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Archive: POLITICS

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The Sad Truth

The political campaigns, especially among conservative Republicans, have aggravated an already grim situation. Republican front-runner John McCain in particular wastes no opportunity to rally his supporters with emotional commitments to use every ounce of energy in his body to fight “radical Islamic militants.” He’ll chase them to the “gates of hell,” he thunders. And the happy crowd roars approval -- not quite sure who the radical Islamic militants are, or why the combined powers of the world’s mightiest democracies and allied Third World tyrannies have not even chased the rascals out of the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, or suburban London, let alone to hell itself.

The crescendo of McCain’s simplistic appeal is always that “I’ll never surrender!” and the happy crowd roars again, secure in the knowledge that surrender is not an option -- though still blissfully confused about whom exactly one might surrender to if surrender were ever an option.

Other intellectual hooligans and cultural skinheads, like Glen Beck on CNN every night, reflect a widespread tendency among conservative media commentators and hosts to replace sensibility with emotion, to act tough when that is easier than being smart and realistic.

[snip]

Sadly, more than six years after 9/11 and five years after the American-led attack on Iraq, the public debate on these issues in the United States – with only a few exceptions – remains mired in intellectual mediocrity, factual inaccuracy, analytical selectivity, cultural insensitivity and political values more worthy of a horse barn than a powerful and otherwise decent nation.

Politicians play on the ignorance and fear of their fellow citizens to rouse emotional responses in a desperate quest for votes; commercial media personalities do the same thing in pursuit of larger audience shares in order to sell more advertising. Both appear irresponsible and uncaring that their simplistic emotionalist and reactionary chauvinism foster a fresh form of racism that can only generate new tensions and greater conflicts down the road.

Rami G. Khouri's full article can be read at Agence Global

Then and Now

Historian William Lee Miller provides an excellent take on Hillary and Obama:

I picture a supporter of William Seward, the senator from New York and odds-on favorite to the win the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, sputtering in exasperation at the upstart from Illinois who suddenly appeared to be taking the nomination away from his candidate. "Who is this guy?" "What has he done?" "He is a talker, not a doer." In the run-up to the Chicago convention in May 1860, Seward had seemed inevitable--but then came this speech-making interloper, gathering up delegates.

Seward would be ready to be president from Day One, this supporter might say, implying that the Illinois fellow would not be ready on Day One.

Read on at fredericksburg.com

He Confirmed; She Claimed

A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn’t do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert’s shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon’s mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu’s secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin’s secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?

When the Palestinians aren’t making claims, their viewpoint is simply not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, studied the way Israel’s leading television channels and newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month – December 2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians. However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.

More from Yonatan Mendel in the London Review of Books

A Helpful Cheat-Sheet

Courtesy of Matthew Baldwin

red-footed boobies? The fewer the Better

William J. Haynes II has just resigned as General Counsel of the Department of Defense. Haynes, you may recall, is the patriotic genius who stated, when asked about the possibility of acquittals in Guantánamo cases, that " If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions".

Well, that was certainly bad enough to disqualify him from any future "service" to our country, but it was hardly Haynes' first foray into the realm of outrage. It turns out that human rights aren't the only ones for which he lacked respect – the envoronment was fair game as well:

Seeking an exemption from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in order to enable the military to resume bombing on a remote Pacific island as part of live-fire training exercises, Haynes prepared a legal brief arguing that even though the island is an important nesting site for such migratory birds as great frigate birds, red-footed boobies and Pacific golden plovers, bird lovers should have no problem with the bombing. Indeed, argued the Haynes brief, conservationists would actually benefit from the destruction of such birds, because it makes the birds rarer - and "bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one." Moreover, Haynes noted, the bombing is good for the birds, too - because it keeps the island free of other "human intrusion." Somehow the Haynes logic did not fare well. A federal judge ruled against the military in 2002. The judge's decision included one particularly memorable line: "The Court hopes that the federal government will refrain from making such frivolous arguments in the future." [1]

via soccerdad at the TalkLeft

the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh

More specifically, the revealing trail which led to it, as recounted by Roger Morris, award-winning historian and former member of the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (before resigning over the invasion of Cambodia).

