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Sunday, July 19, 2015

Another week with the usual scattered links:

• Robert Parry: US/Israeli/Saudi 'Behavior' Problems: Much of the opposition to the US+5/Iran deal is based on an assumption that Iran cannot be trusted -- a naive and rather ironic posture given how the US and its allies have repeatedly meddled in the region's affairs.

  In this American land of make-believe, Iran is assailed as the chief instigator of instability in the Middle East. Yet, any sane and informed person would dispute that assessment, noting the far greater contributions made by Israel, Saudi Arabia and, indeed, the United States.

  Israel's belligerence, including frequently attacking its Arab neighbors and brutally repressing the Palestinians, has roiled the region for almost 70 years. Not to mention that Israel is a rogue nuclear state that has been hiding a sophisticated atomic-bomb arsenal.

  An objective observer also would note that Saudi Arabia has been investing its oil wealth for generations to advance the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, which has inspired terrorist groups from Al Qaeda to the Islamic State. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were identified as Saudis and the U.S. government is still concealing those 28 pages of the congressional 9/11 inquiry regarding Saudi financing of Al Qaeda terrorists.

  The Saudis also have participated directly and indirectly in regional wars, including encouragement of Iraq's invasion of Iran in 1980, support for Al Qaeda-affiliate Nusra Front's subversion of Syria, and the current Saudi bombardment of Yemen, killing hundreds of civilians, touching off a humanitarian crisis and helping Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate expand its territory.

  The US list is even longer, with the CIA's 1953 coup against Iran, the US alliance with the hated Shah, and US support of Iraq in its 1980s war against Iran looming especially large, although most Americans remain remarkably blind to their nation's past errors and offenses, even when they plainly blow back. It's no surprise that the people most critical of the agreement with Iran are the ones most blind to the disasters US intervention has caused in the region.

  More pieces on the Iran agreement:

  • Gareth Porter: How a weaker Iran got the hegemon to lift sanctions: One journalist who has understood all along that Iran's "nuclear ambitions" had nothing to do with creating a nuclear arsenal, much less launching a colossal suicide bomb attack against Israel -- his book on the subject was titled Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. Rather, he argues that Iran's nuclear program was a chit for negotiating the end of US sanctions against Iran which have been in place since 1979. Israel, by the way, was instrumental in making this deal happen: had Netanyahu not whined so much about Iran the US would have had no compelling reason to reëxamine its reflexive prejudice against Iran. On the other hand, Israel's preferred solution would have plunged the US into a war even more hopeless than the Afghanistan and Iraq fiascos. That Obama chose to negotiate is a rare victory for sanity, suggesting that he at least has learned something from Iraq. The deal preserves order and responsibility in Iran, so the various restrictions and inspections will be honored. But more importantly, by dropping the sanctions, the US will stop poisoning the ground, forcing an antipathy that often needn't happen. (In fact, the US and Iran have often found themselves with similar interests but unable to work together.)

  • Fred Kaplan: Why Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Neocons Hate the Iran Deal: Well, you know the answer:

    The most diehard opponents -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi King Salman, and a boatload of neocons led by the perennial naysayer John Bolton -- issued their fusillades against the accord ("an historic mistake," "diplomatic Waterloo," to say nothing of the standard charges of "appeasement" from those with no understanding of history) long before they could possibly have browsed its 159 pages of legalese and technical annexes.

    What worries these critics most is not that Iran might enrich its uranium into an A-bomb. (If that were the case, why would they so virulently oppose a deal that put off this prospect by more than a decade?) No, what worries them much more deeply is that Iran might rejoin the community of nations, possibly even as a diplomatic (and eventually trading) partner of the United States and Europe.

    Which is to say that beyond the letter of the agreement, which ensures that Iran will make no advance toward nuclear weapons for at least ten years (recall that Israel started predicting an Iranian bomb in less than five years back in the mid-1990s), might reduce the desire of both nations for conflict. The assumption here is that Iran is more valuable as an enemy than it is risky.

