Weekend Roundup [250 - 259]

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Having jotted down one or two of these on the road, I figured on doing a Sunday links column, followed by a Monday music column, just like normal times. Didn't work out that way, but thanks to the magic of back-dating my tardiness will eventually be forgotten.

  • Alex Henderson: Rise of the American police state: 9 disgraceful events that paved the way: Let's just list 'em:

    1. Ronald Reagan Escalates the War on Drugs
    2. Rodney King Beating of 1991
    3. 9/11 Terrorist Attacks
    4. Waterboarding and Torture at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base
    5. Growth and Expansion of Asset Forfeiture Laws
    6. National Defense Authorization Act and Erosion of Habeas Corpus
    7. Department of Homeland Security Promoting Militarization of Local Police Departments
    8. Growth of the Prison/Industrial Complex
    9. NYPD Assault on Occupy Wall Street

    Note that nothing facilitates the creation of a police state like war -- even pretend-wars like the one on drugs, but see how the pace picks up with 2001?

  • Paul Krugman: The Invisible Moderate: A more accurate assessment of Obama than the one Krugman put forth in his Rolling Stone puff piece:

    I actually agree with a lot of what David Brooks says today. But -- you know there has to be a "but" -- so does a guy named Barack Obama. Which brings me to one of the enduringly weird aspects of our current pundit discourse: constant calls for a moderate, sensible path that supposedly lies between the extremes of the two parties, but is in fact exactly what Obama has been proposing. [ . . . ]

    Well, the Obama administration would love to spend more on infrastructure; the problem is that a major spending bill has no chance of passing the House. And that's not a problem of "both parties" -- it's the GOP blocking it. Exactly how many Republicans would be willing to engage in deficit spending to expand bus networks? (Remember, these are the people who consider making rental bicycles available an example of "totalitarian" rule.) [ . . . ]

    It's an amazing thing: Obama is essentially what we used to call a liberal Republican, who faces implacable opposition from a very hard right. But Obama's moderation is hidden in plain sight, apparently invisible to the commentariat.

    Actually, when I think of Obama as a "liberal Republican" I flash back to an earlier Illinois senator, Charles Percy, who was better on foreign policy and no worse on economics or civil rights than Obama. But Obama doesn't have the luxury of being a liberal Republican, or for that matter a centrist Democrat. Today's Republicans allow no such luxury, nor do today's problems. As far back as 1998, Jim Hightower warned: "there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos." Today there's just more roadkill.

    By the way, Krugman's too kind to Brooks, whom he quotes as saying, "the government should reduce its generosity to people who are not working but increase its support for people who are. That means reducing health benefits for the affluent elderly . . ." You may wonder why the party of the rich proposes adding means tests to Medicare. It's because they don't want anyone to think they have a right to medical care.

  • Seth McElwee: Why Turning Out the Vote Makes a Huge Difference in Four Charts: The charts show that non-voters are consistently more liberal than voters, which reinforces the by-now-conventional view that Democrats win when then can get the vote out, while the key for Republican gains is voter suppression. This doesn't go into the question of why non-voters don't vote, even though voting is one of the few ways they have to advance their own interests. Clearly one reason is that the economic costs of voting (which include things like the time it takes to vote) are high enough to suppress turnout. Another likely reason is widespread cynicism about politicians -- especially about Democrats, who appeal for public support on election day but more often than not spend the rest of their time triangulating between interest group lobbies, raising money that they often see as more valuable in securing reëlection than any work they do to benefit their constituents.

    When voter turnout is discussed in public it is often treated as a civic obligation, rather than a means to advance individual interests. Republican candidates often denounce low-income voters for voting for the party that best advances their class interests (while at the same time supporting massive tax cuts for their rich constituents). Yet when Benjamin Page interview the rich he finds that they, "acknowledged a focus on fairly narrow economic self-interest" when discussing their engagement in the political process. In this way, the recent Lil' Jon video, "Turnout For What," while tacky, has reframed the voting as a means to forward political interests, rather than as a civic obligation. Since some 41 percent of non-voters claim that their vote wouldn't matter, this message is important. It's also important to remove barriers to voting. Research by Jame Avery and Mark Peffley finds, "states with restrictive voter registration laws are much more likely to be biased toward upper-class turnout." In contrast, states that have adopted same-day registration and vigorously enforced the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) have lower levels of class bias in their electorate. Research also suggests that unions are an important mechanism for low and middle income voters to engage with the political process. Attempts to disempower than should also be viewed through the lens of voter suppression.

    Indeed, Republican opposition to unions seems to have more to do with reducing their political effectiveness than as a favor to the rich. Since their blip in 2010, when Obama voters took a nap, Republicans have seized the opportunity to do as much as they could to suppress voting (as well as to distort it through the infusion of extraordinary sums of money). I expect this to produce some kind of backlash -- the message for those who bother to pay attention is that your vote must be worth something, otherwise why would they be so eager to take it away? -- but thus far the clearest message is how shameless Republicans have become about their desire to exclude a really large segment of the American people. For more on voter suppression efforts, see Jeffrey Toobin: Freedom Summer, 2015 (and from 2012, Jane Mayer: The Voter-Fraud Myth).

  • Paul Woodward: Terrorism exists in the eye of the beholder: I was in Arkansas Tuesday [October 22], when a soldier on duty at a "war memorial" in Ottawa [Canada] was shot by a lone gunman, presumably the person shot and killed later that day in Canada's Parliament building. The TV was tuned into CNN, where they spent the entire day blabbing on and on based on scant information and fervid imagination. The shooter was later identified as Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.

    In 2012 there were seven murders in Ottawa (population close to a million), 2013 nine murders, and so far in 2014 there have been five (including yesterday's).

    The overwhelming majority of the crazy men running round shooting innocent people are on this side of the border. What makes them dangerous is much less the ideas in their heads than the ease with which they can lay their hands on a gun.

    It's often hard to be clear about what should be described as terrorism. What's much easier to discern is hysteria.

    By the way, Zehaf-Bibeau's gun was evidently a Winchester Model 94 lever-action rifle, a design that dates back to 1894 and is limited to eight rounds, which have to be individually loaded -- a very inefficient choice for a "shooting rampage."

    Then on Friday [October 24], a high school student in suburban Seattle went on his own shooting rampage, killing two and injuring three more before shooting himself. I missed CNN's wall-to-wall coverage (assuming that's what they did), but it's safe to guess that the talking heads spent much less time speculating on the shooter's ties to ISIS. For one thing, shooting each other is just something Americans do.

  • I don't have time to dig through Israel's recent garbage, but if you do here are some typical links from Mondoweiss:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Tom Engelhardt: Entering the Intelligence Labyrinth: An introduction, or precis, of Engelhardt's new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World (paperback, Haymarket Books). It bears repeating that the US annually spends $68 billion on 17 major "intelligence" agencies -- sorry for the quotes but it's hard to think of them without choking on that word -- that do, well, what exactly? Sorry, that's a secret, but thanks to the occasional leak or boast we do know a wee bit:

    You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for . . . well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you've created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.

    You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the "backdoors" of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them -- and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.

    You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn't make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can't say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you're doing, you prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and -- should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the Earth.

    As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the intelligence-corporate complex. [ . . . ]

    Keep in mind that the twenty-first-century version of intelligence began amid a catastrophic failure: much crucial information about the 9/11 hijackers and hijackings was ignored or simply lost in the labyrinth. That failure, of course, led to one of the great intelligence expansions, or even explosions, in history. (And mind you, no figure in authority in the national security world was axed, demoted, or penalized in any way for 9/11 and a number of them were later given awards and promoted.) However they may fail, when it comes to their budgets, their power, their reach, their secrecy, their careers, and their staying power, they have succeeded impressively.

    Speaking of secrets, also see: Nick Turse: Uncovering the Military's Secret Military (back from 2011, more relevant than ever):

    In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once "special" for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.

    That aura now benefits from a well-honed public relations campaign which helps them project a superhuman image at home and abroad, even while many of their actual activities remain in the ever-widening shadows. Typical of the vision they are pushing was this statement from Admiral Olson: "I am convinced that the forces . . . are the most culturally attuned partners, the most lethal hunter-killers, and most responsive, agile, innovative, and efficiently effective advisors, trainers, problem-solvers, and warriors that any nation has to offer."

    I suspect that the main target of that propaganda campaign is the president, to drive home the point that "special forces" are a no-risk, high-return, small scale option for any problem that can be solved simply (with a bullet, that is).

  • Rory Fanning: Why Do We Keep Thanking the Troops?: I can't be the only person who finds the constant adulation given to the "troops" of the US military downright disgusting, but it sure is hard to find anyone saying so in print. America has always cultivated hypocrisy, and those in my generation suffered through more than usual dose. We noted the beginnings of a cult of the troops in the Vietnam War, where failure on the battlefield was ever-more-generously decorated with medals, but memory was too close to WWII to get carried away: WWII was an intense, all-encompassing collective effort; with so few uninvolved it would have seemed silly to declare everyone a hero (although as memory dimmed that eventually happened with the "greatest generation" hype). The obvious excuse for putting troops on a pedestal today is that so few people sign up (and many of them are tricked into thinking it's some sort of jobs program). Still, this idolatry obscures one of the fundamental political questions of our time: do the sacrifices of US troops do any good for the vast majority of Americans who are otherwise uninvolved? The answer, I'm certain, is no. If all the US had done after 9/11/2001 was to put out a few Interpol warrants, I doubt that even the tiny number of "terrorist attacks" we've seen since would have happened. Had we practiced policies in the Middle East favoring democracy and basic human rights for all but eschewing intervention and arms sales we probably would have missed out on 9/11 (and both Gulf Wars). Sure, the troops had no real say in the decision to squander their lives in a vain attempt to buttress the Neocon ego, but I'm not so sure they shouldn't shoulder some of the blame. Back in the Vietnam War days there was a popular saying: "suppose they gave a war and nobody came." We were under no illusion that most of those who "came" for the war then were compelled to do so. I can understand, and even sympathize, how one might succumb to the force of the state -- I did, after all, feel that force -- but for me that made those who resisted, either by going to jail or avoiding that fate, were the era's real heroes; nothing one could do in battle came close. Since the draft ended, the choice to deny the war machine its bodies is less fraught, and indeed most people choose that path. So today's troops range from malevolent to the merely misinformed, but they all help to enable a set of policies that ultimately do massive harm to the nation and its people. And often, of course, they do great harm to themselves, adding to the public costs of war. (Aside from the dead and maimed, Fanning mentions that "there is a veteran suicide every 80 minutes in this country," nor does the PTSD stop there.) Of course, there are more nuances to the whole phenomenon, but at root is a common misconception that those who "served" did something to protect the rest of us, something that we all should be grateful for. That simply did not happen. That they sacrificed for something we should regret and be embarrassed by, well, that's more to the point. Only once we recognize that can we get past the charades, and that will be better for all of us.

  • David Bromwich: American Exceptionalism and Its Discontents: Speaking of hypocrisies, here's the hoary mother lode, the notion that we're so special the world wouldn't know what to do without our enlightened guidance. Needless to say, the tone has changed over time. Once America was unique in declaring that "all men are created equal"; today our self-esteem is the very celebration of inequality.

  • David Gerald Finchman: The hidden documents that reveal the true borders of Israel and Palestine: In 1947 David Ben Gurion begged the UN to vote in favor of partition borders for Palestine which would give 55% of the mandate to a majority-Jewish nation that represented only 35% of the total population, and 45% to an almost exclusively Arabic-speaking nation. In 1948 Israel's Declaration of Independence proclaimed a Jewish State but said nothing about borders. This unwillingness to define borders has kept Israel in a state of war ever since, with Israel grabbing another 23% of the Mandate's territory during the 1947-49 war, and the remaining 22% in 1967 (plus chunks of Egypt and Syria). This piece looks into the decision-making process from UN-borders to no-borders. A longer version is available here.

  • Karen Greenberg: Will the US Go to "War" Against Ebola? It's telling that Obama's initial response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was to send in the US military. That made some sense inasmuch as AFRICOM has money to burn and some expertise in logistics, but it also imposes a rigid worldview and introduces a dangerous level of intimidation. The one thing Ebola does have in common with Terrorism is an exaggerated level of hysteria, but that seems of a piece with the media's highly orchestrated kneejerk reactions. I'm reminded of the anthrax scare of 2001, which would have soon gone freaking insane had the perpetrator not had the good sense to stop. Greenberg points out many ways Ebola differs from the Terrorism model.

  • Louis Menand: Crooner in Rights Spat: A useful review of copyright matters:

    Baldwin joins Saint-Amour, the law professors Lawrence Lessig, Jeanne Fromer, and Robert Spoo, and the copyright lawyer William Patry in believing that, Internet or no Internet, the present level of copyright protection is excessive. By the time most works fall into the public domain, they have lost virtually all their use value. If the public domain is filled with items like hundred-year-old images of the back of Rod Stewart's head, the public good will suffer. The commons will become your great-grandparents' attic.

    As it is, few creations outlive their creators. Of the 187,280 books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.3 per cent were still in print in 2002. But, since there is no "use it or lose it" provision in copyright law, they are all still under copyright today. Patry, in his recent book, "How to Fix Copyright," notes that ninety-five per cent of Motown recordings are no longer available. Nevertheless, you can't cover or imitate or even sample them without paying a licensing fee -- despite the fact that your work is not competing in the marketplace with the original, since the original is no longer for sale.

  • Katha Pollitt: How Pro-Choicers Can Take Back the Moral High Ground: An excerpt from Pollitt's new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

    A man's home is his castle, but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. Historically, it's belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husband -- in 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn't her body belong to a fertilized egg as well? And if that egg has a right to live and grow in her body, why shouldn't she be held legally responsible for its fate and be forced to have a cesarean if her doctor thinks it's best, or be charged with a crime if she uses illegal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? Incidents like these have been happening all over the country for some time now. Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for their conduct during pregnancy -- and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014, a law was proposed in the Kansas Legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in the pregnancy. You would almost think the people who have always opposed women's independence and full participation in society were still at it. They can't push women all the way back, but they can use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.

  • Peter Van Buren: Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East: I know what you're saying: "only seven?" Van Buren doesn't get to the political effects of continuing the War on Terrorism -- of continuing to fund the surveillance state, of the increasing militarization of police departments, of the circumvention of the justice system, of how public funds are being drained as remote and preventable problems are prioritized over real and immediate ones by a political establishment deeply in hock to the security phantom.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Weekend Roundup

The Wichita Eagle op-ed page featured Trudy Rubin' Decision Time on ISIS today, three days after the column originally appeared. Having clamored for more war for years, she must be happy now that Obama has vowed to "destroy and degrade ISIS" and hopscotched around the world lining up a new "coalition of the willing" to share the dirt and blame for another foreign intervention in Iraq and Syria (the last one having been such fun). Rubin, meanwhile, has gone on seeking further dragons to slay: If Putin's actions in Ukraine aren't an invasion, then what is? Obama's been busy working on locking the US into a war there too. (See David Frum: Obama Just Made the Ultimate Commitment to Eastern Europe, something Frum is ecstatic about.) This series of events has reduced my opinion of Obama to its lowest point ever. Some of this I explain in my comment on the Peter Beinart piece below, yet even now I doubt that I've pushed that argument far enough. Perhaps one reason I'm so appalled is that there doesn't seem to be much uproar over what has to be judged the most significant American pivot towards war since Bush invaded Iraq. As Beinart puts it, "[Obama's] fierce minimalism fits the national mood. President Obama's Mideast strategy is not grand. It's not inspiring. It's not idealistic. But it's what the American people want and what their government knows how to do." Really?

That so few rank-and-file Democrats feel up to holding Obama responsible for his repeated belligerence probably has more to do with the perception that the Republicans have become a full-fledged threat to civilization. This is in stark contrast to the 1960s, when we had no trouble turning on Lyndon Johnson -- and when the Democratic Party essentially short-circuited the accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society out of a blind commitment to an insane war in Vietnam. Like Johnson, Obama seems bent on sacrificing whatever good he's accomplished on the altar of war. Little comfort that he hasn't accomplished much to squander.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Peter Beinart: Actually, Obama Does Have a Strategy in the Middle East: Argues that Obama is neither dove nor hawk, but "a fierce minimalist" -- which is to say he's a hawk who prefers small game taken with little risk or long-term commitment. Of course, that doesn't explain his "Afghanistan surge" -- in retrospect, that looks like a time-limited concession to the military, a way of saying "put up or shut up." Beinart goes further than the facts suggest:

    On the other hand, he's proven ferocious about using military force to kill suspected terrorists. [ . . . ] By contrast, Obama's strategy -- whether you like it or not -- is more clearly defined. Hundreds of thousands can die in Syria; the Taliban can menace and destabilize Afghanistan; Iran can move closer to getting a bomb. No matter. With rare exceptions, Obama only unsheathes his sword against people he thinks might kill American civilians.

    It's not that simple: Libya never was a threat to American civilians (at least not until he intervened there). And he's actually broken new ground in using drones to kill American citizens. So I think the focus on "terrorist" targets has more to do with scale and risk. He's come to realize that the US military isn't very effective (and often is down right counterproductive) when deployed en masse, so he's avoided that. He also seems to recognize that the US military isn't very effective as an occupying force: they inevitably embarrass themselves, breeding resentment and rebellion. On the other hand, give him the opportunity to kill some "terrorist" and he's happy to pull the trigger. Republicans taunt him as weak, so he's anxious to prove he's a natural born killer. One could do worse than minimizing risk and damage, but "minimalism" is a trap Obama walked into, either because he has no principles or because he has no willpower to defend them against his security bureaucracy.

    Also see Kathy Gilsinan: To Kill a Terrorist, about one of Obama's minimalist "success stories": the killing of Somali "terrorist" leader Ahmed Abdi Godane. The most likely result there is that Al-Shabab replaces Godane with another even-more-embittered leader and nothing more changes. And I might as well point out Beinart's more recent post, Pursuing ISIS to the Gates of Hell. Obama's vow "to destroy and degrade ISIS" remains a bit muddled (why put the weaker verb second?), and framing it with a "Jacksonian" revenge drama doesn't help.

  • Andrew O'Hehir: From 9/11 to the ISIS videos: The darkness we conjured up:

    I think it's worthwhile to revisit the examples of Stockhausen and Baudrillard, and their ideas too, in considering a new outrage that is both literal and symbolic: the ISIS beheading videos. The criminal acts depicted in those videos are on an entirely different scale from 9/11, and it's important not to lose sight of that fact amid the understandable shock and revulsion they have engendered. But the intended effect is strikingly similar, and the ISIS videos are conceptually and historically related to 9/11 as tools of provocation and propaganda. They are designed to make a ragtag band of apocalyptic rebels look like a symmetrical adversary to the world's greatest military power; to incite an exaggerated response from that power, driven by panic and hysteria; and to attract rootless millennials, both from the West and the Muslim world, to their incoherent cause. So far it seems to be working.

    I'm far less certain that the intent behind the beheading videos is to provoke the insane response that Obama and nearly everyone on his hawkish right have committed to, but that's the effect. Rather, they show a profound inability to step outside of their own skin and see themselves as others will see them -- a trait that Obama et al. sadly share with them. If they were smart, they'd court journalists and get them to at least cast reasonable doubts about their fanaticism. Of course, if they were smart, they'd recall Islam's past tolerance for other religions, a principle ("no compulsion in matters of faith") which had allowed Christians and Yazidis (and Jews) to persevere through more than a millenia of past caliphates. And they'd play up the fact that they're seeking freedom from despotic police states in Damascus and Baghdad. But no side is playing this smart: they each tailor their propaganda to suit their own prejudices, confirming their greatest fears and enabling their most vicious and violent cadres to commit acts that will only exacerbate the initial problem.