It was another car bomb in the Middle East, the victim this time one of those "notorious terrorists" seemingly generic to the landscape. Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh died February 12 in Damascus as he lived most of his forty-five years, in that world of searing blast, mutilation, mayhem, and aftershock of cold fear.

Yet behind fleeting, often hackneyed reports of his death, he was no ordinary figure in the long blood-red line of killers and killed. Given a murderer's good-riddance by Washington and Jerusalem while a martyr's memorial from Gaza and Beirut to Baghdad and Tehran, Mughniyeh was emblematic of the gulf between worlds-of atrocities and abject failure of statesmanship on all sides, in which American policy has its own half-century share.

Millions on his head, Mughniyeh led a largely unseen life. But some of its milestones can be glimpsed from the archive of the past fifty years in the Middle East. It is in part the story of a man, a country, a region pitted against the United States in a shadow war of intervention and resistance, attack and reprisal, most Americans never saw.

No outrage or theology of the oppressed can rationalize the savagery of a Mughniyeh, spiraling vengeance that leaves the non-state terrorist-or the government practicing its own version in the guise of "special operations" or covert action-no better than the evil they claim as justification, and their cause ultimately no less betrayed. But there will be no end to reciprocal brutality and defeat in the Middle East until the history Mughniyeh embodies is understood.

Born in 1963 to Shiite peasant parents in Tayr Dibba, a village in impoverished southern Lebanon, he grew up in a cinder block house with no running water in a Levant of vast inequity, where pre-World War II French colonialism and then postwar U.S. support heedlessly fastened Western control with the proxy political-economic repression by the Maronite Christian minority with its avowedly fascist Phalangist party and militia. That client tyranny, masked by Beirut's cosmopolitan façade, was perpetuated by the 1958 military intervention of US Marines and the ensuing CIA corruption of Lebanese politics through the 1970s, including millions in covert subsidies to the Phalange and numerous Lebanese politicians.

He was nine in July 1972 when near where he lived in south Beirut's Shiite slums the city's first car bomb, planted by the Israelis in retaliation for the recent Lod Airport massacre, blew up the spokesman of the group behind the Lod attack, Palestinian poet Ghassan Kanafani, along with his 17-year-old niece Lamees with him for a shopping trip.

Mughniyeh was thirteen in 1976 when the CIA and Israel covertly backed the invasion of Lebanon by Syria to thwart the emergence of a broad nationalist coalition representing the country's Islamic majority and supported by the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

He was an eighteen-year-old engineering student at the American University of Beirut in 1981 when the U.S. gave a "green light" to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in pursuit of the PLO.

He was nineteen in the summer of 1982 when the Israeli Army, with covert U.S. aid, laid siege to Beirut, raking the city with artillery, devastating Shiite neighborhoods. (Osama bin Laden would say later it was the attacks on Beirut's high-rise apartment buildings that prompted him to retaliate against New York skyscrapers.)

By 1982, like several of his boyhood soccer team, teenage Mughniyeh joined the combined PLO and Lebanese nationalist resistance to the invasion, becoming a sniper along the Green Line. He watched that September as the West negotiated the PLO's exit from Lebanon with guarantees that U.S. and other peacekeeping troops would protect Palestinian refugee camps from reprisal by hostile Lebanese factions-only to see the US Marine force swiftly withdrawn, leaving Lebanese militias to massacre helpless hundreds at the Shatila and Sabra camps as Israeli forces looked on. Even US officials, Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, would call the episode "treacherous" and "criminal."

In April 1983, a bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut killed several CIA agents pivotal in past covert actions in Lebanon, an attack Mughniyeh was later accused of "masterminding." But there would be no real evidence of his role-only that the bombing was in retaliation for the Marine withdrawal allowing the Shatila and Sabra slaughter as well as earlier interventions.

