mtanga

Archive: POLITICS

>please note: some links may no longer be active.

Silence = Death

The above catchphrase has been used in politic contexts for quite some time, but it occurs to me that it might well apply to Democrats these days.

We're currently in the midst of one of the most important legislative debates we'll ever have in this country. At stake are the very ideals we have striven so hard over the years to achieve, ideals which have come to define us--at least until recently--and which we have tried so hard to instill in others. More than any other time in recent history, the very core of who we are as a nation is on the line. And remarkably, one of the country's two major political parties has chosen to sit out the debate entirely.

The White House is currently pressing very hard for a bill that would signal to the world our abandonment of the minimum standard of conduct laid out in the Geneva Conventions, a treaty signed onto by nearly ever sovereign nation, many at our behest. We would be doing this for the sole purpose of allowing our intelligence agents to continue using interrogation techniques that nearly everyone (except, of course, our president) concedes amount to torture.

This same proposed bill would strip all detainees of habeas corpus rights and set up a system of military tribunals that would embarrass a banana republic.

As this debate rages on, however, there is a deafening silence among Democrats in Washington.

[snip]

Stripping detainees of habeas rights is a big deal. And by not even bothering to enter the debate, the Democrats have effectively ceded this issue without a fight. And for what? Do Democrats really think staying quiet on these issues is going to keep Karl Rove and his minions from accusing them of being soft on terror? Do they think they really have any chance of winning the votes of people who are strongly in favor of torturing people and setting up kangaroo courts?

That's ridiculous. The most destructive stereotype about Democrats is not that they are soft on terror; it's that they're spineless, that they're afraid to say what they actually believe. And that's exactly the stereotype that the Democrats are reinforcing by sitting this one out. Moreover, by allowing the Republicans to monopolize the airwaves on this issue, Democrats only reinforce the notion that national security is a GOP issue, that the only serious thinkers in the room are on the right side of the aisle.

Read Anonymous Liberal's full post here

The lies and distortionS never stop

Glenn Greenwald cites a classic example of how the Administration's supporters (i.e. apologists) lie in the hopes of gaining political advantage:

The reliably misleading Mitch McConnell shows how this is done: "For example, I imagine it would be awkward for many of my Democrat colleagues to go home and explain a vote to provide sensitive, classified information to terrorists . . . " According to McConnell, those who advocate rules whereby accused terrorists can actually see the evidence to be used against them to determine if they are terrorists want "to provide sensitive, classified information to terrorists."

Similarly, McConnell calls Bush's legislation establishing military commissions Bush's "proposal for terrorist detainees." If they are already "terrorists," why bother with military commissions at all? What are the commissions supposed to determine? Why not just skip to the execution part?

The indispensible Glenn Greenwald

What's Baghdad really like These days?

From a recent interview with NY Times reporter, Dexter Filkins:

He described the current climate as "anarchy," and, when asked if the country was already involved in a civil war, he said, "Yeah, sure."

Asked what advice he had for a reporter from a small paper going to Iraq now without the kinds of money and backup that the Times was able to afford him (or previous reporting experience in Iraq), Filkins replied: "Don't go."

The most that Times reporters can do these days, said Filkins, is "very carefully set up an appointment with someone" using back channels and meet with them under tight security. "We can't go to car bombings anymore," he said, describing how even getting out of a vehicle to report would expose a Western journalist to mob attacks and kidnapping.

As a result, the paper increasingly relies on its 70 Iraqi staffers to go out into the streets and do the actual reporting. These Iraqi journalists, both Sunni and Shiite, do "everything" according to Filkins, and are paid handsomely (by local standards) for their efforts. But they live in constant fear of their association with the newspaper being exposed, which could cost them their lives.

"Most of the Iraqis who work for us don't even tell their families that they work for us," said Filkins. "It's terribly terribly dangerous for them."

He estimated that there are probably 50 murders and 20 to 30 kidnappings in Baghdad every day, and said that it had gotten to the point where it was no longer just Sunni-Shiite clashes or insurgent mayhem. "Nobody trusts anybody anymore," he said. "There's no law, and the worst people with guns are in charge."