  • Nick Turse: American Monuments to Failure in Africa? Until the US military created the US Africa Command in 2007, you heard very little about American military operations in Africa, because there really weren't many. Now the US military is all over the continent, shooting people and blowing shit up but also spreading their budget around on "feel good" projects, much like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan:

    As with Petraeus's career, which imploded amidst scandal, the efforts he fostered similarly went down in flames. In Iraq, the chicken processing plant proved a Potemkin operation and the much ballyhooed Baghdad water park quickly fell into ruin. The country soon followed. Less than three years after the U.S. withdrawal, Iraq teeters on the brink of catastrophe as most of Petraeus's Sunni mercenaries stood aside while the brutal Islamic State carved a portion of its caliphate from the country, and others, aggrieved with the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad, sided with them. In Afghanistan, the results have been similarly dismal as America's hearts-and-minds monies yielded roads to nowhere (where they haven't already deteriorated into death traps), crumbling buildings, over-crowded, underfunded, and teacher-less schools, and billions poured down the drain in one boondoggle after another.

  • More Israel links:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Kathleen Geier: Can we talk? The unruly life and legacy of Joan Rivers: Seems about right, though I'm less of a fan.

    Some critics claim to discern a humanistic project behind Rivers' comedy of cruelty. For example, Mitchell Fain argued that River "says things out loud what we're all thinking, in our worst moments," and that by doing so, "the monster gets smaller." What seems far likelier is that the monster gets socially sanctioned. For decades, a staple of Rivers' act have been nasty jokes about female celebrities who are fat, stupid, or slutty, and male celebrities who are allegedly gay. If she ever talked smack about straight male celebrities, I'm hard-pressed to think of any examples.

    That brings us to Joan Rivers' politics, which mostly were horrible. On the plus side, she was pro-choice, an early supporter of gay rights, and an Obama supporter. On the negative side, there is pretty much everything else. Rivers was a lifelong Republican, and made many comments over the years that left little doubt about her right-wing views. She hated the movie Precious, not for aesthetic reasons, but for frankly political ones ("I thought, Oh, get a job! Stand up and get a job!"). Just last month, she voiced strong support for Israel's military actions actions in Gaza and said that the Palestinians "deserve to be dead." She adored Ronald Reagan and shamelessly fawned over the British royal family. When writers on her show Fashion Police, who were working full-time and only making $500 a week, went on strike, she refused to support them. At times, her humor was outright racist.

  • John Mearsheimer: Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault: A useful corrective to a lot of prevailing assumptions. Clearly, the US (neocon) effort to extend NATO to the borders of Russia has been deliberately and unnecessarily provocative, although one could also argue that deep-seated fears that Russia might revert its past patterns, both before and after the 1917 Revolution, of trying to control what it thought of as its satellites had more to do with NATO's expansion. Moreover, while US-backed "democracy projects" were effectively an attempt at foreign subversion, it would seem that Russia has been organizing support in Ukraine as well. In America we reflexively assume we're acting with the best intentions, but with Cold War blinkers we make little distinction between democracy and neoliberal economic policies that lead to inequality and corruption -- something the post-Soviet bloc has had bitter experience with. There is much to be said in favor of UN-based programs promoting democracy and human rights throughout the world, provided such programs focus on need -- Saudi Arabia is always a good place to start -- rather than the neocon checklist of governments they dislike.

    More dissenting pieces on Ukraine:

  • Jim Newell: GOP's Kansas nightmare: How a red state is on verge of unthinkable upsets: I'd caution against counting these chickens before they hatch, but so far the evidence does suggest that the Democrats greatly improve their prospects at the polls when they bother to run candidates. The Senate contest this year represents a different twist on that, with Democrat Chad Taylor dropping out to let independent Greg Orman run unfettered. I'm not sure that was such a good idea, but Orman has a lot more money to work with, and he might woo more Republicans -- they're pretty regimented on the far right at the moment, but in doing so they've pissed a lot of their own off. Also see Nate Silver. As for the governor, Brownback is widely regarded as a complete fuck up -- I look forward to campaign commercials showing him and Rick Perry praying for rain. But oddly enough he's not only doubled down on the lie that his tax cuts are "working" -- I think that's a euphemism for rich-getting-richer; the new joke is that the only thing flatter than Kansas is the Kansas economy -- but instead of moving center to pick up votes he's been moving right for more money. To be specific, the Kochs have been trying to kill wind power subsidies, which many Republicans (including Brownback until his flip) favor because it means manufacturing and service jobs plus big royalties to farmers. The Kochs regard wind power as heresy against free markets, but if you want to dig a bit deeper, see Lee Fang: Charles Koch founded anti-environment group to protect big oil industry handouts.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Having a lot of trouble focusing these days. Partly the number of things broken and need of (often expensive, sometimes just time consuming) repairs has been mind-boggling. And with the blog on the blink, I've fallen into a two-day week rut, compiling "Music Week" on Mondays then trying to catch up with the world on "Weekend Roundup" on Sundays. Several of the bits below could have been broken out into separate posts -- indeed, I wonder if they shouldn't all be.

I'm thinking especially of the Michelle Goldberg "Two-State" comment as something I could have written much more on. I don't know if I made the point clearly enough below, so let me try to sum it up once more: there are several distinct but tightly interlocked problems with Two-State: (1) the natural constituency for Two-State (at least among pro-Israelis) is the "liberal Zionists" -- an ideology based on an unsustainable contradiction, and therefore a diminishing force -- and without supporters Two-State is doomed to languish; (2) when liberals break from Zionism (which is inevitable if they have both principles and perception) they must do so by committing to universal rights, which means they must at least accept One-State as a desirable solution (Goldberg, by the way, fails this test); (3) as long as [illiberal] Zionists refuse to implement Two-State (and they have a lot of practice at staving it off), liberals (anyone with a desire for peace and justice) should regroup and insist on universal rights (e.g., One-State); (4) under pressure, I think that Zionists will wind up accepting some version of Two-State rather than risking the ethnic dilution of One-State. People like Goldberg would be better off getting ahead of this curve rather than trying to nitpick it. Someone like Netanyahu has thousands of excuses for postponing agreement on a viable Two-State solution. On the other hand, he has no legitimate defense against charges that Israel is treading on the basic human rights of millions of Palestinians under occupation. That's where you want to focus the political debate. And that shouldn't be hard given Israel's recent demonstration of its abuse of power.

The march to war against ISIS is another subject worthy of its own post. There are many examples, but the one I was most struck by this week was a letter to the Wichita Eagle, which reads:

The threat of ISIS appears similar to the threat of the Nazis before World War II. The Europeans ignored Adolf Hitler's rising power because they were tired of war.

As ISIS spreads through the Middle East at will, our nation's leaders are assessing how to counter this threat. ISIS is well-equipped, having seized abandoned equipment the United States gave the Iraqi army, and it is growing in strength, numbers and brutality.

What is the U.S. to do? That decision is in the hands of our nation's leaders. However, with the future leader of ISIS having said in 2009 to U.S. soldiers who had held him prisoner, "I'll see you in New York," trying to avoid conflict because we're tired of war should not be the determining factor.

Much of Europe succumbed to Hitler because Europeans were "tired of war."

Similar? Germany had the second largest economy in the world in the 1930s, one that was reinvigorated by massive state spending on munitions at a time when the rest of the world was languishing in depression. Even so, Hitler's appetite far exceeded his grasp. Germany was able to score some quick "blitzkrieg" victories over France, Norway, and Poland, and occupy those countries through fronts offered by local fascists -- the Vichy government in France, Quisling in Norway, etc. But even given how large and strong Germany was, it was unable to sustain an assault on the British Isles, and its invasion of Russia stalled well short of the Urals. And, of course, provoking the US into entering the war hastened Germany's loss, but that loss was very likely anyway. It turns out that the world is not such an easy place to conquer, and authoritarian regimes breed resistance everywhere they tread.

In contrast, ISIS is a very limited backwater rebellion. Its extremist Sunni salafism limits it to about one-quarter of Iraq and maybe one-half of Syria, and it was only able to flourish in those areas because they have been severely war-torn for many years. They lack any sort of advanced manufacturing base. Their land is mostly desert, so very marginal for agriculture. Their "war machine" is built on confiscated weapons caches, which will quickly wear out or be exhausted. They do have some oil, but lack refineries and chemical plants. Moreover, their identity is so narrow they will be unable to extend their rule beyond war-torn Sunni regions, where they're often viewed as more benign (or at leas less malign) than the Assad and Maliki regimes.

So it's hard to imagine any scenario where ISIS might expand beyond its current remote base: comparing it to Germany under Hitler is laughable. The one thing they do have in common is an enthusiasm for war, developed out of a desire to avenge past wars. You might say that that the West after WWI was "tired of war" but that seems more like a sober assessment of how much was lost and how little gained even in winning that war -- after Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans are similarly dismayed at how much they've lost and how little they've gained after more than a decade of war. Many Germans, on the other hand, were willing to entertain the delusion that they only lost due to treachery, and that a rematch would solve all their problems. It's easy in retrospect to see this asymmetry in war lust as a "cause" of the war, but jumping from that insight to a conclusion that the West could have prevented WWII by standing up to Hitler sooner is pure fantasy. To prevent WWII you'd have to go back to Versailles and settle the first phase of what Arno Mayer later dubbed "the thirty-years war of the 20th century" on more equitable terms -- as effectively (albeit not all that consciously) happened after WWII.

As with post-WWI Germans, ISIS' enthusiasm for war is rooted in many years of scars -- scrapes with the French and British colonialists, with Israel, with brutal Baathist dictators, with the US invasion of Iraq and American support for Kurdish and Shiite militias. Most ISIS soldiers grew up with war and know little else -- in this the people they most closely resemble are not the Nazis but the Taliban, a group which resisted long Russian and American occupations, separated by a bloody civil war and a short-lived, brutal but ineffective period in power. On the other hand the idea that the US should shrug off their "war weariness" and plunge into another decade-plus struggle with another Taliban knock-off isn't very inspiring. Isn't repeating the same steps hoping for different results the very definition of insanity?

Still, the war drums keep beating. The Wichita Eagle has had three such op-eds in the last week on ISIS: from Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, and Trudy Rubin -- each with the sort of screeching hysteria and ignorance of ecology I associate with finding roaches under the bathroom lavoratory. Clearly, what gets their goat more than anything is the very idea of an Islamic State: it looms for these people as some sort of existential threat that must be exterminated at any cost -- a reaction that is itself every bit as arbitrary, absolutist, and vicious as what they think they oppose. But in fact it's merely the logical response to the past wars that this same trio have urged us into. It's worth recalling that there was a day when small minds like these were equally convinced that the Germans and Japanese were all but genetically disposed to hatred and war. (Robert Morgenthau, for instance, wanted to spoil German farms with salt so they wouldn't be able to feed enough people to field an army -- that was 1945?) Europe broke a cycle of war that had lasted for centuries, not by learning to be more vigilant at crushing little Hitlers but by joining together to build a prosperous and equitable economy. The Middle East -- long ravaged by colonialism, corruption, and war -- hasn't been so lucky, but if it is to turn around it will be more due to "war weariness" than to advances in drone technology. The first step forward will be for the war merchants to back away -- or get thrown out, for those who insist on learning their lessons the hard way.

Some more scattered links this week:

  • Michelle Goldberg: Liberal Zionism Is Dying. The Two-State Solution Shouldn't Go With It. This starts off with a point (a major concession, really) that bears repeating:

    In 1948, Hannah Arendt published an essay in the magazine Commentary -- at the time still a liberal magazine -- titled "To Save the Jewish Homeland." She lamented the increasingly militaristic, chauvinistic direction of Zionism, the virtual unanimity among Jews in both the United States and Palestine that "Arab and Jewish claims are irreconcilable and only a military decision can settle the issue; the Arabs, all Arabs, are our enemies and we accept this fact; only outmoded liberals believe in compromises, only philistines believe in justice, and only shlemiels prefer truth and negotiation to propaganda and machine guns . . . and we will consider anybody who stands in our way a traitor and anything done to hinder us a stab in the back."

    This nationalist strain of Zionism, she predicted, might succeed in establishing a state, but it would be a modern-day Sparta, "absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities." It would negate the very humanistic Jewish values that originally fed the Zionist dream. "Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people," she writes. "Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland."

    It's difficult to avoid the conclusion, sixty-six years later, that she was right.

    Goldberg then cites Antony Lerman's recent The End of Liberal Zionism:

    The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals -- and I was one, once -- subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a powerful, intolerant religious right -- this mixture has pushed liberal Zionism to the brink. [ . . . ]

    The only Zionism of any consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.

    "Liberal Zionist" is a contradiction that cannot survive. Indeed, in Israel it is all but dead. The key tenet of liberalism is belief in equal rights for all. In Israel it is virtually impossible to find any political party -- even "far left" Meretz -- willing to advance equal rights for the "Palestinian citizens of Israel" much less for those Palestinians under occupation. On the other hand, the debate as to whether Zionism is inherently racist has been proven not just in theory but empirically. As Max Blumenthal shows in Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, everywhere you look in Israel you see growing evidence of racism.

    In America, it's long been possible for many people (not just Jews) to combine domestic liberalism with an unthinking, uncritical allegiance to Israel. Of course it's getting harder to sustain the ignorance that allows one to think of Israel as a just nation. (The so-called Christian Zionists -- or as Chris Hedges puts it, "American fascists" -- require fewer illusions, since they are likely to be racist and militarist at home as well as abroad.) It sounds like Goldberg -- an early J-Street supporter -- has started to make the break, but she's still not willing to go full-liberal and endorse full and equal rights for all Israelis and Palestinians -- the so-called One-State Solution. She wants to salvage the so-called Two-State Solution, with Israel returning (for the most part) to its 1967 borders and an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank (with or without Jerusalem as its capitol).

    The Two-State Solution was originally proposed by the UN in 1947, but the Zionist leadership weren't satisfied with the proposed borders, and the Palestinian leadership objected to the whole thing, preferring a unified democracy (with a 2-to-1 Arab majority) where nobody would have to move. After the 1949-50 armistice lines were drawn, Israel greatly expanded its borders and had expelled over 700,000 Arabs from its territory, ensuring Jewish demographic dominance. Those borders, which held until 1967, have long been accepted as permanent by most Palestinian groups and by all neighboring Arab countries: a deal that could have been made by Israel any time since the mid-1990s, but which wasn't, because no ruling party in Israel would accept such a deal, nor would the US or the so-called Quartet (which had endorsed the deal) apply significant pressure on Israel to settle. There are lots of reasons why Israel has taken such an intransigent stand. One is that the demise of liberalism leaves Israel with no effective "peace block" -- the price of occupation has become so low, and the political liabilities of peace so high, that Israel currently has no desire to change the status quo.

    This is, of course, a huge problem for anyone who believes in equal rights and/or who puts a positive value on peace in the Middle East. Such people -- by which I mean pretty much all of us (except for a few warmongers and apocalypse-hungry Christians) -- can only make progress toward a settlement by putting pressure on Israel, which is to say by increasing the costs to Israel of its present occupation policies. One way is to counter Israeli propaganda, to expose the facts of occupation and to delegitimize Israel's position. Another step is BDS, with the prospect of growing ever more extensive and restrictive. Another is to adjust the list of acceptable outcomes: that may mean giving precedence to the inclusive, equal rights One-State Solution over the unsuccessful Two-State scheme.

    The fact is that Two-State was a bad idea in 1947 and remains a bad idea today: it is only slightly less bad now because the "ethnic cleansing" that could have been avoided in 1947 is ancient history now; it is also slightly worse because it leaves us with a lot of refugees who will still be unable to return to Israel, and who still have to be compensated and patriated elsewhere. The dirty secret of the Two-State Solution is that it leaves Israel unaltered (except for the relatively trivial loss of some settlements) -- free to remain the racist, militarist Sparta it has become ever since 1948. That's why Israel will choose Two-State over One-State: Two-State guarantees that their Jewish state will remain demographically supreme, whereas One-State risks dilution of their ethnic solidarity. But even if the West's game plan is Two-State all along, you're not going to get there without playing the One-State card. If a US administration finally decides we need to settle this conflict, it won't start (as Obama did) by demanding a settlement freeze; it will start by demanding equal rights for all within whatever jurisdictions exist, and complete freedom from Israel for any jurisdictions that do not offer full and equal Israeli citizenship. Only then will progress be made. The problem with Goldberg's plea is that she's still willing to sacrifice her principles for Israel's identity.

  • Ezra Klein: The DNC'a braidead attack on Rand Paul: Paul's been reading Hillary Clinton's neocon ravings, and responded: "We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS." The DNC's response: "It's disappointing that Rand Paul, as a Senator and a potential presidential candidate, blames America for all the problems in the world, while offering reckless ideas that would only alienate us from the global community. [ . .  ] That type of 'blame America' rhetoric may win Paul accolades at a conference of isolationists but it does nothing to improve our standing in the world. In fact, Paul's proposals would make America less safe and less secure." Klein adds:

    This is the brain-dead patriotism-baiting that Democrats used to loathe. Now they're turning it on Paul.

    There are a few things worth noting here. The first is the ferocity with which the DNC responded to an attack that was, in truth, aimed more at Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. The second is the degree to which a Rand Paul-Hillary Clinton race would scramble the politics of national security, with Democrats running against Paul in much the way Bush ran against Kerry. And the third is that it's still the case in foreign policy, the real divide isn't left vs. right, but interventionists vs. non-interventionists.

    Actually, the "real" political divide is between status quo cons like Obama and Clinton on the "left" side and various flavors of crackpots (including Rand) on the "right." But in foreign policy, the latter have come to include a growing number of non-interventionists, not so much because they believe in peace and justice as because they've come to realize that imperial wars bind us closer to the dark-skinned aliens we claim to be helping, and because some of them begin to grasp that the security apparatus of the state they so loathe (mostly because it's democratic, or pretends to be) could just as easily turn on them. Meanwhile, Obama and Clinton have managed to hire virtually every known "liberal interventionist" as part of their efforts to toady up to the military-security complex, even though virtually none of their real-world supporters buy into that crap. Someone smarter than Rand Paul could turn this into a wedge issue, but he'll tie it to something stupid like preventing the Fed from counteracting recessions.

    Also see Paul Rosenberg: Don't do it, Hillary! Joining forces with neocons could doom Democrats: One thing on his mind is LBJ and Vietnam (who like Hillary was willing to do "dumb stuff" to not appear cowardly), but there's also this:

    Here's the dirtiest of dirty little secrets -- and it's not really a secret, it's just something no one ever talks about: The entire jihadi mess we're facing now all descends from the brilliant idea of "giving the Soviets their own Vietnam" in Afghanistan. How's that for learning a lesson from Vietnam? Well, that's the lesson that Jimmy Carter's crew learned -- and Ronald Reagan's gang was only too happy to double down on.

