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Archive: POLITICS >please note: some links may no longer be active.
About Those Awful Photos There are many bizarre aspects to Obama's decision to try to suppress evidence of America's detainee abuse, beginning with the newfound willingness of so many people to say: "We want our leaders to suppress information that reflects poorly on what our government does." One would think that it would be impossible to train a citizenry to be grateful to political officials for concealing evidence of government wrongdoing, or to accept the idea that evidence that reflects poorly on the conduct of political leaders should, for that reason alone, be covered-up: "Obama and his military commanders decide when it's best that we're kept in the dark, and I'm thankful when they keep from me things that reflect poorly on my government because I trust them to decide what I should and should not know." It's the fantasy of every political leader to have a citizenry willing to think that way ("I know it's totally unrealistic, but wouldn't it be great if we could actually convince people that it's for their own good when we cover-up evidence of government crimes?"). But what is ultimately even more amazing is the claim that suppressing these photographs is necessary to prevent an inflammation of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world generally and Afghanistan specifically. That claim is coming from the same people who are doing this: Up to 100 civilians, including women and children, are reported to have been killed in Afghanistan in potentially the single deadliest US airstrike since 2001. The news overshadowed a crucial first summit between the Afghan President and Barack Obama in Washington yesterday. . . . This week’s airstrikes took place in the Taleban-controlled area of Bala Baluk, in Farah province. US military officials in Kandahar said that the number of fatalities was nearer 30, but the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that the death toll was far higher. Jessica Barry, an ICRC representative, said that an international Red Cross team in Bala Baluk saw “dozens of bodies in each of the two locations” on Tuesday. “There were bodies, there were graves, and there were people burying bodies when we were there,” she said. “We do confirm women and children.” And doing this: The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team. In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by prisoners at the United States Air Force base at Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital. The Obama team determined that the Bush policy was correct: such prisoners cannot sue for their release. And this: American soldiers opened fire and killed a 12-year old boy after a grenade hit their convoy in Mosul on Thursday. . . . "We have every reason to believe that insurgents are paying children to conduct these attacks or assist the attackers in some capacity, undoubtedly placing the children in harm's way," a U. S. military spokesman wrote in an email on Saturday. But eyewitnesses said the boy, identified as Omar Musa Salih, was standing by the side of the road selling fruit juice - a common practice in Iraq -- and had nothing to do with the attack. And this: The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And this: In a federal court hearing in San Francisco this morning, a representative of the Justice Department said it would continue the Bush policy of invoking the 'state secrets' defense, which has been used in cases of rendition and torture. And this: The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday. . . . Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month .. We're currently occupying two Muslim countries. We're killing civilians regularly (as usual) -- with airplanes and unmanned sky robots. We're imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims with no trial, for years. Our government continues to insist that it has the power to abduct people -- virtually all Muslim -- ship them to Bagram, put them in cages, and keep them there indefinitely with no charges of any kind. We're denying our torture victims any ability to obtain justice for what was done to them by insisting that the way we tortured them is a "state secret" and that we need to "look to the future." We provide Israel with the arms and money used to do things like devastate Gaza. Independent of whether any or all of these policies are justifiable, the extent to which those actions "inflame anti-American sentiment" is impossible to overstate. And now, the very same people who are doing all of that are claiming that they must suppress evidence of our government's abuse of detainees because to allow the evidence to be seen would "inflame anti-American sentiment." It's not hard to believe that releasing the photos would do so to some extent -- people generally consider it a bad thing to torture and brutally abuse helpless detainees -- but compared to everything else we're doing, the notion that releasing or concealing these photos would make an appreciable difference in terms of how we're perceived in the Muslim world is laughable on its face. read Glenn Greenwald's full, devastating post at Salon.com
The AfGhan–Pakistan Mess There was something almost painful about watching President Barack Obama last week reprising a track from his predecessor’s Greatest Hits when he hosted the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just like Bush, Obama invited us to suspend well-grounded disbelief and imagine that Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari have the intent, much less the capability, to wage a successful war against the Taliban. Then again, there had been something painful even earlier about watching Obama proclaim Afghanistan as “the right war” and expanding the U.S. footprint there, reprising the Soviet experience of maintaining an islet of modernity in the capital while the countryside burns. It requires a spectacular leap of faith in a kind of superheroic American exceptionalism to imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan that occurred in November 2001 will end any differently from any previous invasion of that country. And it takes an elaborate exercise in self-delusion to avoid recognizing that the Taliban crisis in Pakistan is an effect of the war in Afghanistan, rather than a cause — and that Pakistan’s turmoil is unlikely to end before the U.S. winds down its campaign next door. The Obama Administration has linked the fate of its campaign in Afghanistan to its efforts to persuade Pakistan to fight the Taliban on its own soil. That was always a risky bet. Pakistan’s military swung into action last week — in its own inimitable way, relying on artillery as a counterinsurgency weapon, with predictable “collateral damage” and massive displacement of civilians — following weeks of hysteria in Washington about the country falling to the Taliban, nukes and all. That was nonsense, of course, and you’d have expected better from a Secretary of State who had once chided her President for his “inexperience” than to be babbling about the Taliban’s gains in Pakistan as representing a “mortal threat” to global security, demanding that the Pakistani army go to war on its own soil. read the rest of Tony Karon's intelligent analysis
Still Dangerous
(photo credit: APF) He scares me to death. I tell my kids, I say, "Look, if two cars pull up and one has a stranger and the other car has Dick Cheney, you get in the car with the stranger." – comedian Wanda Sykes speaking at the recent Washington correspondents' dinner
