousands of Jews to immigrate.

That in large part explains the outpouring of rage from Gaza to Ramallah on Tuesday, as well as the kidnapping of foreigners. Britain's duplicity was a reminder--if it was needed--that nothing has changed in a century of Western "diplomacy".

Of course, Israel justifies its action in the face of alleged hints from the Palestinian leadership that they would release Saadat. There's also good reason to suspect that the raid was a stunt to make Olmert look "strong" ahead of Israeli elections at the end of this month.

Whatever the case, the fact remains: Israel can get away with just about anything in the occupied territories.

Willing Executioners

Here's a typically excellent essay by Ed Herman on the absurdity of the saber-rattling towards Iran.

After laying out "Twelve Principles of Propaganda Used in Setting the Stage for War," he concludes:

Uncle Chutzpah and his willing executioners -- the media, UN and coalition of the cowardly and bribed -- have isolated Iran and set her up for possible destabilization and aggression. One wouldn't think this possible given the remarkable parallels in argument and (phony) evidence in this case and that of the failed aggression in Iraq, but the power of the aggressor and subservience of the media and international community are apparently boundless.

It is certainly not assured that Iran will be attacked, and if it is attacked that is most likely to be by bombs only, but it can well happen. The stage is being set, and the folks likely to make those decisions are proven killers, torturers and law violators, confident in their military superiority and invulnerability to prosecution for criminal behavior and with a great capacity for righteous self-deception. And the international community is not only doing nothing to stop them, it is helping them prepare the "(im)moral" and quasi-legal groundwork.

I remain doubtful that the UN Security Council will do much to punish Iran, but that's largely irrelevant for US policy makers.

The UN is being used, like it was in the Iraq war build up, to highlight the seriousness of Iran's nuclear "ambitions" for domestic consumption, primarily. Once the UN stumbles drawing up suitably harsh enough measures against Iran (from the American/Israeli perspective), the international body will be quickly disregarded, labelled "irrelevant" and "weak" for its inability to rein in Tehran's "rogue" behavior. The US will claim that it tried to handle Iran's threat diplomatically, but was hamstrung by Old Europe and the Old Commie duo.

At this point, Israel and/or the US will get down to the real business at hand.

Remembering the Iraq War's Pollyanna pundits

This is hilarious in a sort of wanting-to-rip-your-hair-out way. Why anyone listens to any self-described "pundit" is beyond me.

Airstrikes in Iraq up

Knight Ridder reports that the infamous "aerial occupation" of Iraq is proceeding as feared:

American forces have dramatically increased airstrikes in Iraq during the past five months, a change of tactics that may foreshadow how the United States plans to battle a still-strong insurgency while reducing the number of U.S. ground troops serving here.

A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year. Knight Ridder's statistical findings were reviewed and confirmed by American Air Force officials in the region.

Pro warriors go into convulsions if you dare to draw comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam. But with this sort of news, it's hard to avoid doing so.

The US strategy at the moment -- relying ever more on local (Iraqi) forces and aerial bombing to deal with the insurgency -- is precisely what Nixon ushered in with "Vietnamization" back in the early '70s. Today Bush just uses a less elegant label, "The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."

Wingnut whiplash

The horror

As much as we may all conveniently blame the Bushies and their neocon allies, the truth of the matter is that, as Americans, we're directly responsible for this carnage.

Bourse not the casus belli

In an article for Asia Times Online, William Engdahl throws some cold water on the idea that the US is going to attack Iran over its proposed oil bourse, which was allegedly set to open next week, but has since been pushed back a bit.

(via golby)

Exhibit A

Dave Lindorff:

The Justice Department's vile and underhanded attempt to rig the penalty-phase trial of Zacarias Moussaoui and nail him with a death penalty is Exhibit A for why Bush and Rumsfeld should not be allowed to handle the Guantanamo detainee and other detainee cases through military tribunals.

Amen.

Moussaoui's case was a fat, hanging curve that the Justice Department should have been able to easily knock out of the park. That they've had to resort to cheap tricks in this case is telling. God only knows what they're doing via the military's kangaroo courts.

The Abu Ghraib files

Salon is close to rounding-out the picture of the available pictorial evidence of abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib.

Besides the yet-to-be-released rape stuff, their file is pretty comprehensive.

Bush smears LA Times

I only paid scant attention to what Bush actually said in his recent speech at the FDD.

Yes, there was the forseeable tut-tutting about "Iranian influence" in Iraq. I happened to miss the best part, though -- Dubya's shameless and pathetic finger waving at the press.

Arctic sea ice fails to re-form

I think I'm going to be putting out an open call for some good news on climate change in order to maintain my sanity, soon.

