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To Avoid Old Mistakes, Obama Should Listen to New Voices
Barack Obama spent three months of intensive consultation to arrive at this foregone conclusion: The US will remain in Afghanistan for an indefinite period of time.
And for what purpose? One of the most eloquent speakers to enter the White House could not say.
The New York Times looked back over the past three months.
To reach his decision, the president visited Arlington National Cemetery, wandering “among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.”
The Times insists it got this story after interviews with many participants in the consultation, checking and cross-checking the responses.
I don’t know about you, but I see the fine hand of some skilled spinners at work in the Times defense of yet another war. It makes me feel terribly sad to realize that Karl Rove has not gone, he has just been reborn. A Texas Svengali has transformed himself into team of Chicago-honed Svenalgis.
Here is a sample of some of their best work, shaped for Peter Baker of the New York Times http://tinyurl.com/ycjzqou
How much their sacrifice weighed on [the president] that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.
One participant willing to speak on the record was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who told one interviewer:
“The president welcomed a full range of opinions and invited contrary points of view,” . “And I thought it was a very healthy experience because people took him up on it. And one thing we didn’t want — to have a decision made and then have somebody say, ‘Oh, by the way.’ No, come forward now or forever hold your peace.”
But this was not a wedding ceremony open to everyone. With the possible exception of Vice President Joe Biden, the guests were all singing pretty much from the same page.
One guest who had not been invited was Boston University History Professor Andrew Bacevich, and retired US Army colonel.
In an essay written before the troop increase was announced, Afghanistan – the Proxy War, Bacevich warned the American public against approving Obama’s embrace of the Afghanistan strategy proposed by his handpicked commander, General Stanley McChrystal. In Bacevich’s opinion, this was a strategy union that promised not change, but more, much more, of the same old.
On the Planetary Movement website,http://tinyurl.com/yfrd35s Bacevich argues that a series of troop increases would signal Obama’s embrace of the strategy that had earlier doomed the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush. Bacevich calls that strategy, “armed nation-building”.
Bacevich predicted that if Obama opted for a permanent presence in Afghanistan, which he has essentially done, he would embrace the Bush-Cheney doctrine of “open-ended war” responding to “violent jihadism”. Like Lyndon Johnson before him, Obama has decided he will confront the enemy by winning “the hearts and minds” of a people in whose hearts and minds there is no longing to grant anything but trouble to foreign power occupying their land with soldiers, drones and home invasions.
Bacevich warns that Obama is now in danger of becoming yet another warrior president. By choosing the McChrystal plan, he tells the world that the US national security policy will continue the policies employed in Vietnam and Iraq. The American global military presence will intervene any where, any time, when it decides it is in the best interest of the United States to do so.
The enemy now is “terrorism”. In Vietnam it was Communism. You might think, and I would, that this is the Obama-McChrystal version of the “Bush Doctrine” which Sarah Palin so famously could not explain in her campaign television interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson. (“What do you mean by that, Charlie?)
In laymen’s terms, though Charles Gibson did not put it this way, we are talking here about your basic empire-maintenance project that keeps the world safe for the latest edition of the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about when he left the White House.
The trouble with the empire maindtenance project is that it needs the agreement and the financial support of the folks at home whose young men and women are sent to distant lands for reasons not even the eloquent Barack Obama has been able to articulate.
What will those young men and women have to look forward to in Afghanistan? In addition to a rising American death toll and at a cost to the US tax payers, estimated at one million dollars a year for each US fighting man and woman, they can look forward to a future in a world of permanent bases surrounded by hostile, resentful citizens who will make life dangerous and miserable for them when they venture outside from those bases.
How do we know “permanent” is the correct term? AP writer Charles J. Hanley asked that question in the Arizona Daily Star in 2006, under this headline: http://www.azstarnet.com/news/120996 “Huge bases raise question: Is U.S. in Iraq to stay?” His story opens with these facts:
BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq — The concrete vanishes into the noonday glare, 2 million cubic feet of it, a mile-long slab that’s now the home of up to 120 U.S. helicopters, a “heli-park” as good as any back in the states.
At another giant base, al-Asad in Iraq’s western desert, the 17,000 troops and workers come and go in a kind of bustling American town, with a Burger King, a Pizza Hut and a car dealership, stop signs, traffic regulations and young bikers clogging the roads.
At a third hub down south, Tallil, they’re planning a new mess hall, one that will seat 6,000 hungry airmen and soldiers for chow.
And why do we need such a presence in countries like Iraq (currently) and Afghanistan (future)? We are now operating under the McCrystal-Obama doctrine, permanent military bases designed to fight “terrorists” who would do us harm.
Are these bases permanent? Are they examples of an empire hunkering down for the long run? What do you think? More from AP’s Charles J. Hanley:
“In 2005-06, Washington has authorized or proposed almost $1 billion for U.S. military construction in Iraq, as American forces consolidate at Balad, known as Anaconda, and a handful of other installations, big bases under the old regime.