...don't dismiss Dick Cheney as a fading punch line, or as tragedy reprised as comedy. While the Obama administration has adopted large numbers of policies that directly contradict Cheney's positions, it would be a mistake to overlook Cheney's continued influence on the executive branch through the precedents set by the Bush administration. Among the former vice-president's most important legacies is increased government secrecy. Obama's Department of Justice continues to rely on an alleged "state secrets" privilege. It has thus tried to block lawsuits by victims who alleged they were kidnapped and tortured by U.S. intelligence even though they were innocent of wrongdoing, on the grounds that such trials would reveal state secrets. The same state secrets doctrine was used by Obama's DOJ in an attempt to block investigations of Bush-Cheney warrantless wiretaps. Likewise, the DOJ has attempted to block lawsuits seeking the release of Bush-era e-mails and to prevent prisoners held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan from appearing before a judge to challenge their imprisonment. Although the Obama administration is pledged to withdraw from Iraq militarily in a way that Cheney would never have contemplated, it is just as committed as Bush-Cheney to spreading good cheer about the new government in Baghdad. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the bombings by Iraqi guerrillas this spring the "last gasp" of "rejectionists," seeming to channel Cheney's allegation in 2005 that we were seeing the "last throes" of the insurgency. Red Washington and blue Washington both want to tell us stories about how Iraq will be OK and is just bedeviled by a few unreasoning malcontents who are on their last legs. On a trip to Afghanistan in 2004, Cheney told U.S. troops, "Your children and my grandchildren will live in freedom tomorrow because of what you're doing today." He warned them of continuing threats there, however, saying, "Our coalition still has important work to do." He added, "Freedom still has enemies here in Afghanistan. And you are here to make those enemies miserable." Obama has, likewise, tied the establishment of a stable government in Afghanistan to U.S. national security, and pledged to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida (even though there does not appear to be any significant al-Qaida in Afghanistan anymore). Both Cheney and Obama tend to amalgamate al-Qaida (a small, mainly Arab, international terrorist organization) to the Taliban (a form of Pushtun fundamentalist nationalism with local concerns). Cheney's war in Afghanistan envisaged no end, and neither, apparently, does Obama's. Juan Cole's full piece can be read at Salon.com
When Actions and Words Collide By choosing Cairo, Egypt as the platform for his long awaited address to the global Muslim community, President Barack Obama predictably leans on a reliable dictatorship suffocating a country that is teetering toward religious and political irrelevance. Indeed, modern Egypt resembles its ubiquitous tourist attraction, the Sphinx, the symbolic temple guardian adorned with a human head on a prostrate lion. Similarly, the near-30-year, brutal autocracy of Hosni Mubarak weighs heavily on the immobilised body of an exasperated, stifled and proud populace who've wearily observed their country, a former beacon for Arab nationalism, transformed into a loyal watchdog and stooge for anti-democratic, "pro-western" policies. Perhaps Turkey, which Obama visited last month, served as a more ideal and dynamic location due to its successful marriage of secular democracy and Islam, as evidenced by the election of the AKP party, a moderate, pro-western political party with Islamic leanings. Or Obama could have chosen Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation in the world, which recently held free elections and whose citizens roundly rejected rightwing, deeply conservative Islamic parties in favor of non-sectarianism and moderation. Obama's speech in Cairo on June will mark the third time he has addressed the Muslim world, seeking partnership and conciliation with Muslims jaded by George Bush's unrelentingly belligerent and humiliating "war on terror" policies and his divisive, poisonous rhetoric. In his first major interview to Al-Arabiya, Obama proclaimed: "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy." Yet, Obama's choice of Egypt is an implicit endorsement and validation of Mubarak's dictatorship, and it reiterates the oft-spoken but albeit true cliché in the Muslim world that US merely covets selfish policy interests instead of democratization, autonomy and self determination by and for the Arab and Muslim people. read the rest of Wajahat Ali's piece in Counterpunch
The Crux of the Matter In my view, the central problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the statelessness of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in their diaspora, the continued military occupation or blockade by the Israelis, and the rapid expansion of Israeli colonies, which are usurping Palestinian land and rights. Until the statelessness of the Palestinians is understood and seen as the central problem that it is, there can be no real progress on the issues. Statelessness was an attribute of slaves in premodern times. The Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were the primary victims of the crime of stripping people of their citizenship in a state. It is monstrous that Palestinians should be stateless all these decades after 1948. Make no mistake; it is Israel that deprived them of statehood, which the 1939 British White Paper pledged to them, and which other League of Nations Mandates, such as French Syria and Lebanon and British Iraq, achieved. A stateless person ultimately has no rights, since it is states that guarantee rights. A stateless person may be robbed, raped, and semetimes even killed with impunity. Stateless children are often deprived of schooling. Since the property of the stateless is ambiguous with regard to its legal status, the stateless are at risk for extreme poverty. The contemporary world is a world of states, and falling between the cracks because you lack citizenship in any state is a guarantee of marginality and oppression. Apologists try to shift the blame for Palestinian statelessness from Israel to someone else. But it won't work. The original tort of derailing Palestinian independence was Israel's, and Israel has been the main force preventing the declaration of a Palestinian state, so it is Israel that must step up here. Other countries cannot be expected to solve a problem created by the Israelis, nor do most of the countries in the region havethe economic efflorescence or governmental stability to do so. It seems obvious what needs to be done to end Palestinian statelessness. If a Palestinian state isn't created in short order, the world is in for decades of Apartheid and political decay and consequent trouble, including terrorism and further wars. At the end of this process likely Israel will be forced to absorb the Palestinians as its own citizens, i.e. you end up with a one-state solution. The reason that there is more talk about the latter now is that it does at least resolve the central problem, of Palestinian statelessness, a problem that cannot be solved in any other way once a Palestinian state is forestalled by the massive Israeli colonization of the West Bank. (Actually I should say "Israeli and American," since a third of the Israeli squatters in the West Bank are Americans). more from Juan Cole
