Russia: what goes around, comes around

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For me Bill Clinton is just a fly version of George W. Bush. Russia is even more important than Iraq and Bill Clinton played the saxophone while Russia burned. Probably the two most important things Clinton could have done and didn't do were, provide universal medical insurance for the American people and handle Russia and the needless suffering of its people differently. He failed in both tasks. Russia and by extension the former Soviet Union is one of history's great peoples. They have endless resources, both human and natural. They are brave, talented, tenacious and creative. People like that will never be down very long. The way Clinton handled them and encouraged the "shock therapy" that impoverished and embittered millions of Russians was frivolous, cruel and stupid and we will have to pay a high price for it. If any of the compassion and effort at easing the suffering of defeated Nazi Germany had been applied to the Russian case, at this moment we might even be looking at a true, "New World Order". DS

The breakup of the Soviet Union ended Russia's march to democracy - Stephen Cohen - Guardian
Abstract: The most consequential event of the second half of the 20th century took place 15 years ago at a secluded hunting lodge in the Belovezh Forest near Minsk. On December 8 1991, heads of three of the Soviet Union's 15 republics, led by Russia's Boris Yeltsin, met there to sign documents abolishing that 74-year-old state. For most western commentators the Soviet breakup was an unambiguously positive turning point in Russian and world history. As it quickly became the defining moment in a new American triumphalist narrative, the hope that Mikhail Gorbachev's pro-Soviet democratic and market reforms of 1985-91 would succeed was forgotten. Soviet history was now presented as "Russia's seven decades as a rigid and ruthless police state". American academics reacted similarly, most reverting to pre-Gorbachev axioms that the system had always been unreformable and doomed. The opposing view that there had been other possibilities in Soviet history, "roads not taken", was dismissed as a "dubious", if not disloyal, notion. Gorbachev's reforms, despite having so remarkably dismantled the Communist party dictatorship, had been "a chimera", and the Soviet Union therefore died from a "lack of alternatives". Most specialists no longer asked, even in the light of the human tragedies that followed in the 1990s, if a reforming Soviet Union might have been the best hope for the post-communist future of Russia. Nor have mainstream commentators asked if its survival would have been better for world affairs. On the contrary, they concluded that everything Soviet had to be discarded by "the razing of the entire edifice of political and economic relations". Such certitudes are now, of course, the only politically correct ones in US (and most European) policy, media and academic circles. A large majority of Russians, on the other hand, as they have regularly made clear in opinion surveys, regret the end of the Soviet Union, not because they pine for "communism" but because they lost a secure way of life. They do not share the nearly unanimous western view that the Soviet Union's "collapse" was "inevitable" because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good reason, that three "subjective" factors broke it up: the way Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in "privatising" the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it. Most Russians, including even the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, therefore still see December 1991 as a "tragedy". In addition, a growing number of Russian intellectuals have come to believe that something essential was lost - a historic opportunity to democratise and modernise Russia by methods more gradualist, consensual and less traumatic, and thus more fruitful and less costly, than those adopted after 1991. One common post-Soviet myth, promoted by Yeltsin's supporters, is that the dissolution was "peaceful". In reality, ethnic civil wars erupted in central Asia and Transcaucasia, killing hundreds of thousands and brutally displacing even more, a process still under way. It is hard to imagine a political act more extreme than abolishing what was still, for all its crises, a nuclear superpower state of 286 million citizens. And yet Yeltsin did it, as even his sympathisers acknowledged, in a way that was "neither legitimate nor democratic". Having ended the Soviet state in a way that lacked legal or popular legitimacy - in a referendum nine months before, 76% had voted to preserve the union - the Yeltsin ruling group soon became fearful of real democracy. And indeed Yeltsin's armed overthrow of the Russian parliament soon followed.(...) So why did so many western commentators hail the breakup of the Soviet Union as a "breakthrough" to democracy? Their reaction was based mainly on anti-communist ideology and hopeful myths.(...) Since the late 1980s (the most influential pro-Yeltsin intellectuals) had insisted that free-market economics and large-scale private property would have to be imposed on Russian society by an "iron hand" regime using "anti-democratic measures". Like the property-seeking elites, they saw Russia's newly elected legislatures as an obstacle. Admirers of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, they said of Yeltsin: "Let him be a dictator!" Not surprisingly, they cheered (along with the US government and mainstream media) when he used tanks to destroy Russia's popularly elected parliament in 1993. READ IT ALL

Israel: a personal statement - News Links

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Since I write a lot about the Middle East and especially Israel (not all very complimentary, I'm afraid) some readers might be interested in what I actually know about that country and what might be the background for the opinions I hold. Not that long after the "Six Day War", during the "War of Attrition" , when Golda Meir was prime minister, I lived and worked as a journalist for a year in Tel-Aviv. I wasn't a tourist "volunteer" on a Kibbutz. I worked on an equal footing and on a day to day basis with Israelis. I had many friends and no enemies I know of. Shortly after arriving in the country a young Israeli girl and I fell in love and it is one of the nicest memories I carry from my youth. We were together all the time I was there. When my work took me away, we were too young for our relationship to endure separation and we went our own ways. She is now happily married and so am I. However, whenever I see pictures of young Israelis manning checkpoints in "Judea" and "Samaria, I always think how easily they could be sons or daughters of mine. Nurit (not her real name) was the daughter of prominent journalist from the left-wing of the Israel labor movement. He and my girlfriend's mother had immigrated from Poland to British Palestine before WWII and helped found a kibbutz, where they lived and where my girlfriend and I visited them on weekends. We had a wonderful time. We were "young and healthy" and in love. I thought Israel was Paradise. I heard and participated in the best political conversations in the world. Israel was a socialist country at that time and I met hundreds of people and heard their stories, from the French resistance, the Spanish Civil War and service in the Red Army at Stalingrad... And of course the Holocaust... I already knew that had happened before I arrived. As a small child my life was saved by a German-Jewish lady doctor, a refugee who could barely speak English and who walked across the village where we lived in the dead of a ten below (Fahrenheit!) Midwestern winter, with the roads blocked with snow, to give me a penicillin shot. On the following day, when I had regained consciousness and she was examining me, I was fascinated by the numbers tattooed on her arm. There was an awkward silence in the sick room and later my mother explained what the tattoos were and how they got there. So, to cut to the chase: I am not a Holocaust denier or someone who finds Jewish people either physically, intellectually or spiritually repellent. I loved Israel and bought the whole, "Beautiful Israel" and "a land without people for a people without land"... stuff. Later beginning with the first Intifada, I had some doubts, but my mind was on other things. Really, my personal epiphany, began when the Internet came in and I began to read the Israeli press (in English) again on a daily basis, listening to the voices. Then again, thanks to the Internet, I discovered the revisionist historians like Ilan Pappe and then many strange stories, with even stranger silences, came back to my memory and finally made some sense. So what is my final opinion on a place and people that I love, an opinion that, correct or not, is validated by what the junk mail "universities" term "life experience"? I believe that today's Israel bears the same relationship to the United States as French Algeria bore to France. The Israelis are America's "pied noir". I am just waiting for an American president to tell them, "Je vous ai compris". I believe that Jewish settlement in Palestine was a tragic mistake, with the Jewish people left "holding the bag" of western imperialism. Like the slogan of the Sam Peckinpah western, "The Wild Bunch", "they came too late, they stayed too long". I truly believe that the "Promised Land" of the Jewish people, from the Haredim on out to the far left is the United States of America, where as Tony Judt so accurately puts it the Jews have never in their history been so welcomed, so powerful and so secure and I am very worried that the coming disintegration of America's power due to the Iraq fiasco and the "who lost the superpower?" witch hunt to follow may even spoil that promised land. I believe that there was a brief window of opportunity for peace and survival of the Zionist dream after the first Gulf War and that Bush/Baker were prepared to drag the Israelis kicking and screaming through it. The window no longer exists and Bush/Rice don't have the chops to drag the Israelis even if the window were still there. Is there a solution? Finally I think it would be cheaper and better for the United States to give every man woman and Israeli child a million dollars apiece and a green card and resettle them anywhere in the USA they wish, with a Cuban style fast track to citizenship. Is that an antisemitic idea? I still think that if Israel were an Island off the coast of the Carolinas it would be a paradise. I hope this post helps my possible Jewish readers understand my little 'rants" in the future. DS

