Is the world run by Psychopaths?

Charming, materialistic, aggressive, self-centred, Machiavellian, thrill-seeking alpha males with little respect for rules who eat stress for breakfast – sound like a banker you know? If so, think again: it is a summary of the traits of psychopaths. Financial Times

There is a class of individuals who have been around forever and who are found in every race, culture, society and walk of life. Everybody has met these people, been deceived and manipulated by them, and forced to live with or repair the damage they have wrought. These often charming—but always deadly—individuals have a clinical name: psychopaths. Their hallmark is a stunning lack of conscience; their game is self-gratification at the other person's expense. Many spend time in prison, but many do not. All take far more than they give. Robert Hare (the acknowledged authority on psychopathy)

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There is a quite plausible theory that the world is run by psychopaths: empathy-deficient, glib, manipulative, reckless swine... with apologies to our brother pig, who gives so much and gets so little in return.

I am very skeptical of pop psychology and psychobabble in general and totally against putting a creature as complex as the human one into neat little boxes, however, the autistic and unrepentant behavior of the lords of finance in provoking so much pain on so many millions; the reckless, Harpo-Marxian rutting of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Rupert Murdoch's looting the telephones of the dead, has me wondering if there might be some truth in the idea that our destiny has been delivered unto the hands of the clinically insane.

The best, the most sensitive, video I have found on the subject features Frank Ochberg MD  one of the founding fathers of modern psychotraumatology who has helped to define and research Post-traumatic stress disorder. Doctor Ochberg's interest in psychopaths is directed toward helping their victims, which as far as the News Corporation, politicians or the financial sector is concerned, includes most of us.

Perhaps the deregulated environment of the post-Cold War world is to blame for all of this. For example, basketball is a recent invention and the NBA as a huge business, very, very recent. Before basketball, if you had a son who was 7ft tall, he was simply a freak: you had to buy him a special bed and try to find huge shoes for his enormous feet.... Now, you are thinking that he is going to play for the Lakers and guarantee your old age.... Maybe the same thing has happened to psychopaths... maybe deregulation has created an "NBA" for psychopaths. Maybe this explains the strangeness of the period we live in. DS

Beck, rhymes with yecch: Murdoch flirts with antisemitism... Why?

Welcome to the "Glenn Beck Program," where Jews are Nazis and those who exploit ancient anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives are friends of the Jews.  Michael Wolraich - CNN

“Soros' people called me to say I am an anti-Semite because I was going to air this," he says in one program. "Probably, I am more supportive of Israel and Jews than George Soros." Haaretz

“While I, too, may disagree with many of Soros’ views and analysis on the issues, to bring in this kind of innuendo about his past is unacceptable. To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant. The Holocaust was a horrific time, and many people had to make excruciating choices to ensure their survival. George Soros has been forthright about his childhood experiences and his family’s history, and there the matter should rest." Abraham Foxman, Chairman, Anti-Defamation League

"Go to bed with dogs, wake up with fleas"

Old Spanish proverb

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I'm not sure that the true significance of Glenn Beck's attack on George Soros is being evaluated correctly and in the proper perspective.

The question that people should be asking themselves is not whether Glenn Beck's remarks are antisemitic, because the only people who can define antisemitism are the Jewish people themselves and Abe Foxman is the person America's Jewish community has endowed with the power to decide what is or isn't defamation. Thus if Foxman, speaking ex-cathedra on this question, says that Beck's remarks are "unacceptable" and "repugnant", then that clinches it: Beck has crossed the red line into antisemitism.

That being so, the question people should be asking themselves is why Rupert Murdoch (Beck is merely Murdoch's creature) has decided to play with what is considered the "third rail" (touch it and you die, your career is finished) to end all third rails in US politics, which is antisemitism. And even to take it upon himself to break one of the touchiest of all taboos, which for a gentile to say who is a "good" or a "bad" Jew. And even more provocatively, he has allowed, or most probably encouraged,  Glenn Beck to connect the word "Jew" with the word "conspiracy". In today's America this, as Michael Wolraich points out at CNN, is to enter the world of Lyndon LaRouche. Murdoch has also allowed Beck to mention the most unmentionable of all unmentionables, the "don't go there" of all the don't go there subjects: the Jews that collaborated with the Nazis. No less than Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century's most prestigious political scholars, was dragged over the coals for mentioning it in her controversial book "Eichmann in Jerusalem". 