  • Richard Silverstein: The Jingoism of Anti-Jihadism: Starts with a Netanyahu quote from September 11, 2001, that's worth being reminded of (from New York Times):

    Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, "It's very good." Then he edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy." He predicted that the attack would "strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror."

    I remember watching him on TV at the time, as well as a similarly gloating Shimon Peres, and a slightly more somber John Major offering to share with the US Britain's vast experience in cultivating terrorists. You couldn't ask for better examples of how to react badly and make a problem worse. Silverstein then quotes from Hillary Clinton's Atlantic interview ("They are driven to expand. Their raison d'etre is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank -- and we are all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I'm thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat."):

    Here you have a perfect example of the sickness I outlined above. In the 1950s communism was the bugaboo. Today, it's jihadism. Clinton's conception of the latter uses almost exactly the same terms as those of the Red Scare: words like expansionist, angry, violent, intolerant, brutal, anti-democratic. There's even a touch of Reaganism in Clinton's portrayal of the fall of communism. There's the notion that through all of our machinations against the Soviet Union -- the assassinations, the coups, the propping up of dictators -- all of it helped in some unspecified way to topple Communism. She further bizarrely characterizes our anti-Communist strategy as an "overarching framework," when it was little more than knee-jerk oppositionalism to the Red Menace.

    What is most pathetic about this political stance is that it offers no sense of our own identity, of what we stand for. Instead, it offers a vague, incohate enemy against whom we can unite. We are nothing without such enemies.

    Next up is David Brooks, if you care. Richard Ben Cramer, in How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (by the way, probably the best single book about Israel in the last twenty years) hypothesizes that the reason Israel is so determined not to negotiate an end to the conflict is that its leaders fear losing the shared identity of having a common enemy in the Palestinians. Take the conflict away and the various Jewish subgroups -- the Ashkenazi, Sephardim, Mizrachi, Russians, Americans -- will splinter and turn on each other, fighting over diminishing spoils in a suddenly ordinary state.

    For more on Netanyahu, see Remi Brulin: Israel's decades-long effort to turn the word 'terrorism' into an ideological weapon.

  • More Israel links:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Dean Baker: Subverting the Inversions: More Thoughts on Ending the Corporate Income Tax: Baker is arguing that the inefficiencies caused by the Corporate Tax Avoidance Industry are so great that we might be better off eliminating the tax altogether: if there were no tax, there'd be no need for corporations to pay lobbyists and accountants to hide their income, and we'd also eliminate scourges like private equity companies. First obvious problem here is that leaves a $350 billion revenue shortfall, which Baker proposes recovering with higher dividend and capital gains tax rates. (Of course, we should do that anyway.) One long-term problem is that federal taxes have radically shifted from being collected from businesses to individuals, which makes the tax burden more acutely felt by the public. A VAT would help shift this back, but so would anything that tightened up loopholes and reduced corporate tax evasion. Another advantage of having a corporate income tax is that it could be made progressive, which would take an extra bite out of especially large and/or profitable companies -- the former mostly benefitting from weak antitrust enforcement, the latter from monopoly rents -- which would both raise more revenue and take it from companies that are relatively safe from competition. I'm not strictly opposed to what Baker is proposing, but I'd like to see it worked out in a broader context that includes many other tax reforms that tackle inequality, lack of competition, globalization, and patents more systematically. I suspect Baker would prefer this too.

    Also see Baker's Patent Monopolies: The Reason Drug Companies Pushed Synthetic Opioids.

  • Andrew Hartman: Hegel Meets Reagan: A review of Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

  • Medium's CSS is actually pretty f***ing good. [Warning: very nerdy.] CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. The visual design properties of web pages can generally be controlled by attaching CSS code to the "generic markup code" in a web page (something called HTML). Having worked with pre-Web GMLs (Generic Markup Languages, especially the standardized one, SGML), I've always been very "old school" about coding web pages, which means I've never embraced CSS as a programming paradigm. So my reaction here was first one of shock that so much work went into this. (Looks like four programmers for a couple years, although it's unlikely that they only wrote CSS.) I was also at a loss for much of the terminology (LESS? SASS? mixin?), not that I can't guess what "z-index" implies. It's not that I haven't learned anything in the 15 years since I started building web sites, and it's certainly not necessarily the case that what's changed has changed for the better, but if I'm going to get over the hump of embracing this change I need good examples of making it worthwhile. And this, I suspect, is one.

  • Anya Schiffrin: The Rise and Fall of Investigative Journalism: An international compendium, spun off from her new book, Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World. This, by the way, is one of the few things I've read this week that make me feel more hopeful.

  • Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things to Me: Reprints the title essay, or at least an early draft of it, to Solnit's new book. Of course, I've had clueless men explain things to me, too. (A few clueless women as well, but singling out men is within reasonable statistical norms.) And in groups I have a relatively sensitive CSMA/CD switch, so I'm easily interrupted and loathe to reclaim the floor, so the larger the group the more likely I am to be regaled with unrefuted (not irrefutable) nonsense. Much of my consciousness of such dynamics comes from reading early feminist texts long ago, revelatory even in cases where women are reacting not so much to gender as to implicit power relationships -- something gender was (and not uncommonly still is) inextricably bound up in, but something that didn't end with gender. So Solnit's stories speak to me, even when the precise terminology is slightly off. [One of my favorite tech acronyms, CSMA/CD stands for "carrier sense multiple access with collision detection" -- an algorithm for efficiently deciding when a computer can send data over a common bus network. The same would work for deciding who speaks when in an open room, but actual results are often distorted by volume and ego.]

  • A few more links on Michael B. Katz:

One more little thing. I put aside the August 19, 2014 issue of the Wichita Eagle because I was struck by the following small items on page 3A:

Man sentenced to more than 7 years in prison . . . Scott Reinke, 43, was given 86 months in prison for a series of crimes including burglary, theft, possession of stolen property, making false information and fleeing or attempting to elude law enforcement. . . . In tacking on the additional time last Friday, [Judge Warren] Wilhelm noted Reineke had a criminal history of more than 50 felony convictions.

Kechi man gets nearly 10 years for child porn . . . Jaime Menchaca, 34, of Kechi pleaded guilty to one count of distributing child pornography and was sentenced to 110 months in prison. . . . In his plea, Menchaca admitted that on Sept. 13 he sent an e-mail containing child pornography to a Missouri man.

There's also another piece on page 5A:

Sex offender pleads guilty to child porn . . . Dewey had a 1999 conviction in Pueblo, Colorado, for attempted sexual assault of a child. He admitted in court Monday that he was found last September with images and videos of child pornography that he obtained via the Internet.

Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a 20-year prison term when Dewey is sentenced on Nov. 4.

This struck me as an example of something profoundly skewed in our criminal justice system. I won't argue that child pornography is a victimless crime (although what constitutes pornography can be very subjective), but possession of a single image strikes me as a much more marginal offense than repeated instances of property theft. (I don't think I even noticed the last case until I went back to look for the first two; it's harder to judge.) Glad the burglar/thief is going to jail, but wonder if it wouldn't make more sense for the child porn defendant to spend some time with a shrink, and maybe pay a nominal fine.

Also on the front page of the Eagle is an article called "Kan. GOP lawmakers vow to look out for oil interests": Senator Roberts, Reps. Huelskamp, Pompeo, and Jenkins prostate themselves at a Kansas Independent Oil & Gas Association confab. They all agreed they wanted lower taxes and less regulation. Nobody said much about the recent tenfold increase in earthquakes.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Weekend Roundup

The first thing to note here is that the Four Wars of 2014 -- Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Gaza -- are still going strong, and the conflicting interests super- and not-so-super-powers have in them offer excuses enough to frustrate any efforts at mediation. There have also been reports of shelling along the India-Pakistan border in Jammu, and the US is upset about China challenging a US "reconnaissance plane" near the Chinese border.

The least-reported of these conflicts is in the Ukraine, where various "pro-West" or "pro-Europe" forces staged a coup against Russia-leaning President Viktor Yanukovich in February. As Ukraine shifted to the West, various revolts broke out in heavily Russian southwest Ukraine. Crimea declared independence and asked to be annexed by Russia, which Putin readily agreed to. Other separatist militias seized power elsewhere in southeastern Ukraine, and the "pro-West" Kiev government has been trying to suppress the revolt the old-fashioned way, with bombing and strafing. It's unclear to what extent Russia has been actively promoting and supporting the separatists: NATO and Kiev have asserted various instances, and Putin has steadfastly denied them.

The result so far is that the civil war in Donbass (around Dontesk) has resulted in about 4,000 deaths -- I don't think that includes the Malaysian airliner that was shot down, surely an accident but part of the war's "collateral damage." The US has clearly sided with the "pro-Western" government in Kiev and taken a leading roll in attempting to punish Russia with sanctions. No one thinks Russia is totally innocent here, but the US position is the result of a long neocon campaign to advance NATO to Russia's borders, to corner and cower Russia to prevent the emergence of any non-US military or economic power center. And the failure to cover this war is largely due to blithe assumptions of US benevolence and Russian malevolence going back to Cold War dogma, as well as an abiding belief that force is an effective solution to the world's problems.

If the US was not so entangled in its faith in military force, you would see a concerted effort to mediate the four wars. Rather, Obama has embraced force as America's fundamental strategy in all four arenas. (Syria is only slightly murky here: the US dislikes both sides but can't see any option other than searching for a third side to arm.) The US is most directly involved in Iraq, where we've taken a sudden interest in protecting small minorities like Yazidis and Turkmen who have the most propaganda value. Then there is Gaza, where the ceasefire has been repeatedly broken by Israel, still refusing to open Gaza's borders to allow a semblance of normal everyday life. As I've written before, the "truce" terms Hamas offered at the beginning of the recent military hostilities were completely fair and reasonable. Netanyahu's continued rejection of the terms should make you reconsider just who "the terrorists" are in this conflict. The Gaza death count has continued to climb over 2100. Another Israeli civilian was killed in recent days, bringing the total to 4, in one of the most one-sided massacres of recent times.

While it is possible that ISIS is indeed a terrorist group one cannot negotiate with -- at least that's what the hawks want us to believe -- Hamas has practically been begging for a deal since they entered Palestinian electoral politics in 2006. Israel has not only rejected their every overture, Israel repeatedly drags them back into armed conflict. The US is schizophrenic about this: on the one hand we spend a lot of money trying to support the "good Palestinians" over in the West Bank in the vain belief that if we can improve their economic well-being that will help us move toward peace. On the other hand, any time Israel decides to trash whatever good we've done, we applaud and make sure to replenish their arms. I want to quote a section from Josh Ruebner's Shattered Hopes: Obama's Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace (p. 190):

Promoting "economic growth" for Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, while simultaneously flooding Israel with the weapons and providing it with the diplomatic protection it needs to entrench this military occupation, is a nonsensical proposition. At best, these policies reveal that the United States is working at cross-purposes; at worst, they signal that it is trying to reconcile Palestinians to their open-air prison existence by making it slightly more palatable. What USAID fails to understand publicly is that Israel's military occupation is specifically designed to de-develop the Palestinian economy, not to encourage Palestinian economic growth.

Israel's eviscertation of teh Palestinian economy is integrally woven into the very fabric of its military occupation in innumerable ways. The hundreds of roadblocks, checkpoints and other barriers to movement that Israel maintains in the West Bank and East Jerusalem inhibit the transportation of people and goods, which forces the ever-increasing localization of the economy. Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip has reduced its population to penury and almost total reliance on international charity for survival. Even before, Israel's formal imposition of the blockade on Gaza in 2007, Israel's earlier destruction of the Gaza Strip's only airport and its prevention of the building of a seaport there had greatly constricted Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from engaging in international trade. Similarly, Israel's wall in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its control of the West Bank's border corssings with Jordan, greatly reduce trade opportunities as well. Finally, Israel's widespread razing of Palestinian agricultural land and fruit-bearing trees, along with the expropriation of Palestinian land and water resources for its illegal settlements, have devastated the Palestinian agricultural sector.

The US at least nominally wants peace in Palestine, just not enough to stand up to Israel, which at most wants quiet but is willing to settle for hatred as long as Palestinians remain powerless -- which is one effect of mired in a hopeless economy. In one telling note, it's worth noting that the power plant in Gaza that Israel blows up every few years is insured by the US: Israel breaks it, we pay to fix it, then we pay Israel to break it again. It's a perfect example of government waste, but Americans don't seem able to see that, in large part because we think our interests extend everywhere, we think we have to choose sides everywhere, and we choose those sides on the basis of ignorance and identity.

Some scattered links this week:

  • Ed Kilgore: Jeffords and the GOP's March to the Right: Vermont's last Republican Senator, James Jeffords, has died. He's best remembered for switching parties in 2001, denying Cheney's stranglehold on the Senate. Kilgore drew up a list of "moderate" Republican senators from 1976, just 25 years back, on the even of the Reagan juggernaut, and found 17 (of 38) qualified (not including the likes of Bob Dole and Howard Baker Jr.), adding VP Nelson Rockefeller and (more of a stretch) President Gerald Ford. Since then the Republican Party has been purged as rigorously as Stalin's CP -- the only division today seems to be between those who are categorically insane and those who are merely deranged.

  • Philip Weiss: Hillary Clinton just lost the White House in Gaza -- same way she lost it in Iraq the last time: Some wishful thinking here, but it's worth noting that Clinton has strayed outside the bounds of partisan propriety, notably in attacking Obama's stated intent -- I'm hesitant to call it a policy without more evidence that he's actually trying to follow it -- of "not doing stupid shit."

    Hillary's done it again. Her pro-war comments in that famous interview two weeks ago have painted her into a right wing neoconservative corner. In 2016, a Democratic candidate will again emerge to run to her left and win the party base, again because of pro-war positioning on the Middle East that Hillary has undertaken in order to please neoconservatives.

    The last time it was Iraq, this time it was Gaza. Hillary Clinton had nothing but praise for Netanyahu's actions in Gaza, and echoed him in saying that Hamas just wanted to pile up dead civilians for the cameras. She was "hepped up" to take on the jihadists, she said that Obama's policy of "not doing stupid shit" was not a good policy. She undermined Obama for talking to Iran and for criticizing Israel over the number of civilian casualties in Gaza. She laid all the fault for the massacre at Hamas's door.

    And once again, Hillary Clinton will pay for this belligerency; she won't tenant the White House.

    Weiss knows he's "going out on a limb" so he cites some polling that's worth noting:

    Consider: Gallup says that Israel's actions in Gaza were unjustified in the eyes of the young, people of color, women, and Democrats, and overwhelmingly in some of those categories 51-25% disapproval among the young. 47-35 percent among Democrats, 44-33 among women, 49-25 among nonwhites.

    The problem, of course, is that while the majority of Democrats may have broken from AIPAC over Gaza, how many Democrats in Congress have? Not Elizabeth Warren. Not even Bernie Sanders. Certainly some hypothetical Democrat could score points against Clinton in primaries by painting her as a warmonger and pointing out how her obeissance to AIPAC only serves to prolong conflict in the Middle East, but it's impossible to identify a real Democrat who could effectively make those points. (Dennis Kucinich, for instance, tried twice, failed abysmally, and doesn't even have his House seat to stand on now. Howard Dean pretty much permanently discredited himself when he became a lobbyist for the Iranian terrorist group MEK.)

    The main thing that bothers me about Clinton isn't policy -- not that there aren't many points to disagree on -- so much as the stench of dynasty. More and more the Democratic Party resembles the so-called progressive parties of Pakistan and India, cynically ruled by corrupt families and cliques that needn't offer their supporters anything more than a small measure of protection from the viciousness of their opponents. You'd think that 238 years after the declaration of democracy in America we would have become more sophisticated than that -- indeed, we probably were, but have recently devolved into the present kleptocracy. Obama at least offered a symbolic break from the Bush-Clinton dynasties, but in the end that was only symbolic: his administration was rife with Clinton partisans, and he sealed the party's fate by breaking up the grassroots organization that had elected two Democratic Congresses -- foolishly or cynically preferring to "deal" with lobbyists and Republicans rather than risk democracy within his own party.

  • More Israel Links:

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Patrick Cockburn: How to Ensure a Thriving Caliphate: Excerpt from Cockburn's forthcoming [January 6?] book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. There is a shortage of reliable info about ISIS, as well as a lot of propaganda. (The most laughable was Trudy Rubin claiming to know "The Truth About ISIS.") Not sure this helps a lot either, although the key point that the jihadists derive from the US disruption of Iraq is well taken. More detailed and less inflamatory is The leader of ISIS is 'a classic maneuver warrior', although the tactical comparisons to Genghis Khan strike me as bullshit.

  • Thomas Frank: "Wanted Coltrane, Got Kenny G": Interview with Cornell West, reference is to Obama. "It's not pessimistic, brother, because this is the blues. We are blues people. The blues aren't pessimistic. We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark. That's different."

  • Rahawa Haile: Should Musicians Play Tel Aviv? This kicks around the various reasons foreign musicians shouldn't play in Israel, with some asides on other related cases -- apartheid-era South Africa, obviously, but Haile also mentions concerts in "unsavory" dictatorships like Libya (under Gaddafi) and Turkmenistan, plus Stevie Wonder's decision to not bother with Florida after the Zimmerman verdict. Oddly, Haile spends much more time on Israel's often rabid reaction to African refugees -- mostly from Sudan, where Israel tried to score anti-Arab propaganda points -- than with Israel's second- or third-class treatment of Palestinians (actually, those in Gaza are probably more like fourth). (Max Blumenthal's book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel has quite a bit on Israeli racism against African refugees, but that is just one instance of the more general loathing right-wing Israelis hold for nearly all goyim.) Neil Tennant is quoted: "in Israel anyone who buys a ticket can attend a concert." That, of course, depends on what you mean by "in Israel": if you live in Ramallah, 15 miles away, you can't buy tickets to see the Pet Shop Boys in Tel Aviv, nor can you if you live in Gaza, more like 40 miles away. Tennant is not only wrong, he is wrong in a particularly misleading way: his experience of Israel is of a normal, relatively peaceful and prosperous society, which is true enough for the "Tel Aviv bubble" but completely false for much of the territory subject to Israeli state terror. One thing that perpetuates Israeli state terror is the sense that its preferred citizens enjoy of never having to pay a price for their consent to living in such a state. When an international artists boycotts Israel, that at least sends a message that there is some cost to running such a state, even if it's not likely to have any real effect. The fact is that Israel cannot be forced into changing its ways: the only way change will come about is if Israelis become conscious of how far their nation has strayed from international norms of peace and human rights. For that reason I welcome all such boycotts. On the other hand, I don't keep track of who played Israel when or why. (One of the few I recall is Madonna, who made a documentary about a non-concert trip to Israel and the Occupied Territories, which if I recall correctly was very effective in exposing at least part of the brutality of the regime.) Nor do I discriminate against Israeli jazz musicians -- I must have written about close to 100 and I'd be surprised if the grade curve strays from any other national group. They are individuals, and while many may support their political leaders, many do not -- in fact a very large percentage of them are expatriates, living in New York, London, Paris, and elsewhere -- and in any case, as an American I know as well as anyone that there is very little individuals can do about their governments.