Blair and Ahmadinejad: the pot calling the kettle black- Steve Bell - Guardian

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Ahmadinejad is the new P.T. Barnum

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Gideon Rachman writes in his first class blog in the Financial Times, "Mr. Ahmadinejad is a rather sinister figure. Or a complete clown." Sinister he may be, but in my opinion, crazy he isn't. What Ahmadinejad is doing by publicity stunts like the "cartoon contest" and the "Holocaust conference", with its endless shocking headlines and photo-ops with rabbis included, is to get lots of media exposure for the central idea he is peddling, which is the question: "Why should the Palestinians be the ones to pay the price for Europe's persecution of the Jews?" The idea that the Holocaust has been thus hijacked has quite a lot of resonance in the 3rd world and even among westerners who don't question in any way the tragic reality of the Holocaust itself. Drilling by repetition the idea that the Holocaust is merely being used to justify the suppression of the Palestinians and that this misappropriation is central to Israeli hasbara or PR machinery. Ahmadinejad is successfully using the headline hungry western media as a sounding box to propagate and repeat the question over and over again. The bait has been taken hook line and sinker. As P.T. Barnum said, "there is one born every minute". DS

Wise words on war - George F. Kennan

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Mark Danner has a fine article on Iraq in the New York Review of Books. In it he quotes George F. Kennan, who with Dean Acheson was perhaps the greatest American diplomat of the 20th century. In the fall of 2002, at the age of 98, he is quoted saying one of the wisest and most succinct things I've ever read about war or conflict in general... even to level of harsh words. Let me share it with you. DS

"Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before. In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it."
George F. Kennan -October 2002

Dollar: up in smoke?

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The most interesting point this article that I'm featuring from Der Spiegel makes is that the dollar is not just depreciating against the euro, which would be terrible for Europe; it is falling against many other important currencies too. The pound sterling, the Thai Baht, the South Korean Won and the Chinese Yuan are all rising in value against the dollar. This means that they are holding value in relation to each other. This in turn means that contrary to times past if the dollar crashes today it wont drag the rest of the world down with it. The world economy will just chug along buying and selling manufactured goods to each other, while US software, services and agricultural products will be dirt cheap on the world markets. If an American looks underneath any manufactured thing he finds within his reach he or she will probably find that it was made in a foreign country. Let her have a good look, because it may be some time before she can afford to buy it again. DS

The Fall of the Mighty Dollar - Der Spiegel
Abstract: Experts have been predicting for some time that the dollar would eventually go into a nosedive, and now that time seems to have come. The US currency has lost five percent of its value against the euro since late October, and 13 percent since the beginning of the year. The euro is currently fluctuating around a value of $1.33, which is only 3 cents away from its all-time high in 2004. And yet Trichet's counterpart Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has done nothing but look on as the dollar plunges. A sea change appears to be taking place on the international financial markets. For years, global capital flowed in only one direction, with $2 billion going into the United States every day. Investors viewed the world's largest economy not only as a bastion of stability, but also as a place that promised the best deals, the most lucrative returns and the highest growth rates. The Americans, for their part, welcomed foreign investment. For them, it was almost a tradition to save very little and spend more than they earned -- essentially achieving affluence on credit. Foreigners financed the Americans' almost obsessive consumer spending, which spurred worldwide economic growth for years. Because the US government was unable to fall back on the savings of its citizens, it too was forced to finance its budget deficit with foreign capital. Both consumer spending and the federal deficit kept the dollar high, because the rest of the world was practically scrambling to invest in the United States.(...) Investors worldwide are becoming sceptical and starting to pull their money out of the United States. They have realized that a people and a country cannot live beyond their means in the long term. The US dollar's exchange rate is starting to crumble as a result of this withdrawal. The depreciation is causing growing concern about what will happen to the global economy if the United States loses its role as an engine of growth. (...) The consequences of a declining dollar for the German and European economy will be determined in large part by the way other currencies develop relative to the dollar. "It would be fatal if only the euro were to rise," says DIW analyst Steinherr. "Then it would only be the euro zone that would have to bear the burden of adjustment." But the foreign currency markets suggest a different development, as the dollar is also losing value in relation to other important currencies. The British pound, for example, rose to new highs last week. Even more importantly, the currencies of east Asian growth regions are also appreciating against the dollar. The Thai Baht, for example, gained about 15 percent against the dollar in 2006, while the South Korean Won gained 10 percent. Even the Chinese Yuan, which slavishly followed the dollar in the past, gained more than three percent. Virtually every economy is bearing part of the burden of adjustment.(...) The perils of a currency crash are not nearly as great as they were in the days of the dollar's absolute dominance 30 or 40 years ago. Globalization has led to the development of a number of growth centers in the world economy which share the burden of turbulence. Gone are the days when an American finance minister could boast: "The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem." READ IT ALL

Kucinich to run for president: go for it!

