November 14th, 2008
These reputable talking heads neatly outline the Afghan question: Princeton, escalation. Harvard, Afghanization.
I vote Hahvard.
But it seems the owner-operators are Black and Orange — real Tigers — and that Obama is in their stands.
See the 2nd comment below re CIA director Hayden’s shocking speech yesterday. It clarifies things. (Unless, err … it muddies the waters.)
In particular: The reality of the coming “Afghan Surge” — which both Obama and McCain sold throughout the campaign — seems a big western ground war in the Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan early next year.
This will be the most distracting and dangerous thing on BHO’s plate.
The JFK precedent in wild, blasted bloom? See the 3rd comment below.
November 13th, 2008
It’s almost four years since journalist Gary Webb was suicided.
Here he speaks.
Webb in the mid 90s had re-broken in a big way the big story of the CIA’s involvement in the international drug trade — updating old tales from Vietnam by documenting CIA-NSC responsibility for the Crack explosion in American cities during the Reagan years.
Webb’s serial newspaper reportage in 1996 bore the name Dark Alliance, and was republished in a book of the same name.
Those were the Clinton years; the stories not only got published, but drew widespread attention from the major media.
But Webb himself was soon and suddenly fired by his San Jose newspaper — which also destroyed its web archive of the Dark Alliance story. Soon it was clear that the author had been blacklisted out of the business.
A month after Bush-Cheney were re-installed in 2004, Webb was shot twice in the head and died. Suicide, the coroner reported. Neither Little Jimmy Grimaldi nor Webb’s friends believe that.
Read his book.
And think about Daniel Moynihan in 1991 …
“The time has come to ask, with the Cold War over, can we purge the vestiges of this struggle from our laws, our bureaucracy, and most importantly from our way of thinking,” Moynihan said. “Can we muster the will to redefine ourselves?”
And then tell YourObama to purge and reform the National Security Apparat.
November 9th, 2008
Recent MUST READS in the NY Review of Books:
On Cheney.
On the financial crisis — by George Soros.
And the full interview that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave before resigning — in which he renounces militarism as a possible basis of Israeli security.
October 23rd, 2008
The comment may work against Obama to some degree. Something of a kiss of death.
But the story seems otherwise promising.
Perhaps Larijani — the current Speaker of the Iranian parliament, with “close ties” to the supreme ayatollah — would be shuffled to the Iranian presidency if Obama were to win?
September 29th, 2008
Ed Note: Here is a nearly full version of the interview with Olmert, published in the December 4 NY Review of Books (America’s finest periodical). Very worthwhile reading.
—————
1. The same turn that Itzak Rabin and Ariel Sharon experienced once in the driver’s seat seems to have come about with Ehud Olmert as he waits for his successor as prime minister to take office.
He is calling for withdrawals from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and denouncing the notion of a unilateral attack on Iran as “megalomania.”
In short, he seems to be renouncing militarism as the basis of Israeli security policy.
From the Times:
“What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me,” Mr. Olmert told Yediot Aharonot newspaper … “The time has come to say these things.”
He said traditional Israeli defense strategists had learned nothing from past experiences and seemed stuck in the considerations of the 1948 Independence War.
“With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop,” he said. “All these things are worthless.”
He added, “Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel’s basic security?”
The words are all the more stunning in light of recent history.
Itzak Rabin, a celebrated general and then Likud prime minister, was assassinated for turning on his militarists.
And some people believe that Ariel Sharon — terrorist, then general, then Likud prime minister — who broke with the party policy of perpetual war and founded the new centrist Kadima to pursue peace — was poisoned or neurologically disabled during surgery.
2. Over the summer I spoke with a number of people, mostly Jewish, about prospects for change in Israel. The idea that popped out was rather shocking: the internationalization of Jerusalem.
The sense being: Israel’s security and way of life has decayed to such an extent — and all the more so given the shocking decay of U.S. power under Bush-Cheney — that peace is really the only chance left — and that a serious peace would require not only land and respect for a Palestinian state, but healing the wound of Jerusalem.
Internationalizing the city would more than suffice — would be the grandest gesture of peace imaginable — and would silence war cries for the city’s liberation that for decades have been used by entrenched enemies to recruit footsoldiers.
3. Not that the current prospects for peace are inviting.
Bush-Cheney announced as they took office in 2001 that (Sharon’s) Likud would have free reign to deal with the Palestinians. And then invaded Iraq.
These moves have set the region aflame, spiritually and physically.
– Iraq is in bloody pieces. Humpty Dumpty. In no condition to stand as a western bulwark against Iran. Inviting the prospect of another major Sunni-Shia war.
– Civil war of a kind is again roiling Lebanon — and now (just this week) touching off bombs in Syria.