Read the full interview with Filkins in Editor & Publisher

Will we let him?

Our President-- with his prevarications and euphemisms, like "alternative sets of procedures"-- has been unwilling to speak the truth about what he has done in the past and what he wishes to keep doing in the future. He wants to be free of Congressional and judicial oversight when he spies on people in the United States. He wants to hold, imprison, and detain people without letting them know the evidence used to condemn and convict them. He wants to let the CIA and other operatives continue to use abusive and inhumane interrogation methods. And he wants to make sure that those who have engaged in torture and inhumane treatment are never brought to justice or held responsible for their crimes-- including especially those who authorized these terrible practices.

In short, this President wants legislation that will confirm that he is a law unto himself.

What have we come to, as a nation, when our President demands these things and expect us to follow him meekly? He seeks to maximize his power by maximizing our fear. Will we let him?

Read the rest of an excellent post by JB at balkin

Arlen Specter is a liar

Much like the nauseating and obviously false claim that the American media has a liberal bias, one often hears that the Rebublican Senator Arlen Specter is "independent", and often a "tough" critic of the Bush administration. Don't believe a single word of it. In fact, he's much worse than an overt supporter of this disastrous Administration; he's a dishonest supporter. Glenn Greenwald is all over Specter's most recent – and most spectacularly outrageous – lies.

In June, both the ACLU and The Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported that the FISA bill proposed by Arlen Specter would expressly immunize Bush officials from any legal consequences arising out of their illegal eavesdropping -- giving them what Pincus called "blanket amnesty" -- by retroactively legalizing warrantless eavesdropping going back to 1978. But that weekend, Specter went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and categorically denied that his bill contained any such provision, stating:

Absolutely not. That was an erroneous report. If anybody has violated the law, they'll be held accountable, both as to criminal conduct and as to civil conduct. And in no way did I promise amnesty or immunity or letting anybody off the hook.

At the time of Specter's denial on national television, there was no copy of his bill available online, so I actually wrote a post aggressively criticizing Pincus for his erroneous claim, because I assumed that Sen. Specter (due to self-interest, if for no other reason) would not go on national television and categorically deny that his bill contained what amounts to a Congressional pardon for the administration if it really did contain such a provision.

But once a copy of Specter's became available that week, it turned out that Specter's bill did contain the very blanket amnesty provision which he falsely denied on national television he was offering. As I wrote at the time, the Post and the ACLU were completely correct and Specter -- in order to make his bill seem less draconian than it really was -- simply lied about what his own bill said (that express amnesty provision was thereafter removed from the bill, though the effect of the current Specter bill might be the same).

In order to manipulate enactment of his FISA bill this week, Specter is lying again about his own bill. I have a high threshold for using the word "lie"; I try to avoid it whenever possible and use it only when there is no other accurate description for someone's conduct. That is the case here.

Read Greenwald's extensive, devastating expose´ here

John Le Carré on Lebanon

Of all of the extremely popular, currently active writers to whom I've been exposed, John Le Carré is my favorite. If you haven't read any of his books, and even if spy novels are not your first choice, I'd highly recommend him. He simply is a superb writer.

Le Carré also happens to be a wise observer of current affairs. He wrote the following piece for Le Monde on September 7th.

Take a moment to answer this question, please. When you kill a hundred innocent civilians and one terrorist, have you won or lost the war on terrorism? “Ah,” you’d answer, “but this terrorist could have killed two hundred people, or a thousand people, or even more!” So I ask another question: If in killing 100 innocent people, you create five new terrorists and give them a popular base that then vows to give them aid and support, have you guaranteed an advantage to future generations or have you created an enemy you deserve?

On July 12, the Israeli Chief of Staff gratified us with a glimpse into the subtleties of military thinking in that country. The military operations in Lebanon, he says, “are going to push that country back 20 years”. Well, I was in Lebanon twenty years ago, and it wasn’t pretty. Following the statement, the general kept his word. I am writing this exactly twenty-eight days after Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, such a highly fashionable military practice the Israelis use it themselves.