The Need for Market Discipline Joseph Schumpeter famously argued that the essence of capitalism was creative destruction, by which new economic structures are born from the rubble of older ones. The government stress tests on the 19 largest US banks, the results of which are due be announced on Thursday, could have facilitated this process. The opportunity looks likely to be missed. The tests, which measure how viable banks are under adverse economic conditions, have no “failed” category, even if as many as 10 are reported to need additional capital. But, given that the economic environment already reflects the tests’ worst-case scenario and that recent estimates by the International Monetary Fund of financial sector losses have doubled in six months, the stress test results will not be credibly interpreted as a sign of bank health. Instead, market participants will conclude that banks requiring extra capital have, in fact, failed. As a result, these institutions will not be able to raise outside capital and will immediately require government help. Once again, the question will be how the near-insolvent banks can be kept afloat, to avoid systemic risk. But the question we really should be asking is: why keep insolvent banks afloat? We believe there is no convincing answer; we should instead find ways to manage the systemic risk of bank failures. Schumpeter’s biggest fear was that creative destruction would lead capitalism to collapse from within, because society would not be able to handle the chaos. He was right to be afraid. The response of governments worldwide to the financial crisis has been to give the structure of private profit-taking an ever-growing scaffolding of socialised risk. Trillions of dollars have been thrown at the system, just so that we can avoid the natural process of creative destruction that would take down these institutions’ creditors. Why shouldn’t the creditors bear the losses? read the rest of Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini's piece in the Financial Times
Not So Complex The current craze in DC policy circles is to create a “systematic risk regulator” to make sure that the country never experiences another economic crisis like the current one. This push is part of a cover-up of what really went wrong and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problem that led to this financial and economic collapse. The key fact that everyone must always remember is that the story of the collapse was not complex. We did not need great minds sifting through endless reams of data and running incredibly complex computer simulations to discover the underlying problem in the economy. We just needed some people who understood the sort of arithmetic that most of us learned in 3rd grade. If the people at the Fed, the Treasury, and in other key positions had mastered arithmetic, and were prepared to act on their knowledge, they would have taken steps to stem the growth of the housing bubble. They would have prevented the bubble from growing to the point where its inevitable collapse would bring down both the U.S. economy and the world economy. Just to repeat the basic facts: house prices began to diverge sharply from a 100-year long trend in the mid-90s as wealth created by the stock bubble began to exert upward pressure on real estate prices. After having tracked the overall inflation rate for 100 years, house prices were substantially outpacing inflation. There was no remotely plausible explanation on either the supply or demand side for the run-up in house prices. Income growth was good, but not extraordinary in the late 90s. In the current decade, incomes actually fell slightly after adjusting for inflation. On the supply side, we built houses at near record rates in 2002-2006 indicating that there were no substantial constraints on building. As another tell-tale sign that we were seeing a bubble, inflation-adjusted rents were not rising, indicating that there was no underlying shortage of housing driving up prices. Finally, housing vacancy rates were hitting record levels as early as 2002. At their peak in 2006, inflation-adjusted house prices had risen by more than 70 percent, creating over $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth. There was no way that the loss of this much wealth ($110,000 for every homeowner) would not lead to a severe a recession and create the sort of financial crisis that we are now seeing. In normal times houses are highly leveraged with down payments rarely exceeding 20 percent. In the bubble years, it was common for homebuyers to borrow the full value of their home and sometimes even a few percent more. It should have been obvious to any serious economist or financial analyst that when the bubble burst, there would be hell to pay in the financial sector. more from one of the few high-profile economists who gets it, Dean Baker
Conflict? What Conflict? There is just no way that this ought to have been allowed: "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York shaped Washington's response to the financial crisis late last year, which buoyed Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms. Goldman received speedy approval to become a bank holding company in September and a $10 billion capital injection soon after. During that time, the New York Fed's chairman, Stephen Friedman, sat on Goldman's board and had a large holding in Goldman stock, which because of Goldman's new status as a bank holding company was a violation of Federal Reserve policy. The New York Fed asked for a waiver, which, after about 2½ months, the Fed granted. While it was weighing the request, Mr. Friedman bought 37,300 more Goldman shares in December. They've since risen $1.7 million in value. (...) Mr. Friedman, who once ran Goldman, says none of these events involved any conflicts. He says his job as chairman of the New York Fed isn't a policy-making one, that he didn't consider his purchases of more Goldman shares to conflict with Fed policy, and bought shares because they were very cheap." Whatever Mr. Friedman might think, having a director of the New York Fed serving on the board of Goldman Sachs, and owning 98,600 shares of Goldman Sachs, became an obvious conflict of interest once Goldman became a bank holding company. The New York Fed regulates banks and bank holding companies headquartered in New York, New Jersey, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, and enforces laws governing them, in addition to doing various other things that can affect their share prices. Goldman Sachs is a bank holding company headquartered in New York. I'm not sure how a conflict of interest could be more obvious than that. more from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings
Free the Torturers – and The Rapists I am over the moon about President Obama's recent publication of the Bush administration's torture memos. They come as a breath of fresh air for those of us banged up in Cook County Jail. Obama's announcement that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past" is the most reassuring news most of us here have heard in a long time. Speaking as a multiple rapist and serial killer, I welcome the president's clear view that "this is a time for reflection, not retribution". Absolutely. We have indeed been "through a dark and painful chapter in our history" (in my case 17 years in the super-secure lockdown facility). Now people may say that it is not safe to let me out, especially as I have never expressed any remorse for my actions and indeed have every intention of reoffending as soon as I possibly can. But then has ex-vice president Dick Cheney ever expressed any remorse for killing a million or more Iraqis? Has he ever said that he wouldn't torture more people all over again if he had half the chance? Quite the reverse. He has gone on record trumpeting how successful his torture policies have been. "I find it a little bit disturbing," Cheney said on Fox News, that "they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort … There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity." Speaking for myself and my fellow sadists here in Cook County, I cannot tell you how cheered we all were by Cheney's defence of his torture techniques. read Terry Jones' (of Monty Python fame) full piece in The Guardian (U.K.)
