C’mon, War Party — Let’s Get Cracking!

The poll numbers are in, and it looks like the War Party has its work cut out:

“A majority of Americans want the United States to increase diplomatic efforts over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, while 70 percent oppose the use of U.S. troops to thwart Iran, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Thursday.

“Asked the best course of action for the United States in dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, 45 percent said Washington should join with allies to increase diplomatic efforts and another 17 percent said the United States should step up diplomacy on its own.

“One in four respondents, 26 percent, said they supported the use of U.S. ground troops in Iran, while 70 percent opposed it. Nine percent favored air strikes on selected military targets in Iran.”

Hey, you guys, let’s get that propaganda machine churning! I can hear its gears whirring now: already we have talk that, contrary to our own CIA’s assessment, the Iranians will have nukes in a matter of months — and that Iranian agents are ready to strike at the U.S. at a moment’s notice. Now all we need is a few anthrax-laden letters, and lots more “intelligence” from a certain Middle Eastern exile group — helpfully channeled to the American public via the front page of America’s most venerable news source – and we’ll likely see those poll numbers reversed.

 

Why Are We in Iraq?

If you want to know what we are doing in Iraq, at least a partial answer to your question is provided by Editor & Publisher, a recent edition of which reports:

U.S. Army officials are taking a close look at whether women in a Kentucky National Guard unit posed nude for pictures with their M-16s and other military equipment, authorities said. A local newspaper reported that it had a disc containing 232 of the photos, which they did not publish, and do not plan to publish, E&P has learned.”

The women face court martial, or maybe just a reprimand, but the legions of political correctness are already going to the barricades for them, although we have yet to hear from the Support Our Troops brigade. E&P reports:

“Marsha Weinstein, former executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Women, said that it would be hypocritical to punish women involved when there is a ‘long history of male soldiers posting pin-ups in their lockers’ and of the U.S. military flying in female sex symbols to entertain mostly male troops. ‘I don’t think these women should be court-martialed,’ she told the Courier-Journal.”

Hey, wait, what about those Marines who were discharged for having secret lives as gay porn stars? Why should these Kentucky gals get a free pass? Aside from that, however, one has to wonder: How in heck did these ladies have the time and opportunity to shuck off their clothes and let it all hang out? After all, with our armed forces stretched to the breaking point, and so busy building schools, helping little old Iraqi ladies cross the street, and teaching the Iraqi people the ABCs of Democracy 101, you’d think they’d be otherwise occupied.

Debating the Lobby

The London Review of Books put on a panel last Thursday, held at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City, with the provocative title “The Israel Lobby: Does it have too much influence on U.S. foreign policy?” Speaking for the affirmative: John J. Mearsheimer, a co-author of the controversial Harvard University study, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” (shortened version here) and dean of the “realist” school of foreign policy studies, Tony Judt, and Rashid Khalidi. Speaking for the “Lobby? What lobby?” position, two of the major players in the Lobby: Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, with Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli diplomat and Labor party politician, providing back-up and some degree of plausible deniability.

The New York Observer‘s Philip Weiss was there, and provides us with his impression that “the debate belonged to Tony Judt.” Weiss writes:

“He arrived late to the hall in a turtleneck—everyone else was in ties—and might have been Mariano Rivera, for his confidence and dispatch. He was the most imaginative speaker, and imagination is required when you are describing a King kong sasquatch no one has seen and whose wranglers say doesn’t exist. When Shlomo Ben-Ami and Martin Indyk said that John Mearsheimer was antisemitic for speaking of a collection of Jews who influence policy, Judt demolished them by quoting Arthur Koestler when he became an anticommunist and said that Just because idiots and bigots share some of his views doesn’t discredit the views. The job of the social scientist is to describe the true conditions of society; are these statements accurate or not? That is the only issue. I’m paraphrasing. Judt was way more eloquent.

