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Saturday, April 11, 2015

The big, and for that matter good, news today is Chapa, the missing beaver, returns home to Riverside Park. That Hillary Clinton chose today to launch her 2016 presidential campaign just shows she doesn't have the sort of control over the news cycle she'd like. If you want to fret about Clinton, you can start with Bill Curry: Hillary Clinton just doesn't get it: She's already running a losing campaign. Still, for me, the most interesting line was:

On Friday, Clinton's campaign let slip its aim to raise $2.5 billion; maybe that's not the best way to say hello to a struggling middle class.

A couple months ago, the Koch's made news by threatening to raise just shy of $1 billion for their war on democracy in 2016. Suddenly, that doesn't look like such a daunting amount of money. And the fact is, Clinton is probably a good investment for her big-money donors -- at least compared to the sort of morons running for the Republican nomination. And while the middle class aren't likely to get much from Clinton, they're not where that $2.5 billion is coming from. Main thing they can hope for is less collateral damage in the partisan struggle between pro-growth money and the people who'd rather wreck the economy than see any of their spoils levelled down.

I've paid very little attention to the Republicans who aspire to be president. The "tea party" reaction did little more than double down on the dumbest, crudest platforms of the party, and now there is nothing left there. For example, one thing that has been popping up a lot is the idea of convening a constitutional convention to pass an amendment forbidding the federal government from running a deficit. They might as well poke their eyes out -- that's the level of self-mutilation such an amendment would produce. Clinton has nothing to offer, but at least she's not that stupid. Or take Iran: Clinton has frequently made her mark as a hawk, but she's not so delusional as to think we'd be better off rejecting negotiations with Iran that gave us every assurance we wanted.

I opposed Clinton in 2008 and I would do so again given any real chance of winning something tangible. But I don't see who else is going to raise the sort of money she can raise, and more and more it looks like that money will be needed to make it plain enough how necessary it is to beat the Republicans in 2016. I just hope to see some of that money trickle down the party ticket.

Some more scattered links this week:

• Patrick Cockburn: A Young Prince May Cost Syria and Yemen Dear: Someone could write a very interesting book on the waxing and waning of Saudi outreach -- a broad term ranging from strategic investments to salafist proselytizing to armed intervention -- since the 1970s (with some pre-history back to WWI contacts with the British and FDR's WWII meeting with Kind Saud), how they viewed their mission, and how it did or didn't dovetail with US interests. It would be hard to get the nuances right. For instance, when Bill Casey would meet with King Fahd, neither was playing with a full deck, nor no matter how much they seemed to agree were their intents aligned. While it is clear that the US pressed the Saudis to pump a lot of money for arms into the Afghan muhajideen, was the salafist export part of the deal, or just part of the price? Lately, the Saudis seem to be taking charge: I doubt that Obama would be plotting his own intervention in Yemen, but he didn't hesitate in supporting the new Saudi king.

  Part of the explanation may lie with the domestic politics of Saudi Arabia. Madawi al-Rasheed, a Saudi visiting professor at LSE's Middle East Centre, says in the online magazine al-Monitor that Saudi King Salman's defence minister and head of the royal court, his son Mohammed bin Salman, aged about 30, wants to establish Saudi Arabia as absolutely dominant in the Arabian Peninsula. She adds caustically that he needs to earn a military title, "perhaps 'Destroyer of Shiite Rejectionists and their Persian Backers in Yemen,' to remain relevant among more experienced and aspiring siblings and disgruntled royal cousins." A successful military operation in Yemen would give him the credentials he needs.

  A popular war would help unite Saudi liberals and Islamists behind a national banner while dissidents could be pilloried as traitors. Victory in Yemen would compensate for the frustration of Saudi policy in Iraq and Syria where the Saudis have been outmanoeuvred by Iran. In addition, it would be a defiant gesture towards a US administration that they see as too accommodating towards Iran.

  Yemen is not the only country in which Saudi Arabia is taking a more vigorous role. Last week, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria suffered several defeats, the most important being the fall of the provincial capital Idlib, in northern Syria, to Jabhat al-Nusra which fought alongside two other hardline al-Qaeda-type movements, Ahrar al-Sham and Jund al-Aqsa. Al-Nusra's leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, immediately announced the instruction of Shia law in the city. Sent to Syria in 2011 by Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to create al-Nusra, he split from Baghdadi when he tried to reabsorb al-Nusra in 2013. Ideologically, the two groups differ little and the US has launched air strikes against al-Nusra, though Turkey still treats it as if it represented moderates.