Over these twenty-eight days, nine hundred thirty-two Lebanese were killed and more than three thousand wounded. Nine hundred thirteen thousand people became refugees. Israeli victims were eighty-two dead and sixty-seven wounded. During the first week of combat, Hezbollah launched ninety rockets a day at Israeli. A month later, despite eight thousand seven hundred sorties by the Israeli Air Force unmet by the slightest resistance that paralyzed Beirut Airport and destroyed power stations, fuel depots, fishing fleets, one hundred forty-seven bridges and seventy-two highways, the daily Hezbollah missile launch decreased to to sixty-nine. And the two Israeli soldiers who were the official justification for the war have not been returned.

And yes, as we were warned, Israel did to Lebanon what it had done twenty years earlier. It wrecked its infrastructure and inflicted collective punishment on a fragile, multicultural and resilient democracy which was trying to reconcile its confessional differences and to live in harmony with its neighbors.

Barely a month ago, Lebanon was held out by the United States as a model for the rest of the Middle East. With a possible excess of optimism, it was thought that Hezbollah would cut its ties to Syria and Iran and transform itself into a political, and not merely a military, force. But today all of Arabia celebrates this armed militia and the reputed military superiority of Israel lies in tatters and the image of dissuasion so important to it no longer dissuades anyone. The Lebanese have become the latest victims of a global catastrophe that is the work of misguided zealots for which there is no end in sight.

Tin Foil Hat? I don't think so

Read more about the ease with which Diebold voting machines can be hacked at Firedoglake

Deja Vu of the worst Possible kind

From today's Washington Post:

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims.

Officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency said in a letter that the report contained some "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." The letter, signed by a senior director at the agency, was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, which issued the report.

[snip]

Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect," noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring.

[snip]

"This is like prewar Iraq all over again," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who is president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors."

Now, where, exactly, do you suppose the above article was found? Page A17 of the Washington Post. That's right: A17. Read Jonathan Schwarz's pungent take here

David Hare Revisited

STUFF HAPPENS by David Hare
(2004)

Brit in New York

‘America changed.’ That’s what we’re told. ‘On September 11th everything changed.’ ‘If you’re not American, you can’t understand.’

The infantile psycho babble of popular culture is grafted opportunistically onto America’s politics. The language of childish entitlement becomes the lethal rhetoric of global wealth and privilege.

Asked how you are as President, on the first day of a war which will kill around thirty thousand people: ‘I feel good.’

I was in Saks Fifth Avenue the morning they bombed Baghdad. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ says the saleswoman. ‘At last we’re hitting back.’ ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘At the wrong people. Somebody steals your handbag so you kill their second cousin, on the grounds they live close. Explain to me,’ I say, ‘Saudi Arabia is financing Al Qaeda. Iran, Lebanon and Syria are known to shelter terrorists. North Korea is developing a nuclear weapons programme. All these you leave alone. No, you go to war with the one place in the region admitted to have no connection with terrorism.’ ‘You’re not American,’ says the saleswoman. ‘You don’t understand.’

Oh, a question, then. If ‘You’re not American. You don’t understand’ is the new dispensation, then why not ‘You’re not Chechen’? Are the Chechens also now licensed? Are the Basques? Theatres, restaurants, public squares? Do Israeli milk-bars filled with women and children become fair game on the grounds that ‘You don’t understand. We’re Palestinian, we’re Chechen, we’re Irish, we’re Basque’? If the principle of international conduct is now to be that you may go against anyone you like on the grounds that you’ve been hurt by somebody else, does that apply to everyone? Or just to America?

On September 11th, America changed. Yes, it got much stupider.

Thanks to Eric Alterman who, by the way, was just fired by MSNBC which had sponsored his superb column for 10 years. Beginning on September 18th, Eric's work can be found here

Our Disgraceful Vice-President

From E.J. Dionne in today's Washington Post:

Cheney seemed terribly impatient with democracy Sunday on "Meet the Press" when he suggested that those who oppose President Bush's Iraq policies are helping -- excuse me, validating -- the terrorists.