Blowback Matthew Alexander, former senior military interrogator (via Andrew Sullivan): As a senior interrogator in Iraq, I conducted more than three hundred interrogations and monitored more than one thousand. I heard numerous foreign fighters state that the reason they came to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Our policy of torture and abuse is Al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool. These same insurgents have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of our troops in Iraq, not to mention Iraqi civilians. Torture and abuse are counterproductive in the long term and, ultimately, cost us more lives than they save. The current debate about torture focuses on two broad considerations: the moral and the practical. On the latter, I haven't seen much discussion about the issue of blowback. I think if I or a member of my family was tortured/abused, I would dedicate the rest of my life to revenge -- against both the individuals and the country or cause they represented. I wonder how many of our victims or their relatives have made such a vow. When you think about how many prisoners went through Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and the other detention sites, then multiply that by the number of brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, kids and cousins, you're talking about many thousands of potential avengers. As the means of mass destruction get ever-smaller and more accessible to individuals via vials and backpacks, blowback becomes an even more important issue. It only takes one person from the countless lives that have been damaged or destroyed during the long occupation of two countries. Factor in a culture that puts a premium on honor and grudges and revenge and generally takes a long view of history, and we might not find out for many years exactly how much danger we've put ourselves in. reprinted from The Cunning Realist blog
How The Finance Industry Captured Government ONE THING YOU learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card. The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed. Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea’s 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit. But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund’s economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out. No, the real concern of the fund’s senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis. Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise. read the rest of Simon Johnson's excellent, illuminating article in The Atlantic
A Problem With ConsEnsus Seeking? Let's say that all of the sudden, due to the catastrophic onset of a once-in-a-generation crisis, it no longer becomes possible to deny that the elites at the head of a societally important institution have a record of rampant violation not just of the law, but of our most cherished American ideals. Do you: A) acknowledge that the institution itself has failed in fundamental ways, name and prosecute the true bad apples to the fullest extent of the law, and overhaul the system in a way that essentially wipes out many of the vested interests that have kept it going; or B) attempt to patch up the existing system by agreeing to keep up various now-discredited fictions and illusions in exchange for a few hard concessions from the elites, all in the hope that the whole monstrosity can limp along until the crisis has passed, at which point it can recover and all of the elites can go back to business as usual Obama is, by nature, a consensus seeker with inhuman levels of ambition and talent, which means that on both torture and on Wall St. bankster criminality he instinctively reaches for B), which is the (impossible) option that attempts to please everybody at least a little. But what we really need is A), which would seem to someone like Obama to be the most dangerous option, necessitating as it does the social trauma of genuine collective soul searching. You'd have to be able to gamble that America can tolerate this kind of huge rupture -- like the lancing of a boil -- and come through it all intact, and Obama is not a gambler. from JS in the reader's comments at TPM
About That "Successful" Surge
The brief film is deeply disturbing, even in a country famed for its al-Qaeda beheading videos and sniper snuff movies. The young woman, evidently drugged, vomiting and occasionally calling for her mother, tries weakly to stop the grinning man in a white T-shirt and boxer shorts from pulling off her underwear. She fails. The man, instructing the cameraman to shoot the scene with his mobile phone from various angles, rapes her. That is not the only shocking aspect of the film, according to Jassim al-Bidawi, former Mayor of Fallujah and now a human rights activist. He has identified the rapist as an Iraqi police officer, and says that the cameraman is one, too. They are thought to have drugged the woman as she visited her husband in a detention centre in Ramadi. Since the rapist's uncle is a senior policeman in the city the attacker is all but untouchable, Mr al-Bidawi says. In the desperate rush to drag Iraq back from civil war, sweeping powers were granted to its new security forces. Human rights workers, MPs and American officials now believe that they are all too often a law unto themselves: admired when they defeat terrorists but also feared for their widespread abuse of power. In this vast and largely unaccountable security apparatus, with almost a million people in uniform, corruption is rife. One of the most common ploys is to arrest innocent people and then charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars for them to be released. read the rest of James Hider's piece in The Times (U.K.)