  One thing I'm always struck by is how viscerally divergent our views are of the Islamic State we know (in Saudi Arabia) and the one we don't know (ISIS). The two have much in common, including a great fondness for beheadings and an intolerance of non-Muslims. One difference is that ISIS proclaims its leader to be Caliph, but the Saudi royal family is similarly blessed by the Wahabbi ulema, and the Saudi possession of the "holy cities" of Mecca and Medina confers great prestige. What sets the Saudis apart for US officials may be nothing more than the size of Saudi bank accounts. The old notion that advancing Saudi hegemony over the Muslim world in any way helps us looks ever more misguided.

• Michelle Goldberg: Indiana Just Sentenced a Woman Convicted of Feticide to Twenty Years in Prison: More disturbing than Indiana's Religious Bigotry law:

  On Monday, 33-year-old Purvi Patel, an unmarried woman from a conservative Hindu family who bought abortion drugs online, was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the crimes of feticide and neglect of a dependent. It was not the first time that feticide laws, passed under the guise of protecting pregnant women from attack, have been turned against pregnant women themselves. Indiana, after all, was also the state that jailed Bei Bei Shuai, an immigrant who tried to commit suicide by poisoning herself while pregnant, and whose baby later died. But the Patel case is still a disturbing landmark. "Yes, the feticide laws in other states have been used to arrest and sometimes punish the pregnant women herself," says Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which advised Patel's defense. "This is the first time it's being used to punish what they say is an attempted self-abortion."

  The feticide law has an exception for "legal abortion" so I have to wonder about the quality of legal representation afforded these immigrant women. The great fear we always had about feticide laws was that prosecutors would abuse their authority. In some ways the suicide attempt bothers me more: if the woman was depressed enough to try to kill herself before, I don't see how locking her up in jail will improve her spirits.

• Nicola Perugini/Neve Gordon: How Amnesty International Criminzliaes Palestinians for Their Inferior Weapons:

  Unlawful and Deadly, Amnesty International's recent report on 'rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian armed groups during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict,' accuses Hamas and others of carrying out 'indiscriminate attacks' on Israel: 'When indiscriminate attacks kill or injure civilians, they constitute war crimes.' [ . . . ]

  There is an implied contrast with Israel's superior technological capabilities, which the IDF claims allow it to carry out airstrikes with 'surgical precision.' But the figures tell a different story. At least 2100 Palestinians were killed during Israel's military campaign in Gaza last summer; around 1500 are believed to have been civilians (according to Amnesty some of them were killed by stray Palestinian rocket fire). On the Israeli side, 72 people were killed, 66 combatants and six civilians. These numbers point to a clear discrepancy. It is not only that Israel killed 300 times as many Palestinian civilians, but that the proportion of civilian deaths among Palestinians was much greater: 70 per cent of those killed by Israel were civilians, compared to 8 per cent of those killed by Palestinians. These figures clearly indicate that there is no correlation between precision bombing and distinguishing combatants from civilians. Hi-tech weapons systems can kill indiscriminately too.

  I don't have a problem declaring that Palestinian rockets shot into Israel constitute some kind of crime -- I am, after all, of the belief that all war under all circumstances is criminal -- so long as doing so doesn't distract from the proportionate responsibility for the violence, and the original responsibility for setting the conditions and context within which such violence occurs. The above statistics give you some idea of proportion -- which is to say that nearly all of the violence was launched by Israel against Gaza and its population. I might even quibble that the stats understate how disproportionate Israeli firepower was. As for responsibility for the context of war, that is totally due to Israel's occupation. One might even argue that Palestinian violence aimed at freeing Gaza from Israel's grip is justified, whereas Israeli violence to curb the revolt and prolong the occupation is not. I wouldn't go that far because I don't believe that the ends excuse the means, but those of you who view fighting for freedom as a noble cause should find it harder to condemn those who fight for Palestine.

  One can make other arguments, too. It occurs to me that the inaccuracy and extreme inefficiency of Palestinian rockets makes whoever fires them less culpable: who's to say that they're not mere "warning shots"? On the other hand, launching "precision munitions" clearly shows the intent to kill. Still, the real problem with the Amnesty International report, as with the Goldstone report on previous Israeli atrocities in Gaza, is that by criminalizing Palestinian rockets they suggest a false equivalence between both sides. There is in fact nothing equal about Israel and Gaza.

  By the way, Perugini and Gordon have a forthcoming book on how "human rights" arguments can be used to extend and expand Israeli occupation: The Human Right to Dominate.