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Full disclosure: I confess I really like Dennis Kucinich. He and Howard Dean got it right on the war in Iraq... so of course they are a pair of nuts, right? The Democrats chose a "winner", John Kerry, who triangulated himself into knots over Iraq and lost. If they were going to lose anyway, wouldn't it have been better to run with people who had the most important world issue after the fall of the Berlin wall correctly diagnosed? At least the Democratic Party would have had some moral capital left. Howard Dean is rebuilding the grassroots of the party, which is a very subversive thing to do. A broad activist base and micro-financing might save the party and, who knows? the republic itself. Dennis Kucinich is hanging in there, fighting the good fight. Miracles happen... I wish him all success. DS
Abstract: Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2004, said Monday he is planning another bid because his party isn't pushing hard enough to end the Iraq war.In a statement, Kucinich said he plans to formally announce his candidacy on Tuesday at Cleveland's City Hall, where he served as mayor of his hometown in the 1970s. The liberal, anti-war Ohio congressman said he was inspired to run because he disagrees with the way some of his fellow Democrats are handling the war, including approval of a proposal to spend $160 billion more on the conflict. "Democrats were swept into power on Nov. 7 because of widespread voter discontent with the war in Iraq," said Kucinich, 60. "Instead of heeding those concerns and responding with a strong and immediate change in policies and direction, the Democratic congressional leadership seems inclined to continue funding the perpetuation of the war."(...) He won re-election to his House seat in 2006 with 66 percent of the vote. He based his campaign on job creation and criticizing rising gas prices. He also was an outspoken critic of his own party, saying Democrats have lost their soul by moving away from liberal ideals. READ IT ALL

End of an era:Time to Offshore Our Troops - New York Times

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This article from the New York Times will give many a future historian of our period a useful footnote. It marks the end of an era that began when US president Theodore Roosevelt sent the "Great White Fleet" of 16 battleships and their escorts around the world in 1907, to demonstrate America's growing military power. It was never a good idea to land base American soldiers in the Middle East. Their presence near Mecca and Medina after the First Gulf War was a provocation to Muslim radicals that led directly to 9-11. It is very good idea to withdraw them. Keeping them there may lead to unthinkable catastrophes. There is a catch, however: at any time now or in the future, their withdrawal will be seen (correctly) as a military defeat for the US. Just as Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet" announced the arrival on the world scene of a new great power, the inevitable withdrawal of American soldiers under fire signals the end of America's "lone superpower" status. DS
Hillary Watch: The article states that, "Donald Rumsfeld and Hillary Clinton — go further and consider strengthening our forces around the gulf by shifting some troops from Iraq to neighboring countries." Is this the "Murdoch touch"?

Abstract: The Iraq Study Group’s recommendation that the United States withdraw its combat forces from Iraq reflects a growing national consensus that our military cannot quell the violence there and may even be making matters worse. Although many are hailing this recommendation as a bold new course, it is not bold enough. America will best serve its interests in the Persian Gulf by withdrawing its ground-based military forces not only from Iraq, but from the entire region.(...) The bipartisan authors of the report, for example, advocate maintaining “a considerable military presence in the region” including “powerful air, ground and naval deployments in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar” even after the last American combat troops leave Iraq. Others — including Donald Rumsfeld and Hillary Clinton — go further and consider strengthening our forces around the gulf by shifting some troops from Iraq to neighboring countries. Maintaining a large military presence in the region has been the cornerstone of American policy since the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and remains so today. With the Iraq war, we now have tens of thousands of troops elsewhere in the neighborhood. But this strategy is flawed. In fact, many of the same considerations that led the Iraq Study Group to call for withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq suggest that the United States should withdraw its troops from neighboring states as well — leaving only naval forces offshore in international waters. As in Iraq, a large United States military footprint on the ground undermines American interests more than it protects them. Just as our troops on Iraqi streets have provided a rallying point for the insurgency, the United States military presence throughout the region has been a key element in Al Qaeda’s recruitment campaign and propaganda. If America withdrew from Iraq but left behind substantial forces in neighboring states, Al Qaeda would refocus its attacks on American troops in those countries — remember the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia? Worse, the continued presence of our military personnel across the region will continue to incite extremists to attack American cities. Osama bin Ladin repeatedly stated that the presence of American forces on the holy ground of the Arabian Peninsula was a primary reason for 9/11. Our presence also destabilizes our important regional allies. Not only do American bases make these countries a target for terrorists, but many of their citizens bristle at the sight of United States bases on their soil. Indeed, the most serious near-term threat to our energy interests is the overthrow of friendly governments by domestic Islamic extremists, a danger that is increased by the presence of our troops.(...) Terrorists could damage key oil fields and ports, or friendly governments in the gulf could be toppled by anti-American extremists. These concerns, however, do not justify peacetime forward deployment. United States allies play the primary role defending their own oil fields and safeguarding their internal security, and their forces are better suited for the job. If anything, the presence of “infidel” soldiers nearby increases the likelihood of terrorist attacks and political upheaval. READ IT ALL

Pinochet rides Thatcher into hell - Steve Bell - Guardian

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Caption: "We'll meet again."

William Pfaff on the The Baker-Hamilton Report

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Anyone who reads me regularly knows my weakness for William Pfaff. Here in a few words, while analyzing the Baker-Hamilton report, he asks all the main questions. 1.) How did this fool ever get elected president in the first place? 2.) How to prevent something like that ever happening again? And finally, 3.) Will it ever be possible to clean up his stinking mess? Chapeaux cher maître! DS
Abstract: The domestic political motivation behind Congressional appointment of this independent commission was to find a door through which the United States could leave Iraq with the national eagle’s feathers’ intact. It reflects concern for how to handle the domestic political consequences of the Iraq failure. In this its success is uncertain. The initial evidence is that George W. Bush will react with hostility to this stinging attack on the foolhardiness, arrogance, and as yet unknown eventual costs of his adventure. It may change little in his conduct of the war. The intellectual poverty that lay behind administration policy was evident from the start, in the political and strategic naiveté of the neo-conservative project, which treated war on Iraq as if it were a videogame. Donald Rumsfeld’s final “recommendations” to the president as he resigned were of stupefying emptiness: a rats’ nest of jottings: do this, try that, see if that might work. This was supposed to be an intellectually serious executive and analyst, like Robert S. McNamara? But the president himself has proven to be no more than a college fraternity prankster pretending to be president: “I Am the Decider.” How do Americans get people like this in high office? The present system, or is it a lucrative industry?, of selecting and electing presidents has to end. The essential step is to ban paid political advertising.(...) The report’s insistence on the centrality of the Palestinian question, its proposal for neutral international experts to advise the Iraqi government, and its emphasis on reintegration of Ba’ath party members and Arab nationalists, and on national and regional reconciliation as well, are a fitting conclusion to a report that honors its authors, but may have come too late, or worse, have no serious effect on administration policy. READ IT ALL