  • D.R. Tucker: The Powell Doctrine: Some notes on Lewis Powell, including his notorious US Chamber of Commerce memo that largely laid out the platform for right-wing business' takeover of American politics, and other things, including a defense of Roe. vs. Wade.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Weekend Roundup

It's been a very distracting week, what with the blog sometimes working and more often not. I've been working on a "pseudo-blog" system that should prove more robust -- throughout the troubles of the last few weeks we've always been able to serve static pages -- and I should unveil that soon. Meanwhile, a few scattered links this week:

  • Matthew Harwood: One Nation Under SWAT:

    When the concept of SWAT arose out of the Philadelphia and Los Angeles Police Departments, it was quickly picked up by big city police officials nationwide. Initially, however, it was an elite force reserved for uniquely dangerous incidents, such as active shooters, hostage situations, or large-scale disturbances.

    Nearly a half-century later, that's no longer true.

    In 1984, according to Radley Balko's Rise of the Warrior Cop, about 26% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT teams. By 2005, that number had soared to 80% and it's still rising, though SWAT statistics are notoriously hard to come by.

    As the number of SWAT teams has grown nationwide, so have the raids. Every year now, there are approximately 50,000 SWAT raids in the United States, according to Professor Pete Kraska of Eastern Kentucky University's School of Justice Studies. In other words, roughly 137 times a day a SWAT team assaults a home and plunges its inhabitants and the surrounding community into terror.

    In a recently released report, "War Comes Home," the American Civil Liberties Union (my employer) discovered that nearly 80% of all SWAT raids it reviewed between 2011 and 2012 were deployed to execute a search warrant.

    You can draw a couple short lines from the US counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to militarized policing: one is that surplus military equipment is often dumped no charge onto police departments (Tom Engelhardt starts with a story about the Bergen County Police Dept. obtaining MRAPs -- armored personnel carriers designed to survive IED attacks.) Another is the relatively high percentage of ex-soldiers in police departments. Another is lack of accountability: with the cult of the troops, it's virtually impossible for the US military to hold any of its personnel accountable for unnecessary or excessive force, and as the police become militarized that ethic (or lack thereof) carries over. (Israel, which used to pride itself on discipline, has lately become as bad or worse.) Then there's the increasing proliferation of guns (and "stand your ground" laws) in the general population. Harwood starts with a story of a Florida man who heard through social media that he was going to be "burned." When the man called the police with the threat, he was told to get a gun and defend himself. The threat arrived in the form of a SWAT team sent to serve a search warrant: seeing the gun, they killed the man. Harwood titles one section, "Being the police means never having to say you're sorry."

    Also see: Sarah Stillman: The Economics of Police Militarism.

  • Elias Isquith: Reagan is still killing us: How his dangerous "American exceptionalism" haunts us today: Always good to read a bad word about "the Gipper," but this piece is more about Hillary Clinton and her recent neocon unveiling in the Atlantic. She's always been eager to show how bellicose she can be, and it certainly doesn't hurt to put some distance between herself and Obama, especially as long as she takes positions that don't get tested in practice. But before going into her, and back to Reagan, I'm reminded of how Gordon Goldstein, in Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, quoted Bundy on the contrast between JFK and LBJ: "Kennedy didn't want to be dumb, Johnson didn't want to be a coward." In this, it's tempting to map Obama onto Kennedy, and Clinton onto Johnson. Except that Obama doesn't want to be seen as a coward either, so time and again he backs down and goes with dumb. Clinton is only promising to get to dumb faster.

    Weirdly, Clinton's decision to speak about the U.S.'s role in global politics as if she, in contrast to Obama, was an unapologetic, "old-fashioned" believer in American exceptionalism made her sound like no one so much as Ronald Reagan, the last president who told a humbled America to buck up and forget its recent mistakes. [ . . . ]

    So here's a prediction about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 presidential race. At one point or another, there will be a television ad in which Hillary Clinton will speak of bringing back the former glory of the United States. She'll say it's time to mark an end to nearly 20 years of terrorism, depression, war and defeat. It's time to feel good again about being the leader of the free world. It's morning in America; and everything is great.

    Actually, that sounds like a good idea, especially if she could combine it with a policy shift that gets away from the losing struggles of the last twenty years. One of the interesting things about Reagan is that with a few minor exceptions -- wasting a lot of money on the military and helping turn Afghanistan and Central America into the hellholes they are today -- Reagan was satisfied with "talking the talk" and rarely pushed it too far. For instance, he spent all of 1980 campaigning against Carter's Panama Canal Zone treaty, but once he was elected he didn't lift a finger to change it. On the other hand, Clinton won't be given a pass on her toughness. She'll have to earn it. How successful she may be will depend on how accurately she identifies the malevolent forces that have been dragging America down: namely, the Republicans, and their pandering to the rich and crazy.

  • Saree Makdisi: The catastrophe inflicted on Gaza -- and the costs to Israel's standing:

    Israel's repeated claim that it targets only rocket launchers or tunnels is belied by the scale and nature of the weapons it unloaded on Gaza. Its 2000-pound aerial bombs take down entire buildings along with everyone in them (almost a thousand buildings have been severely damaged or destroyed in such air strikes). Its 155mm howitzer shells have a margin of error of 300 yards and a lethal radius of up to 150 yards from the point of impact. Each of the 120mm flechette shells its tank crews fire burst into a 100 by 300 yard shower of 5,000 metal darts carefully designed to shred human flesh.

    Having sealed Gaza off from the outside world and blanketed almost half of the territory with warnings telling people to flee for their lives (to where?!), Israel has been indiscriminately firing all of these munitions into one of the most densely-inhabited parts of our planet. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled; entire families have been entombed in the ruins of their homes. The catastrophic result of Israel's bombardment is no surprise.

    No surprise -- but also not exactly thought through either; more a matter of casual disregard. For it's not as though Israel has carried out this violence in pursuit of a strategic master plan (its endless prevarications over its objectives in Gaza are the clearest indicator of this). Such gratuitous outbursts of violence (this episode is the third in six years) are, rather, what Israel falls back on in place of the strategic vision of which it is bereft. It can indulge in these outbursts partly because, in the short run at least -- endlessly coddled by the United States, where venal politicians are quick to parrot its self-justifications -- it does not pay a significant price for doing so.

  • Sandy Tolan: Going Wild in the Gaza War: "Going wild" was Tzipi Livni's description of how Israel reacts to any Palestinian provocation they bother to react to. The idea is to overreact so viciously and indiscriminately that the Palestinians will learn to fear offending Israel in any way, settling meekly into their role as "an utterly defeated people." The 2014 edition of "going wild" -- by no means finished yet -- has left over 1,900 Palestinians dead, over 12,000 injured, some 100,000 homeless, many more displaced, pretty much all of 1.8 million people without power or many of the other amenities of civilization, like the ability to shop in the globalized marketplace, or to take a holiday more than 20 miles from home. Those 1.8 million people have certainly been reminded of Israel's carelessness and cruelty. It's hard to see that as a lesson that bodes well for the future. Tolan's first point is that this war could easily have been avoided had Israel and/or the US recognized and worked with Hamas, and he steps through a series of initiatives and "truce" offers that were summarily rejected by Israel and the US -- to this day they insist that "once a terrorist, always a terrorist" (to which Tolan can't help but point out that the leaders responsible "for a horrific massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin and the Irgun bombing of the King David Hotel, killing 91 people" subsequently became Prime Ministers of Israel). Tolan regards Israel as "a deeply traumatized society whose profound anxieties are based in part on genuine acts of horror perpetrated by countless terrorist attacks over decades, and partly on an unspeakable past history of Europe."

    Tragically, Israeli fears have created a national justification for a kind of "never again" mentality gone mad, in which leaders find it remarkably easy to justify ever more brutal acts against ever more dehumanized enemies. At the funeral for the three slain teens, Benjamin Netanyahu declared, "May God avenge their blood." An Israeli Facebook page, "The People of Israel Demand Revenge," quickly garnered 35,000 likes. A member of the Knesset from a party in the nation's ruling coalition posted an article by Netanyahu's late former chief of staff that called for the killing of "the mothers of [Palestinian] martyrs" and the demolition of their homes: "Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."

    On NPR, Ron Dermer, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., decried the "culture of terrorism" in Palestinian society, adding: "You're talking about savage actions . . . In the case of Israel, we take legitimate actions of self-defense, and sometimes, unintentionally, Palestinian civilians are harmed." That day, the Palestinian teenager Mohammed Khdeir was abducted and burned alive, and soon afterward, Israel began bombing Gaza.

    Within Israel, the act of dehumanization has become institutionalized. These days, Israeli newspapers generally don't even bother to print the names, when known, or the stories of the children being killed in Gaza. When B'tselem, the respected Israeli human rights organization, attempted to take out an advertisement on Israeli radio naming names, the request was denied. The content of the ad, censors declared, was "politically controversial."

    Actually, Israel is more schizophrenic than Tolan admits. One thing you notice over history is the extreme contrast between the confidence (to the point of arrogance) of Israel's top security officials (both in the military and in organizations like Shin Bet) and the dread held by large segments of public. No doubt that scaring the people lets the elites do what they want, but that's as much due to the one thing that both agree on, which is that Israeli Jews are different and infinitely more valuable than anyone else. Their specialness, after all, is the whole point of "the Jewish State." Once you believe that, there is no limit to the dehumanization of others.

  • More Israel links:

    • Dan Glazebrook: Israel's Real Target is Not Hamas: It's any possibility of Palestinian statehood.
    • Sarah Lazare: Only Mideast Democracy? In Midst of War, Israel Clamps Down on Dissent.
    • Dylan Scott: For All the Hype, Does Israel's Iron Dome Even Work?: "The essence of his analysis is this: Iron Dome's missiles almost never approached Hamas's rockets at the right trajectory to destroy the incoming rocket's warhead. . . . And if the warhead is not destroyed, but merely knocked off course, the warhead will likely still explode when it lands, putting lives and property in danger." The underlying fact is that Hamas' rockets almost never do any substantial damage whether they are intercepted or not, and since they are unguided, deflecting them has no appreciable effect on their accuracy (or lack thereof). One question I still haven't seen any reports on is what happens when the shrapnel from Iron Dome rockets lands. As I recall, in 1991 Israel's US-provided Patriot anti-missile system did about as much damage as the Iraqi Scuds they were trying to defend against. That was a heavier system, but another difference was that Israel's censors had less interest in suppressing reports of Patriot failures and blowback. Part of the significance of Iron Dome is that it exemplifies Israel's unilateralist strategy -- Ben Gurion's dictum that "it only matters what the Jews do" -- so any failure is not just a technical problem but a flaw in the strategy. Even if Iron Dome were 85% effective, that would still be a lower success rate than could be achieved by a truce. Also see: Or Amit: Checking under Israel's Iron Dome.
    • Tascha Shahriari-Parsa: Is Israel's Operation Protective Edge Really About Natural Gas? Turns out there's a natural gas field off the Gaza coast, estimated in 2000 to be worth $4 billion, so that may be another angle on Israel's "security demands" to keep the Gaza coast closed, to keep Gaza under occupation and deny any sort of independent Palestinian state.

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Jenn Rolnick Borchetta: One nation under siege: Law enforcement's shameful campaign against black America: not on Ferguson -- you don't think that's the only such case, do you?

  • Stephen Franklin: Lawyer: 'We Should Stay on the Parapets and Keep Fighting': The lawyer interviewed here is Thomas Geoghegan, argues both that the labor movement is essential ("People who talk about maintaining the welfare state without a labor movement behind it are kidding themselves. You will not be able to have a full-employment economy without a labor movement") as is working through the courts ("We don't have majority-rule here. We have a lot of gridlock, and lots of checks and balances. Over the years, to break gridlock, you do rely upon the courts to come in from the outside").

  • Paul Krugman: Secular Stagnation: The Book: Funny name for the condition where economies don't bounce back from recessions but drag on with higher unemployment rates and negligible growth for many years -- Japan in the 1990s now looks like merely an early example of a more general trend. There's a new VoxEU ebook with essays on this, something the US is very much affected by at the moment. Krugman explains more here:

    • And let me simply point out that liquidity-trap analysis has been overwhelmingly successful in its predictions: massive deficits didn't drive up interest rates, enormous increases in the monetary base didn't cause inflation, and fiscal austerity was associated with large declines in output and employment.

    What secular stagnation adds to the mix is the strong possibility that this Alice-through-the-looking-glass world is the new normal, or at least is going to be the way the world looks a lot of the time. As I say in my own contribution to the VoxEU book, this raises problems even for advocates of unconventional policies, who all too often predicate their ideas on the notion that normality will return in the not-too-distant future. It raises even bigger problems with people and institutions that are eager to "normalize" fiscal and monetary policy, slashing deficits and raising rates; normalizing policy in a world where normal isn't what it used to be is a recipe for disaster.

  • Martin Longman: On Rick Perry's Indictments: I just wanted to take note of the occasion. It's rare that sitting governors get indicted for anything, and I don't expect much is going to come out of this. Perry's supporters are not only likely to see them as politically motivated, they're likely to take that a proof that Perry's their kind of politician -- one not above getting his hands dirty.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Some scattered links this week:

  • Phyllis Bennis: Obama's Iraq airstrikes could actually help the Islamic State, not weaken it: Could be -- at any rate they will more clearly align the US as the enemy of Islam, a meme that's already in fairly broad circulation both there and here (although thus far only Osama bin Laden bothered to construct the "far enemy" theory to strike at the US -- most Jihadists prefer to fight their local devils). For example, TPM reports: Graham Urges Obama Act in Iraq, Syria to Prevent Terrorist Attack in US -- he actually means "to produce terrorist attack in US" since no one in Iraq or Syria would be sufficiently motivated to attack the US unless the US was acting in their own countries. Of course, the idea that the only way to prevent something is to motivate it is a peculiar affliction of the fascist mindset, rooted not in logic but in the taste for blood. (Speaking of warmongers, TPM also reports, Clinton Knocks Obama's 'Don't Do Stupid Stuff' Foreign Policy Approach on Syria -- lest anyone think that if given the chance she would flinch from doing "stupid stuff." In another TPM report, Shock and Awe, Josh Marshall quotes an anonymous long-time Iraq war consultant on ISIS tactics -- similar to Taliban tactics right down to the shiny new Toyota pickups -- and suggests that Obama will see some initial successes against ISIS frontal attacks, at least until they adjust. I've noted before his the first flush of US airpower and advanced weapons creates a false sense of invincibility, "the feel-good days of the war," which soon ends as "the enemy" adjusts tactics and as the US blunders from atrocity to atrocity. So, pace Bennis, the short-run game is likely to look good to the hawks, and being hawks they're unlikely to ever look at something that produces perpetual war as having a downside. No, the problem with Bennis' piece is that she want to argue US policy in Iraq on the basis of what it means to Iraqis, instead of the affect intervening in Iraq will have in the US. Foreign wars are catnip for the right because they propagate hate and violence and they show the government doing nothing to make American lives better (even the ruse that they create jobs has worn thin).

    And, of course, there's always the oil angle: see, Steve Coll: Oil and Erbil. So far, Obama has been more active in defending Kurdish autonomy than backing Iraq's central government. Coincidentally, ExxonMobil and Chevron have made major deals with the Kurds, bypassing the central government. Favorite line here: "ExxonMobil declined to comment."

    Erbil's rulers never quite saw the point of a final compromise with Baghdad's Shiite politicians -- as each year passed, the Kurds got richer on their own terms, they attracted more credible and deep-pocketed oil companies as partners, and they looked more and more like they led a de-facto state. The Obama Administration has done nothing to reverse that trend.

    And so, in Erbil, in the weeks to come, American pilots will defend from the air a capital whose growing independence and wealth has loosened Iraq's seams, even while, in Baghdad, American diplomats will persist quixotically in an effort to stitch that same country together to confront ISIS.

    Obama's defense of Erbil is effectively the defense of an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose sources of geopolitical appeal -- as a long-term, non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe, for example -- are best not spoken of in polite or naïve company, as Al Swearengen [a reference back to HBO's series, Deadwood] would well understand. Life, Swearengen once pointed out, is often made up of "one vile task after another." So is American policy in Iraq.

  • Elias Isquith: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback on his growing unpopularity: It's Obama's fault! Brownback won the Republican Party nomination last week, with a 63-37 margin over Jennifer Winn. Winn had no political experience, and no money. Her campaign was managed by a libertarian who came out not of the Tea Party but the Occupy movement. Winn's primary motivation for running was the experience and sense of injustice she felt when her son was arrested for drugs. A big part of her platform was calling for legalization of marijuana. She was not, in other words, a natural fit with any identifiable fragment of the Republican Party in Kansas, and still Brownback -- a sitting governor, two-term Senator, former Congressman, rich, pious, with a postcard family, someone who's never faced a closely contested election in his life -- still couldn't run up a two-to-one margin among his own people. So, yeah, he should take the result as a wake-up call. Instead, he explained:

    "I think a big part of it is Barack Obama," Brownback said, referring to his only securing two-thirds of the primary vote. "[A] lot of people are so irritated at what the president is doing, they want somebody to throw a brick."

    Brownback continued: "I think it's a lot of deep irritation with the way the president has taken the country, so much so that people are so angry about it they're just trying to express it somehow."

    Why Kansas voters would be so irrational as to punish Brownback, who in many ways represents everything Obama does not, for the president's sins, the governor did not say.

    Having just suffered through a big-money Republican primary, it's obvious that Republicans in Kansas are totally convinced that everyone in the country (well, except, you know, for them) utterly can't stand Obama or anything associated with him (especially "Obamacare"), so they've concluded that the sure path to election is to go as far over the top in denouncing Obama as possible. But just working yourself up into ever greater levels of hysteria doesn't make that claim any more credible. On the other hand, Brownback has nearly wrecked the state government he was entrusted with nearly four years ago, and he can hardly blame what he did on anyone else.

    John Cassidy: Memo to Obama's Critics: He's Not Callow Anymore has an explanation why Republicans have turned up the vitriol against Obama, what with the Republican House suing the president while many among them talk of impeachment: "But it isn't his inexperience and glibness that's infuriating them. It's the fact that he's learned to play the Washington power game, and, perhaps, found a way to go around them." What Obama's done with all that executive power hasn't been very impressive -- except in Israel-Iraq-Syria-Ukraine foreign policy, where every step he's taken has been wrong, something Cassidy doesn't appreciate -- but Republicans were so used to pushing Obama around that any attempt to call their bluff is seen as a calamity. (I am, by the way, not very happy with Cassidy's recent posts on the four ISIU wars, nor his defense of Obama in them. Nor are the Republicans much concerned there, except inasmuch as they can paint Obama as weak. Too bad: when they impeached Clinton way back when, I wrote that I would have cast a guilty vote, not on the basis of the charges but due to his mishandling of Iraq. Obama is little if any better now.)

  • Ed Kilgore: The Tea Party Is Losing Battles but Winning the War: Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, so well ensconced in Washington he no longer bothers to own or rent any residency in the state he represents, defeated a rather weird Tea Party challenger named Milton Wolf by a 48-41 margin: Wolf's sound bite description of Roberts was "liberal in Washington, rarely in Kansas." Roberts had never been accused of being a RINO, but fearing Wolf's challenge he became noticeably more dilligent about his conservative bona fides over the last year (before that he was mostly known for routing federal money to agribusiness interests). So Kilgore chalks this up as yet another case of the Tea Party moving the Republican Party to the right even when they fail to get their crackpots nominated. (Wolf, an orthopedist, reportedly had a nasty habit of posting his patients' X-rays on Facebook along with denigrating "humorous" comments.)