• Rick Perlstein: Down With the Confederate Flag, Up With Donald Trump!: Even though the purpose of the Republicans' big move into the south was to recruit all the racist Dixiecrats, and even though the Republicans have jettisoned virtually every tenet of the GOP's progressive legacy, one suspects they've never been all that enamored of the confederate flag. So when SC Gov. Nikki Haley took the lead, they didn't have much reason not to follow (they are, after all, the sort of people who blindly follow their so-called leaders). Besides, it deflected a repeat of the usual arguments for gun control. And it rather neatly distanced most of the Republican establishment from a nasty racist massacre: could the killer who wrapped himself in the confederate flag have foreseen that that the flag itself would be one of his victims? Perlstein:

  Suddenly, with a single flap of the Angel of History's wings, America has experienced a shuddering change: the American swastika has finally become toxic -- a liberation that last month seemed so impossible that we'd forgotten to bother to think about it.

  One doesn't waste energy worrying over the fact that America controls over 700 military bases in 63 countries and maintains a military presence in 156; or that Israel has staged a civilian-slaughtering war approximately every other year since 2006; or that in America there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote or that unregulated pyramid schemes fleece Middle Americans out of $10 to $20 billion a year or that a private organization runs our presidential debates, sponsored by the same corporations that underwrite Democratic conventions . . . on and on and on: permanent annoyances.

  Still, the flag is just an icon, now finally tarnished beyond any hope of mainstream redemption . . . like the swastika, which also had a (much briefer) fashion fling on the American right. Still, while some things change, conservatives don't really. At the same time the "American swastika" was bowing out, Donald Trump was rising to top Republican polls on the basis of blatantly racist blanket statements about Mexicans. Jefferson Davis may be a waning American hero, but James R. Polk is due for a revival. (If now Woodrow Wilson, who holds the record for two wars against Mexico, but nothing resembling Polk's victory.) Perlstein explains:

  This is important: conservatism is like bigotry whack-a-mole. The quantity of hatred, best I can tell from 17 years of close study of 60 years of right-wing history, remains the same. Removing the flag of the Confederacy, raising the flag of immigrant hating: the former doesn't spell some new Jerusalem of tolerance; the latter doesn't mean that conservatism's racism has finally been revealed for all to see. The push-me-pull-me of private sentiment and public profession will always remain in motion, and in tension.

  A few days later, Trump's star started to eclipse, when he suggested that John McCain's heroism in Vietnam was tainted ("a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured"). (See Donald Trump Can't Stop, Won't Stop.) We'll see how that plays out, in particular how well Trump holds up with McCain's fawning admirers gunning for him, but it isn't obvious to me that Trump's stance will lose him the base. After all, McCain is a loser: he lost to Obama in 2008, unleashing this whole national nightmare, and maybe that wasn't such an accident, considering how he lost his plane and spent years on the sidelines in America's loser war, a victimhood he parlayed into a political career that again failed when it mattered most. Thus far, Trump has held back on part of what he must be thinking: that the real American Vietnam War hero was Rambo. Maybe he's reluctant to commit to a fiction, but it's not like reality is holding him back. (Ronald Reagan would certainly go for it.) But maybe he's holding out for himself: Trump, after all, is a winner, and isn't that what America really wants? (Never mind the divorces and bankruptcies and all that, or the fact that he's never been elected anything, or whatever else journalists will dig up real soon: Trump missed out on Chris Lehmann's review of The Candidates (good grief), a roll call meant to document that "Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can bedescribed as a full-blown adult failure." His only line on Trump came at the end: "He can make anyone in his general vicinity look good.")

• Andrew O'Hehir: The Republican prison experiment: How the right-wing conquest of the GOP altered political reality: Bemoans the loss of sanity in the Republican party, seeing "the evil zombie sock-puppet condition of the GOP [as] the most gruesome single sympton of our failing democracy."

  I would contend that the Republican Party has been the subject, willing or otherwise, of a version of the Stanford prison experiment, conducted on a grand scale. I wrote about that famous 1971 simulation, now the subject of a new feature film, earlier this week: A group of normal, middle-class California college students eagerly embraced roles as sadistic guards and abused prisoners, submitting almost immediately to the social order of an entirely fictional institution they knew had no real power. Properly understood, the Stanford experiment is not about prisons or schools or other overtly coercive social institutions, although it certainly applies to them. It is about the power of ideology and the power of power, about the fact that if you change people's perception of reality, you have gone most of the way to changing reality itself.