War on drugs: tilting at windmills

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Living in a country like Spain, where possession of drugs for personal use is not a crime and taking drugs (not selling them) is treated as a health problem, it is hard for me to understand why the American prisons are filled to the top with users. Is it a form of racial repression? In one of Milton Friedman's last interviews, quoted in the article from the Seattle Times that I'm featuring below, the Nobel prize winning economist said, "Should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? ... Should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?". He was in favor of legalizing drugs. So am I. I don't see how things could be worse than they are now. This is a problem of social exclusion. The question that should be asked in the USA is: why does it seem impossible for so many of its citizens to live in the United States without being stoned out of their minds? DS

Drugs: the other war we can't win - Seattle Times
Abstract: There are 2.2 million Americans behind bars, another 5 million on probation or parole, the Justice Department reported on Nov. 30. We exceed Russia and Cuba in incarcerations per 100,000 people; in fact, no other nation comes close. The biggest single reason for the expanding numbers? Our war on drugs — a quarter of all sentences are for drug offenses, mostly nonviolent. So has the "war" worked? Has drug use or addiction declined? Clearly not. Hard street drugs are reportedly cheaper and purer, and as easy to get, as when President Richard Nixon declared substance abuse a "national emergency." Drugs crossing our borders have been widely blamed. To stem them, President Bill Clinton launched Plan Colombia, carried on enthusiastically under the Bush administration. The plan's modus operandi is war from the sky — aerial spraying that has covered 2.4 million acres of Colombia's coca plant and opium poppy fields — almost as much territory as Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá has become our second-largest diplomatic mission, employing more than 2,000 people. Still, the U.N. reports, Colombia last year produced 776 metric tons of cocaine, enough to supply 80 percent of the world market. Great victory. In Afghanistan, the provider of a huge portion of the world's heroin, production is soaring with the profits funding insurgents and criminals. Drug cartels with their own armies regularly engage NATO forces — as serious a threat as the Taliban. High-level government officials and police are reportedly corrupted. And the U.S. still presses eradication programs that alienate villagers.(...) We'd be incredibly better off if we had treated drugs as a public-health issue instead of a criminal issue — as the celebrated Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, in fact advised us. Friedman, who died last month at 94, witnessed America's misadventure into alcohol prohibition in his youth. "We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, the gang wars," wrote Friedman. He decried turning users into criminals: "Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse — for both the addict and the rest of us." And in one of his last interviews, Friedman asked the relevant questions: "Should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? ... Should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?"(...) Race remains a disturbing factor: The federal penalty for crack cocaine, favored in poor black neighborhoods, remains 10 times that for regular cocaine, more popular among whites. READ IT ALL

Jimmy Carter and the "Friends of Israel"

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Here is what Jimmy Carter has actually said:

"When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa."

Here is what Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League has said about Carter quoted in Haaretz:

"When you think about the charge that he has made that the Jewish people control the means of communication, it is odious. If the Jews controlled the media, how come he is traveling around the country speaking about this book on talk shows?

How are we really supposed to read Mr. Foxman's remark? Are we allowed to think that if Mr. Foxman himself actually controlled the media, a former president of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize winner wouldn't be able to travel freely around the United States of America and speak about his book on talk shows? Does Mr. Foxman feel frustrated because he can't manage to actually silence a former US president and Nobel Peace Prize winner?
As Jimmy Carter goes on to say:

"I feel completely at ease, I am not running for office. And I have Secret Service protection."

Can we interpret that to mean that if you don't have to look for work and you don't have 24 hour bodyguard service, you had better keep your mouth shut?

In a situation like this, with the Israeli right wing tied like an albatross around the neck of US policy, where the intimidation is this naked, what is very important is to witness that the Jewish community is not monolithic on this question. Here is what Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine has to say about former President Carter in Tom Paine:

Jimmy Carter was the best friend the Jews ever had as president of the United States. He is the only president to have actually delivered for the Jewish people an agreement (the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt) that has stood the test of time. Since the treaty, there have been bad vibes between Israel and Egypt, but never a return to war, once Israel fully withdrew from the territories it conquered in Egypt during the 1967 war. To get that agreement, Carter had to twist the arms of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Sometimes that is what real friends do—they push you into a path that is really in your best interest at times when there is an emergency and you are acting self-destructively. When the U.S. government is following a self-destructive policy, even a policy backed by people in both major political parties, its best friends are those who try to change its direction and are not afraid to offer intense critique. That’s why a majority of Americans, and 86 percent of American Jews, voted in the 2006 midterm elections to reject Bush’s war in Iraq and his policies suspending habeas corpus and legitimating wire-tapping and torture. Not because we were disloyal, but precisely because we love America enough to challenge its policies even when Vice President Cheney questions our loyalty. We know that critique is often an essential part of love and caring. That is precisely what Jimmy Carter is trying to do for Israel and the Jewish people in his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. So it’s astounding to see the assault on Carter that has been launched by the ADL chair Abe Foxman, law professor Alan Dershowitz and a bevy of other representatives of the Jewish community.(...) Jimmy Carter is speaking the truth as he knows it, and doing a great service to the Jews. Unfortunately, this peace is impeded by the powerful voices of AIPAC and the mainstream of the organized Jewish community, who manage to terrify even the most liberal elected officials into blind support of whatever policy the current government of Israel advocates. Ironically, this blind support has had the consequence of pushing many morally sensitive Christians and Jews to distance themselves from the Jewish world, which makes blind support for Israeli policies the litmus test of anti-Semitism. Younger Jews cannot safely express criticisms of Israeli policy without being told that they are disloyal or “self-hating,” and elected officials tell me privately that they agree with Tikkun’s more balanced “progressive Middle Path” which is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. But we’ve found that even Jews in the mainstream media have ignored or condemned our new organization, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, which is, among other things, trying to be an interfaith alternative to AIPAC. It’s time to create a new openness to criticism and a new debate. Jimmy Carter has shown courage in trying to open that kind of space with his new book, and he deserves our warm thanks and support.