No, I'm not mutating into a Chrenkoffian figure; I'm just getting seriously worried about the rate at which negative stories about climate change keep rolling in.

Like, say, this one:

Sea ice in the Arctic has failed to re-form for the second consecutive winter, raising fears that global warming may have tipped the polar regions in to irreversible climate change far sooner than predicted.

Satellite measurements of the area of the Arctic covered by sea ice show that for every month this winter, the ice failed to return even to its long-term average rate of decline. It is the second consecutive winter that the sea ice has not managed to re-form enough to compensate for the unprecedented melting seen during the past few summers.

Scientists are now convinced that Arctic sea ice is showing signs of both a winter and a summer decline that could indicate a major acceleration in its long-term rate of disappearance. The greatest fear is that an environmental "positive feedback" has kicked in, where global warming melts ice which in itself causes the seas to warm still further as more sunlight is absorbed by a dark ocean rather than being reflected by white ice.

Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, said: "In September 2005, the Arctic sea ice cover was at its lowest extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979, and probably the lowest in the past 100 years. While we can't be certain, it looks like 2006 will be more of the same," Dr Serreze said.

"Unless conditions turn colder, we may be headed for another year of big sea ice losses, rivalling or perhaps even exceeding what we saw in September 2005. We are of course monitoring the situation closely...Coupled with recent findings from Nasa that the Greenland ice sheet may be near a tipping point, it's pretty clear that the Arctic is starting to respond to global warming," he added.

Censure -- or not

Someone please -- please!-- buy Democrats a spine already.

Their -- umm, what's that infamous word? -- "fecklessness" was cute, up to a point. But it only grows more pathetic with each passing day.

Watch/read Feingold in action, here. He deserves support, too, so get on the back of your Senators.

Playing to the crowd

Be worried. When Bush starts giving speeches to Likudnik fronts, something rotten usually sits waiting, just around the corner.

Heavy handed regime change

In short, if the Bush administration is really worried about "democracy" in Iran, it will back off and let the reform process already well underway in that nation play itself out.

'Cause everytime the US publicly professes a desire to help Iranians overthrow their "theocratic regime," it only makes the efforts of the activists on the ground more difficult, if not impossible.

Along these lines, Tom Porteous delivers some cogent analysis:

The problem with the United States' confrontational approach to Iran is that it is based on a misreading of the internal situation in Iran and on an over-confident assessment of the strategic position of the United States in the region in the aftermath of the U.S. military invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Diplomatic pressure, far from bringing about a change of heart in Tehran, is already strengthening the domestic political position of the hardliners around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reinforcing their determination to press ahead with their nuclear enrichment plans in defiance of the United States, Europe and Israel. Furthermore, President Bush's nuclear deal with India has significantly undermined the diplomatic argument against Iran by blowing a hole in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Because of the size of Iran's shadow economy and its relative economic self-sufficiency, any economic sanctions against Iran will be ineffective and could further bolster the hardliners' internal political standing. Furthermore, as Iranian officials have pointed out, Iran's status as a major oil producer means that it is in a position to retaliate to economic sanctions in kind, pushing up the price of oil.

The scarcely veiled threat of U.S. military action is no more likely to deter Iran's hardliners. Ahmadinejad calculates, correctly, that a full-scale invasion of Iran is out of the question and that United States or Israeli air strikes would simply help to strengthen Iran's political position in the region and provide a pretext for further consolidation at home (e.g. a crackdown on political opponents). Furthermore, Iran could respond to military action by piling the pressure on the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on Israel from Lebanon and Palestine.

The absence of a cool-headed approach to the crisis on the part of Ahmadinejad and his supporters seems to be based on a very cool calculation of their own factional political interests within Iran's political maze and of Washington's strategic difficulties in the region.

All this points in one direction: at some point in the not too distant future, once the diplomatic process at the U.N. is exhausted and economic sanctions have failed to get the Iranians to change their tune, there won't be any options left on Washington's table except military ones. And Iran's leaders are probably right in their assessment that those options are not good ones.

U.S. firepower could do a lot of physical damage and might even put back Iran's nuclear programme by a few years. But it would also do a lot of political damage: to the prospects of political reform in Iran; to the stability of Iraq, Afghanistan and the wider region; and to U.S. political and strategic standing in the world.

The United States is making the same mistakes with regard to Iran as those which it made with regard to Iraq. The consequences are likely to be just as fraught, and perhaps even more damaging.

If you're worried about a potential military conflict with Iran, as I am, this Porteous essay might be worth forwarding along to friends and colleagues who are wandering in the desert on why Iran's nuclear program has suddenly become such a Grave Threat to Humanity.

