Martin Kramer’s patron at Harvard is Stephen Peter Rosen, a neocon and professor of national security. Rosen also helps run “Long Term Strategy Group”, a consulting company, along with Jacqueline Newmyer. They had a lucrative DOD gig providing bland “strategic” planning guidelines and the odd slide show in DC. It seems they pulled in a mere $2 million in the last few years from Defense.
LTSG previously focused on “asymmetrical warfare” but now, sniffing the winds of war, focus on China. Their work is the sort that a harried undergrad could put together cribbing notes from the internet (like this piece blaming the war in Iraq on American Scots-Irish pugnacity). Rosen was lately house master of Winthrop House, which hosted Karl Rove (apparently when Rosen was master).
Rosen also advises GOP candidates such as Giuliani; and Mike Desch wrote of Rosen, "He qualifies as a movement neocon, having signed many of the Project for a New American Century’s ukases, such as the Sept. 21, 2001 letter arguing, ‘even if the evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq’ and the April 3, 2002 letter baldly declaring, ‘Israel’s fight against terrorism is our fight.’"
Per Desch, Rosen has offered insight into human nature such as:
Humility is always a virtue, but the dominant male atop any social hierarchy, human or otherwise, never managed to rule simply by being nice. Human evolutionary history has produced a species that both creates hierarchies and harbors the desire among subordinates to challenge its dominant member. Those challenges never disappear. The dominant member can never do everything that subordinates desire, and so it is blamed for what it does not do as much as for what it does.
This of course qualifies Stephen Peter Rosen for a tenured position at Harvard’s Dept of Government where he also directs the National Security Program at the Weatherhead Center. Clearly, Beth Simmons, the director of the Weatherhead Center, who called Kramer’s comment "appalling" yesterday, was read the riot act by faculty running the program who are to the right of Genghis Khan and fit comfortably in Harvard.
Juan Cole today had a piece on US military spending as compared to the EU and China, pointing out that the US, which brags about having destroyed the Soviet Union in an arms race, seems now determined to bankrupt itself in an arms race with no one.
It occurs to me that a small but not insignificant part of US military spending goes to these “think tanks” that fund a idle and pernicious class of self-entitled neocons at taxpayer expense. If anyone is looking for a way to reduce the deficit, here is somewhere to begin.
I wish I could say I didn’t want to see it happen, but the US military-industrial complex self destructing in a bloated mess of insurmountable debt — and taking the US economy, and probably federal government down with it — is the only thing I see now that will put a stop to American war crimes. At least, on foreign soil, at any rate.
The US Military is counting on “Full Spectrum Dominance”, at which point any shortfalls in the budget will be made up for with old-fashioned loot.
Yeah. That didn’t work out so well for Rome. Or Spain. Or England.
Genghis Khan destroyed a centuries old library in Babel. It is said that the waters of the Euphrates turned black from the ink of all the books his army dumped in the river.
Kramer and Rosen seem to subscribe to the same, dare I say, school of thought (or lack thereof).
It was the same at Stanford. Condi Rice was our Vice Provost, and Steve Krasner was my Political Science 101 prof. I also took classes on environmental policy and human rights law, but anyone who didn’t have “Security,” “Strategy,” or “Defense” in their title was basically a second-class citizen, and it meant they’d probably never have an interesting post in Washington. The students lapped it all up, kissing ass and taking names (which some would use to get postings in the Coalition Provisional Authority, among other things they weren’t remotely qualified for).
And when I took a class called American Foreign Policy in the 21st century (I took the class in 1999), our focus was trying to figure out who our next big enemy was going to be. Not how to preserve and build on the relative peace following the Cold War. Not how to cooperate and secure an international regime of humanitarian law that could prevent most conflicts. Just, “Who can we bomb next, and why?” The focus was on biological weapons and WMDs being used by non-state actors, and we were encouraged not to think of Iranians as ‘rational actors.’
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
link to
Just like Israel, always talking about “the next war.”
The next one? As far as I can tell, the one they started in 1948 hasn’t stopped.
Lest we forget, these are all the same dumb-asses who lied and cajoled us into the war in Iraq. The blood of thousands of sacrificed American soldiers and at least a million Iraqi civilians are on their hands. Are we really surprised what they’re willing to justify now?