The United State's position in the Middle East is disintegrating in great part because of supporting the policies of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Binjamin Netanyahu and Nathan Sharansky with arms, money and endless UN Security Council vetos. As the situation in the Middle East continues to disintegrate, America may even find itself defending the policies of a up and up fascist like Avigdor Lieberman in a like manner. Because of this disintegration, in a measurable space of time, we may very well find Americans having to bicycle to work, (if they still have jobs).The very worst thing that could happen to United States of America would be a wave of antisemitism. It could literally tear the country to pieces as it did to Spain and Germany. It may turn out that Jewish people settling in Palestine has been a terrible mistake. That would be a tragedy for the Jewish people and also for the Palestinian Arabs who have had to suffer so much for that dream. What would be the greatest tragedy for the American Jewish people, the rest of the American people and for the entire world who have derived so much benefit from this relationship, would be if the Jewish people's settling in the USA had also turned out to be a mistake. What the American Jewish people need most at this moment are less "Friends of Israel" and more just "simply friends"... and friends talk straight to their friends. DS

Dollar and Oil - the price of failure

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One of the seed ideas left over from the 1990s that is keeping us from seeing our own era clearly is the idea that business trumps politics. Everything then was free trade and 'bottom line'. 9-11 didn't "change everything": failing in Iraq has. We have moved quickly into an era where, as Churchill said about the Balkans, we produce "more history than we can digest." The article from the Financial Times looks at the present fall of the dollar from the point of view of fundamentals, but it would be unwise to neglect the political/symbolic angle. All our system runs on oil, the main source of oil is the Middle East, in Iraq, the United States has shown that it cannot control the Middle East. The dollar is the symbol of American power.... As the FT says, "Currency switches are likely to be progressive, subtle and discreet, as untoward attention could hit the dollar, lowering the value of depositors’ remaining dollar-denominated assets." Whistling and shuffling their feet with their eyes on the door. DS
Oil producers shun dollar - Financial Times
Abstract: Oil producing countries have reduced their exposure to the dollar to the lowest level in two years and shifted oil income into euros, yen and sterling, according to new data from the Bank for International Settlements. The revelation in the latest BIS quarterly review, published on Monday, confirms market speculation about a move out of dollars and could put new pressure on the ailing US currency. Market liquidity is traditionally low in December, and many traders have locked in profits, potentially reinforcing volatility. Russia and the members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the oil cartel, cut their dollar holdings from 67 per cent in the first quarter to 65 per cent in the second. Meanwhile, they increased their holdings of euros from 20 to 22 per cent, the BIS said. The speed of the shift may help to explain the weakness of the dollar, which recently fell to a 20-month low against the euro and a 14-year low against sterling.(...) Such shifts may be modest compared with the total assets held, but they provide a crucial indication on future thinking. Currency switches are likely to be progressive, subtle and discreet, as untoward attention could hit the dollar, lowering the value of depositors’ remaining dollar-denominated assets.(...) The dollar has suffered weakness because of concerns about global imbalances and the future course of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy. READ IT ALL

Afghanistan: an ideology collapses

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Today Paul Krugman, in a column about outsourcing says the following, "In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to DynCorp International ... under very loose supervision: ... auditors couldn’t even find a copy of DynCorp’s contract... And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan still doesn’t have an effective police training program." When "Real Existing Socialism" collapsed, it was assumed that this was somehow a vindication of capitalism.... Perhaps it was only a vindication of "collapse". All of the ideology that dresses up American power is being stripped away in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps this is even more evident in Afghanistan, where the motives for the war are clearer and less prone to conspiracy theories than Iraq. Certainly we are seeing a crisis of the prevalent neo-liberal and neo-conservative, "end of history" thinking of the 1990s. The famous Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times", could well be applied to our era. DS
Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan - New York Times
Abstract: Islamic militants are using a recent peace deal with the government to consolidate their hold in northern Pakistan, vastly expanding their training of suicide bombers and other recruits and fortifying alliances with Al Qaeda and foreign fighters, diplomats and intelligence officials from several nations say. The result, they say, is virtually a Taliban mini-state. The militants, the officials say, are openly flouting the terms of the September accord in North Waziristan, under which they agreed to end cross-border help for the Taliban insurgency that revived in Afghanistan with new force this year. The area is becoming a magnet for an influx of foreign fighters, who not only challenge government authority in the area, but are even wresting control from local tribes and spreading their influence to neighboring areas, according to several American and NATO officials and Pakistani and Afghan intelligence officials. This year more than 100 local leaders, government sympathizers or accused “American spies” have been killed, several of them in beheadings, as the militants have used a reign of terror to impose what President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan calls a creeping “Talibanization.” Last year, at least 100 others were also killed.(...) The fundamentalists’ influence is seeping outward, with propaganda being spread on private radio stations, and through a widening network of religious schools and the distribution of CDs and DVDs. It can now be felt in neighboring tribal departments and the settled areas of the North-West Frontier Province. In recent months, Pakistani newspapers have reported incidents of music and barber shops being closed, television sets burned and girls’ schools threatened. The militants are more powerful than the military and the local tribal police, kill with impunity and shield criminals and fugitives. (...) the Taliban commanders and the Pakistani militants under them remain unswervingly loyal to jihad in Afghanistan and, despite the tensions, still enjoy local support for the cause, officials and local journalists say. The failed government military campaigns of recent years, which are seen as dictated by the United States, have further radicalized the local population, many in the region say. As a potential indicator of local support, the families of two suicide bombers sent to Afghanistan from Waziristan gained renown in the community, according to a local journalist.(...) Morale is high among the resurgent Taliban after their revival in Afghanistan this year, one Pakistani security official said. That will lead to still more recruitment and better organization and planning in the year ahead. READ IT ALL

Iran: dealing with the demons

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The only way that the USA could "solve" its situation in the Middle East, as it stands today, is to make a deal with Iran. Not just a little deal, but the "mother of all deals". The realpolitik solution to America's problems in the Middle East would be to become Iran's "new best friend". Full trade (especially oil technology), full diplomatic relations, non-interference in Iran's internal affairs, let them have their atomic bomb: all in exchange for a dignified withdrawal from Iraq and Iran's recognition that the US Navy -- over the horizon -- guarantees the independence of Saudi Arabia and the emirates and free movement of oil. To insure the survival of the Saudi throne, force Israel to accept the Saudi peace plan, which means Israel returning all the land it took in 1967, including Jerusalem.... Hey David, what are you smoking? The United States' international behavior is normally ruled by domestic politics. Pressure groups of every stripe twist the general interest to their benefit. Things will have to get a lot worse in the Middle East before the deal I've sketched out could happen. Will things get worse? Do bears do whatever they do in the woods? DS