So Much for Cheney's Most Recent Hogwash FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned. One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use. It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence. We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives. There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process. more from Ali Soufan, former F.B.I. supervisory special agent, in the NY Times
A William Lind Retrospective on War The 300th column in this series offers a useful point from which to look back. Events since On War #1 have, I think, generally validated the Four Generations framework. Iraq was not a “cakewalk,” nor did our initial invasion of Afghanistan “eviscerate” the Taliban. Mullah Omar proved the better prophet; before the first American bomb fell, he said, “We will lose the government and lose Kabul, but it doesn’t matter.” What lessons might we draw from the previous 299 On War columns and their interplay with the larger world? Three seem to me to be of overriding importance. 1. So long as America pursues an offensive grand strategy, Fourth Generation war will ensure her defeat. The reason is Martin van Creveld’s concept of the power of weakness and its intimate relationship with legitimacy. In a Fourth Generation world, legitimacy is the coin of the realm. At root, Fourth Generation war is a contest for legitimacy between the state and a wide variety of non-state primary loyalties. American power lacks legitimacy because, on the physical level, it is so overwhelming. That is the power of weakness: anyone who stands up to the American military becomes a hero. In turn, any state the American military supports loses its legitimacy. The more places America intervenes militarily, the more states lose their legitimacy, to the advantage of Fourth Generation, non-state entities. In effect, we have a reverse Midas touch. Only a defensive grand strategy, where we mind our own business and leave other states to mind theirs, can break us out of this downward spiral. 2. Second Generation militaries cannot win Fourth Generation wars. Second Generation armed forces, such as those of the United States, fight by putting firepower on targets. This wins at the physical level, but as it does so it brings defeat at the moral level, which is decisive in 4GW. The best current example is Pakistan, where the combination of Predator strikes and arm-twisting of the Pakistani government has undermined the legitimacy of the Pakistani state. That state now stands on the verge of disintegration, which would give al Qaeda and other Islamic 4GW forces the greatest victory they could imagine. The image on Osama’s cave wall should be a Predator, with the title, “Our best weapon.” 3. There is no chance America will adopt a defensive grand strategy or reform its military to move from the Second to the Third Generation - a necessary though not sufficient step in confronting 4GW - so long as the current Washington Establishment remains in power. That Establishment is drunk on hubris, cut off from the world beyond court politics and thoroughly corrupted by Pentagon “business as usual,” which knows how to buy whatever political support it needs. Like all establishments, it sees any real change as a threat, to be avoided. So long as it reigns, nothing will change. What are the implications of these three observations? Militarily, they portend continued failure and defeat. We will fail to get out of Iraq before the next phase of that war begins, or, worse, an Israeli attack on Iran costs us the army we have in Iraq. We will be defeated in Afghanistan, because we will refuse to scale our strategic objectives to what is possible and we will continue to alienate the population with our firepower-intensive way of war. We will push Pakistan over the brink into disintegration, which will be a strategic catastrophe of the first order. We will ignore the disintegration of the state in Mexico, while importing Mexico’s disorder through our ineffective border controls. We will not even be able to stop Somali pirates. What does it say about us when the whole nation rejoices because the U.S. Navy, the most powerful navy on earth, defeated four Somali teenagers? William Lind is, along with John Robb (whose work I have excerpted many times), one of the most important cutting-edge, strategic military thinkers in the U.S. Both men continue to provocatively question the status quo, and their work strikes me as being very valuable. The rest of Lind's piece can be read here
Looking Forward, and All of that Obama has famously been quoted about the importance of looking forward, rather than dwelling on the past. Well, it's supremely appropriate, then, to point out that the Bush administration and its criminaly complicit lawyers adopted the very same, convenient, yet ultimately disastrous blinkered outlook. WASHINGTON — The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture? In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned. This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate. According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans. Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding. The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia. more from the NY Times
Obama's Excusal of Torture On Thursday, April 16, in response to a lawsuit initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union, President Barack Obama released four redacted Office of Legal Counsel memoranda from the Bush administration to the CIA justifying torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. (The CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were modeled on the Chinese Communist coercive brainwashing program against Americans captured in the Korean War to induce false confessions.) Each memorandum hedged its conclusions with substantial caveats, such as the absence of judicial precedents and concessions that reasonable persons could dispute their exculpatory conclusions. The memoranda were later renounced as bad law. Obama has set a precedent of whitewashing White House lawlessness in the name of national security that will lie around like a loaded weapon ready for resurrection by any commander in chief eager to appear “tough on terrorism” and to exploit popular fear. Obama, however, promised non-prosecution of all CIA personnel complicit in torture who relied on the flawed OLC advice. He further pledged to defend them from criminal investigations initiated by foreign jurisdictions and to indemnify them if they are held liable in damages for constitutional or statutory wrongdoing. Obama is similarly defending former OLC Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo against a torture suit initiated by Jose Padilla, convicted of terrorism in 2007 after the government dropped charges that as an “enemy combatant” he plotted to set off a “dirty bomb.” The Yoo memoranda on torture have also been renounced and discredited. Obama also promised to follow the Bush-Cheney duumvirate in claiming secrecy for alleged national-security secrets because “the world is dangerous.” Indeed, he did not voluntarily initiate