In short it would be nearly impossible to offend more Jewish sensibilities in such a short time than Beck has, all the while professing his "more papist than the pope" loyalty to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel. Perfectly outrageous. People are outraged. Mission accomplished

Why is Murdoch doing this?

My theory is that he is doing it to prove he can do it.

To prove that he, Rupert Murdoch, can break all the rules and emerge unscathed, can waltz blithely where others have had to crawl on their bellies in abject repentance or be expelled to the outer darkness where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth .

Why should Murdoch want to do that?

He is playing a mind game with the Zionist right wing, both in America and Israel.

Why?

I think he wants to shake down AIPAC, that is why, and he is "talking trash" to make them nervous.

At this moment the Obama administration is trying to get a settlement freeze and then define the borders of a Palestinian state with a view to creating said state, thus ending the dream of a "Greater Israel". To fight this off, AIPAC is going to need all the help they can get and Fox would have to be a key player in that fight.

Murdoch doesn't want to be taken for granted... that is his message.

He wants to show all observers that he is the boss. That people crawl before him, that he doesn't crawl before anyone...  that his support is costly.

What is his price? I have no idea as yet. All I know is that with Ayn Rand dead, Rupert Murdoch is one of the nastiest pieces of work to share our planet and whatever the price, it will be a devil's bargain. DS

The "Big Lie"... How it works and what it is for

The big lie kicks in: before and after

Americans for Prosperity, the rightwing campaign funded in part by the energy billionaires the Koch brothers, is working with the Tea Party movement to increase its impact through the use of new media and social networking. The Guardian

Rupert Murdoch has declared his dissatisfaction with Barack Obama and the Democratic party, saying that two $1m donations by News Corp were intended to encourage change in Washington. Financial Times

Shortly before leaving for the US to report on the midterm elections, a respected colleague told me that: “Obama’s problem is that he is trying to govern a nation where half the population is insane.” Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

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Today lets look at the "big lie": the art of calling black white and white black and making it stick, how it works and why it works.

I will cut directly to the chase: to me it is obvious that the Tea Party has been evoked, like a political poltergeist, from the shadowy bourne, of the American earth by people like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch in order to terrorize moderate Republicans and keep them from moving to the center and cooperating with president Obama in a time of national emergency.

How bad are things?

Maybe even a bit worse than we think they are.

For example, if we consider the mortgage foreclosure fiasco as the possible tip of an iceberg of massive fraud and generalized, quite unbelievable, negligence throughout the system, something like a metastasis  of  an Enron on steroids, we may be looking at future meltdowns that could make the consequences of Lehman Brother's collapse look as tame as Paris Hilton's prison stay.

I would venture to say that people like the Koch brothers and Murdoch have much better information as to the potential and immanent blowback of all of this and its possible effects on their positions, both  financial and political, than we do.

They obviously are moved to take drastic steps, steps that put the entire system in jeopardy. Therefore, whether us lesser folk have any real inkling of what's going on, by their behavior we may know that something is going on: just as the Chinese detect the coming of an earthquake by monitoring the restlessness of farm animals and songbirds; the way granny knows its going to rain, because her hip hurts. Something is cooking.

In any one of a dozen national emergencies of the nature I suspect (or might not even dream of) that may be developing or might already be upon us, the natural reaction of the citizenry would be to demand, as in wartime, or any other great national emergency, that their elected representatives work together in a bipartisan fashion to clean up the mess and to put in place regulations and regulators to make sure it never happens again and to punish those responsible severely "pour encourager les autres". 

And, who knows, then,  perhaps in  the cheery glow of new found kameradschaft and moderate bi-partisanship, they might set themselves to reform campaign financing, the infrastructure and even work on climate change and fossil fuel energy dependence.

From a certain point of view this kind of constructive or reconstructive harmony must be avoided at all costs.

So we here we come to the big lie.

What I call the "Tea-Fox-Koch-Murdoch-Beck-Limbaugh-Party" are using classic techniques, nothing new here

To get into the mood and to understand better what the Murdochs and the Kochs are up to and what  techniques they are using to achieve their ends, let us look at what the OSS had to say during WWII about the recognized master of the big lie:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. "Hitler as His Associates Know Him" - OSS report on Hitler, p.51

Sounds familiar doesn't it. Now let us hear the "master's voice" as he himself describes in some greater detail how the big lie works:

(...) In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.— Adolf Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

Let us move directly to a concrete example of how this "philosophy" is being put into practice today.