Iran looks like the winner of the Iraq war - Los Angeles Times

Abstract: The report issued last week by the blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group provides fresh proof of Iran's strengthened hand in the Middle East since the U.S.-led invasion: It mentions the Islamic Republic more than 50 times and makes clear that the U.S. will have to seek Iran's help for any resolution. "The report told the Iranians, You are mighty now in the region and in Iraq. The Iranians feel now they are untouchable," said Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Gulf Research Center, an independent think tank in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Bush administration no longer has much leverage to stop Iran from pursuing uranium enrichment, diplomats and analysts said. And the price of cooperation, Alani said, will be very high.(...) "So far, Iran won the Iraq war," said George Perkovich, the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They gained the most by far." He said the U.S. hand was already weak on the nuclear issue because of Russia's reluctance to go along with sanctions against the Islamic Republic. But the report makes clear that Iran has substantial leverage in any negotiation, he said, because of Iran's importance in helping to quell the civil war in Iraq. "We have to deal with reality," Perkovich said. Israel views the situation with alarm. "The idea was to make Iraq a partner in the moderate Arab camp. Instead, it has come under the influence of Iran, a state that calls for Israel's destruction," said Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy defense minister.(...) Western diplomats are reluctant to describe Iran as a victor but concede that for the moment, at least, it looks that way. "Iran won the first round," said a senior Western diplomat in an Arab state. "But there is a long way to go, and if the U.S. leaves Iraq and other countries in the region come in — Saudi, Syria — Iran's position could weaken."(...) Analysts emphasized, far more than the report's authors did, that Iran's strengthened position means the nation is unlikely to see any reason to help the U.S. unless Washington meets Ian's demands. And, they said, Iran will put such a high price on cooperation that it will be impossible for Washington to agree. "Iran certainly would want recognition of their enrichment program, what they claim to be their rights to uranium enrichment…. They would also want lifting of [existing] U.S. sanctions, particularly on investment in oil and gas," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. (...) "It's ironic that Bush, after having coined the 'axis of evil' phrase, now finds it very hard to address the Iran problem because of the failure of the Iraq policy," Fitzpatrick said. "So now they have to deal with the demons." READ IT ALL

Iraq: the last reality show

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Frank Rich quotes Chuck Hagel,“The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can’t quite calibrate.” That is the phrase that sums up the situation best. When Bush invaded Iraq, he set in motion forces he could not foresee and never could control. In effect, he opened the gates of hell. The Middle East could be compared with the San Andreas fault: if it's quiet you have the West Coast, if it moves too much you don't. So many things hang on the price of oil and its free movement in a liberalized market place. So much of America's political and cultural life depend on the safety of Israel, that if oil and Israel are sufficiently and simultaneously jeopardized, we will be looking at the social equivalent of "the big one": that earthquake that all Californians know awaits them. Americans are fascinated by disasters because they have had so little experience of them. Giant gorillas, creatures from outer space, strange diseases: lines form around the block. Paranoia sells tickets. The last Americans who remember fear and hardship personally are the children of the great depression and there are not too many of them left. In most areas of the world if you haven't known catastrophe personally your family can tell you about it. An example: in the 1960s I had a Japanese friend my age, Takeo, whose father was a famous Tokyo architect,. Takeo was upper middle class to his fingertips: Takeo's older brother starved to death, in Tokyo, in 1945. Most families, rich and poor, around the world have stories like that. Americans live blessedly in a bubble; that bubble is about to burst. Look around you, enjoy this Christmas; breathe in its air like the air of the last day of summer. DS

Frank Rich - The Sunshine Boys Can’t Save Iraq - New York Times Abstract: In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that “immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long” might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra. Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990’s he famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. “The Way Forward” is its apotheosis. This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we’re “not winning” in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush’s “absolutely, we’re winning” of late October, it’s hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.(...) Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a “grave and gathering danger” in September 2002 has devolved into a “grave and deteriorating” catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.cIts recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country’s warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to “influence events” for America’s benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas. The group’s coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there’s no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is. By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn’t plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact a charade of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain, for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. (...) The Iraqi government’s ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group’s members visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb) daring to leave the Green Zone. The Bush-Maliki rendezvous 10 days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman. The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however evanescently, come not from “The Way Forward” but from its critics on the right who want significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that a true counterinsurgency campaign would “require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police,” not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John McCain. Since these troops don’t exist and there is no public support in either America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can’t satisfy the hawks even if he chooses to do so. Since he’s also dead set against a prompt withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many “reviews” he conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to keep us from thinking we’ve “lost,” until the whole mess is deposited in the lap of the next president. But as Chuck Hagel said last week, “The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can’t quite calibrate.” It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to suppose that the world will stand still while we dally.(...) The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age. READ IT ALL (bootleg: hat to jurassicporc)

Antisemitism: a footnote - II

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Continuing from a previous post it important to underline that murderous, antisemitism still exists. The charming youngster in the photo on the right is a German neo-Nazi. Antisemites still exist and they hate Jews... all Jews, just as they always have. They would hate Tony Judt as much as the ADL or AIPAC apparently do... Not because of his political stand, but because he is Jewish, they don't consider him a "self-hating Jew". They don't need any Jewish help to hate Jews. They would hate Amira Hass or Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, or even Sandy Koufax if it came to that, simply because these people all are Jewish. It is not acceptable that people who make a reasonable criticism of Israel and its relationship with the United States, as former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter has, be hysterically smeared or that two well qualified and respected academics such as Mearsheimer and Walt be classed with the skinhead in our picture. This really can't continue. At this moment it is absolutely imperative for Americans to define the terms, "antisemite", "antisemitism" and "antisemitic", with great precision. Why? Because the United States is in the process of suffering (it is only beginning) the greatest humiliation of its entire history in Iraq. The origins of this war of choice are obscure and as its story unfolds and as the disaster and sense of humiliation deepens, Americans will want to get to the bottom of who was responsible. It appears at this point that the Israeli right wing have their fingerprints all over it. Their relation to the neocons and to AIPAC is going to be studied under a microscope. This is inevitable. With today's viral technology if the debate is suppressed, even the result of a "who killed Kennedy?" treatment of this subject would be devastating for US/Israeli relations. It is absolutely essential to distinguish the individuals and the specific organizations responsible and to avoid at all cost a "vee vas stabbed in der back," antisemitic surge, because that would literally tear the American social fabric apart as it did Spain's and Germany's before. It is absolutely essential that a natural surge of anti-Israeli feeling; natural, because it appears that a foreign country has led the USA into a great disaster, that these feelings not be turned against America's Jewish community, a community which is an essential, fundamental, part of the United States of America, warp and woof. Accusations of "double loyalty" should not be bandied about frivolously, the question of "double loyalty" has always existed in the USA, a country of immigrants. I'll give a personal example: as a boy I have been at parties with Irish-Americans, where the hat was passed for the IRA and it was soon filled up. The IRA is a terrorist organization and also a symbol of Irish independence and the US government has always frowned upon it, to say the least. The accusation of double loyalty never came up, because the USA has no strategic interest in Ireland or Britain's relation with Ireland. For the USA the "troubles" are a domestic issue for courting the Irish vote. Israel and American Jewish support of Israel has been more or less an element of US domestic politics (this is horribly unfair to the Palestinians) till now. That has changed forever. Israel's fatal mistake was to draw the USA into a military adventure which is tearing American power and prestige to shreds. This is going to cost Israel dearly, but there is no reason it should cost America's Jewish community. The only way it could is if this hysterical attacking of anyone who states the obvious as an antisemite, making them out to be like the fellow in the photo, continues unabated. Nobody likes to be insulted, not just Jewish people. DS