  • Ed Kilgore: The "New" Rick Perry: "New" as in he's distancing himself from the "old" Perry who self-destructed in the 2012 presidential race, presumably to run again in 2016.

    As for Perry's famous message of presenting Texas as an economic template for the country, I think it's a mistake to view this as easy, non-controversial mainline GOP rap that the rest of us can live with. What Perry exemplifies is the ancient southern approach to economic development based on systematic abasement of public policy in order to make life as profitable and easy as possible for "job-creators," at any cost. If it sort of "works" (if you don't care about poverty and low wage rates and inadequate health care and deliberately starved public resources) in Texas thanks in no small part to the state's fossil fuel wealth and low housing costs (though as Philip Longman demonstrated in the April/May issue of WaMo, even that level of success is debatable), it sure hasn't ever "worked" in similarly inclined but less blessed places like Mississippi and Alabama, where the local aristocracy has been preaching the same gospel for many decades.

  • Mike Konczal/Bryce Covert: The Real Solution to Wealth Inequality: In The Nation, this appeared as "Tiny Capitalists":

    Democrats and Republicans advocate different solutions to inequality, but both seek to shift financial risk from the state to the individual. Republicans promote the "ownership society," in which privatizing social insurance, removing investor protections and expanding home ownership align the interests of workers with the anti-regulatory interests of the wealthy. Democrats focus on education and on helping the poor build wealth through savings programs. These approaches demand greater personal responsibility for market risks and failures, further discrediting the state's role in regulating markets and providing public social insurance.

    Instead of just giving people more purchasing power, we should be taking basic needs off the market altogether.

    Consider Social Security, a wildly popular program that doesn't count toward individual wealth. If Social Security were replaced with a private savings account, individuals would have more "wealth" (because they would have their own financial account) but less actual security. The elderly would have to spin the financial-markets roulette wheel and suffer destitution if they were unlucky. This is why social-wealth programs like Social Security combat inequality more powerfully than any privatized, individualized wealth-building "solution."

    Public programs like universal healthcare and free education function the same way, providing social wealth directly instead of hoping to boost people's savings enough to allow them to afford either. Rather than requiring people to struggle with a byzantine system of private health insurance, universal healthcare would be available to cover the costs of genuine health needs. Similarly, broadly accessible higher education would allow people to thrive without taking on massive student loans and hoping that their "human capital" investment helps them hit the jackpot.

    Emphasis added to the key point. Aside from moving basic needs off market, we would also be moving them into the realm of society-guaranteed rights. Also, from optional (something enjoyed by an elite) to mandatory (something securely available to all). Conversely, the political agenda of trying to impose greater market discipline over any area of life is meant to increase inequality, and to make its consequences more acute.

  • Paul Krugman: Libertarian Fantasies: I've always had sympathies for libertarian thinking: the lessons of the "don't tread on me" American Revolution were imprinted early, and the notion that the state was out to keep me from enjoying "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" was backed by clear evidence from my teens, most perniciously through the draft and the drug war. However, I eventually realized that while self-interested public menaces like J. Edgar Hoover occasionally worked in the public sector they tended to be the exception, in corporations they were the rule, so ubiquitous that their corruption lapped over and gnawed at the very idea of public service. But things like the continuing drug war show that their is a need for libertarian types. Unfortunately, they rarely stop at defending freedom from real threats. Many become obsessed with false threats, and have no clue how to go from critique to policy, mostly because their anti-government bias blinds them from the possibility of using government for increasing freedom. (For instance, I'd say that the FDA increases my freedom as a consumer by saving me time worrying about contaminated food. You might say that the FDA limits the freedom of food producers to cut costs and poison people, but there are a lot more of us than them, and regulation is a fairly efficient scheme to even out minimal quality costs and avoid a disastrous "race to the bottom.") Krugman has his own examples, concluding:

    In other words, libertarianism is a crusade against problems we don't have, or at least not to the extent the libertarians want to imagine. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the case of monetary policy, where many libertarians are determined to stop the Fed from irresponsible money-printing -- which is not, in fact, something it's doing.

    And what all this means in turn is that libertarianism does not offer a workable policy agenda. I don't mean that I dislike the agenda, which is a separate issue; I mean that if we should somehow end up with libertarian government, it would quickly find itself unable to fulfill any of its promises.

    I read a lot of Murray Rothbard way back when, and he actually spent a lot of time coming up with private sector solutions to functions like justice that are invariably performed by government. I easily understand why a public justice system may become corrupt and repressive -- traits ours exhibits way too often -- but I couldn't see how Rothbard's scheme could every work, even badly. Rothbard's cases for private firefighters and other services were more workable, but everything he came up was vastly more inefficient than what we already have.

  • Gideon Levy: Go to Gaza, see for yourself: An Israeli journalist, recently named by a right-wing Israeli commentator as someone Israel should lock up in a concentration camp:

    Let's talk about Gaza. The Gaza strip is not a nest of murderers; it's not even a nest of wasps. It is not home to incessant rampage and murder. Most of its children were not born to kill, nor do most of its mothers raise martyrs -- what they want for their children is exactly what most Israeli mothers want for their own children. Its leaders are not so different from Israel's, not in the extent of their corruption, their penchant for "luxury hotels" nor even in their allocating most of the budget to defense.

    Gaza is a stricken enclave, a permanent disaster zone, from 1948 to 2014, and most of its inhabitants are third- and fourth-time refugees. Most of the people who revile and who destroy the Gaza Strip have never been there, certainly not as civilians. For eight years I have been prevented from going there; during the preceding 20 years I visited often. I liked the Gaza Strip, as much as one can like an afflicted region. I liked its people, if I may be permitted to make a generalization. There was a spirit of almost unimaginable determination, along with an admirable resignation to its woes.

    In recent years Gaza has become a cage, a roofless prison surrounded by fences. Before that it was also bisected. Whether or not they are responsible for their situation, these are ill-fated people, a great many people and a great deal of misery. [ . . . ]

    But in Hebrew, "Gaza," pronounced 'Aza, is short for Azazel, which is associated with hell. Of the multitude of curses hurled at me these days from every street corner, "Go to hell/Gaza" is among the gentler ones. Sometimes I want to say in response, "I wish I could go to Gaza, in order to fulfill my journalistic mission." And sometimes I even want to say: "I wish you could all go to Gaza. If only you knew what Gaza is, and what is really there."

  • Andrew O'Hehir: Is Obama haunted by Bush's ghost -- or possessed by him? Lots of things have bothered me about Obama, but his disinterest to put any real distance between his administration and the Bush one on issues of war, peace, and security is foremost -- all the more so because by the time Bush left office those policies had been shown to be utterly bankrupt, and because Obama was elected with a clear mandate for change.

    As we were reminded earlier this week, Obama's efforts to separate his own management of intelligence and spycraft from the notorious torture policies of Bush's "war on terror" now look exceedingly murky, if not downright mendacious. Throughout his campaigns and presidential years, Obama has relied on shadow-men like former CIA director George Tenet, former counterterrorism chief and current CIA director John Brennan and director of national intelligence (and spinner of lies to Congress) James Clapper, all of whom are implicated to the eyeballs in "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the other excesses of the Bush regime. [ . . . ] Despite all the things he said to get elected, and beneath all the stylistic and symbolic elements of his presidency, Obama has chosen to continue the most fundamental policies of the Bush administration. In some areas, including drone warfare, government secrecy and the persecution of whistle-blowers, and the outsourcing of detainee interrogation to third-party nations, Obama has expanded Bush's policies.

  • Stephen M Walt: Do No (More) Harm: Subtitle: "Every time the U.S. touches the Middle East, it makes things worse. It's time to walk away and not look back." Good argument, but could use a better article. Walt's list of all the things that have gone wrong is detailed and long enough, but when he tries to apply his "realist" paradigm he doesn't come with any clear sense of the American interests in the region that he assumes must exist. (Closest he comes is the desire to keep any [other] nation from controlling the Persian Gulf oil belt, which at the moment is so fragmented it hardly calls for any US action at all. He misses what strike me as the two obvious ones: peace and a sense of equality and justice throughout the region, which would in turn undercut past/current trends toward militant and repressive Islam.) He rejects isolationism, but that may well be the best solution one can hope for given how pathological US intervention has been. (After all, alcoholics are advised to quit, rather than just scale back to the occasional drink non-alcoholics can handle without harm.) He does suggest that the US give up on trying to guide any sort of "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, he goes to far as to say that we shouldn't bother with Israel's imperious fantasies if that's what they want to do -- evidently being a "realist" means you never have to think in terms of principles. On the other hand, isn't such a total lack of scruples a big part of how the US became the Middle East plague it so clearly is?

  • Israel/Palestine links:

Also, a few links for further study:

Ask a question, or send a comment.

August 4, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Running a day behind and coming up short as I try to sum up what's been happening around the world and how Israel/Gaza fits into it. The blog, by the way, has experienced intermittent failures, something the ISP (addr.com) has thus far been completely unhelpful at fixing. Sorry for the inconvenience. Music Week will also run a day late (assuming no further outages).

This week's links will once again focus mostly on Israel's continuing assault on Gaza. It is not the only significant war in the world at the moment -- the governments in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine are simultaneously engaged in brutal campaigns to bring their own people back under central state control -- but it is the one that most immediately concerns us in the US, partly because American partisanship in largely responsible for the conflict (i.e., the failure to resolve the conflict peacefully); partly because Israel's thinking and practice in power projection and counterterrorism is seen as an ideal model by many influential American foreign policy mandarins (the so-called "neocons," of course, but many of their precepts have infiltrated the brains of supposedly more liberal actors, notably the Clintons, Kerry, and Obama); and partly because Israel has managed to recapitulate the violence and racism of our own dimly remembered past, something they play on to elicit sympathy even though a more apt reaction would be horror.

I don't want to belittle the three other "civil wars": indeed, the US (almost entirely due to Obama) has actively sided with the governments of Iraq (the US has sent a small number of ground troops and large amounts of arms there) and Ukraine (the US has led the effort to sanction and vilify Russia). On the other hand, the US condemned and threatened to bomb Syria, and has sent (or at least promised) arms to "rebels" there, although they've also (at least threatened) to bomb the "rebels" too. But we also know relatively little about those conflicts, and probably understand less, not least because most of what has been reported has been selected for propaganda effect. For instance, when "separatists" in Ukraine tragically shot down a Malaysian airliner, that story led the nightly news for more than a week, but hardly anyone pointed out that Ukraine had been shelling and bombing separatist enclaves, and that anti-aircraft rockets had successfully shot down at least one Ukrainian military plane before the airliner. (The effective blackout of news of the conflict, including the use of anti-aircraft missiles in the region, should bear at least some measure of blame for the airliner tragedy.) Similarly, we hear much about extreme doctrines of the breakaway "Islamic State" in Iraq, but virtually nothing of the Maliki government practices that have managed to alienate nearly all of northwestern Iraq (as well as the Kurdish regions, which have all but declared their own breakaway state, one that the US is far more tolerant of -- perhaps since it doesn't serve to flame Islamophobic public opinion in the US).

Syria is a much messier problem, for the US anyhow. The state was taken over by the Ba'ath Party in 1963, and led by the Assad family since 1971. Syria fought against Israel in the 1948-49 war, and again in 1967, when Israel seized the Golan Heights, and again in 1973. At various times Syria made efforts to ally itself with the US (notably in the 1990 coalition against Iraq), but several factors prejudiced US opinion against the Assads: the border dispute with Israel and intermittent Syrian support for the PLO, Syria's resort to Russia (and later Iran) as its armaments supplier, the repressive police state and the brutality with which the Assads put down rebellions (e.g., they killed at least 10,000 people in the Hama massacre of 1982 -- a tactic much admired by Israeli military theoreticians like Martin Van Creveld). One might think that Syria's lack of democracy would be an issue, but the US has never objected to other tyrants that could be counted as more reliable allies, such as the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But when Assad fired on Arab Spring demonstrations, prejudice turned Obama against Assad, as the revolt became militarized he chipped in guns, as it became Islamicized he waffled. Obama set a "red line" at the use of chemical weapons, and when that appeared to have been violated, he felt it was his place to punish Syria with a round of gratuitous bombings, but Congress demurred, and Putin interceded with an offer by Syria to give up their chemical weapon stocks. Since then, Obama has promised more arms to Syrian "rebels" and also threatened to bomb those rebels connected with the revolt in Iraq, and he ruined his relationship with Putin -- the only real chance to mediate the conflict -- for recriminations over Ukraine. Meanwhile, Israel (always seen as a US ally even though usually acting independently) bombed Syria.

At this point there will be no easy resolution to Syria. One obvious problem is how many foreign countries have contributed to one side or the other (or in the case of the US to both, if not quite all). So the first step would be an international agreement to use whatever pressure they have to get to a ceasefire and some sort of power-sharing agreement, but obvious as that direction is, the other ongoing conflicts make it impossible. Just to take the most obvious example, the US (Obama) is by far more committed to marginalizing Russia in Ukraine than it is to peace anywhere in the Middle East, least of all Israel. Russia is likewise more focused on Ukraine than anywhere else, although it doesn't help that its main interest in Syria and Iraq appears to be selling arms (it supports both governments, making it a US ally in Iraq as well as an enemy in Syria, blowing the Manichaean minds in Washington). Saudi Arabia and Iran are far more invested against or for Syria and Iraq. One could go on and on, but absent any sort of enlightened world leader willing to step outside of the narrow confines of self-interest and link the solution to all of these conflicts, their asymmetries will continue to grind on, and leave bitter legacies in their paths. In Syria alone, over more than three years the estimated death toll is over 250,000. In Iraq estimated deaths since the US exit in 2011 are over 21,000, but much more if you go back to 2003 when the US invaded and stirred up much sectarian strife. (I couldn't say "started" there because US culpability goes back to 1991, when Bush urged Iraqi shiites to rise up against Saddam Hussein, then allowed the Iraqi army to crush them mercilessly, then instigated "no fly" zones with periodic bombings, along with sanctions lasting until the 2003 invasion.)

As for Israel's latest assault on Gaza, in three weeks Israel has killed over 1,800 Palestinians -- I won't bother trying to separate out "civilians" and "militants" since Gaza has no organized military (like the IDF). That may seem like a small number compared to Syria above, but if you adjust for the relative populations (22.5 million in Syria, 1.8 million in Gaza) and length of war (171 weeks for Syria, 3 for Gaza) the kill rate is about five times greater in Gaza (333 per million per week vs. 65 per million per week in Syria). Moreover, the distribution of deaths is extremely skewed in Gaza, whereas in Syria and Iraq (I have no idea about Ukraine) they are close to even (to the extent that "sides" make sense there). The distinction between IDF and "civilians" makes more sense in Israel, especially as nearly all IDF casualties occurred on Gazan soil after Israel invaded. The ratio there is greater than 600-to-one (1800+ to 3), a number we'll have to come back to later. (The first Israeli killed was a settler who was voluntarily delivering goodies to the troops -- i.e., someone who would certainly qualify as a "militant"; another was a Thai migrant-worker, and some tallies of Israeli losses don't even count him.) The number of Israeli soldiers killed currently stands at 64, some of which were killed by Israeli ("friendly") fire. (The first IDF soldier killed was so attributed, but I haven't seen any later breakdowns. There have been at least two instances where an Israeli soldier was possibly captured and subsequently killed by Israeli fire -- IDF forces operate under what's called the Hannibal Directive, meant to prevent situations where Israeli soldiers are captured and used as bargaining chips for prisoner exchanges, as was Gilad Shalit.) Even if you counted those IDF deaths, the overkill ratio would be huge. But without them, it should be abundantly clear how little Israel was threatened by Hamas and other groups in Gaza. In 2013, no one in Israel was hurt by a rocket attack from Gaza. This year, in response to Israel and Egypt tightening Gaza borders, to Israel arresting 500+ people more or less associated with Hamas (many released in the Shalit deal) in the West Bank, and to Israel's intense bombardment now lasting three weeks, more than a thousand rockets were launched from Gaza at Israel, and the result of all this escalation was . . . 3 dead, a couple dozen (currently 23) wounded. Just think about it: Israel gave Gazans all this reason to be as vindictive as possible, and all it cost them was 3 civilian casualties (one of which they don't even count). In turn, they inflicted incalculable damage upon 1.8 million people. The trade off boggles the mind. Above all else, it makes you wonder what kind of people would do such a thing.

A little history here: Zionist Jews began emigrating from Russia to the future Israel, then part of the Ottoman Empire, in the 1880s, following a breakout of pogroms (state-organized or -condoned attacks on Jews) following the assassination of Czar Alexander. Britain went to war against the Ottoman Empire in 1914, and made various promises to both Arabs and Jews of land they would seize from the Ottomans, including Palestine. In 1920 the British kept Palestine as a mandate. They took a census which showed the Jewish population at 10%. The British allowed Jewish immigration in fits and spurts, with the Jewish population ultimately rising to 30% in 1947. Britain's reign over Palestine was marked by sporadic violence, notably the Arab Revolt of 1937-39 which Britain brutally suppressed, using many techniques which Israel would ultimately adopt, notably collective punishment. Meanwhile, the British allowed the Zionist community to form a state-within-the-state, including its own militia, which aided the British in putting down the Arab Revolt. In 1947, Britain decided to wash its hands of Palestine and returned the mandate to the then-new United Nations. The leaders of the Jewish proto-state in Palestine lobbied the United Nations to partition Palestine into two parts -- one Jewish, the other Arab (Christian and Moslem) -- and the UN complied with a scheme that offered Jewish control of a slight majority of the land, Arab control of several remaining isolated pockets (West Bank, West Galilee, Gaza Strip, Jaffa), with Jerusalem a separate international zone. There were virtually no Jews living in the designated Arab areas, but Arabs were more than 40% of the population of the Jewish areas. The Arabs rejected the partition proposal, favoring a single unified state with a two-to-one Arab majority. The Zionist leadership accepted the partition they had lobbied for, but didn't content themselves with the UN-specified borders or with the international zone for Jerusalem. When the British abdicated, Israel declared independence and launched a war to expand its territory, swallowing West Galilee and Jaffa, capturing the west half of Jerusalem, and reducing the size of the Gaza Strip by half. Several neighboring Arab countries joined this war, notably Transjordan, which was able to secure east Jerusalem (including the Old City) and the West Bank (including the highly contested Latrun Salient), and Egypt, which wound up in control of the reduced Gaza Strip. During this war more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were uprooted and fled beyond Israeli control, to refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, leaving the land occupied by Israel as 85% Jewish.

Israel signed armistice agreements in 1949-50 with its neighbors. Jordan annexed its occupied Palestinian territories and gave their inhabitants Jordanian citizenship, not that that meant much in an monarchy with no democratic institutions. Egypt didn't annex Gaza; it styled itself as a caretaker for a fragment of a future independent Palestinian state, which left its inhabitants in limbo. Israel passed a series of laws which gave every Jew in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and enjoy citizenship there, and denied the right of every Palestinian who had fled the 1948-50 war to ever return, confiscating the lands of the refugees. Palestinians who stayed within Israel were granted nominal citizenship, but placed under military law. Gazan refugees who tried to return to Israel were shot, and Israel repeatedly punished border incidents by demolishing homes in Gaza and the West Bank. (Ariel Sharon first made his reputation by making sure that the homes he blew up in Qibya in 1953 were still occupied.) Israel was never happy with its 1950 armistice borders. After numerous border incidents, Israel launched a sneak attack on Egypt in 1967, seizing Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula up to the Suez Canal, then quickly expanded the war into Jordan (grabbing East Jerusalem and the West Bank) and Syria (the Golan Heights).

