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Archive: POLITICS

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Worth a Look

Japanese filmmaker Watai Takeharu has created a documentary on the Iraq war which, by all accounts, is outstanding. Ironically, it has not yet been released in the U.S., but you can learn more about it here from Gregory Elich. Also, if you happen to be in the metro NYC area, there will be a screening next Wednesday. Detailed information can be found here.

Exactly

I've said this before. But perhaps it seems like hyperbole. So I'll say it again. The president's interests are now radically disjoined from the country's. We can handle a setback like Iraq. It really is a big disaster. But America will certainly surive it. President Bush -- in the sense of his legacy and historical record -- won't. It's all Iraq for him. And Iraq is all disaster. So, from his perspective (that is to say, through the prism of his interests rather than the country's -- which he probably can't separate) reckless gambits aimed at breaking out of this ever-tightening box make sense.

Think of it like this. He's a death row prisoner concocting a thousand-to-one plan to break out of prison. For him, those are good odds. The rest of us are doing three months for disorderly conduct. And he's trying to rope us into his harebrained scheme. Like I said, his interests are very different from ours.

Speak up. We're on the edge of the abyss.

Josh Marshall

Clear Enough?

Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the CIA's reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb? That's the big question that runs through the many little details that have emerged in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney's former top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early 2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA.

More from David Ignatius in The Washington Post

Powerful, important words

SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITEE TESTIMONY – ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

February 1, 2007

Mr. Chairman:

Your hearings come at a critical juncture in the U.S. war of choice in Iraq, and I commend you and Senator Lugar for scheduling them.

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II.

This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran -- though gaining in regional influence -- is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Steve Clemons has more

Wednesday Buffet

There are several important articles which appeared on various sites today, and rather than excerpting each one, I've created a brief list from which to choose. Frankly, if you have the time, I strongly recommend that you read all of them.

–TomDispatch provides a preview of Chalmers Johnson's forthcoming book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

–Robert Scheer, the first-rate journalist who was, as you may recall, fired from the L.A. Times for no good reason, makes a forceful case for impeachment at Truthdig

–Joe Conason reports in the NY Observer on the efforts of the Bush administration to provoke war with Iran

–Glenn Greenwald covers several topics

open source investigations

Some of you may not be familiar with the expression "open source". Answers.com descibes it in this way:

[Open source] software is created by a development community rather than a single vendor. Typically programmed by volunteers from many organizations, the source code of open source software is free and available to anyone who would like to use it or modify it for their own purposes. This allows an organization to add a feature itself rather than hope that the vendor of a proprietary product will implement its suggestion in a subsequent release.

That was the original meaning of the phrase, but it has long since been used in different contexts as well. Open source investigations follow the same basic principles, as a number of people openly contribute to a communal effort to solve an investigation. A good example was the work done by those at the Firedoglake website on the Plame affair. Another good example is the work done by eRiposte on the fraudulent Niger uranium connection which the Bush administration used to buttress support for the Iraq war. In his most recent post (on Firedoglake, as it happens), eRiposte creates a graphic, and impressive example of the power of open source investigating. And bear in mind that these recent revelations are a direct result of of information found in documents which were declassified for the ongoing Libby trial. Here's his summary:

Let's momentarily set aside the fact that there was zero justification for classifying/redacting the highlighted phrase - this was a pure and simple cover-up on behalf of the British Government. The main point here is that Blair and his lackeys in the British Parliament fraudulently stood their ground on the uranium claim in the aftermath of the Joseph Wilson op-ed in July 2003, and in doing so, performed a great "service" to Bush-Cheney. Bush and Cheney responded in kind by going to extraordinary lengths to hide information pertaining to the CIA's dismissal of the validity or credibility of the British claim in the 2004 Phase I SSCI report - a "service" that Bush-Cheney lackey Pat Roberts was clearly only too willing to perform, with WINPAC's help.

All of this may seem like old news to many, but I think it is important for history to reflect the depths to which these people went to try to hide their mutual complicity in the Iraq WMD fraud.

It's really worth reading the whole thing, and reflecting on just how superior this open source work is to what the mainstream media currently has to offer.

The Brookings Institution on Iraq

The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.

This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush's last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country - but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.

Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.

US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.

The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.

Read the full article in The Independent (U.K.)

Hillary? Obama?