Our allies in the war on terror, Cheney said, "want to know whether or not if they stick their heads up, the United States, in fact, is going to be there to complete the mission."

Then the punch: "And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we've had in the United States. Suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists."

"Thinking the unthinkable"

From Steve Clemons' Washington Note:

Vice President Cheney has come out of the shadows to defend his role as hardliner-in-chief in the so-called "war on terror."

AP's Tom Raum reports in his article:

"Part of my job is to think about the unthinkable, to focus upon what in fact the terrorists may have in store for us," Cheney told NBC's "Meet the Press" when asked about his "dark side."

Cheney didn't think the unthinkable -- he did the predictable. He sorted out who he thought were the good guys and the bad guys -- lumped the bad guys together in ways they should not have been -- and focused American military power recklessly at the wrong targets connected to 9/11, thus puncturing America's mystique in the world and exposing before our allies and our foes both our military and financial limits.

Sensing American weakness, our allies are counting on America less and our foes are advancing their agendas. That is what Cheney's predictable behavior and lack of strategy has done to undermine American interests and our basic security.

The "Unthinkable" (and the smarter strategy) would have been Cheney crafting a grand bargain with Iran after the Iranians had helped the U.S. temporarily stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The "Unthinkable" would have been maintaining and exploiting America's well-developed thug management system of influencing the behavior of the world's thugs with both carrots and sticks. After release of the recent Senate report indicating no tangible connection between Saddam and al Qaeda -- in fact finding that Saddam was concerned about and opposed al Qaeda -- the "unthinkable" thing to do would have been to ally with Saddam (temporarily) in eliminating both the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

While dictators are deplorable, America does not have the will or resources to topple all of them in one large effort -- no matter the dreams of the Project for a New American Century -- and must make hard choices. The fact that dictators are usually not bent on self-destruction but are rather shrewdly calculating self-dealers gives America an edge in manipulating them through their own rationality. To some degree, America's invasion of Iraq has undermined this thug-oriented calculus and now made it harder for us to compellingly influence other global thugs.

Thinking the "Unthinkable" would have been sidelining Ahmed Chalabi when we learned what a conniving, duplicitous rip-off artist he was and instead considering alternatives for regime change in Iraq short of invasion and occupation. One of these plans was a British-hatched effort to support the former Baathist Iyad Allawi -- himself someone who has played all sides off the other but still someone who could have secured the support of many leading generals in Iraq and potentially led a coup against Saddam -- decapitating the leadership and then installing a brand of leadership that would have walked Iraq away from fascism while not disbanding the military and re-educating and re-branding as acceptable the least ideological and most competent people in Iraq's national and regional bureaucracies.

This last option has clear problems -- moral clarity being only one -- but that kind of thinking is what Cheney should be told is "thinking the unthinkable."

If only Cheney had spent more time on the "unthinkable" -- and putting his zealotry behind thinking through every option, every possibility, every complex strategic cost and opportunity -- America would not be on the brink of a fundamental loss in international stature and military capacity.

Someone please get Cheney on the line. The Vice President definitely needs to take some courses on "thinking the unthinkable."

The Intersection of Two Tragedies

Today, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I received word that a friend had died unexpectedly. As a result, I find myself reflecting on the former tragedy through the prism of the latter.

While I live in the metropolitan New York area, and was here on 9/11, I did not personally know any of the victims. That allowed me, after having recovered from the initial shock, to remain somewhat aloof, to view the event in broader, and perhaps to some extent, more balanced terms than many. It also helps to explain why my anger in the wake of the event was, for the most part, not directed at the obvious target.

Without in any way excusing those who perpetrated the heinous act, the anger only began to well up in me as I watched our government – and many of my fellow citizens – react in the same manner as one would expect of a frustrated bully. Rather than taking the time to seriously analyze the event, to consider possible root causes, to imagine what might go wrong if America attempted to solve the terrorism problem through brute military force, the Administration, widely backed by a fearful and (therefore) easily duped population, dishonestly dragged the country into what has become a disaster of epic proportions.