They have already pulled out of 34 of the 110 bases they were holding last March, said Maj. Lee English of the U.S. command’s Base Working Group, planning the consolidation.
“The coalition forces are moving outside the cities while continuing to provide security support to the Iraqi security forces,” English said.
The latest budget also allots $39 million for new airfield lighting, air-traffic-control systems and upgrades allowing al-Asad to plug into the Iraqi electricity grid — a typical sign of a long-term base.”
Empire maintenance always follows the “pacification” of an occupied land. In Afghanistan this is sold to American tax payers as a vital necessity in order to find and eliminate what a senior US intelligence official recently told ABC news was approximately 100 Al Qaeda members remaining in Afghanistan.
(Think what an expenditure of that size could do to the Latin American drug cartels, whose daily shipments of illegal drugs into the US is an ongoing threat to America’s well being.)
Frank Rich noted in his New York Times column (December 6, 2009) that in his speech announcing the troop increase, Obama tried to sell his decision to the American people without admitting that the action lacks the commitment of its two most essential partners”, a corrupt and illegitimate Afghan government, and the American people, who do not support continued wars in distant lands.
What possible logic led Obama to embrace McChrystalism?
Rich writes that Obama’s speech failed to provide that logic. We are to fight a war to protect us from another attack by Al Qaeda, he asks?
We face a greater danger from security breaches at home than we do from from a second Al Qaeda 9/11 attack.
Rich points first to the White House “dinner crashers” who slipped by the Secret Service. Had they wanted to harm President Obama and his guests, they could have done so.
“This was the second time in a month — after the infinitely more alarming bloodbath at Fort Hood — that a supposedly impregnable bastion of post-9/11 American security was easily breached. Yes, the crashers are laughable celebrity wannabes, but there was nothing funny about what they accomplished on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Their ruse wasn’t “reality” television — it was reality, period, with no quotation marks. It was a symbolic indication (and, luckily, only symbolic) of how unbridled irrationality harnessed to sheer will, whether ludicrous in the crashers’ case or homicidal in the instance of the Fort Hood gunman, can penetrate even our most secure fortifications.”
We are waging a costly war in a distant land where the Taliban is no threat to our nation, while Washington gate crashers and a single homicidal Fort Hood army major easily penetrates a major military installation.
In an essay in the Catholic publication Commonweal, Andrew Bacevich http://tinyurl.com/yzoaf9l asks the question that in Washington “goes not only unanswered, but unasked: What is it about Afghanistan, a country that possesses nothing the US requires that could possibly justify such lavish attention?
“Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. As then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.”
In the Atlanta Constitution City Room, where I once worked, the story that came across the wire that we knew would never make it into the paper was something on the order of “Afghanistan officials race to site of train wreck.” Too far away, the editors would assume, and who ever heard of Afghanistan, anyway.
Now we know more about Afghanistan than we ever wanted to know. And if we listen to people like Andrew Bacevich we should at least acknowledge that Afghanistan has long been known as “The Graveyard of Empires”. For good reason. http://www.amazon.com/Graveyard-Empires-Americas-War-Afghanistan/dp/0393068986
The picture above was taken by Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Posted in Religion and politics
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Troop Buildup Is Vietnam Redux; Not The Change Obama Promised
Juan Cole, author of the blog Informed Comment, wrote an essay for Salon on the speech which also lamented Obama’s failure to remember Vietnam:
President Barack Obama’s just-announced plan for Afghanistan seems modeled less on Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam strategy than on George W. Bush’s Iraq exit strategy. Or, at least it is modeled on the Washington mythology that Iraq was turned from quagmire into a face-saving qualified success by sheer indomitable will and a last-minute troop “surge.” But Afghanistan is not very much like Iraq, and the Washington consensus about its supposed end-game success in Iraq is wrong in key respects. Are think tank fantasies about an Iraq “victory” now misleading Obama into a set of serious missteps in Afghanistan?
Stephen Walt wrote in the New Foreign Policy.com (November 30) http://tinyurl.com/yf4a7l2
Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday’s New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance.
According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America’s supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren’t so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that “U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny.” . . . .
I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”
Now I don’t think the issue is quite that simple, but the comment got me thinking: How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.
Walt arrived at a rough estimate of 288,000 Muslim deaths over the past thirty years. He also found that roughly 10,000 Americans had been killed by Muslims in the same period.
Almost all of those deaths on both sides occurred before Obama became president. If he had decided to pull a Truman on his military commanders. he would have demonstrated that he did mean it when he said he would change American conduct in world affairs.
Instead he is stuck in the demeaning position of a decision dictated to him by the military brass and their backers in the American political right. It is hard not be pessimistic when this happens.
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Tom Friedman Sounds the Alarm; The Muslims Are Coming!
openly advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel
On May 30, 2003, Friedman appeared the Charlie Rose PBS program. Here is an excerpt from that interview:
ROSE: Now that the war is over, and there’s some difficulty with the peace, was it worth doing?