The UN resolution following the 1967 war called for Israel to return all the lands seized during the war in exchange for peace with all of Israel's neighbors. The Arabs nations were slow to respond to this "land-for-peace" proposal, although this was the basis of the 1979 agreement that returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, and would be the basis of subsequent peace proposals backed by every nation in the Arab League -- the sole difference is that Jordan has since renounced its claim to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, so those as well as Gaza might form the basis of an independent Palestinian state, as originally envisioned by the UN. The PLO has agreed to this solution, and Hamas has announced tacit approval (they have what you may call a funny way of putting things, one that unfortunately allowed for a large measure of distortion by Israeli "explainers" [hasbara-ists]). So if Israel ever wanted peace, both with its neighbors and with its current and former Palestinian subjects, that simple deal is on the table (as well as several subsequent ones which allow Israel additional concessions, although those are less universally accepted).

The rub is that Israel has never wanted peace, and nowadays the political consensus in Israel is further than ever from willing to even consider the notion. This is a hard point for most people to grasp -- who doesn't want peace? -- but nothing Israel does makes any sense until you realize this. We can trace this back over history, or you can just look at the current fracas. Israel, after all, could have decided to handle the June 12 kidnapping-murder as a normal police matter. Despite everything they've done since, they haven't caught their two prime suspects, so they couldn't have done less as to solving the crime, and they would have gotten a lot more credit and sympathy. But rather than react as any normal country would, they went out and arrested 500 people who had nothing to do with the crime, and in the process of doing that they killed another nine Palestinians. The rockets, which in any case did no real damage, were primarily a response to the arrests, and more basically to Israel's blockade of Gaza, which is itself a deeper manifestation of Israel's belligerency. Even then, Israel could have ignored the rockets. The decision to start shelling/bombing Gaza was completely their own, as was the decision to send troops into Gaza to destroy tunnels that hadn't caused any actual harm to Israel. In short, all that destruction is the direct result of Israel reacting the way Israel always reacts to provocations: by escalating the level of violence. And that's simply not the way a nation that wants to live in peace behaves.

I can think of several reasons why Israel has chosen to be a state of perpetual war:

  1. The essential precept of Zionism is that anti-semitism is endemic in the world, leaving Jews with no recourse except to separate themselves from everyone else, to retreat to a common defensible redoubt, and to build iron walls around themselves that their enemies cannot breach. Because anti-semitism is eternal, peace is illusory, a temptation to lapse the martial spirit necessary to maintain those walls. The Holocaust only served to reinforce this early view, and has been driven deep into the psyches of subsequent generations. The "iron wall" doctrine was developed by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Proof of how little Zionism has evolved is that Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of Jabotinsky's secretary and main disciple.
  2. The core fact of Zionism is that it created a colonial enclave in a region that was already occupied with the intent of dominating and expanding that region. In order to survive, the colonists had to alienate themselves from their surroundings, to cohere and act as a community, to defend themselves and vanquish the aboriginals. Every successful example (as well as near misses like French Algeria and Afrikaner South Africa) developed the same pathologies of racism and violence, and these are especially sharp in Israel now because the success of the project seems so tenuous.
  3. Israel's early history, especially the wars of 1948 and 1967, are exceptionally susceptible to self-mythologizing, both due to the level of leadership and the semi-miraculous outcomes of those wars: in 1948 Israel declared independence, expanded its UN-specified borders by nearly 50%, and radically consolidated a large Jewish majority despite the combined efforts of the Arab armies; in just six days 1967 Israel won an even more stunning victory over rising Arab nationalists, again greatly expanding their territory. Such wars are seductive, casting a mythic glow over the nation's self-conception that none of the later wars, muffled and muddled as they've been, have managed to erode. Of course, it helps that one can make a case that the 1948 and 1967 wars were necessary -- at least to convince neighboring countries that Israel was a fact they wouldn't be able to forcibly undo.
  4. War is one of the few human endeavors that gives a nation a joint sense of purpose and belonging, at least as long as it is successful (or not too dreadfully disastrous). Israelis tasted that in 1948 and 1967 and ever since they fear losing that sense of unity, of common purpose, identity, fear, and hope. Indeed, every war -- even one that looks so pointless and horrifying as this one does to the rest of the world -- creates a huge spike of support for whoever leads it. You see this elsewhere -- Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War and George H.W. Bush's original Gulf War are textbook examples, although for the US World War II was the one that really hit the spot, putting us so far on top of the world that in many ways, despite many disasters, we still haven't crashed to earth yet -- but perhaps the sense is even stronger in a nation with such broad and deep military service, where the preferred career path in politics or business is promotion in the IDF (or Israel's numerous other security agencies).

Those four points are all true, self-reinforcing in various combinations at various times. They help explain why David Ben-Gurion, for instance, sabotaged his successor for fear that Moshe Sharrett might normalize relations with Israel's Arab neighbors, turning Israel into an ordinary country. They help explain why Abba Eban was so disingenuous following 1967, giving lip service to "land-for-peace" while never allowing any negotiations to take place. They help explain why a long series of Israeli politicians -- Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon are the two that stand out in my mind -- tied up so much land by encouraging illegal settlements, and why today's West Bank settlers retrace the steps both of the Yishuv's original settlers and of even earlier Americans encroaching on Indian lands. They help explain why Israelis habitually label anyone who crosses them a terrorist (something John Kerry was accused of last week), and why Israel habitually refuses to negotiate with those it sees as enemies. They help explain why Israel places so little value on the life of others. (One irony is that a nation which has no capital punishment for its own citizens, even when one kills a Prime Minister, yet has casually engaged in hundreds of extrajudicial assassinations.)

I've gone on at some length here about Israel's innate tendencies because there seems to be little else directing Netanyahu's process. It used to be the case that the Zionist movement depended on forming at least temporary alliances with foreign powers to advance their goals. For instance, they got the UK to issue the Balfour Declaration and commit to creating a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine. Later, when the UK quit, the nascent Israel depended first on the Soviet Union then on France for arms. Eventually, they found their preferred ally in the US, but for a long time US presidents could limit Israel's worst instincts, as when Eisenhower in 1956-57 pressured Israel into withdrawing from Egypt's Sinai, or when Carter in 1978 reversed an Israeli effort to enter Lebanon's Civil War. (Neither of those limits proved long-lasting: Israel retook Sinai when a more accommodating LBJ was president, and moved recklessly into Lebanon in 1982 under Reagan's indifference.) As late as 1992, voters were sensitive enough to Israel's US relationship to replace obdurate Yitzhak Shamir with the much friendlier Yitzhak Rabin (a former Israeli ambassador to the US and initiator of the Oslo Peace Process -- ultimately a sham, but one that broke the ice with the US, and got him killed by a right-wing fanatic). But since then Bush II turned out to be putty in Ariel Sharon's grubby hands, and Obama has proven to be even more spineless viz. Netanyahu. So whatever limits America might have posed to Israeli excesses have gone by the wayside: Israeli cabinet ministers can accuse Kerry of terrorism just for proposing a ceasefire, confident that such rudeness won't even tempt Congress to hold back on an extra $225M in military aid.

Still, you have to ask, "why Gaza?" Two times -- in 1993 when Israel ceded virtually all of Gaza to the newly formed Palestinian Authority, and in 2005 when Israel dismantled its last settlements in Gaza -- Israel signaled to the world that it had no substantive desire to administer or keep Gaza itself. (It is still possible that Israel could annex all of the West Bank and Jerusalem and extend citizenship to Palestinian inhabitants there -- there are Israelis who advocate such a "one-state solution" there as an alternative to trying to separate out a Palestinian state given the scattering of Israeli settlements in the territory, but there is no way that Israel would entertain the possibility of giving citizenship to Palestinians in Gaza.) However, Israel has continued to insist on controlling Gaza's borders and airspace, and limited its offshore reach to a measly three kilometers. Then in 2006 Palestinians voted for the wrong party -- a slate affiliated with Hamas, which was still listed by the US and Israel as a "terrorist entity" (as was the PLO before it was rehabilitated by signing the Oslo Accords). The US then attempted to organize a coup against Hamas, which backfired in Gaza, leaving the Strip under Hamas control. From that point, Israel, with US and Egyptian backing, shut down the border traffic between Gaza and the outside world -- a blockade which has severely hampered Gaza ever since.

Hamas has since weaved back and forth, appealing for international help in breaking the blockade, and failing that getting the world's attention by launching small rockets into Israel. The rockets themselves cause Israel little damage, but whenever Israel feels challenged it responds with overwhelming violence -- in 2006, 2008, 2012, and now in 2014 that violence has reached the level of war. In between there have been long periods with virtually no rocket fire, with resumption usually triggered by one of Israel's "targeted assassinations." Between 2008-12 the blockade was partially relieved by brisk use of smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. In 2013 Gaza benefited from relatively free above-ground trade with Egypt, but that came to an end with the US-backed military coup that ended Egypt's brief experiment with democracy (another case of the "wrong" people, as viewed by the US and Israel, getting elected). With Egypt as well as Israel tightening the blockade of Gaza, followed by the mass arrest of Hamas people in the West Bank, rocket fire resumed, only to be met by the recent widespread slaughter.

Hamas has thus far insisted that any ceasefire include an end to the blockade. As I've written before, that seems like a completely reasonable demand. Israel has mistreated Gaza ever since occupying it in 1967, and that treatment became even worse after 2005, becoming little short of sadistic. Hamas has even offered to turn its control of the Gaza administration back over to a "unified" PA, which would be backed but not controlled by Hamas. (In my view an even better solution would be to spin Gaza off as an independent West Palestine state, totally free of Israeli interference.) Israel's assertions regarding Gaza are inevitably confused: they claim they need to blockade Gaza for security against missiles that in fact are fired mostly to protest the blockade (the other cases are a weak response to Israel's far more powerful arsenal). On the other hand, Israeli control keeps Gaza from ever developing a normal economy, and Israel's tactics (like targeted assassinations) keep Gaza in a state of constant terror.

Throughout history, there have been two basic approaches to counterterrorism: one is to kill off all the terrorists one-by-one; the other is to negotiate with the terrorists and let them enter into responsible democratic political procedures. The former has worked on rare occasions, usually when the group was extremely small and short-lived (Che Guevara in Bolivia, Shining Path in Peru). The outer limit was probably the Algerian anti-Islamist war of 1991-94 where Algeria killed its way through more than ten generations of leaders before the movement self-destructed, but even there the conflict ended with negotiations and amnesty. Israel's practice of collective punishment pretty much guarantees an endless supply of future enemies. As long as you understand that Israel's intent and desire is to fight forever, such tactics make sense. And as long as Israel can maintain that 600-to-1 kill ratio, someone like Netanyahu's not going to lose any sleep.

Inside Israel military censorship keeps the gory details out of sight and out of mind, reinforcing the unity that makes this such a happy little war, but elsewhere it's all becoming increasingly clear: how flimsy Israel's excuses are, how much they destroy and how indifferent they are to the pain they inflict, indeed how callous and tone-deaf they have become. Moreover, this war shows what chumps the US (and Europe) have become in allying themselves with Israel. No matter how this war ends, more people than ever before are going to be shocked that we ever allowed it to happen. Even more so if they come to realize that there was never any good reason behind it.

Back in June, when all this crisis amounted to was three kidnapped Israeli settler teens and Israel's misdirected and hamfisted "Operation Brother's Keeper," I argued that someone with a good journalistic nose could write a whole book on the affair, one that would reveal everything distorted and rotten in Israel's occupation mindset, possibly delving even into the warped logic behind those kidnappings. Since then, I've been surprised by three things: the scale of human tragedy has become innumerable (at least in a mere book -- only dry statistics come close to measuring the destruction, and they still miss the terror, even for the few people who intuit what they measure); how virulent and unchecked the genocidal impulses of so many Israelis have become (the trend, of course, has been in that direction, and every recent war has seen some outbursts, but nothing like now); and how utterly incompetent and impotent the US and the international community has been (aside from Condoleezza Rice's "birthpangs of a new Middle East" speech during the 2006 Lebanon War, the US and UN have always urged a ceasefire, but this time they've been so in thrall to Netanyahu's talking points they've scarcely bothered to think much less developed any backbone to act). It's a tall order, but this may be Israel's most senseless and shameful war ever.

This week's scattered links:

  • Arno J Mayer: The Future of Israel and the Decline of the American Empire: This originally ran in 2009 following Israel's 2008 war with Gaza, but nothing since has invalidated it.

    Israel is in the grip of a kind of collective schizophrenia. Not only its governors but the majority of its Jewish population have delusions of both grandeur and persecution, making for a distortion of reality as a chosen people and part of a superior Western civilization. They consider themselves more cerebral, reasonable, moral, and dynamic than Arabs and Muslims generally, and Palestinians in particular. At the same time they feel themselves to be the ultimate incarnation of the Jewish people's unique suffering through the ages, still subject to constant insecurity and defenselessness in the face of ever-threatening extreme and unmerited punishment.

    Such a psyche leads to hubris and vengefulness, the latter a response to the perpetual Jewish torment said to have culminated, as if by a directive purpose, in the Holocaust. Remembering the Shoah is Israel's Eleventh Commandment and central to the nation's civil religion and Weltanschauung. Family, school, synagogue, and official culture propagate its prescriptive narrative, decontextualized and surfeited with ethnocentrism. The re-memorizing of victimization is ritualized on Yom Ha Shoah and institutionalized by Yad Vashem.

    Israel uses the Holocaust to conjure the specter of a timeless existential peril, in turn used to justify its warfare state and unbending diplomacy. [ . . . ]

    Although its leaders avoid saying so in public, Israel does not want peace, or a permanent comprehensive settlement, except on its own terms. They do not dare spell these out publicly, as they presume the enemy's unconditional surrender, even enduring submission. Instead the Palestinians continue to be blamed for a chronic state of war that entails Israel's continuing self-endangerment and militarization. [ . . . ]

    Since Israel's foundation, the failure to pursue Arab-Jewish understanding and cooperation has been Zionism's "great sin of omission" (Judah Magnes). At every major turn since 1947-48 Israel has had the upper hand in the conflict with the Palestinians, its ascendancy at once military, diplomatic, and economic. This prepotency became especially pronounced after the Six Day War of 1967. Consider the annexations and settlements; occupation and martial law; settler pogroms and expropriations; border crossings and checkpoints; walls and segregated roads. No less mortifying for the Palestinians has been the disproportionately large number of civilians killed and injured, and the roughly 10,000 languishing in Israeli prisons.

    Mayer, by the way, is one of the most distinguished historians of our times, known especially for his landmark book on Versailles and the post-WWI settlement. More recent books include Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in History and Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel.

  • Nathan Thrall: Hamas's Chances: In this conflict, Hamas has been made to look bad by rejecting the one-sided ceasefire proposals of Israel, Egypt, and the US (although Israel was the first to gun down the latter, branding John Kerry as a terrorist). Perhaps Hamas simply remembers Israel's duplicity the last time they negotiated a ceasefire (details of that ceasefire have rarely been discussed):

    The 21 November 2012 ceasefire that ended an eight-day-long exchange of Gazan rocket fire and Israeli aerial bombardment was never implemented. It stipulated that all Palestinian factions in Gaza would stop hostilities against Israel, that Israel would end attacks against Gaza by land, sea and air -- including the 'targeting of individuals' (assassinations, typically by drone-fired missile) -- and that the closure of Gaza would essentially end as a result of Israel's 'opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting residents' free movements and targeting residents in border areas.' An additional clause noted that 'other matters as may be requested shall be addressed,' a reference to private commitments by Egypt and the US to help thwart weapons smuggling into Gaza, though Hamas has denied this interpretation of the clause.

    During the three months that followed the ceasefire, Shin Bet recorded only a single attack: two mortar shells fired from Gaza in December 2012. Israeli officials were impressed. But they convinced themselves that the quiet on Gaza's border was primarily the result of Israeli deterrence and Palestinian self-interest. Israel therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza's waters.

    The end of the closure never came. Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones -- agricultural lands that Gazan farmers couldn't enter without being fired on -- were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank.

    Israel had committed to holding indirect negotiations with Hamas over the implementation of the ceasefire but repeatedly delayed them, at first because it wanted to see whether Hamas would stick to its side of the deal, then because Netanyahu couldn't afford to make further concessions to Hamas in the weeks leading up to the January 2013 elections, and then because a new Israeli coalition was being formed and needed time to settle in. The talks never took place. The lesson for Hamas was clear. Even if an agreement was brokered by the US and Egypt, Israel could still fail to honour it.

    Yet Hamas largely continued to maintain the ceasefire to Israel's satisfaction. It set up a new police force tasked with arresting Palestinians who tried to launch rockets. In 2013, fewer were fired from Gaza than in any year since 2003, soon after the first primitive projectiles were shot across the border. Hamas needed time to rebuild its arsenal, fortify its defences and prepare for the next battle, when it would again seek an end to Gaza's closure by force of arms. But it also hoped that Egypt would open itself to Gaza, thereby ending the years during which Egypt and Israel had tried to dump responsibility for the territory and its impoverished inhabitants on each other and making less important an easing of the closure by Israel.

    In July 2013 the coup in Cairo led by General Sisi dashed Hamas's hopes. His military regime blamed the ousted President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, its Palestinian offshoot, for all of Egypt's woes. Both organisations were banned. Morsi was formally charged with conspiring with Hamas to destabilise the country. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and hundreds of Morsi's supporters were sentenced to death. The Egyptian military used increasingly threatening rhetoric against Hamas, which feared that Egypt, Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority would take advantage of its weakness to launch a co-ordinated military campaign. Travel bans were imposed on Hamas officials. The number of Gazans allowed to cross to Egypt was reduced to a small fraction of what it had been before the coup. Nearly all of the hundreds of tunnels that had brought goods from Egypt to Gaza were closed. Hamas had used taxes levied on those goods to pay the salaries of more than 40,000 civil servants in Gaza.

    Thrall also has more details on the "unification" agreement with Fatah, which is widely seen as the main reason Netanyahu singled out Hamas -- not that he really cares which Palestinian faction he refuses to do business with:

    The final option, which Hamas eventually chose, was to hand over responsibility for governing Gaza to appointees of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, despite having defeated it in the 2006 elections.

    Hamas paid a high price, acceding to nearly all of Fatah's demands. The new PA government didn't contain a single Hamas member or ally, and its senior figures remained unchanged. Hamas agreed to allow the PA to move several thousand members of its security forces back to Gaza, and to place its guards at borders and crossings, with no reciprocal positions for Hamas in the West Bank security apparatus. Most important, the government said it would comply with the three conditions for Western aid long demanded by the US and its European allies: non-violence, adherence to past agreements and recognition of Israel. Though the agreement stipulated that the PA government refrain from politics, Abbas said it would pursue his political programme. Hamas barely protested.