He was twenty in September 1983 when the U.S. Sixth Fleet intervened in the Lebanese Civil War by firing on rebel forces fighting the reactionary Phalangist regime, the USS Virginia and John Rodgers pounding hills above Beirut with 24,000 pounds of ordnance, soon followed by the battleship New Jersey's small car-size 2,000-pound shells inflicting untold civilian as well as combatant casualties.

On October 23, 1983, a truck bomb with 12,000 pounds of explosives killed 241 Marines quartered at the Beirut Airport after being sent back to Lebanon. U.S. officials later accused Mughniyeh in the attack, though again there would be no evidence-only that the assault on the Marines was in retaliation for the U.S. naval shelling and other interference in Lebanon's civil war. "We still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport," Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense at the time, told PBS in 2001, "and we certainly didn't then."

A turning point came for Mughniyeh came in 1985 when he was a twenty-two-year-old bodyguard to Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. A fiery preacher, spiritual mentor to many in the rising political consciousness of Lebanon's Shiite community, Fadlallah took no political role, opposed violence and sectarian division, and defied growing Iranian influence in Lebanon. But on March 8, 1985-in reprisal for the Marine barracks bombing, and in an operation goaded by the Israelis and funded by the Saudis, both of whom saw Fadlallah as a threat to their own interests in Lebanon-the CIA tried to car-bomb Fadlallah. By chance the cleric escaped harm, but the huge explosion ravaged the poor Shiite area where he lived, wounding 200 and killing 80, among them Fadlallah's bodyguards and Mughniyeh's close friends. The next day, a banner hung over the smoking ruins-"Made in the USA."

Morris' full piece can be read at Counterpunch.org

The Surge "Success" Lie

In recent weeks and months, you've no doubt heard politicians – both Republican and Democrat – agreeing that the so-called surge has produced very positive results in Iraq. Well, it doesn't take much digging to reach a different conclusion. Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail (the latter having been one of the most consistently accurate and brave correspondents working in Iraq throughout the occupation) set things straight:

What the U.S. has been calling the success of a “surge”, many Iraqis see as evidence of catastrophe. Where U.S. forces point to peace and calm, local Iraqis find an eerie silence

And when U.S. forces speak of a reduction in violence, many Iraqis simply do not know what they are talking about.

Hundreds died in a series of explosions in Baghdad last month. This was despite the strongest ever security measures taken by the U.S. military, riding the “surge” in security forces and their activities.

The death toll is high, according to the website icasualties.org, which provides reliable numbers of Iraqi civilian and security deaths.

In January this year 485 civilians were killed, according to the website. It says the number is based on news reports, and that “actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site.”

The average month in 2005, before the “surge” was launched, saw 568 civilian deaths. In January 2006, the month before the “surge” began, 590 civilians died.

Many of the killings have taken place in the most well guarded areas of Baghdad. And they have continued this month.

“Two car bombs exploded in Jadriya, killing so many people, the day the American Secretary of Defence (Robert Gates) was visiting Baghdad last week,” a captain from the Karrada district police in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.

“Another car bomb killed eight people and injured 20 Thursday (last week) in the Muraidy market of Sadr City, east of Baghdad, although the Mehdi army (the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr) provides strict protection to the city,” the officer said. “There is no security in this country any more.”

Learn more about what's really happening on the ground in Iraq at Dissident Voice

Serbia and Kosovo

As you may have heard, the U.S. Embassy was attacked and burned in Belgrade during a violent protest of Kosovo's secession. Lenin, over at Lenin's Tomb, has some useful insights into the historical dynamics contributing to the current unrest:

Serbian protesters, angry at the secession of Kosovo, certainly picked the right target. There's hardly anywhere in the world where people don't delight in seeing a US embassy go up in flames. Unfortunately, they also managed to burn some poor functionary to death. Inevitably, the old cliches will be drawn upon. The reaction will be put down to simple-minded nationalism, ethnic hatreds, ancient prejudices etc, augmented by an obstinate Serbian administration stirring things up. There's no manipulative demagogue around to help the fantasy this time, since he's kicked the bucket. Further, the pro-Western candidate, Boris Tadic, won the recent elections. Nevertheless, there are ominous murmurings about the Serb regime trying to make it difficult. These myths are entirely unhelpful to understanding what's happening, but they have been cultivated for almost two decades now.