FRIEDMAN: I think it was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. I think that, looking back, I now certainly feel I understand more what the war was about . . . . What we needed to do was go over to that part of the world, I’m afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically, and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. . . .
And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: which part of this sentence do you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? . . . . Well, Suck. On. This. That, Charlie, was what this war was about.
We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.
al-Haram al-Sharif
Eid ul Adha
an Israeli-American settler, off-duty Israeli army reservist and member of the extremist Kach movement
http://palsolidarity.org/2007/02/2011
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan
Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam,” and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by “The Narrative.”
Ponder these words with your deductive reasoning cap, firmly in place. What do we find?
First, Friedman acknowledges that he agrees with the conventional wisdom that Major Hasan “may have been” mentally unbalanced. But then he find, as he no doubt hoped he would, some anti-American moments in the major’s life. He “showed up” at a public-health seminary, with a Powerpoint presentation that carries the ominous title, “Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam.”
Wait, there’s more in that fecund fact-filled paragraph. Major Hasan has had “contacts” with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America.”
This leads Friedman to render his judgment , or as he puts it, “the more it seems”, that Hasan “was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by ‘The Narrative'”.
Hasan is no longer mentally unbalanced; by the end of the paragraph he is an “angry jihadist”.
Well, Tom, which is it? A nutcase or a jihadist? Or in your mind, are the two the same?
Friedman doesn’t hang around to clarify his quick shift from nutcase to jihadist. He moves on to the real focus of his column: His attack on The Narrative. I find it fascinating that Tom is now adopting what serves as a new set of marching orders from Israel’s spin-masters.
If you have been following the dialogue that takes place away from the Main Stream Media, the word “narrative” has been frequently employed by supporters of the Palestinian cause who have argued that, thanks to the Main Stream Media in the Western world, there has been only one narrative used to explain the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the Zionist narrative.
I presume Israel’s spin masters sent out the memo, or in Tom’s case, probably gave it to him personally during some of his warm and friendly chats with high level Israeli military and political officials. The spin is this: The Palestinians are starting to succeed in showing the world that the year 1948 was the start of two narratives.
The Zionist narrative has always started with the Holocaust and anti-semitism, the genesis of a permanent state of victimhood that permits Israelis to batter the Palestinians with all the violence required to drive them into virtual prison walls.
Until recent years, that was the only narrative known to the world public. Narrative was not even used as a term by the Zionists. It was simply The Way Things Are.
To compete against The Way Things Are, Palestinians and their supporters have begun to speak of another narrative, one that began with the Nakba (the “catastrophe”), and all that followed, up to , and including, Israel’s massive seizure of Palestinian land, the slaughter of innocents (in battles and attacks that were always deemed ‘defensive actions”), and the steady march of ethnic cleansing that drives Palestinians into caged camps.
Tom Friedman is the media general designated by Israel to lead the Main Stream Media in battle against that Palestinian narrative. Tom has shown himself to be a willing and faithful warrior in the War of Narratives.
He wisely moves away from the Palestinians, knowing his reading public thinks in population blocs. Arabs are Muslims, and Muslims? Well, here is more from Tom’s latest column. This portion starts with the familiar Zionist mantra, “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid” as he describes the evolution of Major Hasan.
“What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.”
You got that people? This guy is no foreign-born ticking time bomb. He was BORN, RAISED AND EDUCATED in America, and he succumbed to THE NARRATIVE. Bring the children into the house. Don’t let them play with Muslims. And make sure all public events that include proponents of The Narrative, are either blocked or attacked.
What is this alternative Narrative that Tom warns us about? His description is chilling, ugly and definitely, fails the Advent smell test:
The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand “American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy” to keep Muslims down.
Do you know any parents, pastors, church officials, public officials or college presidents, who have cowered before the fear tactics of the Zionist Narrative? I know you do; don’t try and deny it.
Tom is here espousing what has been largely debunked as a description of the dynamics of world power struggles, The War of Civilizations.
Have you wondered lately how best to describe what drives American foreign policy? Tom tells you, using his best neo-con verbiage:
Yes, after two decades in which U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny — in Bosnia, Darfur, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Kurdistan, post-earthquake Pakistan, post-tsunami Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan — a narrative that says America is dedicated to keeping Muslims down is thriving.
Friedman, if you think back, was a cheer leader for the Iraqi war because he believed that WMDs were about to erupt from Iraq, first to strike Israel and then finally, the rest of the world. Who was behind our war against Iraq? The New York Times, with Friedman leading the way, the congressional neo-cons, and of course, Israel,
Most people have repented of that crusade against Iraq, but not our man Friedman and most certainly not Israel. Now instead of WMDs, he scares the West with The Narrative which, he writes, “was concocted by jihadists.”
Then Friedman trots out yet another of his unnamed sources, this time a ” Jordanian-born counterterrorism expert, who asked to remain anonymous”.