release of the four OLC memoranda, but responded to a Freedom of Information Act suit. And President Obama has echoed the Bush-Cheney state secrets arguments to block lawsuits challenging the legality of spying on Americans without warrants in contravention of the Fourth Amendment or federal law, or seeking damages for torture. Moreover, Obama has been unable to recite a single instance where transparency proved more dangerous to the liberties of the American people than has secrecy, the birthplace of COINTELPRO, Shamrock, Minaret, Abu Ghraib, and torture of 14 “High Value al Qaeda” detainees in secret prisons abroad (according to the International Committee of the Red Cross). On the same day Obama was excusing torture and promising more secret government, The New York Times published a front-page story disclosing the National Security Agency’s apparently illegal interceptions of emails and phone calls of American citizens in the United States without individual judicial warrants. The interceptions exceeded even the sweeping group warrant authority to spy on persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States that were authorized in amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act enacted last September. President Obama has declined to sanction a single official implicated in the latest apparent violation of a statute he supported as a senator. He has similarly chosen non-prosecution for former President Bush, former Vice President Cheney, and high-level officials at the NSA and CIA who authorized more than five years of FISA felonies: namely, warrantless NSA spying on American citizens on American soil in flagrant contravention of FISA, about which more anon. The evidence is now undeniable. President Barack Obama is flouting his unflagging constitutional obligation enshrined in Article II, Section 3 to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He is also reneging on his signature campaign promise to restore the rule of law, transparency, and accountability to the White House. He is displaying the psychology of an arrogant empire as opposed to a modest republic in continuing and escalating the Bush-Cheney duumvirate’s global and perpetual war against international terrorism heedless of foreign sovereignties or the lives of civilians. the rest of former Reagan official Bruce Fein's piece can be read here
the (Lying) Tradition Continues With the Obama administration publicly stating its desire to find a diplomatic solution to Western concerns over Iran's nuclear program, one would think top White House and State Department officials would go to great pains to ensure their statements about Iran comport with the facts. And with Admiral Dennis Blair, the top intelligence official in the U.S., stating Iran has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons and in fact suspended years ago any weapons work it may have engaged, one would think this fact-checking task would be made that much easier. One would think. The reality? Obama's chief spokesperson and his top foreign policy officials have shown a remarkable lack of concern for the truth, choosing to repeat the Bush administration line about Iran pursuing or developing nuclear weapons despite the fact there is no evidence they are doing so -- and contrary to the view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran suspended any weapons-related work back in 2003. Just this week, the administration's most prolific liar on Iran, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during a joint press conference with the prime minister of Haiti stated: We will continue to work with our allies to make it clear that Iran cannot continue to pursue nuclear weapons. We will stand behind the sanctions that have already been implemented, and we will look for new ways to extend collective actions vis-a-vis Iran's nuclear program. Meanwhile, a day earlier White House spokesman Robert Gibbs discussed the Obama administration's efforts to halt Iran's "pursuit of its illicit nuclear program": As you all know, Bill Burns went last week to meet with the P-5 plus one, to discuss the next steps involved. There was unity among the participants about the strategy moving forward, and that the goal remains very clear. The goal is, and remains, a suspension of Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program. more from Charles Davis
Exactly Correct George Orwell mistakenly assumed that obfuscating language designed to glorify criminal acts would be invented and normalized by government. At least in the U.S., that function is outsourced to government's most loyal and eager servants: establishment journalists. A principal reason why the government has been able to engage with impunity in the extremism and lawlessness of the last decade is because most journalists refuse even to describe it as what it is. – Glenn Greenwald
The Make-Believe Economy The rally in the stock market will not fix the banking system, slow the crash in housing, patch-together tattered household balance sheets, repair failing industries or reverse the precipitous decline in consumer confidence. The rising stock market merely indicates that speculators are back in business taking advantage of the Fed's lavish capital injections which are propelling equities into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the unemployment lines continue to swell, the food banks to run dry and the homeless shelters to burst at the seams. So far, $12 trillion has been pumped into the financial system while less than $450 billion fiscal stimulus has gone to the "real" economy where workers are struggling just to keep food on the table. The Fed's priorities are directed at the investor class not the average working Joe. Bernanke is trying to keep Wall Street happy by goosing asset values with cheap capital, but the increases to the money supply are putting more downward pressure on the dollar. The Fed chief has also begun purchasing US Treasuries, which is the equivalent of writing a check to oneself to cover an overdraft in one's own account. This is the kind of gibberish that passes as sound economic policy. The Fed is incapable if fixing the problem because the Fed is the problem. Last week, the market shot up on news that Wells Fargo's first quarter net income rose 50 per cent to $3 billion, pushing the stock up 30 percent in one session. The financial media celebrated the triumph in typical manner by congratulating everyone and announcing that a market "bottom" had been reached. The news on Wells Fargo was repeated ad nauseam for two days even though everyone knows that the big banks are holding hundreds of billions in mortgage-backed assets which are marked way above their true value and that gigantic losses are forthcoming. Naturally, the skeptics were kept off-camera or lambasted by toothy anchors as doomsayers and Cassandras. Regrettably, creative accounting and media spin can only work for so long. Eventually the banks will have to write down their losses and raise more capital. Wells Fargo slipped the noose this time, but next time might not be so lucky. more from the sobering Mike Whitney at CounterPunch