The break-up of Yugoslavia, for all that it involved the instrumentalisation of nationalism, was not fundamentally about that. It was about changes in property forms, a neoliberalisation enforced by the IMF with predictably catastrophic results. Producing waves of strikes and protests, it also led to intense competition among the players in the federation about the political forms in which the changes would take place, who would benefit, and how. The two northernmost republics, Croatia and Slovenia, were also the wealthiest and had reason to resent paying taxes toward the federation, while their political elites were straining at the leash. They took up democratic demands in order to win popular support, but also encouraged reactionary brands of nationalism, especially in Croatia, where Tudjman gave vent to pro-Nazi and anti-semitic politics, not to mention virulent anti-Serb sentiment which would be formalised in state repression and exclusion. Though one cause of resentment was the redistribution of their wealth to the poorest autonomous region, Kosovo, they nonetheless opportunistically backed Kosovan protesters if it would weaken the Serbian republic. It had nothing to do with the legitimate grievances of Kosovan Albanians. Milosevic had successfully used the resentment about Kosovo's autonomy under the 1974 constitution, to put himself in a virtually impregnable position in the Serbian communist party. Many of the accounts melodramatically describe a cold manipulator and demagogue, and he was adept at diverting discontent and protest into nationalist sentiment, outplaying far more doctrinaire rivals such as Vuk Draskovitch. However, trying to get the broadest layer of support on his side and also hoping to rely on the JNA whose elite was concerned about its privileges, took a formally pan-Yugoslav position and kept to it throughout.

Continue reading this piece here

Preemptive? Preventitive? Neither?

Francis Wilkinson argues the latter:

To be preemptive, a war has to be about to happen anyway. You’d rather not have a war at all, but the other guy’s going to attack you any minute, so you beat him to the punch. But it’s not like Iraq was massing troops on the Mexican border, or even aiming its tin-can missiles at us. So you don’t hear much any more about Iraq being a preemptive war.

You still hear the war called preventive, meaning we attacked Saddam because he was (a) capable of attacking us and (b) planning to do so, though maybe not right away (and probably not via Brownsville). Neither condition has turned out to be remotely true. The Iraq war has prevented nothing, least of all itself.

Iraq is a speculative war. Its IPO was based on speculation about WMD’s, terrorist connections, and the desire and capacity of people we didn’t know to adopt a form of government they didn’t know. Subsequent offerings have been based on more speculation, this time about bad things that might happen if we don’t continue the war indefinitely.

Like recent forays into South Florida real estate, our speculative war in Iraq was leveraged with a hefty mortgage and a blind eye toward the market’s down side.

Iraq: the bubble that keeps on bursting.

via The New Yorker

The Horror of Intimacy

This is from a Washington Post article about Marc Garlasco, a former U.S. intelligence analyst who now works for Human Rights Watch:

Sitting in a secure vault deep inside the Pentagon, Marc Garlasco cheered when the laser-guided bombs he had helped target slammed to Earth, striking Iraqi soil. As a body flew like a rag doll across the video screen, framed in a bright flash and a cloud of dust, Garlasco and his fellow intelligence analysts thought they had taken out one of the U.S. military's top targets during the early days of the Iraq war...he reveled in the April 2003 airstrike...

[Soon afterward] Garlasco left the Defense Intelligence Agency and traveled worldwide as a human rights activist seeking to determine the civilian toll of his previous work.