Mr. Anonymous told Friedman:
“This narrative is now omnipresent in Arab and Muslim communities in the region and in migrant communities around the world. These communities are bombarded with this narrative in huge doses and on a daily basis. [It says] the West, and right now mostly the U.S. and Israel, is single-handedly and completely responsible for all the grievances of the Arab and the Muslim worlds. Ironically, the vast majority of the media outlets targeting these communities are Arab-government owned — mostly from the Gulf.”
Friedman’s discussion with Mr. Anonoymous leads him to issue one of his set of instructions to a world leader, this time to Barack Obama. He wants the president to give another speech, following up the one he gave in Cairo, saying this:
“Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, ‘This is not Islam.’ I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn’t. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.”
Friedman started with a question about Major Hasan’s mental instability. He segued quickly, and throughout his column, to a discussion of the War of Civilizations, Islam against the West. It is a leap without evidence and it projects Hasan as the Father of all Islamic evil. What an assignment to place on a mentally unstable man who maintained a questionable connection to a radical Islamic cleric.
It is tempting to suggest to Friedman that he reflect back on the events of February 25, 1994, when 29 Palestinian worshippers were killed and another 125 injured at the massacre at Hebron’s Ibrahim Mosque massacre. The massacre was carried out by Baruch Goldstein, who came from the Kiryat Arba settlement within walking distance of Hebron.
Goldstein opened fire on the worshippers with the an assault rifle and four magazines of ammunition. After the massacre a memorial was erected for Baruch Goldstein at the entrance to Kiryat Arba.
All religions have fanatics who act in horrendous ways contrary to the religious tradition they claim to follow. It is an act of absolute irresponsiblity to use such actions to attack adherents of that religious tradition.
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Posted in Media, Middle East Politics
16 Comments
Talking With McGovern in a Time of Palin and Israel’s Settlements
by James M. Wall I was fed up with the ugliness of American political dialogue. I knew it was time to call George McGovern. I found him on St. Thomas Island, where he was attending the funeral of an old … Continue reading
Posted in Middle East, Politics and Elections
11 Comments
Mired In Political Purgatory by Israel Lobby, Abbas Halts Election
He sees the mainstream churches at least as often foolish as they are wise. He believes that the Century, and liberal Protestants generally, must shift from pious approval of their churches to a more realistic and vigorous appraisal. Concludes Wall: “What we have to say about the church and the world will be gutsy and robust.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,945203-2,00.html#ixzz0XA5Il4Oy Continue reading
Posted in Middle East Politics
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Abbas Ends His Two State Dream; Bibi Takes His DC Victory Lap
The picture above, of Mahmoud Abbas, is by Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times. It was taken on November 11, in Ramallah at a rally on the 5th Anniversary of the death of Yasir Arafat.
Administration’s peace efforts, and relentless Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank, the reality is dawning rapidly that the two-state solution is no more than a slogan that has no chance of being implemented or altering the reality of a de facto binational state in Palestine/Israel.
This places an obligation on all who care about the future of Palestine/Israel to seriously consider the democratic alternatives. I have long argued that the systems in post-apartheid South Africa (a unitary democratic state), and Northern Ireland (consociational democracy) — offer hopeful, real-life models.
Mr. Netanyahu didn’t offer any new commitment about Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — which the Palestinians have demanded be fully stopped as a precondition for peace talks — or list any specific terms for holding new negotiations.
Without a unified Palestinian government, there is no two state solution. Israel’s long pretense of wanting a “partner for peace” is over. The hope vested in President Obama has been dashed against an iron wall of Israeli intransigence.
In 1948, some 600,000 Jews, their backs against the sea, fended off the assault of much larger enemies sworn to our destruction. We were aided by many of our fellow American Jews. You gave money, arms, and most important, tremendous moral support.
You helped Israel absorb waves of immigrants, you spearheaded the historic struggle to free Soviet Jewry and you have tirelessly worked to strengthen the American-Israeli alliance which is a cornerstone of Israel?s security.
Jewish Federations of North America GA
Haaretz Correspondent Barak Ravid http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1127029.html
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to tell U.S. President Barack Obama that he was “very serious” about wanting to advance peace talks with the Palestinians during the two leaders’ scheduled meeting on Monday.
The last-minute scheduling of Netanyahu’s White House meeting, after Israeli officials said over the past several weeks that Netanyahu hoped to see Obama, was widely seen as a sign of strained relations between the two leaders.
“We mean business,” Netanyahu planned to tell the American president, and add that Israel was ready to be “generous” in scaling back the construction in West Bank settlements.