  The Republican Party did not organically evolve into a xenophobic, all-white party of hate that seeks to roll back not just the Civil Rights movement and feminism, but the entire Enlightenment. It did not accidentally become untethered from reality and float off to the moons of Pluto. Those possibilities were already present, but they had to be activated. Partly as a result of its own ideological weakness and internal divisions, the GOP was taken over from within and from above: In the first instance, by a dedicated core of right-wing activists, and in the second by the ultra-rich, super-PAC oligarchy epitomized by the Koch brothers. The two forces sometimes worked separately, but ultimately the first was funded and sponsored by the second. [ . . . ]

  Among other things, the GOP's flight to Crazytown has permitted leaders of the Democratic Party to crawl ever more cozily into the pockets of Wall Street bankers and to become ever more intertwined with the national security state -- while still proclaiming themselves, in all innocence and with considerable plausibility, to be less noxious than the alternative. So we see millions of well-meaning people getting ginned up to vote for Hillary Clinton, despite the nagging sensation that the political universe in which she represents the best available option is a cruel hoax. Pay attention to that feeling! It's the reality we have discarded, banging on the door.

  People forget this, but when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, his hot button issue wasn't his desire to slash taxes on the rich or open up every bureau of government to corporate lobbyists to loot and plunder. It was to "take back" the Panama Canal, which was "ours" until Jimmy Carter treacherously "gave it away." Speech after speech hammered away on the Canal, but after Reagan was elected he didn't lift a finger to undo Carter's treaty. Even after his VP became president and sent the army into Panama to apprehend a former CIA asset who had gone off the reservation, Bush left the treaty intact. The Canal was never anything but a talking point, recycled over and over because the Republicans thought it made Carter look weak, when in reality it only showed he was sane: losing one of the last vestiges of imperialism was good for the US and for Panama, for everyone. Rhetoric-wise, the Republicans were as removed from reality in 1980 as they are now. Their problem now is that their rhetoric has a track record that shows it only makes matters worse, and they've surrendered so completely to their rhetoric that they're trapped. If their snap judgments on the Iran deal are any indication, the Republican nominee in 2016 -- it doesn't matter who becuase they're all interchangeable clones -- will snort and fume against Iran like Reagan did Panama. Again, the idea is that making a deal with the devil just makes America look weak, and no Republican would do that.

  I wouldn't assume that if elected whoever the Republican is will backtrack, realizing that Obama's deal was the best they'd ever get, even though that would make sense. But I also think it's a losing argument, and the Republicans haven't realized that yet. Arguing against the deal is necessarily arguing for an undetermined, dangerous result, most likely another war in a region where we've repeatedly failed. But then very few of the platform issues the Republicans have locked themselves into are either popular or potentially workable.

• More pieces on Greece:

  • Tariq Ali: Diary: Before Syriza was elected in Greece, the Euro masters focused on providing only what was needed to bail out their own banks. After, the focus became destroying Syriza, which turned out to be easy because Tsipras was more committed to the euro than to the political will of his supporters.

    The EU has now succeeded in crushing the political alternative that Syriza represented. The German attitude to Greece, long before the rise of Syriza, was shaped by the discovery that Athens (helped by Goldman Sachs) had cooked its books in order to get into the Eurozone. This is indisputable. But isn't it dangerous, as well as wrong, to punish the Greek people -- and to carry on doing so even after they have rejected the political parties responsible for the lies? According to Timothy Geithner, the former US treasury secretary, the attitude of the European finance ministers at the start of the crisis was: "We're going to teach the Greeks a lesson. They lied to us, they suck and they were profligate and took advantage of the whole thing and we're going to crush them." Geithner says that in reply he told them, "You can put your foot on the neck of those guys if that's what you want to do," but insisted that investors mustn't be punished, which meant that the Germans had to underwrite a large chunk of the Greek debt. As it happens, French and German banks had the most exposure to Greek debt and their governments acted to protect them. Bailing out the rich became EU policy. Debt restructuring is being discussed now, with the IMF's leaked report, but the Germans are leading the resistance to it. "No guarantees without control": Merkel's response in 2012 remains in force.

  • Barry Eichengreen: Saving Greece, Saving Europe

  • Ashoka Mody: Germany, Not Greece, Should Exit the Euro: After all, if Germany exited, the Euro would depreciate, which would help everyone else, while Germany merely became richer.

  • Jordan Weissmann: Europe's Economic Misery Has Worked Out Pretty Well for Germany: Some more background for the Mody piece above, based on a piece by Ben Bernanke. One chart shows that Germany's unemployment is below 5 percent, while the rest of the Eurozone is above 13%.