“Judt’s second great moment was when he accused Indyk of being ‘faux-naive’ —a civilized way of saying, You’re lying—when Indyk kept saying that the lobby was one small factor in an American president’s exertions of power. Here again, he used his imagination. Because when you’re talking about something about which there is very little information, and those who know something about it are trying to deny its existence, you need imagination. Anyway, Judt described the real exercise of power. He said that when a small state defied an American president, and the president wanted to do something about it, he had a great number of seen and unseen ways of compelling that state to fall into line, all sorts of bullying and pressure and fury. None of these had been deployed in Israel’s case, and lo and behold the settlements had continued to expand, over four decades… Again I’m paraphrasing. Judt also got the last word of the night when he explained to a hungry audience that knew in its bones it has been deprived, that this discussion was an astoundingly rare one, and mind you it was organized by the London Review of Books. Thus he gave the audience a real sense of how the U.S. discourse/policy works, which is what the evening was after all fumbling towards.

“The most resonant moment of the debate was Judt’s, too. He pointed out that when he had endorsed the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis, in an article for an unnamed major North American newspaper, he was asked by the editors whether he is Jewish, and told to stick that fact in the article. (Otherwise they couldn’t publish it, was implicit or explicit, I’ll have to check my tape). The newspaper—obviously—was the New York Times, in which Judt’s op-ed taking Walt/Mearsheimer’s side, appeared last April, as I recall, to stunning effect. I say resonant, and damning: Let’s consider the lesson of this story: You can only speak out on this issue if you’re Jewish? Oh my god, how did we get here…”

Writing in Counterpunch, Michael J. Smith, in noting the panel was “moderated” by Ann-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs at Princeton, quips: “The name of this institution always makes me laugh — as who should say, the Henry VIII School of Women’s Studies, or the Lester Maddox Institute for Racial Amity.“ Smith goes on to observe that the inevitable query — was the paper produced by Mearsheimer and his colleague Stephen Walt (former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) anti-semitic? — was asked of the Amen Corner in Slaughter’s first question:

Well, more or less, yes, was the predictable answer from Israel’s defense bench. Mearsheimer, said the imposing, silver-maned Indyk, postulates a sinister “cabal” (he must have used this word a hundred times over the next two hours) that includes “anyone who has a good word to say about Israel.” With regard to the Iraq war, Indyk’s trump card was that the Israel lobby couldn’t have made that happen, since the Israel lobby really wanted to go after — Iran! Mearsheimer, who has presumably heard this sort of thing quite a lot lately, watched Indyk with an unblinking, curious, naturalist’s gaze, as though he had discovered a new subspecies of E. Coli.”

You don’t need a microscope to see these bugs — they dominate the foreign policy establishment, the nation’s media, the thinktanks, and there’s nothing new about them. What is new, however, is that it’s suddenly okay to name them, and debate them, even if they spend the entire time denying their own existence. Some people, on the other hand, are not all that comfortable with the new glasnost….

The content and tone of an indignant “report” in the New York Sun, authored by Ira Stoll, is summed up in the headline: “‘Israel Lobby’ Caused War in Iraq, September 11 Attacks, Professor Says.” Bollocks. When you read Stoll’s piece, it turns out that Mearsheimer, the professor in question, was merely quoting Al Qaeda honcho Khalid Sheik Mohammed to the effect that his “animus to the United States stemmed from U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.” Mearsheimer arguing that there is a “link” between America’s Israel-centric foreign policy and the motives and ideology of Al Qaeda is not to say that either Israel or its Amen Corner in the U.S. in any way “caused” the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That this even needs to be pointed out is a measure of how quickly the Lobby’s “arguments” have degenerated into demagogy and hysteria when faced with a serious challenge.

Twist and turn, distort and smear — the Lobby’s smear machine is a perpetual motion machine of malice and misinformation. In reacting with this level of unreasoned vitriol, the Lobby only confirms the validity of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis — that unconditional support for Israel, over and above the pursuit of American interests in the Middle East, is the singular achievement of Israel’s lobby in the U.S., made possible by a veritable embargo against any discussion of the Lobby’s political and social power.

Does the Israel lobby have undue influence in Washington? Why, to even ask the question is “anti-semitic,” don’tcha know? It is also “anti-semitic” to notice — let alone comment on — the House’s recent approval of a $500 million “aid package” to Israel for “joint defense systems.”