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Posted in Middle East Politics
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House Condemns Goldstone 344-36, Clinton Caves on Settlements
Rep. Baird http://tinyurl.com/yfhpyqf
Tony Karon http://tinyurl.com/yayy8fx
Abdeljalil Bounhar / AP.jpg
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has called for Palestinian elections in late January, has been losing support in the region because of the perception that he yields to pressure from Israel and the US. With the January election looming, this was not a good time for the US to deliver twin blows to Abbas’ public image before and after he met with Secretary of State Clinton in Abu Dhabi, just before her meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
The first blow came from what Politico’s Lauren Rozen described as the “US flip-flop on the settlements freeze issue”. That blow was coupled with the public humiliation Abbas suffered after he initially blocked further consideration by the UN Human Rights Council of the Goldstone Report.
By not standing with Hamas and the Gazans who had suffered great losses in life and property, Abbas was immediately subjected to swift and angry reaction from the Palestinian public. This reaction forced him to reverse the Goldstone decision and endorse its further consideration.
Rozen quotes one Middle East authority (unnamed), who told her that “There is no strong, capable person navigating this ship. It all seems unprofessional, a policy drifting in different directions, thus projecting weakness to a savvy and cynical region that studies and looks for signs of strength and weakness. Very dangerous and full of implications for Iran and Af-Pak policy.”
This is a harsh criticism which most likely comes from a “Middle East authority” who is unfriendly to both Obama and Clinton. But the point is undeniable that “signs of strength and weakness” are watched closely in the region. The Obama-Clinton team has been no help in recent weeks to a battered President Abbas.
The Obama Administration’s bid to relaunch an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is falling apart faster than you can say settlement freeze — in no small part because President Obama began his effort by saying “settlement freeze.” . . . .
Asking the Arab states to accept Israel’s offer to simply slow down construction in the West Bank and its refusal to stop building and demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem — after President Obama publicly and repeatedly demanded it — has battered the Administration’s credibility in Arab capitals.
Congressman Brian Baird (D-Washington) will be one of those courageous members of the House who will vote against the resolution. Baird is one of the few members of the House who have, as he puts it, “actually been in Gaza”.
On his Web site, he asked his colleagues,
MARRAKESH, Morocco — For the last seven months, the Obama administration has labored in vain to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians together, pushing for a loose quid pro quo under which Israel would freeze construction of Jewish settlements while its Arab neighbors undertook diplomatic steps to bolster Israel’s confidence in its security.
Now, in the latest acknowledgment that its policy has failed, at least for the moment, Secretary of StateHillary Rodham Clinton has begun setting the stage for a new phase of Middle East diplomacy, with a more modest goal. She is trying to get the parties talking at any level to avoid a dangerous vacuum until a Plan B emerges.
Mrs. Clinton began sketching out this approach Tuesday in a speech and in meetings with Arab foreign ministers during a conference of Arab and Western nations in this city of pink sandstone buildings. She flew to Cairo later to hold talks with the Egyptian leader, Hosni Mubarak.
Making it clear that the Israeli government would not agree to President Obama’s call for a complete halt to settlement construction, Mrs. Clinton promoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer as a reasonable compromise that could still form the basis for progress. Mr. Netanyahu
Clinton’s scaled down goals http://tinyurl.com/yh6xuuw
Why are we bringing this resolution to the floor without ever giving former South African Constitutional Court Justice Richard Goldstone a hearing to explain his findings? Have those who will vote on H.Res. 867 actually read the resolution? Have they read the Goldstone report? Are they aware that Justice Goldstone has issued a paragraph by paragraph response, available on my Web site at http://www.baird.house.gov, to H.Res. 867 pointing out that many of its assertions are factually inaccurate or deeply misleading?
On his Web site, Rep. Baird continues:
What will it say about this Congress and our country if we so readily seek to block “any further consideration” of a human rights investigation produced by one of the most respected jurists in the world today, a man who led the investigations of abuses in South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Kosovo and worked to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals as a member of the Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina?
The resolution, co-sponsored by the two senior members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), charges that the report by South African jurist Richard Goldstone for the U.N. Human Rights Council is “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy,” in part because it was based on “a flawed and biased mandate,” and that the militant group Hamas was able to “significantly shape the findings of the investigation.” Lawmakers expect it to win easy approval under a fast-track procedure that allows for no amendments.
“Even before I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist.” Berman told the Jewish publication, Forward, when he became chairman of Foreign Affairs. He was first elected to Congress in 1982. Continue reading
Posted in Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections
8 Comments
Moyers’ Tough Questions Help Goldstone Explain His Report
I want to know how and why it was decided to embark on Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip and to expand it into a ground offensive. I want to know if the decisions were affected by the Israeli election campaign then underway and the change in U.S. presidents. I want to know if the leaders who launched the operation correctly judged the political damage it would cause Israel and what they did to minimize it. I want to know if those who gave orders to the Israel Defense Forces assumed that hundreds of Palestinian civilians would be killed, and how they tried to prevent this.
These questions should be at the center of an investigation into Operation Cast Lead. An investigation is necessary because of the political complexities that resulted from the operation, the serious harm to Palestinian civilians, the Goldstone report and its claims of war crimes, and the limits that will be imposed on the IDF’s freedom of operation in the future. . . .