Don’t forget the 80,000 maimed US soldiers too. IUDs have a way of doing that. And how many US congress people have had sons or daughters “fighting over there” in the middle east? 2?
Clinton
Bush
Chaney
All those “American” neocon think tank scribblers.
At most, their kid goes and fights in the IDF.
46% of US combat soldiers come from rural areas in the USA. Google it.
Oh, I believe you. As bad as certain cities in the US have it, rural areas have been neglected for a much longer time — the average rural American’s interest ranking below that of factory farms and strip mines.
This means, essentially, that white farm boys and girls, lower-middle class, bleed for Jews in Israel who despise them. And American Jews who go to profit from stealing land from Arabs, are protected by Uncle Sam. Gee, can we have a new
New Jersey reality program to cover this?
And don’t forget, you Italian Americans, that Jews invented pizza. Yeah, I know, the Germans once claimed they invented it.
“This means, essentially, that white farm boys and girls, lower-middle class, bleed for Jews in Israel who despise them. And American Jews who go to profit from stealing land from Arabs, are protected by Uncle Sam.”
And this lusty dramatic tallis -ripper of a novel shows all this through the eyes and differing fortunes of a hard-working family of Latvian Jewish curtain-makers who settled in Israel…
With all of the saber rattling against Iran and the ginned up polls telling us that Americans love Israel and hate Iran, where is the polling on whether the US public would support military action against Iran? Those polling results should be made public before the Iran situation gets any more out of hand.
Show this link to mcclatchydc.com
to the US public before asking them any hard questions.
I believe all the saber rattling serves to keep the issue of Iran’s nuclear program on the front burner for many European countries and North American ones as well. The US knows that attacking Iran at this juncture would be highly detrimental to its own interests. So the goal is to impose more and more sanctions on Iran, both in an effort to drain it economically and at the same time to undermine the current government by supporting internal enemies.
It’s a very similar tactic to the one used against Iraq throughout the 1990s.
In the end, the US does most of the work — vetoes, sanctions, diplomatic lobbying, intelligence gathering, bankrolling anti-Iranian terrorism (Mujahedine al-Khalq) — and Israel reaps the benefits.
Economic sanctions are always a form of collective punishment. The US congress and Israel have not problem with that at all. Why should they? Nothing negatively directed at their own country ever affects them. It’s immoral to the top.
And make sure we get to see the actual poll questions, so we can decide any built in spin. Not gonna happen.
RE: Professor Kamer “advocating cuts in certain subsistence aid to Palestinians in order to curb extremism”
SEE – “UNRWA: Canada Leads, the US Should Follow”, solomania.com, 01/25/10
(EXCERPT) Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have been shaming the United States with their strong stand on Israel and UN-related issues, and now this is extremely welcome news: Canada will no longer be writing checks to UNRWA, but only funding specific projects: “Help, not hate”
“Help, not hate”, The National Post (Canada), 01/25/10
Since last fall, the federal Conservative government has been withdrawing taxpayer funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that use their grants to take sides against Israel in the Middle East conflict. Now comes word that last week, Ottawa told the United Nations it would no longer fund the world body’s Palestinian refugee agency. From now on, Canadian aid to Palestinians will be directed to specific projects. We will no longer give lump-sum aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), since most of that money simply goes straight into the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) general treasury, where it might be used for humanitarian projects or might be used to arm and train terrorists…
“SOLOMANIA” SOURCE – link to solomonia.com
“THE NATIONAL POST” – link to nationalpost.com
FROM M.J. ROSENBERG’S ‘MEDIA MATTERS’ BLOG OF 02/24/10:
(EXCERPT)….[Prof. Martin] Kramer elaborates in a subsequent piece. In response to the argument that the international community does not provide Palestinians with “pro-natal subsidies,” Kramer explodes: “This is a lie. UNWRA (the United Nations agency that provides support for Palestinian refugees) assures that every child with ‘refugee’ status will be fed and schooled regardless of their parents’ own resources….”
So the “pro-natal subsidies” to which he refers are food! That explains why he points to the success of Israel’s current sanctions…
SOURCE – link to mediamattersaction.org
ALSO SEE: Gaza: Treading on Shards, By Sara Roy, The Nation, 02/17/10
(EXCERPTS)…According to Amnesty International, 90-95 percent of the water supplied by Gaza’s aquifer is “unfit for drinking.” The majority of Gaza’s groundwater supplies are contaminated with nitrates well above the acceptable WHO standard–in some areas six times that standard–or too salinated to use. Gaza no longer has any source of regular clean water. According to one donor account, “Nowhere else in the world has such a large number of people been exposed to such high levels of nitrates for such a long period of time….