That’s in addition to the $2.36 billion in military aid handed to Israel by U.S. taxpayers annually. It is also double what the Bush administration asked Congress for — but then, to say that the U.S. Congress is “Israeli-occupied territory,” as Pat Buchanan trenchantly remarked some years ago, is a “hate crime.”

Islamic Bomb

Sorry to distract from all the Dictatorship Day celebrations this weekend, but nuclear physicist and Antiwar.com regular contributor, Gordon Prather, reminds us that none of the Middle Eastern countries being targeted (Iraq, Iran, Syria) in this Phony “Global War on Terror” – so that they won’t “give nukes to terrorists” – have nukes or the capability to make them. The only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons is Pakistan – our ally – and if terrorists ever get a nuke, that country is its most likely origin. (Not that either of us are arguing for aggression against that country.)

“Pervez Musharraf, currently Pakistan’s President and ‘Chief of Staff’ of Pakistan’s army, has been on a world-wide book tour, flogging his just published autobiography, In the Line of Fire. It must be good, President Bush urged us to buy it.

“Steve Croft, of CBS News, began his interview of Musharraf this way:

‘Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons and Islamic militants, has been called the most dangerous country in the world, and one of the most dangerous places in it is riding in the motorcade of President Musharraf. Twice suicide bombers have tried to blow it up, killing 14 people in the process. Both times, Musharraf barely escaped.

‘There have been half a dozen plots on his life. Why are so many people trying to kill Pakistan’s president?’

“Basically, it’s because of Musharraf’s decision shortly after 9/11 to turn his back on the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the Islamic militants in his own country and to “cooperate” with President Bush in his ‘War on Terra.’

“But with the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden’s continued protected presence in Pakistan/Afghanistan, and the recently released National Intelligence Estimate [.pdf] that Bush’s war of aggression against Iraq has increased the chances that you and yours will get nuked in your jammies, probably by a Pakistani nuke, it may be worth recalling ‘It’s Pakistan, Stupid,’ a column originally posted four years ago, on August 31, 2002, before it was general knowledge that Boy Bush had already commenced bombing the gee-whiz out of Iraq.”

My favorite quote from the article:

“You see, the Islamic terrorists and their nukes are in Pakistan – not Iraq. Any attempt to prosecute the loose-nuke problem in Iraq may be counterproductive.”

Continue reading “Islamic Bomb”

Happy Dictatorship Day

The prize for the headline of the year goes to today’s Washington Post for the following gem:

“Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill”

The Post article on the military tribunal bill the Senates passed yesterday  details some of the legal and procedural rights that people seized as “enemy combatants” will not possess.  (Amnesty International has a good summary of the bill here).

The Post article gives the impression that only aliens have to fear being treated  slightly better than East Bloc dissidents. But as a superb piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times by law professor Bruce Ackerman noted, the legislation “authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.”

When I clicked on the “print” version of the “absent rights” article, the page on the Washington Post website included a hefty ad:  “Helping to Deliver Air Dominance for the U.S. – the Lockheed Martin – Boeing – Pratt Whitney – F-22 Raptor.” 

Who the hell needs civil liberties when we have “air dominance”?

Comments/ caterwauling etc. welcome at my blog here

Republican Honor Roll on Terror/Tribunal Bill

The following Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the Torture-“Terrorist” Tribunal bill (HR 6166) today.

Ron Paul, Roscoe Bartlett, Wayne Gilchrest, Walter Jones, Steven LaTourette, James Leach, Jerry Moran.

These folks deserve hearty applause for their courage in rebuffing the surge of authoritarian sentiments now sweeping the Grand Old Party.

The final vote was 253-168, with 12 members not bothering to vote.

A vote for the bill was a vote for torture, plain and simple.  Congressmen can hem and haw and pretend that they are only authorizing Bush to make decisions on what methods of interrogation will be used.  But everyone who has been paying half-attention knows that the US govt. has been torturing people since 9/11.  And now the House of Representatives has sprinkled its holy water over American barbarity.

This Torture/Tribunal bill looks to me to be far more dangerous for both Americans and for the world than is the Patriot Act. [Comments / grousing/ etc. welcome here at my blog]