Why are the "Tea-Fox-Koch-Murdoch-Beck-Limbaugh-Party" so afraid of Barack Obama?

Because he is a radical socialist-communist-extremist, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

They are afraid of him for precisely the reason he "disappoints" his progressive base: They are terrified of him because he is a born centrist, reaching out eagerly for members of the Republican opposition in order to "cut a deal" or "split the difference".

That has been his message from the beginning. To refresh your memory:

I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.  Senator Barack Obama - Keynote speech, Democratic convention - 2004

Despite all of President Obama's unearthly and unbearable lightness of being, that speech still has them terrified. The more he appears manifestly mild mannered and generaly ineffectual, the louder they cry "Marxist!" and "radical!"... and worse.

That idea of inclusiveness, the mildness, the desire to negotiate and split the difference, not radical, leftist, extremism, is what has Murdoch and the Kochs frantic and frothing at the mouth.

Why?

Because, under the new rules of globalization, much of the world's economic power and especially the cash, has escaped from state control, regulation and supervision. As the recent euro crisis showed, elected officials of powerful and wealthy countries found themselves suddenly at the mercy of the "markets" and the rating agencies, themselves made up of human beings, whose power, unlike the law makers of a democratic states, is in no way derived from the consent of the governed... and there are people... not many people, but very, very rich people, who are extremely comfortable with that.. and why shouldn't they be?

Now it happens that there is only one state in the whole world that is still, for the moment at least, potentially powerful enough to be able to bring this situation under some sort of control at home and abroad, and this state is in theory a democracy that is elected by its citizens to serve them.

That state is, of course, the United States of America.

Now, for the state apparatus of the United States of America to bring the situation under control in America and to a great extent around the world, all the branches of the state, executive, legislative and judiciary would have to be in nearly total alignment, as they were during World War Two.

Keeping that from happening, paralyzing the political system so that unity is entirely unthinkable except around "supporting our troops" to defend the "homeland" against the threat of "terrorism" is what the Tea Party movement and every move of Fox and Kochs is about.

The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax.  George Monbiot - Guardian

I think we have just solved George Monbiot's mystery.

As I said at the beginning of this piece,  the Tea Party has been created in order to terrorize moderate Republicans and keep any of them from moving to the center and cooperating with president Obama in a time of national emergency.

Just to see how effective this strategy is, lets look at the following four year old quote from certainly the best known and perhaps the most respected of Republican moderates, John McCain,

“People want us to do what we’ve forgotten, which is put aside philosophical differences, which are important, and legislate and get things done.”

What happened since then? This from Vanity Fair:

“The senator owes his victory to the pressure he received from conservatives and Tea Partiers,” the conservative guru Richard Viguerie declared after the primary. “To receive that support, he had to give up his maverick positions that have sometimes given aid and comfort to the liberals. I’m sure Senator McCain knows very well that he would not have won if he had continued his reputation as the Democrats’ favorite Republican.”

So that is what it is really all about: it is about not legislating and not getting things done... to paralyze the government of the United States of America at a critical time in its history. To prevent the system from flushing itself out and regenerating itself. To cut the wires of the burglar alarms to be able to sack the house in peace.

The danger is impossible to exaggerate, because, in any normal country in the world if democratic politics become impossible and the state is paralyzed, sooner or later you have either a coup d' etat or a civil war... or both, and not necessarily in that order. How long America's incomparable mechanisms of infotainment alienation can fend off that law of gravity remains to be seen. DS

Why are so many Americans so crazy?

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from. Frank Rich - NYT

Over half of surveyed Republicans said they believe that the president is a socialist Muslim who wants to take away gun rights and turn over U.S. sovereignty to the U.N. What’s deeper, though, is the vitriol of those beliefs, with a substantial number of Republicans believing that Obama resents America's heritage (47 percent), is the "domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of" (45 percent), wants to use an economic or terrorist event as an excuse to take dictatorial powers (41 percent), is doing some of the same stuff that Hitler did (38 percent), and may, in fact, be the Anti-Christ (24 percent). Daily Beast    

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Just to begin by giving a quick answer to the question posed by the title of this post, "Why are so many Americans so crazy?". The answer is that living in a cloud of misinformation, they are being driven insane.