    If Germany still had to rely on its own currency, it would be far more expensive than the euro. That would hurt its ability to export Volkswagens, prescription drugs, and Becks around the world. But, instead, it shares a currency with the eurozone's many weaker members. That has two big effects. First, it lets German companies sell their products in countries like France, Italy, and Greece, where otherwise consumers might not be able to afford them. Second, it keeps German wares relatively cheap outside of Europe, most importantly in crucial markets like the United States and China.

    While Germany has reaped the benefits of euro membership, it hasn't returned the favor by buying more goods from, say Southern Europe. Instead, by keeping government spending in its neighbors tight, it has basically put a lid on imports. The end result is a massive trade surplus that has left its economy in decent shape while leaving its eurozone compatriots hanging out to dry. Worse yet, it has demanded harsh austerity measures in return for bailouts, which have murdered domestic demand in countries including Greece, making it difficult for them to recover.

    So Germany has managed to turn the euro into a mechanism for transferring wealth into its own coffers.

  • Cédric Durand: The End of Europe: When the EU and the Eurozone were founded, there was considerable optimism on the left that the new institutions would lead to equalized outcomes across the entire zone, but that didn't happen as the institutions came under the ever tighter control of neoliberal capital.

  • Mark Weisbrot: Why the European authorities refuse to let Greece recover: As Yanis Varoufakis put it, "The complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe's democracy."

Also, a few links for further study:

• Max Blumenthal: The Next Gaza War: Since Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel has maintained a blockade on Gaza, bombed or shelled its prisoners numerous times, the intensity rising to the level of war at least once every other year. Blumenthal has a new book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (Nation Books) about the July-August 2014 war, which like its 2012 and 2010 predecessors, settled nothing, leaving opportunities open for the next set of Israeli politicians to prove their mettle:

  Among the leaders of Israel's increasingly dominant religious nationalist movement is Naftali Bennett, the 43-year-old head of the pro-settler Jewish Home Party. Bennett spent much of last summer's war railing against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to order a full reoccupation of Gaza and the violent removal of Hamas -- a potentially catastrophic move that Netanyahu and the Israeli military brass vehemently opposed. While Bennett accused Palestinians of committing "self-genocide," his youthful deputy, Ayelet Shaked, declared that Palestinian civilians "are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads." According to Shaked, the "mothers of the martyrs" should be exterminated, "as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

  In the current Israeli governing coalition, Bennett serves as Minister of Education, overseeing the schooling of millions of Jewish Israeli youth. And Shaked has been promoted to Minister of Justice, giving her direct influence over the country's court system. Once one of the young Turks of the right-wing Likud Party, Netanyahu now finds himself at the hollow center of Israeli politics, mediating between factions of hardline ethno-nationalists and outright fascists.

  Where Gaza is concerned, Israel's loyal opposition differs little from the country's far-right rulers. In the days before the January national elections, Tzipi Livni, a leader of the left-of-center Zionist Union, proclaimed, "Hamas is a terrorist organization and there is no hope for peace with it . . . the only way to act against it is with force -- we must use military force against terror . . . and this is instead of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's policy to come to an agreement with Hamas." Livni's ally, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, reinforced her militaristic position by declaring, "There is no compromising with terror." [ . . . ]

  Months after the cessation of hostilities, even as foreign correspondents marvel at the "quiet" that has prevailed along Gaza's borders, the Israeli leadership is ramping up its bloody imprecations. At a conference this May sponsored by Shurat HaDin, a legal organization dedicated to defending Israel from war crimes charges, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon warned that another crushing assault was inevitable, either in Gaza, southern Lebanon, or both. After threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran, Yaalon pledged that "we are going to hurt Lebanese civilians to include kids of the family. We went through a very long deep discussion . . . we did it then, we did it in [the] Gaza Strip, we are going to do it in any round of hostilities in the future."

  Also see: Bill Berkowitz: Why Is the Mainstream Media Running Away From Max Blumenthal's New Book About Israel?.

• Tim Weiner: The Nixon Legacy: Adapted from Weiner's new book, One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (Henry Holt). Post focuses on Nixon's paranoia as Watergate moved toward resolution, but that madness was hard earned, intrinsic to a politician who made an art of escalating and withdrawing at the same time, of turning defeats into vindictive grudges -- a psyche that the US government has still never managed to free itself from, probably because those who run covert programs there have always had need to cover up what they do. They say power corrupts, but you rarely glimpse how addictive that corruption is until you uncover someone like Nixon.

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