To make matters much worse, what we have done by invading a country which had absolutely no connection with 9/11, and which posed no threat to the U.S., is to have (thus far) caused the loss of life of somewhere between 50,000–100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, 2669 American soldiers, and tens of thousands of serious injuries. Also, as a direct result of the invasion and occupation, we have spawned new generations of terrorists and sympathizers around the world.

While very different, of course, the relatively small tragedy of which I just received word strikes me as being in some way related. Though I had known Robbie for only a few years, the intimacy of that simple friendship makes losing him – a single human being – more wrenching than having lost several thousand fellow citizens on 9/11. I mention this in part because I have the strong impression that our political leaders often fail to consider the devastating impact that a single, unnecessary death has on those close to the deceased. For every innocent Iraqi killed, there are multiple friends and family members who are hardened, if not radicalized. For every innocent Palestinian or Lebanese killed, there are multiple friends and family members who are hardened, if not radicalized. Violence begets violence.

Not only has the failure of our leaders to recognize that obvious point contributed to a disastrous foreign policy, but it also adds great significance to this simple, devastating fact, which Michael Moore brought out in his film Fahrenheit 9/11: virtually none of the Congressmen who supported the war in Iraq had sons or daughters at risk of fighting in the conflict (and it goes without saying that the same was true of high-level members of the Administration). Can you imagine how differently these powerful people might have behaved had their own children been in harms way?

The complexity of the world precludes the possibility of any simple answers to the question of how we should deal with terrorist threats, but this much I know: policies which lead to the kind of " collateral damage" which we have seen recently in Iraq and Lebanon are both are ignorant and unacceptable. Please do what you can to help the country change course, especially at election time in November.

Rationalizing The Iraq War

John Robb has, for quite some time now, been writing intelligently about the profound changes which are taking place in modern warfare. He is an expert in the field, and many of his observations made over the past couple of years have proved to be prescient.

Now, given that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is widely viewedto have been a disasterous mistake, Robb warns against missing the crucial point:

We are now at the start of a long process of rationalization over the US defeat in Iraq. The most common of these rationalizations include: if only we had "...not disbanded the Baathist army," "...sent in more troops," or "...become better at nation-building." However, in each case the approach is one dimensional, since we tend to view ourselves as the only actors on the stage. The actions and reactions of the opposition are discounted and explained away as fluff and background noise (those pesky terrorists...).

A better, and more sane approach, is to embrace the concept that war is a conflict of minds. There are two sides. For every change in approach there will be counters mounted by the opposition. In the case of Iraq, that opposition was extremely difficult to beat since it was organized along the lines of open source warfare. This organizational structure gave it a level of innovation, resilience, and flexibility that made it a very effective opponent. Given this, the simplest explanation for the outcome in Iraq is that we were just beaten by a better opponent (the Israeli's seem to be getting this, why can't we?).

Read Robb's full post here

Forgotten Gaza

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world. Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air. A total of 262 people have been killed and 1,200 wounded, of whom 60 had arms or legs amputated, since 25 June, says Dr Juma al-Saqa, the director of the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City which is fast running out of medicine. Of these, 64 were children and 26 women. This bloody conflict in Gaza has so far received only a fraction of the attention given by the international media to the war in Lebanon.

Read Patrick Cockburn's full report in The Independent (U.K.)

Hitler, Churchill, and all that

You've probably either read or heard some of the disgraceful rhetoric being spewed by the Administration's big guns recently. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are leading the disingenuous charge, as usual, and the latter's speech to a VFW and Foreign Legion assembly has drawn the most coverage.