The Future not used

Gosh, this could have come in handy three years ago...

Too Polemical or Too Critical?

I enjoyed the article that can be found here.

If you've wondered why Chomsky gets ignored in academia -- particularly for his media analysis -- you might too.

Iraq: The reckoning

Ah, the mess -- three years on. None of this was predictable, of course. A good idea gone horribly wrong. Yep.

State of the News Media

LA Times:

A "new paradox of journalism" has emerged in which the number of news outlets continues to grow, yet the number of stories covered and the depth of many reports is decreasing, according to an annual review of the news business being released today by a watchdog group.

Many television, radio and newspaper newsrooms are cutting their staffs as advertising revenue stagnates, but blogs and other online ventures lack the size or inclination to generate information, reports the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The study depicts the media in an interregnum - with the reach of print, radio and television reduced, but the promise of an egalitarian online "citizen journalism" unfulfilled.

"It's probably glib and even naive to say simply that more platforms equal more choices," project Director Tom Rosenstiel said. "The content has to come from somewhere, and as older news-gathering media decline, some of the strengths they offer in monitoring the powerful and verifying the facts may be weakening as well."

The general trend seems to be towards more media options for consumers, but options which typically provide less incisive and probing coverage.

In other words, the pool is wider, but, at the same time, shallower.

Being open about regime change

Sound familiar?

The internal administration debate that raged in the first term between those who advocated more engagement with Iran and those who preferred more confrontation appears in the second term to be largely settled in favor of the latter. Although administration officials do not use the term "regime change" in public, that in effect is the goal they outline as they aim to build resistance to the theocracy.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Senate testimony last week. "We do not have a problem with the Iranian people. We want the Iranian people to be free. Our problem is with the Iranian regime."

It should.

Plus, Gary Leupp offers a useful translation for weasling like that above.

Why are people afraid of her words?

Post mosque bombing body count suppressed in Iraq

It makes sense that one of the primary reasons why it's been difficult to quantify precisely how many Iraqis have been killed in sectarian violence since the bombing of the Askariya mosque in Samarra is because there's been an active effort to obscure reporting of it by Shiite officials.

Conveniently and perhaps ironically, this helps both those engaged in the violence and US opinion managers, the latter of whom have been trying very hard to convince Americans that a civil war isn't going to happen anytime soon.

The Meritocracy Myth

Ain't it the truth: "Education is changing from an opportunity for students to explore and grow to institutions that are consumed with rankings. Education is becoming about providing credentials to obtain high-paying jobs rather than training people for a thriving democracy."

More:

The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status.

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge.

Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using "merit" as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised.

Read the entire interview, here.

Blix on Iran

Our old buddy Hans Blix was recently interviewed and asked about his opinion on Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Here's what he had to say:

It is desirable to induce Iranians to refrain from enrichment activities because it would increase the tension in the Middle East. However, I have to admit, as a lawyer, that the NPT allows enrichment for peaceful purposes. The Iranians point to Brazil and Japan: They are also part of the NPT and they do enrich uranium. No one suspects them of seeking weapons. Of course, Iran's peaceful intent has been challenged, but nothing has been proven otherwise.

In the end, if we want Iran not to go down the path of nuclear weapons, we have to ask why they would want such weapons and remove that reason. No one discusses security in this current debate over Iran. But there are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq next door. And there are U.S. bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan and other surrounding neighbors.

Then the U.S. says “all options are on the table” and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton is saying the U.S. will make it very painful if Iran does not tow the line. Actually, the October 2004 agreement in London between the Western countries and Iran included a passage about a working group on security. But it never met. What I'm saying is that the way to induce Iran to forego weapons is with a guarantee of their security.

I'd also add that it is better to negotiate with Iran at the IAEA in Vienna instead of at the Security Council in New York. In New York, the Iranians will feel they are negotiating under a threat, which will make it harder for them to make a deal. We talk with the North Koreans in Beijing. No one seems to care that it is not in New York. Why do we have to negotiate with Iran in New York?

...I don't know Iran's intentions. There is circumstantial evidence [that it is seeking a nuclear bomb], as there was [circumstantial evidence of WMD] in Iraq. Of course, the more you look at it, the more you are capable of making judgments about the circumstances. But also, as in Iraq, you can't prove a negative. I'm amazed that the U.S. is demanding that the IAEA "prove" Iran has no intention to make a bomb. You can't!

It's almost cute that Blix is playing ignorant at the end here. I can't imagine he's really "amazed" that the US is pursuing the "prove a negative" angle. Although, the more that I think of it, perhaps he's "amazed" that the US is getting away with the same shell game again.

(via political theory)