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Sunday, October 25, 2015

No real time to write this week's roundup -- it's my birthday and I'm busy cooking (see the notebook for the menu). But I do have a bunch of links open in various tabs and I thought I might share them before they become stale. In no particular order:

• Uri Avinery: The Settler's Prussia: In the 19th century, Germany was, fatefully, taken over by a marginal state on its far northeastern border, Prussia. Avinery sees the settler movement doing something like that in Israel. Also see Avinery's Weep, Beloved Country.

• Andrew J Bacevich: Yes, the US can leave Afghanistan:

  What we have here is temporizing dressed up in policy drag. It is a gesture designed to convey an appearance of purposefulness to an enterprise whose actual purpose has long since vanished in the mists of time.

  Having inherited from his predecessor two wars begun in 2001 and 2003, respectively, Obama will bequeath those same two wars to the person who will succeed him as president in 2017. It is incumbent upon Americans to contemplate the implications of this disturbing fact. By their very endlessness, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq constitute a judgment on American statecraft, one further compounded by the chaos now enveloping large swaths of the Islamic world. Here are the consequences that stem from misunderstanding military power and misusing a military instrument once deemed unstoppable.

  Only by owning up to the mindless failure of U.S. military efforts since 9/11 does it become possible to restore real choice. Alternatives to open-ended war waged on the other side of the globe do exist. Contrary to Carter's lame insistence, the United States can leave Afghanistan. Protecting Americans from the relatively modest threat posed by the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Islamic State -- or all three combined for that matter -- does not require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces in the Islamic world, especially given the evidence that the presence of American troops there serves less to pacify than to provoke.

  Bacevich also wrote a more substantial piece at TomDispatch, On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail).

• Peter Beinart: Trump Is Right About 9/11: As was well known if not at the time then shortly after, there were a number of concrete things the Bush administration could have done that might have kept 9/11 from happening. Terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke was especially unhappy about how Bush's neocons dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda, and Beinart dredges up all that story -- one that few in the press seem to recall, but which makes Trump's reminder that 9/11 happened during Bush's presidency appear to have more weight. Beinart could have made an even stronger case had he pointed out some of the things Bush did to aggravate tensions in the Middle East, such as his Clinton-esque bombing of Iraq and his support for Sharon's Counter-Intifada in Palestine. One might counter that Trump has unrealistic notions about what presidents can do, but that's a big part of his charm (or absurdity).

• Tom Carson: 'Spies' Like Us: Steven Spielberg and the Cold War's Forgotten Battles: Review of Bridge of Spies and the Cold War it illuminates, for once.

• Kathleen Frydl: Donald Trump and the Know-Nothings: More useful as an historical excursion into the short-lived 1850s nativist party than as an analysis of Trump himself, but that's because the "Know Nothings" were more colorful and their ignorance was more florid. One of history's great truisms: stupid people in the past could be interesting, but stupid people today are just tiresome.

• Assaf Gavron: Confessions of an Israeli traitor:

  The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and intolerant than it has ever been. Talk has trended toward fundamentalism ever since the Israeli operation in Gaza in late 2008, but it has recently gone from bad to worse. There seems to be only one acceptable voice, orchestrated by the government and its spokespeople, and beamed to all corners of the country by a clan of loyal media outlets drowning out all the others. Those few dissenters who attempt to contradict it -- to ask questions, to protest, to represent a different color from this artificial consensus -- are ridiculed and patronized at best, threatened, vilified and physically attacked at worst. Israelis not "supporting our troops" are seen as traitors, and newspapers asking questions about the government's policies and actions are seen as demoralizing. [ . . . ]

  The cumulative effect of this recent mindless violence is hugely disturbing. We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what's happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle East -- those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes. So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the world. So that we can return to being human.

• Ed Kilgore: The Cult of the Second Amendment:

  And to a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it's based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government.