Gregory Djerejian, a Republican who supported the war, incidentally, is an eloquent blogger whose work can be found at his Belgravia Dispatch. He has deconstructed Rumsfeld's speech in superb fashion. Here's a taste:

With this speech Rumsfeld has become something of our 1938ist-in-Chief (though POTUS appears to be giving him a good run for his money of late). A 1938ist is a journalist, or think-tanker, or blogger, or policy-maker (this last, the most dangerous variant, by far) who tiresomely wield cliched and hackneyed historical analogies about, mostly, Munich, Chamberlain, Hitler and Churchill, somewhat like dim primitives, so that all significant geopolitical challenges these United States are currently confronting are met with clarion calls that we sternly rebut any pussy-footed Chamberlainism, that we be sure to wield Churchill's steely will and adopt his grave mien, that we be careful not to futilely feed the uber-crocodile of Islamic fascism. It's something akin to a freshman 20th Century European history class, where the little nerdy guys who want to prove their manhood yelp on about the perils of appeasement, all the while barely understanding what we are at risk of appeasing even.

I mean, we are led to believe that Sheikh Nasrallah, Ahmadi-Nejad, Khaled Mashal, Bashar Asad, Sunni insurgents in Anbar (whether criminals, neo-Baathists, local Sunni nationalists, or international jihadists), Shi'a militias (whether Mahdi or hard-line Badr, or Mahdi splinter groups), Hamas' leadership in Gaza and the West Bank--all are part of one big mega-pot--one where they can easily be labeled with the nonsensical moniker of Islamic Fascists. And us pussy-footers who dare question whether staying the course (sorry, 'adapting to win') via Rumsfeld's failed strategy in Iraq is the best policy, or refraining from direct high level diplomatic discussions with Syria or Iran (or indirect talks, via European and Arab proxies, with elements of Hamas' leadership), or keeping Guantanamo open, we are told we are rank appeasers. We are Chamberlains. We are defeatists. We are traitors.

But this is madness. This is idiocy. This rote regurgitation of hyper-simplistic "analysis" is not worthy of the world's reigning superpower's foreign policy and policy-making elites. But, alas, we are not blessed with talented practitioners, but rather hubris-ridden “leaders” wedded to failed strategies who are not statesmanlike enough to look at the larger national interest dispassionately, so as to execute much needed course corrections. In short, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush have become stubborn discredited national security actors who, with Rove, are attempting to grasp on to continued Congressional support for the remainder of a lame-duck term, and they are trying to take us along for the ride, not least with liberal dispensations of fear-mongering rhetoric.

The scary thing is, it could work. This is a country in the grips of a national mania, namely gross paranoia fused with governmental incompetence. We are petrified when we see an Arab language T-shirt on a plane, we dutifully ditch our bottled water and shampoo and deodarants before boarding a flight (without even the merest peep about whether there might not be a more intelligent way to ban prospectively dangerous liquids), we don't stop to wonder how by failing to provide for basic security in Iraq, or not pushing for a general peace settlement as 'honest broker' between the Arabs and Israelis, or not controlling the excesses of Israel's recent military action in Lebanon, or not stopping to ponder whether Iran today is really anywhere near as powerful an actor as Hitlerian Germany--whether such policies in the region might not be helping to radicalize new generations of jihadi recruits, not least as the 1938ist broad-brush approach looping all the above parties into some idiotically simplistic categorization of Islamic Fascists, or Islamo-Nazis, or so on, is contributing to a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby we are dutifully helping to effectuate Bin Laden’s bidding by stoking a bitter religious war.

Read Djerejian's full, long, and truly excellent decontsruction here

Afraid of the Truth, Perhaps?

Rick Santorum is nothing if not consistent. Consistently idiotic, that is. Here's what he said recently:

I am outraged to learn that former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s request for a visa to visit the United States has been approved by the Bush Administration. Mohammed Khatami is one of the chief propagandists of the Islamic Fascist regime.

Now let's take a look at some of the views expressed recently by Khatami, who, as Steve Clemons points out, is widely considered to be a relatively good guy, and a potential long term U.S. ally:

"The policies of the neo-conservatives have created a war that creates more extremists and radicals," he told The Independent in Chicago. "The events of 9/11 gave them this ability to create fear and anxiety ... and to create new policies of their own and now events are creating an expansion of extremists on both sides. A struggle is under way to dominate this world multilaterally ... We are a witness to war - with suppression from one side and extremist reaction in the form of terror from the other."