PS. Phil Weiss (who is Jewish and thus also hated by antisemites) has a "must read" post over at New York Observer, the subject is, "Jimmy Carter Can't Say What Jewish Critics of Israel Are Free to Say". He proceeds to cite Israel's famous UN Abba Eban, chapter and verse on the subject of Jewish pressure and influence in US politics.

Antisemitism: a footnote

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Note to readers:

Antisemitism does exist. What is unacceptable is to lump ex-president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State, James Baker with the brutish skinheads and "lager louts", who desecrate Jewish cemeteries and firebomb synagogues. This hysterical, attack dog strategy, with its Stalinist overtones, is debasing language to a point where "genteel antisemitism" may make a comeback. Is that what AIPAC and the ADL want? These strategies are neurotic and self-destructive. The debate is inevitably going to take place because America is being defeated in a war, whose origins are unclear. It would be good if America didn't turn into a mega-Bosnia because of it. DS

Baker Report "antisemitic" and Jimmy Carter is trashed: the battle is joined

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The selection of neocon blogs from the Los Angeles Times below is a good sample of how this battle over Baker-Hamilton and Israel's influence on US policy is going to shape up. Most of the classic points are here, beginning with blanket charges of anti-Semitism, references to "Islamofascism" and of course "Munich" and Neville Chamberlain. Also in the LA Times is a brave piece by Jimmy Carter, certainly America's most underrated president, defending himself against the, by now, inevitable charges of antisemitism, where he says:
"Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations who would be unlikely to visit the occupied territories, and their primary criticism is that the book is anti-Israel. Two members of Congress have been publicly critical. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for instance, issued a statement (before the book was published) saying that "he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel." Some reviews posted on Amazon.com call me "anti-Semitic," and others accuse the book of "lies" and "distortions." A former Carter Center fellow has taken issue with it, and Alan Dershowitz called the book's title "indecent."(...) The book describes the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid. I have made it clear that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens. Obviously, I condemn any acts of terrorism or violence against innocent civilians, and I present information about the terrible casualties on both sides. The ultimate purpose of my book is to present facts about the Middle East that are largely unknown in America, to precipitate discussion and to help restart peace talks (now absent for six years) that can lead to permanent peace for Israel and its neighbors. Another hope is that Jews and other Americans who share this same goal might be motivated to express their views, even publicly, and perhaps in concert. I would be glad to help with that effort. "
A selection of neocon bloggers from the Los Angeles Times

Roger Simon:

Is James Baker the biggest American anti-Semite since Father Coughlin[?]

Charles Johnson:

All these recommendations stem from a basis of complete fantasy, in which Israel's Arab neighbors are genuinely interested in peace and all we have to do to get it is ask them the right way.

Michael Brandon McClellan:

The report is thus simultaneously both unoriginal and ridiculous.

David Horowitz:

The news is sickening to every decent soul except to the Islamic Nazis and their friends in the international left and the delusional folk who think that if America leaves Iraq the terrorists will leave too (Speaker Pelosi actually made that precise comment this October). Talking to the Hitler in Teheran and the Arab Mussolini in Damascus makes perfect sense to the contemporary Chamberlains -- Baker, Hamilton (he of the capitulate to the Sandinistas crowd). I never thought I would live to see a day when the last years of the Thirties would be repeated, let alone by Americans. But there it is.

Hugh Hewitt:

Of the 43 "former officials and experts" consulted --including Mark Danner of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Friedman, Leslie Gelb, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, Ken Pollack, Thomas Ricks, and George Will-- the ISG did not find it necessary to talk with, say, Victor Davis Hanson, Lawrence Wright, Robert Kaplan, Mark Steyn, Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht, or Christopher Hitchens. The ISG did talk with Bill Kristol. I wonder how long that sit down lasted?

The report combines an almost limitless condescension towards the "Iraqi sovereign government," even going so far as to lay out a timetable for its exact legislative program for the next six months, with a cavalier indifference to the Syrian death squads operating in Lebanon, and the certain nature ofDS the Iranian regime --still, on this very day, hosting the anti-Holocaust conference.

It is a wonder, this bit of appeasement virtuosity, and I think it will gain for its authors all the lasting fame that has attached itself to the name Samuel Hoare, and his brainchild, the Hoare-Laval Agreement.

This battle is going to be the most fierce and wrenching in the United States since the anti-slavery debates of the 1850s. It is absolutely essential that it take place, the air must be cleared. What is so tragic is that this debate about Israel's and its lobby's influence on American policy could only take place in the context of of America's huge failure in Iraq. DS