  This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government's use of lethal force against criminals. [ . . . ]

  Nowadays this revolutionary rationale for gun rights is becoming the rule rather than the exception for conservative politicians and advocates. Mike Huckabee, a sunny and irenic candidate for president in 2008, all but threatened revolutionary violence in his recent campaign book for the 2016 cycle, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy:

  If the Founders who gave up so much to create liberty for us could see how our government has morphed into a ham-fisted, hypercontrolling "Sugar Daddy," I believe those same patriots who launched a revolution would launch another one. Too many Americans have grown used to Big Government's overreach. They've been conditioned to just bend over and take it like a prisoner [!]. But in Bubba-ville, the days of bending are just about over. People are ready to start standing up for freedom and refusing to take it anymore.

  Dr. Ben Carson, another candidate thought to be a mild-mannered Christian gentleman, recently disclosed that he used to favor modest gun control measures until he came to realize the importance of widespread gun ownership as a safeguard against "tyranny."

  "When you look at tyranny and how it occurs, the pattern is so consistent: Get rid of the guns," Carson told USA Today. [ . . . ]

  Indeed, a lot of Second Amendment ultras appear to think the right to revolution is entirely up to the individual revolutionary.

  My own view is that the second amendment was meant to ensure that state militias would be able to fight the Civil War, although the other obvious reading had to do with fighting Indians. Both meanings had become obsolete by 1900, and civilians have never had a significant role in fighting against criminals. The second amendment wasn't repealed then because it didn't seem to be all that harmful -- no least because the courts consistently ruled against an individual right to guns. That's only changed recently, and the full impact has yet to be felt, but what's disturbing about it isn't just the increase in the number of guns out there and the number of (often incompetent) people carrying them, but the sheer nonsense gun advocates wind up spouting. One stupid idea is that if everyone was armed we'd all wind up treating each other with more proper respect. A deeper one is that we're shifting responsibility for managing conflict from law and the courts to the streets. Then there's the notion Kilgore dwells on, that because individuals have a right to own guns they have a right to use them to oppose the rule of law when they (alone) find it unjust. The latter is often used not just to rationalize gun ownership but to permit individuals to own ever more powerful firearms because that's what it would take to neutralize the power of the state. The problem here is not just practical -- after all, we're talking about a state that owns AC-130 gunships that can fire thousands of rounds of depleted uranium per minute, and that's not even the scariest example. The real problem is that it gives up on making sure the state is responsible to the public in a fair and equitable way.

• Nancy LeTourneau: What I Learned From Watching the Benghazi Hearing: Mostly, that Clinton kept her cool through eleven hours of idiots trying to rile her. But also it has something to do with the word preferences between Republicans and the administration, not that I get all the nuances there. For example, I tire of hearing the word "terrorist" used so indiscriminately: partly because it seems to be all it takes to gain license to kill someone (and perhaps a few others in the vicinity), partly because it seems like much (if not most) of the real terror is perpetrated by the so-called anti-terrorists. Still, lest the Republicans turn Clinton into some sort of heroic figure, see Jason Ditz: Bizarre Revisionism: Hillary Claims Libya Shows Consequences of US Military Withdrawals.

• Mark LeVine: The tide is turning against Zionist extremism:

  As the inherent contradiction between Israel's self-image as a modern, democratic and progressive country and the reality of a half-century-long brutal occupation become clear to all, the erosion of support for Israel by the emerging generation of American Jews will continue and likely increase, with profound consequences not just for Israel but also for the future of the American Jewish community.

  For an example LeVine didn't cite, see Two establishment Jews (Harvard and Microsoft) endorse boycott of Israel and 'single state' in Washington Post.

• Josh Marshall: Netanyahu Reduced to Defending Hitler, Really . . .: This is the first piece I saw on Netanyahu's speech to the World Zionist Congress, where he argued that Hitler "just wanted to deport the Jews" until he met exiled Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose answer to Hitler's "So what should I do with them?" was "Burn them." With the Palestinian Revolt of 1937-39 failed, al-Husseini went into exile and spent WWII in Nazi Germany. It is known that he met with Hitler once, in 1941, and Israelis have been trying to make mountains out of that mole hill ever since. Still, it seems bizarre that any Israeli, much less the Prime Minister, would try to make Hitler seem less horrific just to blame some Palestinian -- anything, I guess, to distract from all of Israel's self-inflicted problems. More links on this:

  • Marc H Ellis: Has Netanyahu's revisionism ended the use of the Holocaust as enabler of Israeli injustice toward Palestinians?
  • Tony Greenstein: Rewriting the Holocaust
  • Natasha Lennard: Netanyahu's absurd Holocaust mythology
  • Rainer Schulze: Netanyahu, the Grand Mufti and the Holocaust: Why it is important to get the historical facts right
  • Richard Silverstein: Bibi Butchers History
  • Philip Weiss/Adam Horowitz: Despite global disgust, Netanyahu doubles down on claim that Hitler got idea of Final Solution from a Palestinian

• Gareth Porter: Why the US Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster:

  The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East, and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the sectarian wars to follow.