[snip]

"We are unfortunately witnessing the emergence of policies that seek to confiscate public opinion in order to exploit all the grandeur of the nation and country of the United States ... policies that are the outcome of a point of view, that despite having no status in the US public arena as far as numbers are concerned, uses decisive lobby groups and influential centres to utilise the entirety of America's power and wealth to promote its own interest and to implant policies outside US borders that have no resemblance to the spirit of Anglo-American civilisation and the aspirations of its Founding Fathers or its constitution, causing crisis after crisis in our world."

Read the rest of Robert Fisk's report in The Independent (UK)

Just in case you hadn't noticed

“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”

--Otto von Bismark

Soros on Terror

In today's Bostoin Globe, George Soros, who is often ignoranty attacked and mischaracterized by faux conservatives, offers an important distillation of the Administration's misguided and oversimplified "war on terror".

THE FAILURE OF Israel to subdue Hezbollah demonstrates the many weaknesses of the war-on-terror concept. One of those weaknesses is that even if the targets are terrorists, the victims are often innocent civilians, and their suffering reinforces the terrorist cause.

In response to Hezbollah's attacks, Israel was justified in attacking Hezbollah to protect itself against the threat of missiles on its border. However, Israel should have taken greater care to minimize collateral damage. The civilian casualties and material damage inflicted on Lebanon inflamed Muslims and world opinion against Israel and converted Hezbollah from aggressors to heroes of resistance for many. Weakening Lebanon has also made it more difficult to rein in Hezbollah.

Another weakness of the war-on-terror concept is that it relies on military action and rules out political approaches. Israel previously withdrew from Lebanon and then from Gaza unilaterally, rather than negotiating political settlements with the Lebanese government and the Palestinian authority. The strengthening of Hezbollah and Hamas was a direct consequence of that approach. The war-on-terror concept stands in the way of recognizing this fact because it separates ``us" from ``them" and denies that our actions help shape their behavior.

A third weakness is that the war-on-terror concept lumps together different political movements that use terrorist tactics. It fails to distinguish among Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, or the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi militia in Iraq. Yet all these terrorist manifestations, being different, require different responses. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah can be treated merely as targets in the war on terror because both have deep roots in their societies; yet there are profound differences between them.

Read the rest of Soros' piece here

Could it be?

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because "God chose us." Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.

But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).

Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?

Could it be...

Read the rest of Amira Hass' editorial in Haaretz

Thinking of Supporting Hillary?

There are plenty of problems with the conventional wisdon that Hillary Clinton will (and should) be the 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate. Sibel Edmonds and William Weaver have written a substantive editorial which raises some important questions.

Why have we Americans lost confidence and faith in those elected? Where and when did we go wrong; or perhaps more correctly, they go wrong? What have these representatives done, or, failed to do, that arouses such anger and loathing in the very same constituents who voted them into office?

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is a perfect example; an elected senator who has served six years in her seat, never taking a strong stand in support of her constituents on any serious or controversial issue; a senator who has used her record-breaking TV public appearances to say "nothing"; a senator whose senate office adheres strictly to a motto of "See no Evil, Hear no Evil"; an elected official who has no record of conducting investigations into cases that are matters of great concern to her constituents and to our nation; a senator who has consistently stood quietly on the sidelines when the issues at hand demand public hearings -waiting to determine the direction of each blowing wind; a politician who has spent all her focus and energy on a campaign of shallow publicity glitz and her PR empire behind it.

Edmonds and Weaver go on to list several powerful examples here

Oliphant

"very sad, very unfortunate"

So these are the sort of standards set by our military leaders?

The Marine officer who commanded the battalion involved in the Haditha killings last November did not consider the deaths of 24 Iraqis, many of them women and children, unusual and did not initiate an inquiry, according to a sworn statement he gave to military investigators in March.