The investigations by the army and Military Police are meant to examine soldiers’ behavior on the battlefield. They are no substitute for a comprehensive examination of the activities of the political leadership and senior command, who are responsible for an operation and its results.
It’s not the company or battalion commanders who need to be investigated, but former prime minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, and the heads of the intelligence chiefs and Foreign Ministry, who were party to the decisions. It is also important to investigate Barak and Livni’s election campaign advisers to find out if and how the campaign affected the military and diplomatic efforts.
Aluf Benn why Cast Lead http://tinyurl.com/yzuchh5
Until now, Israel has refused to have anything to do with the Goldstone investigation and the Report that followed. Will this change now that the United Nations General Assembly is waiting for a response from Israel and Hamas?
Uri Avenery, long time Israeli peace activist, believes Israel has three options:: conduct a real investigation;ignore the demand and proceed as if nothing has happened, or conduct a sham inquiry. Avenery wrote in his weekly column this week:
It is easy to dismiss the first option: it has not the slightest chance of being adopted. Except for the usual suspects (including myself) who demanded an investigation long before anyone in Israel had heard of a judge called Goldstone, nobody supports it.
Among all the members of our political, military and media establishments who are now suggesting an “inquiry”, there is no one – literally not one – who means by that a real investigation. The aim is to deceive the Goyim and get them to shut up. . . .
The second option is the one proposed by the army Chief of Staff and the Minister of Defense. In America it is called “stonewalling”. Meaning: To hell with it.
The army commanders object to any investigation and any inquiry whatsoever. They probably know why. After all, they know the facts. They know that a dark shadow lies over the very decision to go to war, over the planning of the operation, over the instructions given to the troops, and over many dozens of large and small acts committed during the operation.
In their opinion, even if their refusal has severe international repercussions, the consequences of any investigation, even a phony one, would be far worse. . . .
As for option three, Avenery believes:
The politicians who oppose (ever so quietly) the Chief of Staff’s position believe that it is impossible to withstand international pressure completely, and that some kind of an inquiry will have to be conducted. Since not one of them intends to hold a real investigation, they propose to follow a tried and trusted Israeli method, which has worked wonderfully hundreds of times in the past: the method of sham.
A sham inquiry. Sham conclusions. Sham adherence to international law. Sham civilian control over the military.
Nothing simpler than that. An “inquiry committee” (but not a Commission of Investigation according to the law) will be set up, chaired by a suitably patriotic judge and composed of carefully chosen honorable citizens who are all “one of us”.
Testimonies will be heard behind closed doors (for considerations of security, of course). Army lawyers will prove that everything was perfectly legal, the National Whitewasher, Professor Asa Kasher, will laud the ethics of the Most Moral Army in the World. Generals will speak about our inalienable right to self-defense. In the end, two or three junior officers or privates may be found guilty of “irregularities”.
Israel’s friends all over the world will break into an ecstatic chorus: What a lawful state! What a democracy! What morality! Western governments will declare that justice has been done and the case closed. The US veto will see to the rest.
So why don’t the army chiefs accept this proposal? Because they are afraid things might not proceed quite so smoothly. The international community will demand that at least part of the hearings be conducted in open court. There will be a demand for the presence of international observers. And, most importantly: there will be no justifiable way to exclude the testimonies of the Gazans themselves. Things will get complicated. The world will not accept fabricated conclusions. In the end we will be in exactly the same situation. Better to stay put and brave it out, whatever the price.
Avenery is a veteran journalist and Israeli politician. If there are any options other than these three, he hasn’t found it.
So how will Israel respond? And what will Hamas do next?
Those answers remain hidden insiide the power centers in Gaza and Tel Aviv, with some limited input from Ramallah.
http://tinyurl.com/yjvlg75
Moyers hit the interview ground running, fast:
BILL MOYERS: Let me put down a few basics first. Personally, do you have any doubt about Israel’s right to self-defense?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Absolutely not. And our approach to our mission and in our report the right of Israel to defend its citizens is taken as a given.
MOYERS: So the report in no way challenges Israel’s right to self-defense?
GOLDSTONE: Not at all. What we look at is how that right was used. We don’t question the right.
MOYERS: Do you consider Hamas an enemy of Israel?
GOLDSTONE: Well, anybody who’s firing many thousands of rockets and mortars into a country is, I think, in anybody’s book, an enemy.
MOYERS: Were those rocket attacks on Israel a threat to the civilians of Israel, to the population of Israel?
GOLDSTONE: Absolutely.
Moyers asked Goldstone whe he took the assignment. Goldstone gave his reasons and in so doing, he laid out his credentials for the job
it was a question of conscience really. I’ve been involved in investigating very serious violations in my own country, South Africa, and I was castigated by many in the white community for doing that.