Many, including myself, have very mixed feelings about the two early front runners in the race to become the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee. But if not one of them, who? Biden? I hope not. Edwards? Possibly, but far from ideal. Then who? Tim Dickenson tells us in The Rolling Stone:

A stiff vice president campaigns on his administration's legacy of unprecedented prosperity. Looks terrible on TV. Bows out, following a disputed vote count. Then, two terms later, with no incumbent in the race, he re-enters the fray. Promises to change the course of a disastrous war founded on lies. And charges to victory. I'm referring, of course, to the 1968 campaign of Richard Milhous Nixon. But four decades later, history has a chance to repeat itself for Albert Arnold Gore.

If the Democrats were going to sit down and construct the perfect candidate for 2008, they'd be hard-pressed to improve on Gore. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he has no controversial vote on Iraq to defend. Unlike Barack Obama and John Edwards, he has extensive experience in both the Senate and the White House. He has put aside his wooden, policy-wonk demeanor to emerge as the Bush administration's most eloquent critic. And thanks to An Inconvenient Truth, Gore is not only the most impassioned leader on the most urgent crisis facing the planet, he's also a Hollywood celebrity, the star of the third-highest-grossing documentary of all time.

Dickenson's full piece

Dick Cheney, Dangerous Liar

Vice-President Cheney was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN a couple of days ago, and if he were not one of the two most powerful people in the world, his outrageously dishonest denials about Iraq might be somewhat amusing. JB at the Balkinization website does an excellent job encapsulating the extremity of Cheney's dishonesty:

"Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes."

– Dick Cheney, January 24, 2007

"The Americans are not there. They're not in Baghdad. There are no troops there. Never. They're not at all."

– Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka Baghdad Bob, April 7, 2003

A News Hour Throwback

The complicity of the mainstream media during the Bush administration's reckless, dishonest reign has, and will continue to be well-documented. But what I have found to be most disappointing are not the predictable results of corporate, profit driven (and therefore conservative) ownership of the major networks, but rather the degeneration of the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Like many of my readers, I imagine, The News Hour has been a staple of mine for years. I remember just how good it once was, back when it was The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. But sadly, the show which once set the standard for serious, in-depth news reporting and discussion, has declined steadily during the past several years. And what makes my disappointment so acute, is that a serious alternative to superficial mainstream television news was (and is) so badly needed during this period.

The fact of the matter is that The News Hour only reaches its potential every once and a while these days, as the insidious political correctness seen regularly on other news programs has infected public television as well. Even, or should I say especially Jim Lehrer, the widely respected star of the show, has failed to do his job in a serious manner. From his obsequious interviews of lying heads of state, to his often weak choices of guests, Lehrer should be ashamed of his performance during such a critical period in American history. (To get an idea of what a truly serious, conscientious journalist can accomplish, take a look at what Bill Moyers has been doing since 2000.)

Last night there was a segment on the most recent commander who is to be sent to save the day in Iraq, General Petraeus. The first guest, Major General William Nash (Ret.), kicked off the discussion in an all too familiar way:

Well, I don't think we, on paper anyway, can come up with anybody any better. He's well-qualified, in terms of experience and education. Both in terms of operations in Iraq and the opportunities he had in the last 16 months to think through all the issues, especially evolving around the writing of this manual that so many people have talked about.

Then something interesting, and all too unusual happened. The other guest, Colonel Douglas MacGregor (Ret.), shunned the tacitly agreed upon comity typically found amongst pundits, and said this:

Well, General Petraeus is the latest in a series of officers selected by the retired four stars and presented to the administration as the ideal candidate.

A couple of years ago, Senator McCain made the statement that Generals Sanchez and Abizaid were probably the two best generals we've ever had. I don't think Senator McCain would make that assertion today. They presided over a disaster. General Casey, who's now left, and Senator McCain has actually talked about blocking his nomination to be chief of staff in the Army.

This leaves us with General Petraeus. What do we know about him? Well, I would say he comes to this job with three strikes against him. And let's set the effusive praise aside that we've heard before with General Abizaid.

Number one, he commanded the 101st Air Mobile Division on the way to Baghdad. It was a singularly undistinguished command. His assistant division commander at the end of the operation was so disappointed in the failure of the 101st to contribute much to the outcome that he said the Fifth Corps had fought the war essentially with one hand tied behind its back. The Third Infantry Division had carried the fight.

Secondly, he goes to Mosul, and he worked very hard to demonstrate his sensitivity to the cultural differences, to work on a whole range of issues, but we also know that some people would say, within hours of the 101st departure, the area reverted to insurgent control. Actually speaking, the insurgents simply took it over.

And then, finally, you have the training of the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army today is, by anyone's definition, a disaster, and it is substantially his creation.

That blow sent Major General Nash reeling for the rest of the segment, and Margaret Warner, who wouldn't know how to host an edition of BBC's Hard Talk if she had the opportunity, was clearly taken aback.