There is always the temptation to see certain people as reasonable when they aren't. "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. Isaiah 1:18", was the favorite bible passage of Lyndon Baines Johnson and it describes the basic attitude of all successful negotiators. The lesson learned from the epic battle to pass a more than tame and mediocre health bill is that it is impossible to negotiate with whipped up insanity.

All of this insanity, from tea party to Antichrist is about using racism to distract people from seeing clearly what is right in front of their faces.

Essentially what we have is Rupert Murdoch in the role of Joseph Goebbels,  with Beck and company playing post-modern George Wallace, nightly on Fox.

The idea is very simple, classic really. The system is in crisis, social inequality is widening and hardening, so stimulating paranoia and racism is a simple and effective way of keeping people from thinking about things like taxing the rich in order to get good public schools, affordable health care and other such Bolshevik twaddle.

To understand this craziness we have to turn it inside out. The first thing about it that catches my attention in the Harris and similar polls is that a significant portion of the American population is totally paranoid and extremely suggestible. If we discount genetics and/or some hallucinogen that has been added to the water, we would have to look at objective factors to account for this vulnerability.

To begin with America's cult of competition, of dividing people from childhood into "winners" and "losers", has created an entire nation within the nation of losers: an enormous mass of people who feel terrible about themselves.

The American Dream is based on social mobility, but a great many Americans have not "moved" up since they arrived, even many who arrived during colonial times. At this moment many are on an express elevator moving down.

Since colonial times the subjugation and humiliation of African-Americans has provided a valuable tool in defusing social tensions in the rest of the population.

It all goes back that far.

Probably the most valuable service to domestic peace that slaves provided even, or especially, for those who didn't own them, was the role of being someone even the most miserable white person could feel superior to.

The real problem in America is not racism in itself, the problem is a society or a culture that divides human beings into "winners" and "losers" and punishes the losers so mercilessly. These unfortunates simply cannot survive psychologically without their "whipping boy". Racism is a tool of social control. The classic "divide and rule".

That is the dirty little family secret of American capitalism: keeping the races at each others throats prevents the social democracy that exists in practically every other country of similar economic development.

God knows that America is full of desperately miserable white people. Not all of them are poor, not by long shot.

For losing and feeling miserable in America is not just economic, a study of marketing messages will give you an idea of the infinite ways that an American can be a "loser".

The entire American consumer economy, which is 70% of the total, is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. A person of color might blame all the frustrations of life on race prejudice and he or she would be right in most cases. The white loser, and they are legion, hasn't ever had that safety valve.

Those whites who fear they might be "losers" themselves, and if we look at the economic and psychological facts of life in today's American, that might include most American whites, desperately need someone to look down upon as a psychological safety valve and of course, since time immemorial African-Americans, even the lightest skinned among them, have served that purpose. Their status as loser was even pleasing to the abolitionists that wanted to "uplift" them.

For literally hundreds of years, besides this role as the official ultimate-loser, no other role beyond entertaining or lifting heavy loads was permitted them.

In 1952 an African-American author, Ralph Ellison published a ground breaking novel, “The Invisible Man”, whose title many critics feel defined the experience of people of African descent in America: that of being invisible and voiceless. In the years that followed, the people of color in the United States raised their voices and became visible, to the great and continuing discomfort of many whites. The white people of the US south who once voted solidly Democratic have punished that party’s leadership of the civil rights movement by voting solidly Republican ever since… the key to the victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The “Conservative Revolution”, that only favors the rich, is based on the resentment of poor whites and gives the wealthy the necessary numbers to win elections.

With Barack Obama this resentment is coming to head.

Up till now, American "identity" politics was always played with surrogates: WASP or "waspable" white men wearing masks.

Thus Bill Clinton was "America's first black president". The whatever WASP whose turn it was to woo Latinos, would eat tacos and say "juntos podemos" with an atrocious accent etc, etc. Candidates would attempt to show that they were "sensitive" to the feminist agenda and so on. Absolutely de rigueur for all white, male and protestant presidentiables was a photo at Yad Vashem sporting a yomulka. This all came with the turf like kissing babies. It was all a game.