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

Bush: The Cowboy Cornered

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Although born in Connecticut and a failure in the awlbidness (oil business), George W. Bush likes to think of himself as West Texas oilman(awlmayhen). In this disguise his answer to being cornered, broke and friendless, staring utter failure in the face, may be the classic posture of a West Texas oilman: to shoot the works, go for broke, double or nothing. Unless removed from office, this wannabe "cowboy" is still the Commander in Chief of the largest air force and the largest navy in the history of the world and before being a laughing stock, a neocon whipping boy and having his daddy crying in public, (real cowboy's daddy's don't cry in public) he may decide for the "quick draw" and to go out in a blaze of glory. We are looking at one mean SOB and the world's most dangerous man. His answer may very wll be an all out aerial and naval bombardment of Iran. Anybody who thinks Bush will let James Baker lead him away quietly could be terribly mistaken. Below is another wonderful analysis by my hero, William Pfaff, the anti-Thomas Friedman. DS
Iran as Carthage - William Pfaff
Abstract: At the end of November more than a hundred officials and specialists concerned with security in the Middle East were invited to Athens to “solve the security puzzle in the eastern Mediterranean and the broader Middle East,” a challenge which needless to say they failed.(...) Again the profound depth was revealed of the chasm that exists between official American and Israeli perceptions and interests on the one hand, and on the other those of what more than ever seems all the rest of mankind. On the final morning of general discussion, with all subjects on the table, the Israeli delegates, mainly from government or quasi-official institutes, devoted themselves to describing the threat Iraq allegedly poses to the region, and eventually to all of international society. This argument was repeated by the official Americans present, who included the U.S. ambassador in Israel, Richard Jones.(...) This emphasis in Athens on a supposed future Iranian nuclear menace was not surprising, since it has been the main international theme pressed by Israel and the Bush administration ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran. It has provided a distraction while the American military position in Iraq steadily worsened, and popular support at home shrank for George W. Bush’s war policy. To those of us who still recall traces of their high school history, these officials recalled Cato the Elder, the puritan who hated Carthaginian ways and intoned to the Roman Senate at every opportunity Delenda est Carthago! -- meaning Carthage must be destroyed -- thereby helping bring on the Third Punic War in which Carthage was destroyed. The current version is that Iran must be destroyed. And who knows, Israel or the United States may destroy it before all this is over. The striking thing in Athens, on this occasion, was the total lack of concern displayed for Iran’s threat, real or imaginary, by virtually everyone else in the conference room. The general discussion proceeded on formulating an initiative to stop the fighting between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, and on the bleak future of Israeli-Palestinian relations, neither seeming a subject of Israeli or American interest. The warnings about Iran were greeted with audience indifference and trips to get coffee. No one even bothered to argue. A recently published Israeli assessment of American opinion, written by a former intelligence official now with a think-tank in the United States, said the same thing about American public attitudes. He told his readers in Israel that the American public today is obsessed with Iraq. It wants a not-wholly-disastrous way to get out. It has no interest whatever in Iran. It feels no threat from Iran. If President Bush were to initiate military action against Iran, the report said, he would be impeached. I can’t speak for the truth of the last comment as I am not currently in the United States. But it certainly seems true that American and Israeli officials, and journalists, for that matter, are whipping a dead horse when they go on and on about Iran. To promote another war of choice in the Near East seems madness to ordinary Americans -- not to speak of ordinary, or official, Europeans. READ IT ALL

Up against the wall: Baker Hamilton sets off Israeli alarm bells - Debka

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Encapsulated here in a nutshell, from the Israeli intelligence, perma-leak, Debka, are Israel's fears of being "sold out" by United States in its "orderly retreat" from Iraq. Obviously if the United States is to maintain even a shred of prestige in the Middle East and if any of its "moderate" Arab allies are to survive, Israel will have to return all the land taken in 1967, including Jerusalem and Israel will have to pay (read the US taxpayer will have to pay) reparations to the Palestinians uprooted in 1948 in lieu of repatriation. Just as traditional anti-Semites ascribe all the ills of the world to a deep, dark Jewish conspiracy, many Jews apparently believe in a massive Goyish (in this case cold, thin-lipped WASP) conspiracy to eradicate them. To anyone thinking of adhering to either camp I would advise they apply the wisdom of "Hanlon's Razor": Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. DS
Abstract from Debka: The pair is pursuing new policy line which sacrifices the traditional US-Israeli alliance for the sake of wooing Iran, Syria and Iraq’s neighbors for help in Iraq. During his senate hearings, Gates confirmed - and indirectly justified - Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon by declaring that Iran wants the power of deterrence against “the nuclear countries surrounding them – Pakistan in the east, Russia in the north, Israel in the west and the United States in the Persian Gulf.”(...) The designated US defense secretary did not consult – or even inform - Israel before a disclosure that violates a confidence long-held between the two governments. Gates also said that “If Iran obtains nuclear weapons no one can promise it would not use them against Israel.” He was then confirmed as defense secretary Wednesday by an overwhelming 95-2 Senate vote. The only two opposing votes were cast by two Bush allies, Sens. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and Jim Bunning, R-Ky. They cited his criticism of the war and his view that the U.S. should engage Iran as part of a solution. The Pentagon, which has warned against granting a role to Iran and Syria at Israel’s expense, has a new master, Robert Gates. He has already applied the broom to his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld’s senior aides. Some Washington pundits accused the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, James Baker, as forcing President George W. Bush to resort to dealing with the Iraqi Shiite-led government for the sake of an orderly US exit from Iraq. The price offered is acceptance that Iran could go nuclear within two years at Israel’s expense. The group’s recommendation of a Madrid-2 peace conference for a Middle East peace would pander to the Arabs and their European backers by pushing for a full Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 war. Israel and its supporters in the United States would have no say – “…a unique opportunity for the US to strike a deal without Jewish pressure,” as one Washington observer put it. This sort of crude language has not been heard in Washington’s top circles since George Bush the elder was president and James Baker his secretary of state. The new-old gang has also revived the threat of an imposed “peace.” It is barely veiled in the Baker-Hamilton report’s statement: “The US cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it embarks on a renewed and sustained commitment to a comprehensive peace plan on all fronts.” READ IT ALL

Peace is in the air? Winds of war?

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Zeitgeist alert: No news is good news. You know it's a quiet and peaceful day when this item is front page news. Would a peaceful world be filled with news like this? Or if we didn't live in such a state of total paranoia would an innocent pétomane cause an emergency landing of a regular airline? DS

Flatulence leads US jet to divert - BBC

An American Airlines plane made an emergency landing in Nashville after passengers reported the smell of sulfur from burning matches. The matches were found on the seat of a woman who had attempted to conceal the odour of flatulence with the matches, Nashville airport authorities said. All 99 passengers and five crew left the plane while it was searched. The woman was questioned by the FBI but released without charge and allowed to board another American Airlines flight. "It was determined that she was trying to conceal body odour," said Lynne Lowrance of the Nashville Airport Authority. She had "no malicious intent but had struck matches which is against [Transport Security Administration] rules," Ms Lowrance said. The unidentified woman had an unspecified medical condition, Associated Press news agency said. She was carrying safety matches, which the TSA allows in carry-on luggage. The matches are not allowed to be struck, however.

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