This is precisely the sort of serious, important debate to which a program like The News Hour is ideally suited. But the editorial decisions made by those in charge have consistently undermined the show's potential.

You can watch, listen to, or read the full transcript of the above segment here. And you might as well enjoy it, as I sure wouldn't count on seeing Colonel MacGregor back on The News Hour anytime soon.

The importance of DNA EVIDENCE

Fifteen years to the day after he was convicted of a brutal murder that DNA tests prove he did not commit, Roy Brown is set to be released from prison after a hearing in state court today, the Innocence Project said. On January 23, 1992, Brown was convicted of a murder the previous year and sentenced to 25 years in prison, where he has remained ever since. DNA test results confirm that Brown is innocent - and that, instead, the murder was likely committed by a man who killed himself three years ago after Brown wrote to him to say he had uncovered evidence that he was the actual perpetrator.

"This is unlike any case we've ever seen. Roy Brown broke the case from his prison cell and confronted the actual perpetrator, who in turn killed himself. The true perpetrator's courageous daughter then volunteered her own DNA sample, only to have the judge who oversaw Roy's trial refuse to release him - saying that he had more confidence in the highly questionable practice of 'bite-mark' analysis than in the hard science of DNA. Only after the true perpetrator's body was exhumed and subjected to DNA testing did prosecutors accept the truth," said Peter Neufeld, Co-Director of the Innocence Project. "Today, exactly 15 years after he was convicted, the truth has finally set Roy Brown free."

The above was excerpted from the Innocence Project website, and you can read more about the need for more such DNA testing at TalkLeft

Before and After

Paul Woodward at The War in Context uses these aerial photographs of Haret Hreik, Lebanon to illustrate how dangerous it is to take anything the mainstream media feeds us at face value. Here's his piece:

Read the CNN headline, "Hezbollah-led protesters shut Lebanon down," or listen to the State Department's Nicholas Burns express U.S. support for "the elected government," and there's only one conclusion we are supposed to draw: Those anti-Western, pro-Syrian Islamists are trying to launch a coup.

Certainly this is the culmination of a campaign to change the balance of power in Lebanon -- so was the much celebrated "Cedar Revolution." The issue from the American perspective is not why people are taking to the streets but whether they are pro-Western. If they are, then, ipso facto, their action is part of the tide of democratic change. If they are not, then they present "a threat to democracy."

In Lebanon, an awkward wrinkle to what's currently happening is that the protesters aren't all Shiites - they also include the Maronite Christian supporters of Michel Aoun.

"Christians and Muslims unite in fight for representative government." That could be the headline but since such a government would not show deference to either America or Israel's desires, that's not the narrative we are allowed to hear.

As for why Christians have joined ranks with Hezbollah, we're told that this all comes down to the presidential ambitions of Michel Aoun. Yet look at what Israel, with U.S. support last summer, did to Haret Hreik, the poor mixed Christian and Muslim suburb of South Beirut where Aoun was born. It shouldn't be too hard to see why his sympathies are not aligned with Western powers right now.

The biggest blunder of all?

In the chain of disasters that has characterized the occupation of Iraq, one of the very first was also one of the most avoidable. Just before Baghdad fell, the United States administration flew in a Shia cleric, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, as its goodwill ambassador to the Shia holy city of Najaf. Upon arrival, al-Khoei was hacked to death by a mob on the orders of the radical, anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Washington didn’t seem to know that its potential allies, the Shia, were divided, or that al-Khoei’s father was a moderate who had been used by Saddam Hussein to stop a Shia rebellion in 1991.

There were experts on the Arab world in the US State Department who could have warned al-Khoei’s handlers. But Washington had decided against using such Arabists and even their own Arabic interpreters. Since then, the results, when not deadly, have been darkly comic. US Army engineers, for instance, were stymied in their reconstruction efforts by an explosion on a bridge in Baghdad because it was the same bridge they always crossed to get their Iraqi translator.

The consequences of America’s failure to use its Arabists in Iraq have been considerable. Before they were excluded, area experts had warned the US administration that it had less than half the number of troops necessary to hold the country after the invasion. They foretold the massive looting in Baghdad and the security breakdown. They warned against using Ahmad Chalabi as America’s man in Iraq, and Chalabi ended up misleading everyone. The Arabists warned Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, not to dismantle the Iraqi army and bureaucracy, and when he did, thousands of unemployed people took their guns to the insurgency. More recently, the lack of area experts has contributed to the framing of a constitution and the staging of elections that promise little peace, and might contribute to an all-out sectarian war between Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish factions.

The rest of Hugh Graham's extensive look at the problem can be found here

A One State Solution?