"I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines," Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines, said in the statement.

"I did not have any reason to believe that this was anything other than combat action," he added.

Read the full Washington Post article here

Six Questions

Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years (through 2004). He also served as the chief of the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. Harper's has an article up in which he is asked six questions. Here's the first, followed by his response:

1. We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism?

On balance, more vulnerable. We're safer in terms of aircraft travel. We're safer from being attacked by some dumbhead who tries to come into the country through an official checkpoint; we've spent billions on that. But for the most part our victories have been tactical and not strategic. There have been important successes by the intelligence services and Special Forces in capturing and killing Al Qaeda militants, but in the long run that's just a body count, not progress. We can't capture them one by one and bring them to justice. There are too many of them, and more now than before September 11. In official Western rhetoric these are finite organizations, but every time we interfere in Muslim countries they get more support.

In the long run, we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. There's our military presence in Islamic countries, the perception that we control the Muslim world’s oil production, our support for Israel and for countries that oppress Muslims such as China, Russia, and India, and our own support for Arab tyrannies. The deal we made with Qadaffi in Libya looks like hypocrisy: we'll make peace with a brutal dictator if it gets us oil. President Bush is right when he says all people aspire to freedom but he doesn't recognize that people have different definitions of democracy. Publicly promoting democracy while supporting tyranny may be the most damaging thing we do. From the standpoint of democracy, Saudi Arabia looks much worse than Iran. We use the term “Islamofascism”—but we're supporting it in Saudi Arabia, with Mubarak in Egypt, and even Jordan is a police state. We don't have a strategy because we don't have a clue about what motivates our enemies.

Read the rest of the interview here

Balled Up, Spines exposed

Billmon, using an interesting and amusing historical reference, comes up with an excellent summary of Bush's answers to recent questions: The Hedgehog Defense.

"The strategy is to help the Iraqi people achieve the objectives and dreams which is a democratic society . . . We’re not leaving so long as I’m the president. That would be a huge mistake."

George W. Bush (Press Conference, 8/21/006)

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953)

When Berlin divided writers and thinkers (which leaves Shrub out) and human beings in general (I suppose we have to include him) into two categories -- the hedgehogs and the foxes -- he didn't mean for either label to be taken pejoratively. After all, his list of hedgehogs included Dante, Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Erasmus were among his foxes.

What Berlin meant, I think, is that hedgehogs try to integrate all of their experiences and thoughts into a single, overarching concept of life and their place in it, while foxes, as he put it, have ideas about the world "without . . . seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision."

At this point, I would say Shrub is acting like a hedgehog on hallucinogens.

Read the rest of Billmon's post here

LT. General James Mattis and Colonel Nathan R. Jessup

There has been a lot of talk about the recent promotion of Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis to command the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Central and Marine Expeditionary Force. Much of the talk has swirled around the fact that Mattis said the following during a 2005 public forum:

Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. ... It’s fun to shoot some people. I’ll be right upfront with you, I like brawling. You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.

Now there may well be other issues relating to his promotion which are worth discussing, but the most interesting commentary I've seen thus far comes from Obsidian Wings, where Andrew writes a thought-provoking piece using Aaron Sorkin's Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) from the play and film A Few Good Men in order to broaden the discussion. It's quite a good article, and much of the commentary (found below it) is stimulating as well.

Andrew leads with Jessup's signature outburst:

"You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives...You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.

We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand to post."

Read Andrew's post here

Israel and Lebanon: Some little known facts

Courtesy of Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Cordesman, having returned from a recent trip to Israel, has released a draft report on the war. Here are a couple of nuggets included in the report:

No serving Israeli official, intelligence officer, or other military officer felt that the Hezbollah acted under the direction of Iran or Syria.

[snip]

Israeli officers and officials made it clear that Israel’s real reason for going to war, however, was the steady deployment of medium and longer range systems, and the potential creation of a major Iranian and Syrian proxy missile force that could hit targets throughout Israel.

Read more, including some interesting commentary, at Helena Cobban's site

More politics? click here!

•••

books