– Iran, with Made-in-America wars on her borders east and west, is clearly expanding influence in both directions.
– Meanwhile Bush-Cheney energy policy and (non) statesmanship have alienated Saudi Arabia and the other wealthy Arab gulf states, leaving the fabric of relationships regionwide frayed. War thrives in such confusion.
Would a genuine settlement with the Palestinians and the “liberation” of Jerusalem be enough to draw Arab and Persian leaders to bury the hatchet with Israel, and to deprive the jihadist ideologues of recruits?
A guess is yes. The ideologues would remain, and persist, but would lose their majority in the street.
Who knows. Perhaps it’s too late. Perhaps 60 years of war have bred animosity that a negotiated peace cannot extinguish.
But the significance of Olmert’s words, against the history of Rabin and Sharon, should not be lost.
They mean: If peace does not work, then nothing will: Israel, born in a war of conquest that has never ceased, and which she cannot win, sooner or later must lose.
It will be interesting to see the reaction of Likud leader Bibi Netanyahu, of the Israeliocentric lobbyists in Washington, of the right-wing Jerusalem Post, and of New York’s reputable Jewish Daily Forward.
And, of course, of Olmert’s successor. The current Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni. A woman. The first since Golda Meir.
Perhaps Olmert intended to clear roadblocks for something new that she may have in mind.
4. Complicating matters: there seems a growing consensus that Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons is advancing at a faster rate than the consensus gauged a year ago.
Here’s today’s Op-Ed by the head of the Wisconsin Project for Nuclear Arms Control.
And here’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed El Baradei, head of the Int’l Atomic Energy Agency, expressing renewed worries himself.
5. It’s … piquant that these renewed worries, and Olmert’s change of heart, come to light during days when the United States is in complete free fall.
It may be that the fire lit by Bush-Cheney and their Likud Lobby foreign policy team will be put out by China and Russia with some help from Europe, while Uncle Sam watches sadly selling apples on the street corner.
September 26th, 2008
The Asia Times is fingering well known Likud Lobbyists in D.C. and the publishers of the right-wing Jerusalem Post as the folks behind an apparently vile DVD that’s been inserted in 28 million battleground-state newspapers in recent weeks.
Ah, here it is: Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.
The DVD does not mention Obama. But people elsewhere are complaining that nevertheless it targets his candidacy.
I haven’t seen it. The trailer at the website suggests it relies heavily on video of jihadist training camps and doctrination sessions.
To instill the fear of Allah in middle-of-the-road voters, clearly, is the aim.
Is it fair, then, to conclude that they’re trying to push the idgit vote to McCain, having finally been snuffed this spring by baby Bush?
However that may be, both candidates were careful to bow deeply to Israel in the debates this evening.
That is: Lehrer asked about the threat Iran posed to the US — and instead each candidate devoted his time to expounding the threat to Israel and the mideast generally. Reading the same teleprompter.
Caroline Glick, a top editor at The Jerusalem Post, and a bellicose belcher of neofascist screed, is named by the Asian Times.
And in D.C. — Meyrev Wurmser. Of similar cast. (Proud to have blocked the application of the Helsinki Accords to Israel’s war.) You can check her out here — then follow the links within her bio to others and …
Voila. You’ve been well introduced to the Likud Lobby, and the makers of the Iraq war.
Apparently they want more.
(Want more? Here.)
September 25th, 2008
1. The story’s in the Guardian today. Interesting.
Bush, by refusing, seems to have fully broken with the Likud Lobbyists he had hired in 2001 to run foreign affairs, and to have fallen in line with the eurocentric Bilderberger consensus.
Noteworthy that the initiative and its snuff came more or less on schedule: May 14. For a year it had been surmised and stated in back pages that April 2008 was the point beyond which Israeli intelligence felt the Iranian nuke program could not be allowed to grow.
2. The Jerusalem Post this morning reacts with a news story with reader comments and a mediocre Op-Ed by Richard Pipes.
3. Meanwhile, at the UN in New York, Iran’s president spoke softly:
Growing world problems like war and poverty are the result of American mismanagement of global affairs, he said at one point.
“We don’t want all this, we like to have friendships,” he said. “I really don’t think that the American people like what they see either. If American people had the chance to truly express themselves they would definitely express opposition to how the world has been run.”
If we only had the chance …!
September 25th, 2008
Well. Maybe we are indeed at war with Pakistan.
Paki army and US army soldiers exchanged gunfire on the ground earlier today, after the Pakis again fired at raiding US helicopters crossing the border.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Paki army fought a pitched battle with pro-Taliban joes — 50 dead or so.
Is it civil war yet?
And why are we and the Taliban both shooting at the same guys?
Let’s see, the enemy of my friend’s enemy is my enemy’s friend’s …