A couple of weeks ago while watching BookTV (yes, that's right, BookTV), I stumbled across an interesting interview with an author named Ali Abunimah, in which he was discussing his newly published book One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. While many are likely to dismiss his proposal as being too idealistic, it should be taken seriously, at the very least, because of the tremendous obstacles which stand in the way of the more widely accepted idea of a two state solution.

Remi Kanazi examines Abunimah's proposal on the Atlantic Free Press site:

One Country begins by revealing the various layers of Israel’s occupation and the grim realities of the proposed two-state solution. The accepted international and Palestinian call for a two-state solution is based on 22 percent of historic Palestine—the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinians (entitled under United Nations Resolution 194) insist on the right of return to their homeland or to be duly compensated for their expulsion. Yet, no Israeli prime minister or prominent figure to date has endorsed this right, nor has any Israeli government proposed a full withdrawal from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Abunimah reveals that, during the Camp David talks of 2000, Israel’s most “generous” offer to the Palestinians included just 76.6 percent of the West Bank (while Israel would effectively annex East Jerusalem and the territorial waters of the Dead Sea) and demanded that “at least 80 percent of the settlers remain in place.” Abunimah further states, “Israel…insisted on permanent control of Palestinian airspace and a long list of onerous ‘security’ arrangements that would rob the Palestinian state of any real independence from Israel and introduce enormous opportunities for delay and backsliding as had happened with the Oslo Accords.”

Israel couldn’t simply withdraw from the entire West Bank. Israel’s impetus was predicated on the notion that the expansion of its borders and the enlargement of the demographic majority were necessary for its survival. Once the settlements were integrated into the Israeli narrative, successive US administrations acquiesced and declared—privately and publicly—that Israel was “entitled” to keep “parts” of the settlements in a final two-state solution. The settlement process, however, sectioned Palestinians off into inaccessible ghettos, dividing Palestinian land in such a way that a contiguous state became inconceivable. Israel never diverged from its initial plan to annex the settlements into the greater state. Abunimah correctly asserts, “It is not credible that a society would invest billions of dollars in roads and housing that it truly intended to give up.”

Kanazi's full article

Some perspective

On 9/11, an event used in part by the Administration as a pretext to launch a brutal and unnecessary war in Iraq, 2973 innocent people died. The United Nations announced today that more than 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in sectarian violence in 2006 alone. Thirty-four thousand.

New York Times

First and Foremost

I have spent most of my adult life as a reporter covering insurgencies, from the five years I covered the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala to seven years in the Middle East and nearby regions, where I covered the two Palestinian uprisings and the civil wars in Algeria and Sudan, and finally to the three years I reported on the wars in the Balkans, including the rebellion in the Serbian province of Kosovo by the Kosovo Liberation Army. Some of these wars were fought with skill, such as the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador and the French-backed counterinsurgency in Algeria; others were not, such as the war in Kosovo, fought by a Serbian government whose stupidity and brutality rivaled our own in Iraq.

The plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq will be accompanied by a subtle, but disastrous, change in the way the war is fought—a change that will almost assuredly increase the monthly tallies of American dead and wounded. The president warned that “deadly acts of violence will continue, and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties.” In his version of the war, these losses will allow us to climb from the sinkhole we have dug for ourselves to the sunlight of victory. Unfortunately, for Iraqis and for us, what the president proposes is a mistake of catastrophic proportions. It defies basic counterinsurgency doctrine and will leave American troops more vulnerable, more exposed and in greater danger in this war of shadows.

A counterinsurgency war is, first and foremost, a political war. It requires a deftness, as well as cultural and political sensitivity, that American troops and commanders, most of whom do not even know enough Arabic to read the road signs in Baghdad, do not possess.

Read Chris Hedges' full piece at Truthdig

Statins and Parkinson's Disease: A connection?

Statins are cholesterol lowering drugs, Lipitor being the most widely used, and they are the best selling class of drugs in the world. As is often the case, though, such shortcuts are rarely risk-free.

Scientists are to investigate why people with low cholesterol levels appear to be more likely to develop Parkinson's disease, following concerns that statins - given to control cholesterol - could cause an increase in the numbers of people with the illness.

About 2.3 million adults in the UK take statins to help control their cholesterol levels; the American scientists have found that those with lower levels of cholesterol are more likely to develop the degenerative neurological disorder of Parkinson's disease.

The link between statins and Parkinson's is not yet understood, and health charities last night urged caution. But the scientists behind the research warn that if they get confirmation of the finding, in their follow-up study of 16,000 people, there could be a surge in Parkinson's diagnoses in the next five years as the effects of the drug set in.