The Malignancy Spreads Just in case some of you still have romantic notions about the BBC being different from the corrupt, dishonest, mainstream U.S. media, Robert Fisk will disabuse you: The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest. The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth. Let's go step by step through this pitiful business. Zionism does indeed instinctively "push out" the frontier. The new Israeli wall – longer and taller than the Berlin Wall although the BBC management cowards still insist its reporters call it a "security barrier" (the translation of the East German phrase for the Berlin Wall) – has gobbled up another 10 per cent of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" that Arafat/Mahmoud Abbas were supposed to negotiate. Bowen's own brilliant book on the 1967 war, Six Days, makes this land-grab perfectly clear. Anyone who has read the history of Zionism will be aware that its aim was to dispossess the Arabs and take over Palestine. Why else are Zionists continuing to steal Arab land for Jews, and Jews only, against all international law? Who for a moment can contradict that this defies everyone's interpretation of international law except its own? Even when the International Court in The Hague stated that the Israeli wall was illegal – the BBC, at this point, was calling it a "fence"! – Israel simply claimed that the court was wrong. UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 called upon Israel to withdraw its forces from territories that it occupied in the 1967 war – and it refused to do so. The Americans stated for more than 30 years that Israel's actions were illegal – until the gutless George Bush accepted Israel had the right to keep these illegally held territories. Thus the BBC Trust – how cruel that word "trust" now becomes – has gone along with the Bush definition of Israel's new boundaries (inside Arab land, of course). The BBC's preposterous committee claims that Bowen's article "breached the rules [sic] on impartiality" because "readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war". Well, yes of course. Because I suppose the BBC believes that Israel's claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another "sensible" view of the war. The BBC Trust – and I now find this word nauseous each time I tap it on my laptop – says that Bowen didn't give evidence to prove the Jewish settlement at Har Homa was illegal. But the US authorities said so, right from the start. Our own late foreign secretary, Robin Cook – under screamed abuse from Zionists when he visited the settlement– said the same thing. The fact that the BBC Trust uses the Hebrew name for Har Homa – not the original Arab name, Jebel Abu Ghoneim – shows just how far it is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which so diligently abused Bowen. Haaretz gave considerable space to the BBC's findings yesterday. I'm not surprised. But why is it that Haaretz's top correspondents – Amira Hass and Gideon Levy – write so much more courageously about the human rights abuses of Israeli troops (and war crimes) than the BBC has ever dared to do? Whenever I'm asked by lecture audiences around the world if they should trust the BBC, I tell them to trust Amira and Gideon more than they should ever believe in the wretched broadcasting station. I'm afraid it's the same old story. If you allow yourself to bow down before those who wish you to deviate from the truth, you will stay on your knees forever. read the rest of Fisk's piece in The Independent (U.K.)
About Those "Surgical Strikes" Air strikes and artillery barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the dead. Analysis carried out for the research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 per cent of those killed in air raids by the US-led coalition were children and 46 per cent were women. Fatalities caused by mortars, used by American and Iraqi government forces as well as insurgents, were 42 per cent children and 44 per cent women. Twelve per cent of those killed by suicide bombings, mainly the tool of militant Sunni groups, were children and 16 per cent were females. One in five (21 per cent) of those killed by car bombs, used by both Shia and Sunni fighters, was a child; one in four (28 per cent) was a woman. The figures, compiled by academics at King’s College and Royal Holloway, University of London, show that hi-tech weaponry has caused lethal damage to those in the population who would be furthest away from the conflict. more from The Independent (U.K.)
Taleb's Rules Nassim Taleb is the now famous author of The Black Swan, who also predicted the current financial crisis on the basis of his theories described in the book. He has also developed a brilliant set of 'rules' for developing a more resilient financial system. Here are the first few: What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious. read the rest at John Robb's Global Guerrillas
About That Toxic Asset Pricing... The government's official view that toxic assets are incorrectly priced due to illiquidity "fire sales" is wrong, a new study by Harvard and Princeton finance professors suggests. You can read the whole paper by Harvard's Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford and Princeton's Jakub Jurek below. The striking conclusion is that the low prices of toxic assets actually reflect the fundamentals, rather than being driven by an illiquidity discount. "The analysis of this paper suggests that recent credit market prices are actually highly consistent with fundamentals. A structural framework confirms that bonds and credit derivatives should have experienced a significant repricing in 2008 as the economic outlook darkened and volatility increased. The analysis also confirms that severe mispricing existed in the structured credit tranches prior to the crisis and that a large part of the dramatic rise in spreads has been the elimination of this mispricing." This contrasts sharply with the analysis that underlies most of the financial rescue programs launched by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. The white paper released to support the Private-Public Investment Partnerships, the program that seeks to encourage private firms to buy toxic assets with government subsidized loans, took the opposite point of view. "Troubled real estate-related assets comprised of legacy loans and securities, are at the center of the problems currently impacting the U.S. financial system...The resulting need to reduce risk triggered a wide-scale deleveraging in these markets and led to fire sales," the Treasury and the Fed claimed. more from John Carney