Also, a few links for further study:

• Grégoire Chamayou: Manhunters, Inc.: An excerpt from Chamayou's book, A Theory of the Drone, offering a fairly lengthy history of drone development and applications. E.g.:

  In 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had become convinced that "the techniques used by the Israelis against the Palestinians could quite simply be deployed on a larger scale." What he had in mind was Israel's programs of "targeted assassinations," the existence of which had recently been recognized by the Israeli leadership. As Eyal Weizman explains, the occupied territories had become "the world's largest laboratory for airborne thanatotactics," so it was not surprising that they would eventually be exported. [ . . . ]

  Within the United States, not all the high-ranking officers who were informed of these plans greeted them with enthusiasm. At the time, journalist Seymour Hersh noted that many feared that the proposed type of operation -- what one advisor to the Pentagon called "preemptive manhunting" -- had the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program, the sinister secret program of murder and torture that had once been unleashed in Vietnam.

  Chamayou goes on to talk about "hunting warfare" ("a competition between the hiders and the seekers"), "network-centric warfare," "nexus topography," "effects-based operations" ("targeting a single key node in a battlefield system has second, third, n-order effects"), and "prophylactic elimination." The jargon suggests that the campaign is endless, that there is no way to determine when the enemies list has been exhausted, let alone when it might become counterproductive.

• Steve Fraser: Plutocracy the First Time Around: An excerpt from Fraser's new book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.

• Rivka Galchen: Weather Underground: About injection wells and the sudden surge in earthquakes in Oklahoma, not that you can get a straight answer from the state government. I always thought that the reason there are pumping oil wells on the state capitol grounds had less to do with making money than with reminding the legislators who they work for.

• Seymour M Hersh: The Scene of the Crime: Hersh returns to Vietnam to see how the massacre at My Lai, which he first reported back in 1969, is remembered.

• Mike Konczal: Liberal Punishment: Book review of Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (2014, Oxford University Press). Focuses on anti-crime initiatives by liberals connected to racial violence in the 1940s, 1960s, and prison revolts in the 1970s. No doubt that's part of the story, but conservatives have contributed too, only partly because they pushed liberals into a corner where they wound up competing to see who is the more draconian.

• Jill Lepore: Richer and Poorer: A survey of recent literature on increasing inequality, including: Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster); Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little Brown); and Anthony Atkinson, Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Harvard). Fraser's book is the one I rushed out to buy. One of my own theories that I'll test against Fraser is that the Cold War's celebration of capitalism was meant as much to cower the working class into submission and impotence. Another is that the evident acquiescence is concentrated in the media.

• David Palumbo-Liu: Business of backlash: GOP cashes in on Koch/Adelson anti-BDS donations: Based on a report, "The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and other Movements for Social Justice," by a group I'm not familiar with, the "International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network," this starts to identify a who's who of the secret funders who always seem to come down whenever some academic says something politically incorrect about Israel. I'm a bit surprised to see the non-Jewish Koch brothers listed alongside Sheldon Adelson and the usual suspects. Makes me wonder about extending BDS.

• Richard Silverstein: South African Intelligence Cables Expose Mossad Africa Operations: Long and fascinating survey of Israeli spying in Africa, both in cooperation with Apartheid-era South Africa and beyond. A couple points that particularly struck me: one was about Mossad's use of El Al Airlines as a cover; another was the estimate that Mossad has 4,000 "sayanim" (voluntary spy assets) "in the UK alone" -- make me wonder whether certain people here in Wichita have Mossad handlers.

• Matt Taibbi: The Year's Most Disgusting Book: "From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey From Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #8488-054," by Bernard Kerik -- famous NYC Corrections Commissioner and Police Commissioner, contractor hired to help train the Baghdad police, Bush nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security before all the dirty laundry came out and he wound up in jail, where he finally discovered that US prisons are run poorly, counterproductively even. Taibbi remains a stickler for hypocrisy, preferring the prison memoir of an unrepentant asshole like G. Gordon Liddy. Meanwhile, I can think of a few other candidates for "most disgusting book of the year" -- Mike Huckabee's God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy leaps to mind, but I'm sure there would be others if I took a bit of time to research the subject.

• Tzvia Thier: My personal journey of transformation: An Israeli reexamines what she's been taught:

  It has been hard work to examine my own mind. Many questions that leave me wondering how could I have not thought about them. My solid identity has been shaken and then broken . . . I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty and hatred by "my" people towards the "others" and what you see, you can no longer unsee . . .

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