    The agreement was signed on 23 April, after Kerry's peace talks had broken down; had the talks been making progress, the US would have done its best to block the move. But the Obama administration was disappointed in the positions Israel took during the talks, and publicly blamed it for its part in their failure. Frustration helped push the US to recognise the new Palestinian government despite Israel's objections. But that was as far as the US was prepared to go. Behind the scenes, it was pressuring Abbas to avoid a true reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. [ . . . ]

    The fears of Hamas activists were confirmed after the government was formed. The terms of the agreement were not only unfavourable but unimplemented. The most basic conditions of the deal -- payment of the government employees who run Gaza and an opening of the crossing with Egypt -- were not fulfilled. For years Gazans had been told that the cause of their immiseration was Hamas rule. Now it was over, their conditions only got worse.

    The June 12 kidnappings took place ten days after the new PA government was formed. That soon led to the current war, which in some ways has given Hamas another lease on life (peculiar as that seems):

    For Hamas, the choice wasn't so much between peace and war as between slow strangulation and a war that had a chance, however slim, of loosening the squeeze. It sees itself in a battle for its survival. Its future in Gaza hangs on the outcome. Like Israel, it's been careful to set rather limited aims, goals to which much of the international community is sympathetic. The primary objective is that Israel honour three past agreements: the Shalit prisoner exchange, including the release of the re-arrested prisoners; the November 2012 ceasefire, which calls for an end to Gaza's closure; and the April 2014 reconciliation agreement, which would allow the Palestinian government to pay salaries in Gaza, staff its borders, receive much needed construction materials and open the pedestrian crossing with Egypt.

    These are not unrealistic goals, and there are growing signs that Hamas stands a good chance of achieving some of them. Obama and Kerry have said they believe a ceasefire should be based on the November 2012 agreement. The US also changed its position on the payment of salaries, proposing in a draft framework for a ceasefire submitted to Israel on 25 July that funds be transferred to Gazan employees. [ . . . ]

    The greatest costs, of course, have been borne by Gaza's civilians, who make up the vast majority of the more than 1600 lives lost by the time of the ceasefire announced and quickly broken on 1 August. The war has wiped out entire families, devastated neighbourhoods, destroyed homes, cut off all electricity and greatly limited access to water. It will take years for Gaza to recover, if indeed it ever does. [ . . . ]

    The obvious solution is to let the new Palestinian government return to Gaza and reconstruct it. Israel can claim it is weakening Hamas by strengthening its enemies. Hamas can claim it won the recognition of the new government and a significant lifting of the blockade. This solution would of course have been available to Israel, the US, Egypt and the PA in the weeks and months before the war began, before so many lives were shattered.

  • More Israel links:

    • Joel Beinin: Racism is the Foundation of Israel's Operation Protective Edge: Quotes Israeli Knesset member Ayelet Shaked, urging the wholesale slaughter of women in Gaza: "Now, this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They must follow their sons. Nothing would be more just. They should go, as well as the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there." Another Israeli urged that the mothers and sisters be raped. "Racism has become a legitimate, indeed an integral, component of Israeli public culture, making assertions like these seem 'normal.' The public devaluation of Arab life enables a society that sees itself as 'enlightened' and 'democratic' to repeatedly send its army to slaughter the largely defenseless population of the Gaza Strip -- 1.8 million people [ . . . ] imprisoned since 1994."
    • Juan Cole: Top 5 Ways the US Is Israel's Accomplice in War Crimes in Gaza: the US shares raw signals intelligence directly with Israel; the US continually replenishes Israel's ammunition; the US pressures Egypt to uphold the blockade of Gaza; "Since 2012, the USA has exported $276 million worth of basic weapons and munitions to Israel"; the US actively opposed nonmember observer state status to Palestine at the UN (which would give Palestine recourse to the International Criminal Court, which would offer a legal pathway for challenging Israeli war crimes).
    • Evan Jones: A Short History of Israeli Impunity: starts with a semi-famous 1891 quote from Ahad Ha'am reporting on the first Zionists in Palestine: "[Our brethren in Eretz Israel] were slaves in their land of exile and they suddenly find themselves with unlimited freedom . . . This sudden change has engendered in them an impulse to despotism as always happens when 'a slave becomes a king,' and behold they walk with the Arabs in hostility and cruelty, unjustly encroaching on them'." Of course, it only goes downhill from there. The rest of the long piece is pure screed, in case that's what you're in the mood for.
    • David Kirkpatrick: Arab Leaders, Viewing Hamas as Worse Than Israel, Stay Silent: "After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states -- including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip." Israel supporters (David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer are two I recall) are quick to enlist this "coalition" as proof of how out of step Hamas is -- I've even heard Syria added to the list. Each of those has its own peculiar reasons, but net effect is likely to backfire, as it aligns the Arab despots with Israel while relegating the entire Palestinian resistance against Israel to extreme Islamists -- as if they are the only ones with sufficient integrity to defend human rights.
    • Philip Kleinfeld: Racists Are Rampaging Through Israel: Many, many examples. "Israel has never been the kind of free and open society it has tried so hard to project. Racism did not begin with the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir or the beating and attempted lynching of Jamal Julani. 'Zionist doctrine has always pushed society in a very particular direction,' the academic Marcelo Svirsky told me. But it is getting worse. [ . . . ] One of the most striking aspects of this 'phenomenon' is how young the people taking part appear to be. Those posting on social media, running amok in lynch mobs, and crashing leftist rallies with sticks, chains, and brass knuckles are, for the most part, young people -- many in their mid-20s, some in their teens."
    • Stephen Robert: There'll be more Gazas without a two-state solution: The author still hopes for a "two-state solution," but realizes that regardless of what Netanyahu may say when it is convenient, he will never allow that. "The Netanyahu coalition favors a bi-national state, a state where a large percentage of its inhabitants will not be citizens and will be governed without their consent. They will continue, as has been the case for forty-seven years, to be denied the most basic rights of a civil society."
    • Richard Silverstein: Israeli TV Poll, What to Give Barack Obama for His Birthday? 48% Say: Ebola: "Doesn't this tell us quite a bit about the Israeli political environment? The leader of Israel's only real ally in the world is despised so much that Israelis would like to see him dead." As I recall, during Bush's two terms the right-wing hype machine was ever-so-sensitive about any perceived slight against America's president, out of respect for the office and the country if nothing else. But that all went away when Obama was elected -- given the things Republicans routinely say about Obama, it's no wonder that Israelis think it's all right to pile on.
    • Is Iron Dome better at destroying missiles or spreading fear: Quotes a letter: "One commentator rightly said that Iron Dome functions as the Deus-ex-Machina of this war. Everyone but us is convinced it saves lives. We see it more as a psychological warfare device. Curiously, much of the explosion sound that gets people so worked up here is largely produced by the Iron Dome system itself. What is striking if not outright suspicious is that there is hardly any information in the aftermath of interceptions; we know nothing about it and nobody cares."
    • Killings of 2 protesters on 'Day of Anger' brings West Bank deaths to 13, and Palestinian teens assaulted and detained by Israeli soldiers after being attacked by settlers in Hebron: Two more of Kate's extraordinary compendiums of links covering stories rarely reported elsewhere.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Weekend Roundup

Scattered links this week, mostly Israel (but what else can one do?). Information is less forthcoming in the world's other hotspots -- Libya has emerged as one, alongside Syria and Iraq, and Ukraine. One thing I wonder about the latter is how intense the fighting has been as the central government attempts to beat down the seccessionists. It seems likely that Russia provided the latter with the BUK missile believed to have shot down the Malaysian Airlines plane, and that the rocket was fired by someone expecting Ukrainian military planes rather than a neutral airliner. The downed airliner should be a cautionary lesson for both sides, but instead has been up as a political tool, to villify Russia, making matters worse rather than better. I don't doubt that there is some amount of villainy on the Russian side, but the other side (Ukraine? Europe? America?) is hardly innocent either, and restarting the Cold War will only be worse for all. At times like this, one needs statesmen. Instead, all we got is Obama, hounded by spooks like Lindsey Graham.

Let's start with a couple twitter images, reportedly Gaza City's Sheijayia neighborhood before and after Israeli bombing. Not the same views, but you get the idea:

Meanwhile, back to the links:

  • Mustafa Akyol: Turkey Can Teach Israel How to End Terror: Turkey had battled Kurdish separatists since 1984, their approach described by one of their generals as "killing all terrorists one by one." A couple years ago Turkey changed its approach, started negotiating with PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, and has largely resolved the problem. (Was it a coincidence that Turkey's change coincided with the ending of their alliance with Israel?)

    The Kurds were not angry at Turkey because they were innately prone to violence. They were angry because Turkey had done something grievously wrong to them. And a peace agreement became possible only when the Turkish public and the state acknowledged this fact.

    If Israel is ever going to achieve peace, Israelis will have to overcome their own self-righteous hawkishness as well -- and abandon the intellectually lazy reflex that explains Palestinian militancy as the natural product of Arab and Islamic culture's supposedly violent nature.

  • Uri Avnery: Once and for All!: Of course, it isn't really this symmetric, but the headline talking points could be solved easily:

    In this war, both sides have the same aim: to put an end to the situation that existed before it started.

    Once And For All!

    To put an end to the launching of rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, Once And For All!

    To put an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt, Once And For All!

    So why don't the two sides come together without foreign interference and agree on tit for tat?

    They can't because they don't speak to each other. They can kill each other, but they cannot speak with each other. God forbid.

    This is not a war on terror. The war itself is an act of terror.

    Neither side has a strategy other than terrorizing the civilian population of the other side. [ . . . ]

    Both hopes are, of course, stupid. History has shown time and again that terrorizing a population causes it to unite behind its leaders and hate the enemy even more. That is happening now on both sides.

    Avnery didn't point out the greatest symmetry, which is that compliance with the other side's goals would cost nothing and actually benefit both sides. Despite the claims of Israel's most blinded supporters, there is no reason to think that Gazans take any absolute satisfaction in killing Israelis with rockets. Nor, if the rockets stopped, should Israel gain any succor watching Gazans starve. I'm not sure that any Israelis can articulate the real reason they've persisted in keeping Gaza locked up and down. Twice now, Israel has adopted policies which show that they have no long-term desire to keep Gaza: at the start of Oslo when they handed the whole Strip over to the PA, and in 2004 when they dismantled their last settlements in the Strip. One has to wonder why they didn't Cut Gaza Loose -- hand the Gaza Strip off to the UN to form an independent state, more or less as I proposed a couple weeks ago.

    I tried circulating my post around a bit, but got no interest or feedback whatsoever in it. Pro-Palestinians don't like it because they think that splitting off Gaza will make it that much harder to get any sort of independence for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and they may be right. (Assuming no right of return -- I think that's a totally dead prospect given Israel's strength and racism -- it tilts the demographics to the point where Israel might consider granting citizenship to all extant West Bank and Jerusalem Palestinians, although that's likely a long struggle away.) And pro-Israelis don't like it because most Gazans are Israeli refugees with a still legitimate right of return, so at the very least they fear that a Palestinian state might legitimize the refugees' moral case. (If this sounds kind of fishy, it's because it is, but Israelis are raised to see existential threats everywhere; that is, after all, the bedrock Zionism is founded upon.)

    Avnery only sees one way out of the mutual destruction of war-after-war, and that's to do something very similar to what I proposed. So I count him (and the Israeli peace camp) among the people who might advance such a plan. It should also appeal to liberal Zionists, especially outside Israel. It is, for instance, something that should make sense to Kerry and Blair but they can't currently grasp because of their phobia about Hamas and how they see Gaza and Hamas as one. And if they did embrace it, what rejoinder would Netanyahu have? He can't claim that Israeli control in any way benefits Gaza. Nor can he claim that Israel's past and current security efforts are the only way Israel can ensure its own security. The problem with nearly every scheme to resolve the conflict is that it would impose some unacceptable cost to Israel, but cutting Gaza loose doesn't have any costs: it's a scheme that even an implacable stonewaller like Netanyahu can't resist forever. And it would be a positive step, breaking the blockade/rockets cycle that resulted in Israeli escalation and war in 2006, 2008, 2012, and now 2014.

  • Richard Silverstein: Israel's Slaughter, Based on a Lie: Evidently, at least one Israeli "official source" confirms that they realize that Hamas was not responsible for the kidnapping-murder of three Israeli teenagers back on June 12, the event that kicked off a series of events leading to Israel's latest intensive demolition of Gaza. The crime was, instead, the work of a "lone cell" in Hebron. However, Netanyahu sought to use the murders as an excuse to break up the unification deal between Hamas and Fatah. He sent 10,000 IDF troops into the West Bank where they ransacked thousdands of homes, arresting 500 Palestinians (mostly associated with Hamas, many of whom had been in Israeli prisons before being released in last year's prisoner exchange deal), and killing seven. When Hamas protested by shooting off some rockets from Gaza, Israel then began its bombardment and invasion of Gaza, killing well over a thousand more.

    This entire slaughter is based on a lie. And not just a small lie, but a huge, cancerous, evil lie. I do not like to make absolute moral statements if I can avoid it. But there is no doubt in my mind that Bibi Netanyahu is evil. While that doesn't necessarily mean all of Israel is evil, as long as they elect this megalomaniac to office, then all of Israel is culpable in his malevolence. [ . . . ]

    To return to Sheera's tweet, lest anyone question her source, the BBC's Jon Donnison is reporting that Israeli police spokesflack, Mickey Rosenfeld is saying the same thing explicitly.

    On a related matter, several thousand Israelis marched yesterday night in Tel Aviv against the Gaza massacre. It is not easy to do so when 90% of your fellow citizens believe you're being traitorous. I don't know if such protests are enough to exonerate the nation of war crimes. But they are some small solace.

    The lie at the root of the war gives this some resonance with the Bush invasion of Iraq, although lies leading to war are old hat -- the sinking of the Maine in 1898 and the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964 are two of the more notorious ones in US history. Nor is this anything new for Israel: the false rumors of Syria massing troops on the border in 1967, the assassination of Israel's UK ambassador in 1982 that was used as a pretext for invading Lebanon, and whatever that cockamamie story was in 1956, are just the first examples that jump into mind. Lies and wars go hand-in-hand, first as rationales then to cover up the dirty truth. The only thing remarkable about this war is how fast Israel's lies are being uncovered -- that's partly explained by the prevalence of media but also by how baldfaced the lies are. Sure, Netanyahu is vile, but that's not news either: he was the principal person responsible for destroying the Oslo framework and inciting the second intifada. Since returning to power he's sloughed off the Mitchell and Kerry iniatives and seems well on his way to kicking off a third intifada. But there's no originality in Netanyahu's evil, and little of the personal monstrosity you can find in Ariel Sharon (or Yitzhak Shamir or Menachem Begin or even Yitzhak Rabin, to limit ourselves to Israeli PMs): you can explain everything he's done as the dutiful son of his father, who was Vladimir "Iron Wall" Jabotinsky's secretary in exile in New York. Netanyahu has never enjoyed an original thought in his life. He is, rather, the slave of an old and profoundly wrong idea, which is that the only way Zionism can survive in Israel is by repeatedly beating Palestinians into submission. That idea is what's evil; Netanyahu's is merely its tool.

  • More on Israel's latest war:

    • Kate: Six Palestinians are killed in West Bank in protests of Gaza slaughter: The title piece plus dozens of other reports
    • Helena Cobham: Absence of "peace process" might help Gaza ceasefire negotiations: Main point here is that Abbas has agreed with the Hamas ceasefire proposal, which insists that Israel release the prisoners covered in the Shalit deal who were arrested by Israel in their anti-Hamas sweep of the West Bank, and that the blockade of Gaza be ended. Israel supposedly can't negotiate these points with Hamas because Israel cannot talk to Hamas.
    • Annie Robbins: In Photos: Worldwide protest against Israeli attack on Gaza: Photos and videos of demonstrations from around the world. Also see: Martin Gajsek: Report from historic march on Qalandia checkpoint in solidarity with Gaza.
    • Richard Silverstein: Israel Murders IDF Soldier to Prevent His Capture: Explains the "Hannibal Directive," which basically says that if there is a chance that an IDF soldier might be captured and turned into a bargaining chip (like Gilad Shalit was), the IDF should kill that soldier first. As Silverstein reports, there has been at least one example of that during the present hostilities.
    • Rebecca L Stein: How Israel militarized social media: How the IDF put their best face on for Facebook, Twitter, etc.
    • Al-Haq: Why Israel's legal justifications for 'Operation Proective Edge' are wrong: Israel has made a big deal out of their practice of phoning or other warnings, arguing that if they contact you (or at least try) and their attack subsequently injures you, they are not responsible. To say the least, this assumes they have the right to bomb, and hardly shows any concern for the consequences. Moreover, such calls can themselves be a form of terror. Or they could be misdirecting. This piece focuses mostly on international law, which Israel is in gross violation of.
    • Udi Aloni: The swan song of the Israeli left: Includes a link to the film Forgiveness.
    • Jonathan Freedland: Liberal Zionism After Gaza: A postscript following Freedland's review of Ari Shavit's My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel and John B Judis' Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. In the latter piece I particularly appreciate Norman Finkelstein's quote on Shavit's "insights": "[they] comprise a hardcore of hypocrisy and stupidity overlaid by a tinsel patina of arrogance and pomposity. He's a know-nothing know-it-all who, if ever there were a context for world's biggest schmuck, would come in second." Shavit's the kind of guy who writes movingly about how Israel force-marched entire towns over the border and into permanent exile, then proclaims the atrocity worthwhile because it now lets him live in a fully Jewish state. (As opposed, I suppose, to a guy like Benny Morris, who uncovered numerous IDF atrocities, only to lament that there weren't more.) In this war as in so many others, liberal Zionists "shoot and cry": as Freedland translates, "the Israeli dove gets to win the admiration of the outside world, Jew and non-Jew alike, but the beauty and sensitivity of his conscience even as the behavior of his country, and the army whose uniform he continues to wear, does not change." And the order is essential: shooting first, by lining up for every war, he assures his comrades of his loyalty, even if he returns to humanity later.
    • Lisa Goldman: The Gaza war has done terrible things to Israeli society: For example: "Peaceful, unarmed [anti-war] demonstrators in Israel's two most liberal cities were physically attacked by ultra-nationalists wielding stones and bottles. In Haifa, nationalist thugs assaulted the Arab deputy mayor, slamming the middle-aged man down on the pavement. In Tel Aviv, they chased anti-war protestors into a cafe and smashed a chair over the head of one of them, even as municipal sirens wailed to announce an incoming rocket from Gaza. The police were ineffective in stopping the violence."
    • Melvin A Goodman: Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto: A reminder that Gaza resembles nothing so much as a classic ghetto, an open air prison locked down and patrolled from the outside. The most famous one was the Warsaw Ghetto managed by the Nazis in WWII -- one well known in Israel thanks to the valliant but doomed Jewish revolt there, long touted in Israel as one of the few cases where Jews fought back, like good Israelis do today. It is remembered elsewhere for the utter carnage of the Nazi "final solution": they killed over 300,000 Jews in putting the revolt down, laying waste to the entire ghetto. Israel hasn't approached that level of genocide, at least not yet, but they've killed thousands, destroyed uncounted homes and businesses and public buildings and key infrastructure. What keeps Israel from applying its own "final solution"? A mix of conscience, practicality, and concern for world opinion. All of those are wearing thin, especially conscience -- most obviously, Rabbi Dov Lior's ruling in favor of the "destruction of Gaza so that the south should no longer suffer."