  The actual creation of Islamic State is also directly linked to the Iraq War. The former U.S. commander at Camp Bucca in Iraq has acknowledged that the detention of 24,000 prisoners, including hard-core al-Qaida cadres, Baathist officers and innocent civilians, created a "pressure cooker for extremism." It was during their confinement in that camp during the U.S. troop surge in Iraq 2007 and 2008 that nine senior al-Qaida military cadres planned the details of how they would create Islamic State.

• Gareth Porter: The US Could End Saudi War Crimes in Yemen -- It Just Doesn't Want To:

  According to a joint report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2,682 civilian deaths and injuries resulted from air bombardment in Yemen from late March to the end of July 2015 -- more than anywhere else in the world during the first seven months of the year.

  The Saudis have also imposed a tight blockade on Yemen by air, land and water, to prevent not only weapons, but also food, fuel and medicine from reaching millions of Yemenis, creating a humanitarian disaster. Doctors Without Borders declared in July that the Saudi blockade was killing as many people in Yemen as the bombing. US Navy ships have been patrolling alongside Saudi ships to prevent arms from entering Yemen, while disclaiming any involvement in the Saudi-led blockade of food, fuel and medical supplies.

  The Amnesty report points out that the United States has a legal obligation under the Arms Trade Treaty not to provide weaponry it knows will be used in the indiscriminate bombing of Yemen. Article 6 of that treaty, which entered into force in October 2014, forbids the transfer of arms and munitions to a party to an armed conflict if it has knowledge that the weaponry will be used for "attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which it is a party."

  I suspect one reason for Obama's reluctance to criticize Saudi Arabia for killing civilians in Yemen is that the US had been doing exactly that through its drone program for many years now. Some details of that (plus much more) appear in Cora Currie: The Kill Chain: The Lethal Bureaucracy Behind Obama's Drone War.

• Jon Schwarz: A Short History of US Bombing of Civilian Facilities, and Tom Engelhardt: The US Has Bombed at Least Eight Wedding Parties Since 2001: Two immediate (and rather obvious) responses to the US bombing of a Médicins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan. The Schwarz piece includes a cartoon with a quote from Obama's then-latest mass shooting speech (the one in Oregon).

• Nathan Thrall: The End of the Abbas Era:

  For Abbas, political survival depended on making significant gains before any of this occurred. His strategy entailed several gambles. First, that providing Israel with security, informing on fellow Palestinians, and suppressing opposition to the occupation would convince Israel's government that Palestinians could be trusted with independence. Second, that after Palestinians had met US demands to abandon violence, build institutions and hold democratic elections, the US would put pressure on Israel to make the concessions necessary to establish a Palestinian state. Third, that after being invited to participate in legislative elections, Hamas would win enough seats to be co-opted but too few to take over. Fourth, that by improving the Palestinian Authority economy and rebuilding its institutions, Abbas would buy enough time to achieve Palestinian statehood.

  In all four respects, he came up short. Israel took his security co-operation for granted and the Israeli public did not demand that its government reward Abbas for his peaceful strategy. The US did not apply the necessary pressure to extract significant concessions from Israel. Hamas won the legislative elections, took over Gaza, and refused to adopt Abbas's political programme (though Hamas's victory also strengthened international support for Abbas, as the international community shifted from democracy promotion to democracy prevention). And West Bankers, though dependent on the jobs and economic infrastructure provided by the PA, also resent it, and have lost whatever faith they once had that Abbas's strategy could succeed. According to an opinion poll taken last month, two-thirds of West Bankers and Gazans want him to resign.

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