"I found myself standing at that crater, talking to a man about how his family was destroyed, how children were killed, and there was this bunny-rabbit toy covered in dust nearby, and it tore me in two," Garlasco said...It really dawned on me that these aren't just nameless, faceless targets. This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time."

Saul Alinsky studied the Capone crime organization while a graduate student at the University of Chicago. This is Alinsky's account of a conversation he had with Frank Nitti, who ran Capone's crime empire while Capone was in prison for tax evasion in the early 30s:

Once, when I was looking over their records, I noticed an item listing a $7,500 payment for an out-of-town killer. I called Nitti over and I said, "Look, Mr. Nitti, I don't understand this. You've got at least twenty killers on your payroll. Why waste that much money to bring somebody in from St. Louis?" Frank was really shocked by my ignorance. "Look, kid," he said patiently, "sometimes our guys might know the guy they're hitting, they may been to his house for dinner, taken his kids to the ball game, been the best man at his wedding, gotten drunk together. But you call in a guy from out of town, all you've got to do is tell him, 'Look, there's this guy in a dark coat on State and Randolph; our boy in the car will point him out; just go up and give him three in the belly and fade into the crowd.' So that's a job and he's a professional, he does it. But one of our boys goes up, the guy turns to face him and it's a friend, right away he knows that when he pulls the trigger there's gonna be a widow, kids without a father, funerals, weeping—Christ, it'd be a murder."

From Jonathan Schwarz's Tiny Revolution

InfraGard

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.

Could it be? Read on in The Progressive

Chilling Manipulation

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

There is much more from Nick Davies' new book in The Independent (U.K.)

Keeping Ours Eyes on the Ball

A couple of days ago while the American media was obsessing over the firing of Patti Solis Doyle from the Clinton campaign and the courting of super delegates, an entire continent and much of the rest of the world was absorbed by something quite different. On Sunday night Egypt clinched victory in the African Cup of Nations final held in Ghana with a 1-0 win over Cameroon. The hero and scorer of the winning goal was an Egyptian striker from the Al-Ahli club Mohamed Aboutrika. Here is the picture of Aboutrika celebrating a goal he scored earlier in the tournament. He repeated that shirt lifting exercise in the final to reveal a t-shirt with a slight twist on that slogan, this time “Sympathize with the Palestinians.” Aboutrika became not just a sporting symbol but a national and political symbol also, and the celebrations spilled over from Egypt into Gaza (plenty of other things have been spilling in both directions of late).

Here’s why this matters and it merits attention and even a two minute break from the relentless primaries speculation: the unresolved Palestinian issue resonates, it is not just a creation used by Arab regimes and al-Jazeera, it is something that echoes with and talks to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. There are grievances out there and they have an impact, sometimes a decisive impact on how America is viewed in the world especially given its association with the issue. Americans can ignore that, pretend it doesn’t exist or tell themselves that this is just about terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. But doing so would be a mistake and would continue to ignore the crucial breeding ground that provides such fertile terrain for al-Qaeda and other extremist recruitment. Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an American interest (of course an Israeli and Palestinian interest as well).

via Daniel Levy

Un–Mitt–igated Disgrace

Mitt Romney's campaign failed, at least in part, because he transparently switched long-held positions in order to please different segments of the Republican voters. As you may know, he bowed out today, and underscored what a disgraceful human being he is by uttering these words:

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Speaks for itself.

Good riddance.

Ritter On Iraq

Scott Ritter is the former weapons inspector who, you may recall, correctly sounded prescient alarms about the dangers of launching an unnecessary invasion of Iraq, again offers a perspective which you'll be hard pressed to find in the mainstream media.