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Avi Shlaim: Cursed Victory: Review of Ahron Bregman's new book, Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories (2014, Allen Lane [UK]). The review is itself a good short history lesson, especially on Ehud Barak's ill-fated negotiations with Syria and Arafat. ("Bregman confirms the view I have long held -- that the two principal reasons for the collapse of the summit were Barak's intransigence and Clinton's mismanagement.") I doubt that there's much here we don't already know, although Bregman has a reputation for digging through the documents, which as Avi Raz's recent The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War made clear, show that Israel's opposition to any sort of peace initiative has been a consistent policy all along.

    Bregman describes Israel as "a heavy-handed and brutal occupier." He regards the four decades of occupation chronicled in this book as a black mark on Israeli, and indeed, Jewish history. He finds it depressing that a people that has suffered such unspeakable tragedies of its own can behave so cruelly towards another. The only sign of hope in this otherwise bleak picture is that the occupation may carry within it the seeds of its own demise. By forcing the Palestinians to live in squalor, Bregman concludes, Israel has "hardened those under its power, making them more determined to put an end to the occupation, by violent means if necessary, and live a life of dignity and freedom."

  • On the slaughter of innocents: Unsigned (the author seems to have been involved in Human Rights Watch), but a long and impressive meditation that recounts the history of mass slaughter -- examples include the Mongol practice of sacking cities and similar desires by both sides in WWII -- but is written with Gaza in mind. A couple examples:

    The Israeli architect and philosopher Eyal Weizman has analyzed how groups like Human Rights Watch participate, inadvertently and from admirable aspirations, in the science of war: their "collusion . . . with military and political powers." Their methods involve a shift "from a focus on the victims of war to an analysis of the mechanism of the violations of law." Law itself, once broken, is treated as the chief victim; the individuals whose lives were at stake fade away in the descriptions of the offense almost as they did in the choosing of targets. This elision, however unwanted, is built into the methods. "Today's forensic investigators of violence move alongside its perpetrators, morphing into them," according to Weizman. "Humanitarianism, human rights and international humanitarian law," he writes, "have become the crucial means by which the economy of violence is calculated and managed."

    The Weizman book quoted is The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2012, Verso Books). I'm not familiar with that book, but have scanned through his Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (2007, Verso Books), one of the most deeply revealing looks at exactly how Israel manages its occupation system. The point about how human rights violations can be trivialized as violations of law is evident in all the reports which claim that Gazan rockets constitute a war crime, which in routine course balances off Israel's war crime -- its use of far more deadlier munitions. The real world difference, of course, is proportionality, which in the Israel-Gaza case is crudely visible in death and injury reports and would very likely be even more striking if you could convert the entire war efforts into some common measure of force.

    The focus on civilian casualties generates a strict, technical approach to the question of responsibility. The individual story is subordinated not just to the lawbooks, but to the slide rule. No side can ensure absolutely that it will prevent civilian casualties, as long as it's at war and killing people. So no side is completely devoid of guilt. But since the Geneva Conventions give a certain latitude for trying but failing, even killers can make a claim to innocence as well. The authority to evaluate such shades of inculpation gives enormous power to the human rights investigator and his organization, power over fine mathematical gradations of right and wrong: much greater power than simpler, starker, less technologically advanced modes of assessing morality could endow.

    But this focus buries other questions, broader ones, about responsibility for the conflict as a whole. [ . . . ]

    The aim of Israel's various "operations" in Gaza is not just to take out specific people, but to cow a population. (Even the famous text messages that supposedly warn residents a bomb is about to blast their home have, as Gazans can tell you, at least as much to do with showing off the invisible, terrifying omniscience of a military surveillance system. We know where you are.) Unleashed with that intent behind them, weapons -- however "smart" -- will terrorize, not just target; the very targeting is an aspect of terror, a reminder of superior knowledge as well as superior means, but spillover is equally intrinsic to the effect. The message inevitably exceeds the "purely" military purpose, and the collateral damage itself becomes the point: a sign of exultant excess, the means drowning the end. You can't go on talking about equivalence without acknowledging Israel's military domination, its unmeasurable ability to destroy. And to cap its technological triumph, it is (and has been for forty years) the only state in a thousand-mile radius with nuclear bombs.

    Much more in this piece, such as the line: "The confrontation between popular rebellion and a rapacious settler society isn't just an old, cowboys-and-Indians story that we can look on with disinterest or restrained amusement." (One might note that the US-Indian wars are still taught in the US military academies, and US troops frequently refer to counterinsurgency operations as operating in "Injun territory." Judging from scattered quotes, it would seem that part of Israel's hasbara toolkit is to remind Americans of their struggle to conquer the Indians -- ancient history in the US but a vivid analogy in Israel.)

In local news, sorry to hear that Randy Brown died: a longtime newspaperman, journalism professor, and political dabbler, certainly a positive presence in Wichita. And here's a sampler of his columns. In other Wichita news today, the Eagle published Sen. Jerry Moran's op-ed on why it would be better to let the lesser prairie chicken go extinct than to inconvenience any Kansas oil or gas producers. And in the big money 4th Congressional District primary, the Eagle endorsed vile Mike Pompeo (R-Koch) over evil Todd Tiahrt (R-Boeing). I can't find the candidate questions box, but Tiahrt's professed desire to be a public servant was almost touching, until he added that bit about standing up to special interests. In his sixteen years in the House, no one was a bigger corporate whore. The best you can say for him is that he sold himself cheap, and not a lot of the money stuck to his fingers, so you could buy into his sincerity thing, if only you were part of the public he so dedicated himself to serving. Curiously, Tiahrt's gained in the polls recently by attacking Pompeo's defense of the NSA -- a position he almost certainly wouldn't have thought of had Pompeo not been so rabid on it. If I could ask a debate question it would be about where they stand on the Export-Import Bank: the tea party (and most likely the Kochs) are all agitated against it, but the main beneficiary is Boeing -- and even though Boeing abandoned Wichita, I can't imagine "Tanker Todd" parting with them.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Weekend Roundup

This week's scattered links, but for one reason or another most still focus on Israel (for one thing, this weekend has been much bloodier than the previous week). Having recently read Stephen F Cohen's Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War (2011), I expected to have more to say about the civil war in Ukraine and the shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines airliner, but in my short time I didn't run across much that improved upon speculation (one of the worst pieces was Bob Dreyfuss: Vladimir Putin Should Take Responsibility for the MH17 Shootdown.) As someone who is inclined to suspect that Putin was responsible for the Moscow apartment bombings that he used as a pretext to re-open the Chechen War, there's not much I would put past him, but neither evidence nor logic is yet compelling, and the unfounded charge is actively being used to further estrange relations with Russia, which quite frankly Obama needs to mend even if that means giving up ground in Ukraine. As I wrote below, Obama has made a colossal error in re-entering Iraq, on top of making an almost utter hash of Syria, and the only way out of the latter is some sort of understanding with Russia. Cohen's book, by the way, is very prophetic about Ukraine -- not necessarily about the country itself but about the massive level of cold war hangover America's foreign policy nabobs suffer from and their utter mindlessness in facing anything having to do with Russia. I've long said that the whole neocon vision was for America to behave all around the world with the same reckless dominance fetish that Israel exhibits in the Middle East. In the last two months that's pretty much what we've been seeing. The only real surprise here is how pathetic it makes the leaders look: Netanyahu, for instance, is wailing about how Hamas is forcing Israel to kill Palestinians, as if he, himself, has no control over his government. Nor does Obama seem to be any more in control of his policies. It's really quite shameful.

Nor am I the only one saying these things. Just looking at my recent twitter feed:

Saree Makdisi: It's quite clear that Israel plunged into its bombardment, as usual, without any strategic plan in mind. Quite literally mindless violence.

Roger Cohen: John Kerry says Israel "under siege" by Hamas. Read that once. Read it twice. Three times. It doesn't get any better. We have a problem here.

Ali Abunimah: Remember, Israel could have had a ceasefire any time if it agreed to basic humanitarian conditions for people of Gaza. It refused.

Sana Saeed: In case you're keeping count: this is the third IDF offensive against Gaza since the Obama administration came into office.

[Actually, the third since Obama was elected president, but Operation Cast Lead occurred before Obama took office. I like to refer to it as Israel's pre-emptive strike against the Obama administration.]

Also as Michael Poage noted, today's Kansans for Peace in Palestine demo today in Wichita drew about 500 people. It led on the KWCH News, ahead of a fairly even-handed report on Gaza that put more emphasis on dead Palestinians than on live Israelis whining about rockets.

  • Juan Cole: Falluja and Gaza: Why Counter-Terrorism fails when the Problem is Political: Yeah, but for a while counter-terrorism is a workable excuse to avoid talking about political problems. It simply declares that authorities can manage dissent with violence.

    Just as the enemies of the US ultimately prevailed in Falluja, so the enemies of Israel will prevail in Gaza.

    Oppression and occupation produce resistance. Until the oppression and the occupation are addressed, the mere inflicting of attrition on the military capabilities of the resistance will not snuff it out. Other leaders will take the place of those killed.

    If Israel really wanted peace or relief from Hamas rockets, its leaders would pursue peace negotiations in good faith with Hamas (which has on more than one occasion reliably honored truces). Otherwise, invading Gaza will have all the same effects, good and bad (but mostly bad) that the US invasion of Falluja had on Iraq.

    Also see Cole's Israel's Groundhog Day: Reverse Snowballs and the Horror of Lawn-Mowing.

  • Annie Robbins: Israel is in a pickle:

    Israel is likely in a pickle. Its stated goal for this invasion is to stop the missile fire (and dismantle Hamas's control of the strip). To do that it must locate Hamas' weapons arsenal and thus far, it appears it is clueless as to where they are. Israel doesn't know the extent of weaponry Hamas has amassed, either in quality or quantity. All the blowing up of civilian infrastructure, including homes and hospitals, won't end the rocket fire because it's extremely unlikely any central stash of weaponry is stored in homes, schools, hospitals or mosques. The weapons are probably underground which is why it requires a ground invasion to find them. This is what "deal with the tunnels" means when Obama says "the current military ground operations are designed to deal with the tunnels."

    Rudoren claimed Netanyahu "won plaudits from Israeli leftists this week for embracing an Egyptian cease-fire proposal." Win plaudits from media pundits he did, but this was not an Egyptian proposal, it was a proposal cobbled together by Tony Blair after Obama had previously spoken with Netanyahu and offered to help broker a truce (without any input from Hamas). A ceasefire catering to Israel represents nothing more than a surrender for Palestine, a surrender worse than retreating to the status quo of endless occupation because hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who were freed in the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap in 2011, were rearrested from the West Bank during a pogrom hyped as a response to the claim Hamas kidnapped the 3 Israeli youths, a claim that has never been backed by even a shred of evidence.

  • Nathan Thrall: How the West Chose War in Gaza: Israel's assault on Gaza is really a war on Hamas, more specifically on the willingness of Hamas to participate in a "national consensus" government alongside Fatah.

    Yet, in many ways, the reconciliation government could have served Israel's interests. It offered Hamas's political adversaries a foothold in Gaza; it was formed without a single Hamas member; it retained the same Ramallah-based prime minister, deputy prime ministers, finance minister and foreign minister; and, most important, it pledged to comply with the three conditions for Western aid long demanded by America and its European allies: nonviolence, adherence to past agreements and recognition of Israel.

    Israel strongly opposed American recognition of the new government, however, and sought to isolate it internationally, seeing any small step toward Palestinian unity as a threat. Israel's security establishment objects to the strengthening of West Bank-Gaza ties, lest Hamas raise its head in the West Bank. And Israelis who oppose a two-state solution understand that a unified Palestinian leadership is a prerequisite for any lasting peace. [ . . . ]

    Hamas is now seeking through violence what it couldn't obtain through a peaceful handover of responsibilities. Israel is pursuing a return to the status quo ante, when Gaza had electricity for barely eight hours a day, water was undrinkable, sewage was dumped in the sea, fuel shortages caused sanitation plants to shut down and waste sometimes floated in the streets. Patients needing medical care couldn't reach Egyptian hospitals, and Gazans paid $3,000 bribes for a chance to exit when Egypt chose to open the border crossing.

    For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it's worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. A cease-fire that fails to resolve the salary crisis and open Gaza's border with Egypt will not last. It is unsustainable for Gaza to remain cut off from the world and administered by employees working without pay.

    The weird thing about this story is not so much what Israel has done as how the Obama administration has allowed itself to be paralyzed by the association of Hamas with terrorism. It's not even has if the US has never been willing to reclassify an organization once it wound up on the T-list -- Bush, for instance, made up with Ghaddafi's Libya. But where Israel is involved, Obama suddenly turns chickenshit. It's not just that Netanyahu has outfoxed Obama. It's more like Obama is suffering full-fledged Stockholm Syndrome.

  • More Israel links:

    • 13 IDF soldiers killed in Gaza as Operation Protective Edge death toll climbs to 18: The Palestinian death toll is up to 435, although there is no recognition of that in this piece from the Israeli press. The numbers are increasing quite rapidly as Israel's "ground incursion" proceeds, and while they are still extremely lopsided, this is the first indication that Israel will pay a price for its aggression.
    • Massacre in Gaza: At least 60 killed in Shuja'iyeh, over 60,000 in UN Shelters: This seems to have been the most immediate Israeli response to the loss of 15 Israeli soldiers.
    • Mohammed Omer: Gaza Hospitals Can't Cope. No surprise here, but the problem isn't just increasing demand: it's power plants being disabled, vital supplies being blockaded, and the occasional Israeli bombing of hospitals.
    • Richard Silverstein: Gaza War, Day 14: 18 IDF Dead, 430 Palestinian Dead: Sums up the above, noting "it is precisely this mounting loss of its own soldiers which may cause Israelis to take stock of this bloody mess and step back from the brink. Clearly, Israelis have no sense of proportion or concern when it comes to Palestinian dead."
    • Hamas wants to pile up 'telegenically-dead Palestinians for their cause' -- Netanyahu, on television: Israel's propaganda line is that Hamas is not only responsible for all Palestinian deaths, that they crave more and more Palestinian deaths in their diabolical scheme to shame Israel. Not only is Netanyahu saying this, IDF puppet like David Brooks has put it even more succinctly: "Hamas has basically decided they want to see their own people killed as a propaganda coup." Or as Bill Clinton put it, "in the short and medium term Hamas can inflict terrible public relations damage by forcing (Israel) to kill Palestinian civilians to counter Hamas." Netanyahu has yet to explain why he fell for this dastardly plan, allowing his government and the IDF to be so manipulated by Hamas.
    • Hasbarapocalypse: Naftali Bennett says Hamas committing 'massive self-genocide': I think Bennett (Israel's Economy Minister, head of the second largest party in the latest Knesset elections) gets credit as the first person to describe what's happening in Gaza as "genocide." Most likely he just mangled the talking point, but maybe added a little wish fulfillment.
    • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: Why Israel Is Losing the American Media War: "If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them. But his complaint is in itself a concession." The author attributes this to social media exposing more of the actual battleground, but I suspect something that Robbins (above) aludes to: blockaded off as it is, Gaza is becoming increasingly opaque to Israel at the same time it is becoming more transparent to the rest of the world. Moreover, although Israel remains effective at manipulating key parts of the media -- I could assemble a half dozen links on how distorted coverage has been in the Washington Post -- there are just too many alternative sources of news and analysis for them to control. Moreover, there are too many people in the media who know better -- I'm not seeing the link now, but there was an amusing report about Barney Frank feeling he was being ganged up on defending Israel on a CNN interview.
    • Thalif Deen: Why No Vetoed Resolutions on Civilian Killings in Gaza? Partly because Russia and China have vetoed resolutions condemning Assad in Syria, so they don't have a lot of moral authority to go after Israel, and given that all they would get out of it is a bit of embarrassment for the US (a country which has already vetoed hundreds of resolutions on Israel) that's evidently not worth the effort. Turns out all the world's powers have axes to grind -- not with each other so much as with the various people unfortunate enough to fall under the thumbs of their deranged clients.
    • Dead Gazans Missing From Senate Endorsement of Israeli Invasion: All 100 US senators, including some you might expect to know better, voted in favor of an AIPAC-authored, which this piece quotes in toto. While taken as an endorsement of Israel's bombardment and invasion of Gaza, it actually says no such thing: it denounces Hamas rocket attacks (which currently threaten 5 million Israelis), declares them "unprovoked," reaffirms "Israel's right to defend its citizens and ensure the survival of the State of Israel," and demands that Abbas "dissolve the unity governing arrangement with Hamas and condemn the attacks on Israel." To the Senate's knowledge, no Palestinians have been harmed.
    • As Israel attacks Gaza, 110 Palestinians injured and 12 detained in clashes at Al-Aqsa compound: One of Kate's roundups of Israeli press reports, showing among other things that Israel has not let up on arrests in the West Bank, that settlers continue to run amok, and that protests against Israel's operations in Gaza are being brutally suppressed. Also more details on Gaza.
    • Lawrence Weschler: Israel Has Been Bitten by a Bat: Basically a rant, and a couple days old, but worth reading: "I know, I know, and I am bone tired of being told it, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is plenty of blame to go around, but by this point after coming on almost 50 years of Israeli stemwinding and procrastinatory obfuscation, I'd put the proportionate distribution of blame at about the same level as the mortality figures -- which is, where are we today (what with Wednesday morning's four children killed while out playing on a Gaza beach)? What, 280 to 2?" The title refers to rabies.

Also, a few links for further study:

  • Hayes Brown: What You Need to Know About the Tunnels That Bring Life -- and Death -- Into Gaza: Some useful background on the Gaza tunnels that Israel is so desperately attempting to destroy. The key point is that since Israel tightened its blockade of Gaza after removing its settlements in 2005 -- Israel referred to this as "putting Gazans on a diet" -- the tunnels have become an indispensible lifeline, at least partly alleviating the suffering that Israel imposes:

    All told, what passes through the tunnels makes up a substantial portion, if not the vast majority, of the Gazan economy at this point. In October 2011, United Nations figures estimated that "800,000 liters (around 5,000 barrels) of fuel, 3,000 tons of gravel, 500 tons of steel rods and 3,000 tons of cement" passed through the tunnels daily.

    Of course, missiles and other contraband enter Gaza through the tunnels, but as long as the tunnels are needed for importing essentials like food and building materials there will be no popular support for shutting them down.

  • Dahr Jamail: Incinerating Iraq: Probably the best journalist working in Iraq since the US invasion -- see his Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007) -- brings us up to date. From early on the US was responsible for stirring up Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq, and when things got out of hand the US was able to shift alliances, offering protection to Sunni tribal leaders willing to turn on "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" and thereby temporarily reducing the violence. When US troops left, they advised Maliki to ease up on the Sunnis, but true to form -- this was, after all, why the Americans installed him in the first place -- he kept pushing down the Sunnis and wound up with an explosion engulfing the northwestern third of Iraq and threatening Baghdad. If Obama had any sense, he would have backed away from Maliki, offering US aid to negotiate a diplomatic solution (preferably extending the talks to Syria, now that Assad isn't looking so awful). Instead, he reaffirmed his support for the discredited post-occupation Iraqi government, the only way Americans seem to know how: by sending bombers, "advisers," and special forces troops, a commitment that will convince Maliki that he doesn't have to reform a thing, that he can win outright, and one that puts Obama on the slippery slope of having to send more and more reinforcements in to stave off a face-loosing debacle. This was possibly the single dumbest decision in month chock full of foreign policy disasters (e.g., Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan/Pakistan).

Ask a question, or send a comment.

prev --