Bernanke’s Financial Rescue Plan The recent 22 percent uptick in the stock market is a sign that Bernanke’s monetary stimulus is beginning to kick in. Oil rose from $33 per barrel to over $50 in little more than a month. Other raw materials have followed oil. The dollar has plunged every time the stock market has gone up. These are all signs of nascent inflation which is likely to accelerate after the current period of deleveraging ends. Food and energy prices will rise sharply and the dollar will come under greater and greater pressure. This is Bernanke’s nightmare scenario: a surge in inflation that forces him to raise rates and kill the recovery before it ever begins. The Fed’s unwillingness to be proactive in dealing with credit bubbles has created a situation where there are no easy answers or pain-free solutions. Bernanke’s approach to the crisis has been wrongheaded from the get-go. It makes no sense to commit nearly $13 trillion to prop up a grossly oversized financial system while providing less than $900 billion stimulus for the real economy. The whole plan is upside-down. It is consumers, homeowners and workers that create demand (consumer spending is 72 percent of GDP) and yet, they’ve been left to twist in the wind while the bulk of the resources have been directed to financial speculators who are responsible for the mess. Mike Whitney provides more (typically) excellent analysis at Dissident Voice And further damning analysis from Mike Shedlock
Al Franken
Franken, the soon-to-be U.S. Senator from Minnesota, was, of course, a comedian for many years. His partner during the early stages of his career was Tom Davis, who recalls Al as a kid: "[His mother] Phoebe was a real estate agent. As an eleven-year-old home alone, Al answered the telephone. Apparently she was selling a house to the actor Clayton Moore, who was famous in the midfifties for his leading role in the popular television show The Lone Ranger. Now he was retiring to Minneapolis: Al: 'Hello?' "At thirteen, he earned money as a caddy at a country club golf course. One golfer was playing poorly and became cranky with his caddy. Golfer: 'You must be the worst caddy in the world.' via Delancy Place
Two Steps Forward, One Step back CHICAGO -- President Barack Obama’s speech to the Turkish Parliament on Monday, April 6, was another milestone in what appears to be his continuing attempt to steer the American ship of foreign policy in new directions. He made some important new statements and changes in style, while repeating some silly old bad habits and simplistic insults. If he intended to address the Islamic world and signal a more humble, realistic policy towards majority-Islamic countries, he gets high marks for intent and execution, and medium marks for substance. He reminded us once again of three linked issues: The United States has serious problems with some Muslims and some quarters of the Islamic world; it is trying to acknowledge and redress those problems with a refreshing combination of courage, humility and honesty; but, it still suffers deep structural flaws in achieving this worthy goal. The most significant thing about Obama’s speech in my view was the disparity between how he addressed all the tough issues that matter to Turkey -- EU admission, Kurdish relations, Armenian history, Cyprus, democracy consolidation, and South Caucasus states -- while only offering soft rhetoric and hollow generalities when speaking about American relations with the Islamic world. Specificity reflects seriousness, while generalities reflect hesitation. Obama should be commended and applauded for tackling these issues to begin with, but he should be chided for resorting to simplistic nothingness in four areas. The first is his meaningless statement that “the US is not at war with Islam”. He might be surprised to learn that neither is Islam at war with America or Americans. He would be much better advised to stick to the facts by noting that a very small number of criminal Muslims attacked the United States, and his country is justifiably fighting them and trying to bring them to justice. By addressing “Islam” as a protagonist, he recklessly transforms specific quarrels into civilizational, religious and cultural battles. His second mistake is to speak glowingly of respect for the Islamic faith and all it has contributed to the world, while always counter-framing his words in the context of terrorism and warfare. He should instead speak of the rights that individuals and countries expect to enjoy in a world governed by law and mutual commitments to sovereign rights. Muslims don’t need an American president or anyone else to tell them they have a fine cultural heritage; they know that intuitively, and simply by living their faith and values. They want to hear from the leader of the world’s strongest nation that he respects the rule of law that is applied equally, fairly and consistently to all countries, regardless of their religion. The third mistake he makes -- a genetic weakness for all American officials, it seems -- is that he frames the tensions between some Muslims and some Americans in terms of religious differences, rather than acknowledging that most criticisms of the United States in the Arab-Asian heartland of Islam reflect anger with US foreign policies. The problem is not faith, it’s foreign policy – specifically American policies supporting Israel or supporting dictators and autocrats throughout the Arab-Asian region. By evading these core problems, he ends up slightly comically and unsuccessfully flailing for substitute issues to address. The fourth weakness in Obama’s speech and his general approach is to single out Iran as a potential menace for allegedly wanting to develop nuclear weapons, and chiding Iranian leaders like a school teacher talks to children. This totally negates and sidelines his remarks about wanting to deal with Iran on the basis of “mutual interests and mutual respect.” If that were the case, he would speak instead about working with Iran and others to implement all relevant international laws and regulations to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, while affirming every country’s right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. more from Rami G. Khouri at Agence Global
Visionary? As regular readers know, I have been plenty critical of Obama during his early weeks in office. But credit where it is due, and I'll let Juan Cole lead in... Barack Obama continues to shake up the world with his new ideas, demonstrating himself again among the more creative and bold leaders the world has seen in the past half-century. In Prague on Sunday, he called for the US to lead a drive to abolish nuclear weapons: The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. No nuclear war was fought between the United States and the Soviet Union, but generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light. Cities like Prague that had existed for centuries would have ceased to exist. Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black markets trade in nuclear secrets and materials. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered in a global nonproliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point when the center cannot hold. . . Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st. And as a nuclear power -as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it. So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. Cole's Informed Comment On the other hand, Chris Floyd has quite a different take
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