Any analysis of the current state of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq that relied solely on the U.S. government, the major candidates for president or the major media outlets in the United States for information would be hard pressed to find any bad news. In a State of the Union address which had everything except a “Mission Accomplished” banner flying in the background, President Bush all but declared victory over the insurgency in Iraq. His recertification of the success of the so-called surge has prompted the Republican candidates to assume a cocky swagger when discussing Iraq. They embrace the occupation and speak, without shame or apparent fear of retribution, of an ongoing presence in that war-torn nation. Their Democratic counterparts have been less than enthusiastic in their criticism of the escalation. And the media, for the most part, continue their macabre role as cheerleaders of death, hiding the reality of Iraq deep inside stories that build upon approving headlines derived from nothing more than political rhetoric. The war in Iraq, we’re told, is virtually over. We only need “stay the course” for 10 more years.

This situation is troublesome in the extreme. The collective refusal of any constituent in this complicated mix of political players to confront Bush on Iraq virtually guarantees that it will be the Bush administration, and not its successor, that will dictate the first year (or more) of policy in Iraq for the next president. It also ensures that the debacle that is the Bush administration’s overarching Middle East policy of regional transformation and regime change in not only Iraq but Iran and Syria will continue to go unchallenged. If the president is free to pursue his policies, it could lead to direct military intervention in Iran by the United States prior to President Bush’s departure from office or, failing that, place his successor on the path toward military confrontation. At a time when every data point available certifies (and recertifies) the administration’s actions in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere (including Afghanistan) as an abject failure, America collectively has fallen into a hypnotic trance, distracted by domestic economic problems and incapable, due to our collective ignorance of the world we live in, of deciphering the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president’s rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the president’s words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in view of the “success” of the “surge,” but rather holding at current levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the reality that the statistical justification of “surge success,” namely the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The “surge” never addressed the underlying reasons for Iraq’s post-Saddam suffering, and as such never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the “surge” offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.

Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead. True, there will be a plot of land in the Middle East which people will refer to as Iraq. But any hope of a resurrected homogeneous Iraqi nation populated by a diverse people capable of coexisting in peace and harmony is soon to be swept away forever. Any hope of a way out for the people of Iraq and their neighbors is about to become a victim of the “successes” of the “surge” and the denial of reality.

Ritter's full piece can be read – not in the NYT, WAPO, or any other mainstream outlet – but at Truthdig.com

Well, Senator?

In the wake of recent news, Jack Balkin has composed this letter to John "Straight Talk" McCain:

Dear Senator McCain:

The White House has now admitted that the United States has waterboarded, that President Bush believes the practice is not torture, and that it violates neither the anti-torture statute, the McCain Amendment (which you sponsored) nor the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (which you voted for).

Will you condemn the White House for its latest admission? Will you say to the President what you said to Rudy Giuliani back in October?

"All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today," Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview.

Of presidential candidates like Mr. Giuliani, who say that they are unsure whether waterboarding is torture, Mr. McCain said: "They should know what it is. It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture."

And if that is so, Senator McCain, do you agree that the Administration is subject to criminal liability under the torture statute and the War Crimes statute? Do you agree that the United States, under the leadership of George W. Bush, has committed war crimes and has stated that it sees no obstacle to doing so again?

The country awaits your answer.

Balkinization

And It Spreads

Just before 4:30 one afternoon last July, calls to prayer echoed from all the mosques in Ayn al Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in the city of Sidon, south of Beirut. First built in 1948 for refugees from northern Palestine, the camp has grown into a ramshackle ghetto. Concrete and cinderblock line tight alleys with cobwebs of low-hung electrical cables. On the walls are layers of faded political posters—some for Hamas, some for Fatah, and still others for Saddam and even Hezbollah leader Seyid Hassan Nasrallah—marking the divisions among Palestinian resistance factions.

At the Shuhada, or martyrs’ mosque, a dozen men stood in paramilitary uniforms with walkie talkies, M4 Carbines, AK-47s, scopes, pistols, combat boots, long beards, and sunglasses. Unlike the hundreds of familiar, unkempt militiamen slinging old weapons in the camp, these men were professionals. They joined about two hundred others on the mosque’s second floor for a special prayer. They were burying Daghagh Rifai, a comrade in Usbat al Ansar, shot that morning by members of their rival faction, Fatah, after a string of attacks and retaliations. The men lined up with the others in orderly rows, placing their weapons on the floor between their legs. Some wore the salwar kameez typical in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a jihadist fashion statement. Following the prayer they gathered to gaze briefly at the corpse, wrapped in the green flag of Islam, not the Palestinian flag.