I investigated serious war crimes in the Balkans and the Serbs hated me, hated me for that. And I was under serious death threat, both in South Africa and in respect of the Balkans. And then I went onto Rwanda, and many people hated me for doing that. I’ve been a co-chair of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and for the last five years, I’ve been sending letters of protest weekly to countries like China and Syria and you name it, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, complaining about violations of human rights.
So I’ve been involved in this business for the last fifteen years or so, and it seemed to me that being Jewish was no reason to treat Israel exceptionally, and to say because I’m Jewish, it’s all right for me to investigate everybody else, but not Israel.
The Moyers-Goldstone interview is available in two sections and with the full text at http://tinyurl.com/yfjfz7d
Here are selected highlights:
BILL MOYERS: Your report, as you know, basically accuses Israel of waging war on the entire population of Gaza.
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: That’s correct.
MOYERS: I mean, there are allegations in here, some very tough allegations of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed civilians who pose no threat, of shooting people whose hands were shackled behind them, of shooting two teenagers who’d been ordered off a tractor that they were driving, apparently carrying wounded civilians to a hospital, of homes, hundreds, maybe thousands of homes destroyed, left in rubble, of hospitals bombed. I mean there are some questions about one or two of your examples here, but it’s a damning indictment of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, right?
GOLDSTONE: Well, it is outrageous, and there should have been an outrage. You know, the response has not been to deal with the substance of those allegations. I’ve really seen or read no detailed response in respect of the incidents on which we report. . . .
.
MOYERS: What did you see with your own eyes when you went there?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, I saw the destruction of the only flour-producing factory in Gaza. I saw fields plowed up by Israeli tank bulldozers. I saw chicken farms, for egg production, completely destroyed. Tens of thousands of chickens killed. I met with families who lost their loved ones in homes in which they were seeking shelter from the Israeli ground forces. I had to have the very emotional and difficult interviews with fathers whose little daughters were killed, whose family were killed. One family, over 21 members, killed by Israeli mortars. So, it was a very difficult investigation, which will give me nightmares for the rest of my life. . . .
MOYERS: What makes those acts war crimes, as you say?
GOLDSTONE: Well, humanitarian law, really fundamentally is what’s known as the “principle of distinction.” It requires all people involved, commanders, troops, all people involved in making war, it requires them to distinguish between civilians and combatants. . . And then there’s a question of proportionality. One can, in war, target a military target. And there can be what’s euphemistically referred to as ‘collateral damage,’ but the ‘collateral damage’ must be proportionate to the military aim.
If you can take out a munitions factory in an urban area with a loss of 100 lives, or you can use a bomb twice as large and take out the same factory and kill 2000 people, the latter would be a war crime, the former wouldn’t. . . .
MOYERS: Did you find war crimes by Hamas? . . .
GOLDSTONE: We found that the firing of many thousands of rockets and mortars at a civilian population to constitute a very serious war crime. And we said possibly crimes against humanity.
MOYERS: But Hamas is not a party to the Geneva Convention, right? I mean, they are not law-
GOLDSTONE: Well it can’t be, because it’s not a state party.
MOYERS: It’s not-
GOLDSTONE: But it is bound by customary international law and by international human rights law, and that makes it equally a war crime to do what it’s been doing.
MOYERS: Yet critics say that by focusing more on the actions of the Israelis and, then on the Palestinians, you are, in essence making it clear whom you think is the more responsible party here.
GOLDSTONE: I suppose that’s fair comment, Bill. I think it’s difficult to deal equally with a state party, with a sophisticated army, with the sort of army Israel has, with an air force and a navy, and the most sophisticated weapons that are not only in the arsenal of Israel, but manufactured and exported by Israel, on the one hand, with Hamas using really improvised, imprecise armaments. So it’s difficult to equate their power. But that having been said, one has to look at the actions of each. And one has to judge the criminality, or the alleged criminality, of each. . . .
MOYERS: Why do you think they bombed the infrastructure so thoroughly?
GOLDSTONE: Well, we’ve found that the only logical reason is collective punishment against the people of Gaza for voting into power Hamas, and a form of reprisal for the rocket attacks and mortar attacks on southern Israel.
MOYERS: So that would be the explanation for why, if they were interested only in stopping the bombing, they didn’t have to destroy the land.
GOLDSTONE: No, this was a political this was a political decision, I think, and not a military one. I think they were telling the people of Gaza that if you support Hamas, this is what we’re going to do to you.
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Posted in Media, Middle East Politics
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A Bibi-Obama Split: Jones Speaks But Oren a J Street No-Show
Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street director, made it quite clear that J Street is Israeli-focused when he spoke to the conference:
Substantively, of course, we’re here because we care so deeply about changing the course of events in the Middle East. Because we know the path we are on – of endless conflict, failure to compromise, terror and bloodshed – leads only to hopelessness and despair.
We rally tonight around this simple premise: that the security and very future of the Jewish, democratic homeland in Israel is at risk without an end to the conflict and to the occupation of the Palestinian people.