The problems start when the Democrats decided to use "originals" instead of the traditional, "ballo in maschera". The whole charade begins to fall apart without the WASP surrogates.

All of this resentful white anger has been directed heretofore against surrogates: the Jimmy Carters, the Ted Kennedys, the Walter Mondales, the Dukakises, the Gores and the Kerrys; and all the racism was disguised in euphemisms like "state's rights" or "liberal" or "elitist" or "un-American".

Now for the first time the American white ultra-right have got the chance to actually organize and march against a real black man who incarnates all the euphemisms, instead of a surrogate.

Even a "JFK meets Sydney Poitier" figure like president Barack Obama, or especially like Obama, is an unbearable provocation -- a lifetime membership card in the "loser" club -- for millions of American white people.

What is to be done? How to proceed.

Take a look at the two quotes below. I think that between them they hold the germs of program for the American left... if such an animal really exists.

"Reagan’s view of government as the problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of health care relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the only entity that can look out for our interests." Robert Reich

The deeper point--the ones the tea partiers haven’t courage nor the brains to see--is that our technological age has laid bare a core fact of American life: that our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder. There is little “upward mobility.” Your children probably won’t live as well as you, much less better. Your 2nd and 3rd mortgages made them billions and then they bankrupted you. They stole your future itself. Leonce Gaiter

The ideas expressed here are not very complicated, they would be practically self-evident if so much time and media effort plus financial fiction had not been expended in clouding all these realities.

When Robert Reich speaks of health care saying that America's "economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America", he is underlining one of the principal facts of our world today, i.e. non-state actors, like multinational corporations, effectively controlled by a small percentage of the share holders and/or a management elite, are often more powerful than elected governments. This means, as Reich points out, that empowering government, which we elect, is the only defense we have against these unelected, non-state actors, who are indifferent to our welfare, whose only motive is profit.

Leonce Gaiter makes clear that this relationship with the non-state actors is an oppressive one and that with the bursting of the credit bubble and the destruction of the "wealth effect" created by endless credit, many people are finding themselves to be much less "middle class" then their advertising created fantasies led them to believe. Their treasured self-image is well tarnished and they are discovering that, as Gaiter says, "our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder." So in this crisis any person who lives from his salary and whose only patrimony is/was the house he lives/lived in, is, in the words of Marx and Engels, "at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind".

Alas, few are equipped either by temperament or by training to face with "sober senses" either the "real conditions" of their lives or the "relations with their kind". This lack makes them easy prey for movements like the Tea Party that fill the paths to truth with the traditional red herrings of American racism disguised as libertarianism.

This nauseating and supremely effective tactic is being trotted out once again.

At this moment the fundamental role of progressive Americans is to expose and root out racism.

The day when Americans in similar economic straits cease to see skin color and see clearly and soberly what they all have in common, in the same way  that the wealthy and powerful minority always have: on that day will the battle for social justice in the United States be more than half won. DS

Murdoch appears to pull up his poodle(s) short

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This is a very special and dangerous moment. Many very powerful people are afraid that Bush is about to execute what Professor Immanuel Wallerstein calls a "fuite en avant", in Iran, which could be translated as a desperate action, a mixture of a "hail Mary pass" and Samson in the temple. A disastrous attack that could set off a chain of unforeseeable consequences comparable to Gavrilo Pricip's fine adventure on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. The article I'm including from The Times of London, illustrates this consensus.

The Times, where the article quoted below appears, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, of whom Tony Blair is said to be in awe. I don't think Tony Blair would have dared to draw down British troops from Iraq without running it in front of Murdoch first. BTW, Murdoch also owns the neocon bible, "The Weekly Standard". Some observers have been wondering why the neocon commentators who led the charge into Iraq are so quiet about Iran at this very moment. Murdoch also owns Fox, which I don't receive over here (¡gracias a Díos!) so I would be grateful if my American readers would compare the tone of Fox with the Standard and The Times. Nobody I've read yet seems to draw any connection between the silence of the Standard and the criticism of the Times. But it appears that Murdoch is not really "on board" for "The End of Days". However, as the mentor of my youth, Neddy Seagoon used to say, "if only I knew how little I know, I'd know a little." DS