His comrades carried Daghagh’s body on an olive-colored military gurney; a procession of hundreds followed them around the corner and up an incline as camp residents watched from their doors or windows. When the silent marchers approached Lebanese soldiers at the camp’s gate on the way to the cemetery, the armed men stayed behind. They let relatives carry the body.

The new men in the camps were largely foreign jihadists, with the same weapons, tactics, and sectarian goals of Iraqi resistance fighters.

Ayn al Hilweh, the largest refugee camp in Lebanon, houses up to 75,000 people in 1.5 square kilometers of squalor. The camp is dominated by two main factions, the older, nationalist, and more secular Fatah, and Usbat al Ansar, which emerged in the 1990s. A balance of power keeps large-scale fighting from breaking out. But in the past decade the camps have seen a slow transformation: the waning of Yasser Arafat–style Palestinian nationalism represented by Fatah and other leftist nationalist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the rise of Islamist groups like Usbat al Ansar, mobilized around religious, not national, identity, influenced by global jihad, and, some believe, with direct links to al Qaeda.

The balance of power among these groups is fragile, and in a camp to the north it has tipped. As Daghagh was being buried, another group, Fatah al Islam, joined by members of Jund al Sham, an offshoot of Usbat al Ansar, was fighting the Lebanese army from the refugee camp of Nahr al Barid. Unlike Usbat al Ansar members, though, most of the fighters were not homegrown and not focused on liberating Palestine. They were largely foreign jihadists, with the same weapons, tactics, and sectarian goals of Iraqi resistance fighters, and were perhaps the first sign that the war in Iraq is spilling into the region.

The rest of Nir Rosen's article can be read in full in the current issue of Boston R

U.S. Elections Through Foreign Eyes

Of the presidential candidates I have interviewed, only George C Wallace, governor of Alabama, spoke the truth

The former president of Tanzania Julius Nyerere once asked, "Why haven't we all got a vote in the US election? Surely everyone with a TV set has earned that right just for enduring the merciless bombardment every four years." Having reported four presidential election campaigns, from the Kennedys to Nixon, Carter to Reagan, with their Zeppelins of platitudes, robotic followers and rictal wives, I can sympathise. But what difference would the vote make? Of the presidential candidates I have interviewed, only George C Wallace, governor of Alabama, spoke the truth. "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans," he said. And he was shot.

What struck me, living and working in the United States, was that presidential campaigns were a parody, entertaining and often grotesque. They are a ritual danse macabre of flags, balloons and bullshit, designed to camouflage a venal system based on money, power, human division and a culture of permanent war.

Travelling with Robert Kennedy in 1968 was eye-opening for me. To audiences of the poor, Kennedy would present himself as a saviour. The words "change" and "hope" were used relentlessly and cynically. For audiences of fearful whites, he would use racist codes, such as "law and order". With those opposed to the invasion of Vietnam, he would attack "putting American boys in the line of fire", but never say when he would withdraw them. That year (after Kennedy was assassinated), Richard Nixon used a version of the same, malleable speech to win the presidency. Thereafter, it was used successfully by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. Carter promised a foreign policy based on "human rights" - and practised the very opposite. Reagan's "freedom agenda" was a bloodbath in central America. Clinton "solemnly pledged" universal health care and tore down the last safety net of the Depression.

Nothing has changed. Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain's one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country. They all believe the US is not subject to the rules of human behaviour, because it is "a city upon a hill", regardless that most of humanity sees it as a monumental bully which, since 1945, has overthrown 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed 30 nations, destroying millions of lives.