The work begun in the generations before ours to build a nation in the image of our people to be the home of our people will only be complete when Israel has defined borders, a Palestinian state has been established next door and the rest of the region and the world recognizes Israel and accepts its existence.
Our presence here in such numbers and with such energy demonstrates the powerful base of political support ready to back active pursuit and achievement of comprehensive, regional peace in the Middle East – as an urgent priority not a distant, almost meaningless, aspiration.
We do not want the United States to simply be a passive facilitator of fruitless negotiation. No – as President Obama has said, we have had enough talking about talking.
We want action and we want resolution. We want the United States and the international community actively at the table – and we want this conflict to end.
As I hope has been clear in the early stages of the conversation tonight – while this movement is welcoming to all who seek peace, justice and an end to the conflict – it is rooted in a love of Israel and concern for its future.
Special Update on Bloggers Panel Monday afternoon
This just in from Helen Cobban:
Our decidedly “off-Broadway” blogger’s panel took place at noon today, tucked into something slightly larger than a broom closet in the bowels of J Street’s conference hotel. There were about ten of us on the panel and three additional panelists participating remotely, via the craziest kind of phone/Skype connections.
Audience people (who also included some really cool people like Australian-Jewish blogger Antony Lowenstein) were literally pasted to the walls and would have hung from rafters had there been rafters.
At one point J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami put in a small cameo appearance at the back of the audience. I believe he was not there when blogging superstars like Phil Weiss and Max Blumenthal were deciding whether to give J Street one thumb’s-up, one and a half, or two…
Anyway, bottom line, the panel was an independent activity. J Street did not endorse the views expressed there, and we weren’t obliged to line up like clockwork behind all of J Street’s positions, either. But all in all, huge kudos to J Street for embracing the idea of a free-speech forum like this.
Posted in Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections
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Tony Judt Still Fights to Expose Israel’s “Inconvenient Truths”
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty of Judt http://tinyurl.com/ybcdw47/
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml
:
Ali Abunimah’s One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
Amos Alon writings http://www.nybooks.com/authors/16
Israel continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the “road map.” The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line: “It’s all Arafat’s fault.”
Israelis themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and a handful of terrorists can all claim victory, and they do. Have we reached the end of the road? What is to be done?
A huge community of leftleaning New Yorkers turned out because Judt has been so important, and this public act was one of leadership. As he has done on other occasions, he pulled aside the curtains and the wings to show that the little world we are used to accepting is not necessarily the world of history. It is the world of recent “opinion.” . . .
It was in the end a thrilling spiritual message, forged by Judt’s own misery, and a challenge to our creativity, to break the chains of established opinion and tell a different story about history.
http://tinyurl.com/yh9hrrm
In a New York Times column, written in June of this year, Judt cut to the heart of the phony diplomatic game the US an Israel have been playing over “freezing” settlement growth
He concluded his column:
President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress. But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond.
Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel’s defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. They are nothing but a colonial takeover that the United States has no business subsidizing.
But if I am right, and there is no realistic prospect of removing Israel’s settlements, then for the American government to agree that the mere nonexpansion of “authorized” settlements is a genuine step toward peace would be the worst possible outcome of the present diplomatic dance. No one else in the world believes this fairy tale; why should we? Israel’s political elite would breathe an unmerited sigh of relief, having once again pulled the wool over the eyes of its paymaster. The United States would be humiliated in the eyes of its friends, not to speak of its foes. If America cannot stand up for its own interests in the region, at least let it not be played yet again for a patsy.
Judt, who teaches at New York University, is known as a combative writer and reviewer, and this reputation is confirmed by his new collection of pieces, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, which opens with the trouncing of a recent biographer of Koestler for being, among other things, priggishly obsessed with his subject’s sex life. Over the years, Judt has been notable, in particular, for his acid dismissals of “romantic” communists and their fellow travellers. Many of his targets have been French intellectuals – he has ripped into Sartre numerous times – but in Reappraisals he also, from his own position on the left, accuses Eric Hobsbawm of being a “mandarin” and calls the much loved EP Thompson a “sanctimonious, priggish Little Englander”.
But by far the biggest tumults Judt has caused have followed an essay he published five years ago, entitled “Israel: The Alternative”, which opened with the notion that “the president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line”, and went on to contend that the time had come to “think the unthinkable” – the bringing to an end of Israel as a Jewish state, and the establishment in its place of a binational state of Israelis and Palestinians.
But whereas his anti-communism sat comfortably with mainstream liberal opinion in America, his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks.
He raised hackles by labelling liberal commentators in America – including New Yorker editor David Remnick, Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman – Bush’s “useful idiots”.
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.
In one vital attribute, however, Israel is quite different from previous insecure, defensive microstates born of imperial collapse: it is a democracy. Hence its present dilemma. Thanks to its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices. It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens.
Alternatively, Israel can continue to occupy “Samaria,” “Judea,” and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both.
Or else Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah. Israel: The Alternative
Posted in Middle East Politics
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Wallwritings 