Fears grow over Iran - The Times

Abstract: Tony Blair has declared himself at odds with hawks in the US Administration by saying publicly for the first time that it would be wrong to take military action against Iran. The Prime Minister’s comments came hours before the UN’s nuclear watchdog raised the stakes in the West’s showdown with Tehran.(...) Senior British government sources have told The Times that they fear President Bush will seek to “settle the Iranian question through military means” next year, before the end of his second term if he concludes that diplomacy has failed. “He will not want to leave it unresolved for his successor,” said one. But there are deep fissures within the US Administration. Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, who has previously called for direct talks with Tehran, is said to be totally opposed to military action.(...) One senior adviser to Mr Gates has even stated privately that military action could lead to Congress impeaching Mr Bush.(...) Mr Blair, in a BBC interview yesterday, said: “I can’t think that it would be right to take military action against Iran"(...) It was notable that Mr Blair’s remarks yesterday closely resembled those of Jack Straw last year, who said that an attack on Iran was “inconceivable”, angering Washington and perhaps contributing to his removal as Foreign Secretary. The Prime Minister’s comments reflect what British officials have been saying privately for some time, but also show a growing streak of independence from Mr Bush. The White House was unhappy with the timing of Mr Blair’s announcement this week on withdrawing 1,600 British troops, concerned that it undercut Mr Bush’s efforts to shore up support for his troop surge on Capitol Hill while sending out “mixed messages” to the Iranians. READ IT ALL

Watch Hillary

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Hillary Clinton is the weather vane of American politics, the consummate professional who crafts everything she says or does to a very sophisticated (and expensive) reading of all the pressure groups, polls, niches and think tanks. She always seeks to be perfectly positioned on every issue, perfecting the Clinton trademark, "triangulation". For Hillary the Baker-Hamilton report presents a horrible problem. On one side is public opinion, that is to say; living, breathing voters and the foreign policy establishment: their consensus is talk to Iran and to hold a regional peace conference to settle Israel/Palestine. On the other side is the most unpopular president in living memory and of course, the neocons (Murdoch owns the Weekly Standard) followed by AIPAC and behind them the Israeli right wing; all of whom want to attack Iran. This is impossible to triangulate. Here, on one side, we have the weight of public opinion finally focused on reality and on the other side a pressure group famous for its power. Voters on one side, financing and press coverage on the other. A 'perfect storm' for a political hack. To really follow what is happening now, to know which way the wind is blowing, watch Hillary. Following her in the next few days and weeks may be comic as she whipsaws around this issue trying to find the perfect fix. DS

Poisened Spy Case Doesn't Make Any Sense

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The Soviet Union collapsed because the Russians couldn't make a decent washing machine or a car anyone would want to drive, not because they couldn't execute an enemy without fuss at the proper time. The death of Litvinenko coinciding with the Helsinki summit was obviously timed to cause Putin maximum embarrassment. Logically you would have to look among his enemies to find anyone who would want to embarrass him. There seem to be interesting links to Yukos and to disgruntled oligarchs in general. The Israeli military web DEBKA’s intelligence sources add that the Russian ex-spy is believed to have been a double agent, who sold trade secrets to different parties in and outside Russia, among them some of the Russian oligarchs living in exile in the West. Livinenko served as a colonel in a Russian Federal Security Services unit which investigated and carried out special operations against businessmen. To pursue this theory, it would be useful to follow the press coverage of the affair. The editorial from the Guardian below keeps a prudent distance from the rush to judgment. DS

A still mysterious death - Leader - The Guardian
Abstract: Russia's argument that a scandal abroad is the last thing that President Putin needs at this moment, holds weight. Why would the Kremlin risk a torrent of western opprobrium by killing an insignificant critic in London? Friends of Litvinenko claim he was investigating the death of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and therefore a threat to the Russian state who also sanctioned her murder. But the leads in the investigation of her murder point away from the Kremlin and towards either the Moscow-backed regime in Chechnya or elements in the Russian army, exposed by her courageous journalism as war criminals. We know that Litvinenko had already shot his bolt, by publishing a book accusing the Kremlin of involvement in the blowing up of apartment blocks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in 1999 which Moscow used to launch a new campaign in Chechnya. That was seven years ago and the truth still has not come out. Those waiting for the truth about the death of a Russian in London might have longer to wait. READ IT ALL