…It is possible that high nitrate levels have contributed to some shocking changes in the infant mortality rate (IMR) among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. IMR, widely used as an indicator of population health, has stalled among Palestinians since the 1990s and now shows signs of increasing. This is because the leading causes of infant mortality have changed from infectious and diarrheal diseases to prematurity, low birth weight and congenital malformations. These trends are alarming (and rare in the region), because infant mortality rates have been declining in almost all developing countries, including Iraq…
ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to thenation.com
More about the topic in question.
I came across research that shows that in the last 10 years or so, the Israeli government has been cutting back on social programs, family planning programs and welfare programs in the Palestinian sector in Israel. The goal is to curb population growth by lowering the birth rate.
Oh yeah, so what’s new?
What I really hate is goy America (98%) PAYS FOR THIS.
Oh yeah, so what’s new?
What I really hate is goy America (98%) PAYS FOR THIS.
so you really hate that goy america PAYS FOR THIS? A hate so good they named it twice.
Please explain your comment to me and others who come to this blog.
Well, you just jabbed out the comment twice, with a pejorative and capital letters for emphasis no less. You seem obsessed by the ZOG versus Christian American Heartland melodrama. That’s my point. Clear enough?
And why does he insist on using that word “goy”? What purpose is served by that? Maybe it’s a clue.
I think Citizen’s heart is in the right place. He sees people getting screwed over and he doesn’t like it. The problem is that he believes that there was such a thing as White-Christian unity, and that ZOG has undermined that unity. That’s a fairy tale. I’m no Marxist, but it’s all class warfare as far as I can tell.
“I came across research that shows that in the last 10 years or so, the Israeli government has been cutting back on social programs, family planning programs and welfare programs in the Palestinian sector in Israel. The goal is to curb population growth by lowering the birth rate.”
Considering the words of Kramer, isn’t that like, pretty explosive? Was Kramer simply reiterating a program already in existence?
Kramer’s words were merely an expression of a particular form of a policy that seems to be part of Israel’s foundation– Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall policy.
Iron Wall posited using wildly disproportionate military force as a “pedagogic tool” (in the words of Professor Ian Lustick in a conference convened by Richard Silverstein in Dec 2009 link to edmaysproductions.net
) to consistently punish Arabs until enough of them ‘learned’ that they could not defeat Israel, that resistance was futile, that half-a-loaf was the best they could hope for.
Starvation is Iron Wall collective punishment by other means.
Furthermore, Ephraim Sneh stated in a speech at AIPAC in 2008 www dot c-spanvideo.org/program/205778-1 (at 60 minutes) that Iranians are incapable of changing their government, that reform is impossible because the mullahs will not allow it, therefore, since the regime and not nukes is the problem in Iran, actions should be taken to make it impossible for Iran’s leaders to govern and impossible to feed Iran’s 70million people.
I cannot fathom why that man was not taken from that hall in handcuffs and charged with incenting genocide. Instead, the people in the hall applauded.
What have we sunk to?
Don’t know whether Kramer was “reiterating a program already in existence, but the philosophy that Israel has the right to impose genocide on others is deeply entrenched in Israel’s foundation mythos, documents, zionist founders, present day leaders and spokesmen and spokeswomen.
When Citizen uses ‘goy,’ I understand Citizen to mean persons who hold a differing value system from such as Kramer, Sneh, Jabotinsky, etc.
Mooser,
The underlying issue, that is to say, the bigger picture, is what Israel perceives to be a threat to its national security, i.e. the so-called demographic time bomb.
The demographic phobia is not new. In the seventies, there was a government committee, called the “Demography Committee”. Its first meeting was held in 1976 to study family planning in the Palestinain sector in Israel.
At that meeting, the participants decided that the meetings should remain secret. What is new in the recent demographics debate is its ferocity and saliency.
More recently, the National Security Council in Israel was tasked with managing Bedouin affairs in the Negev and drafting governmental policies to deal with them.
In its 2004 annual report to the Cabinet, the Israeli NSC described these Bedouin citizens as, “time bomb ready to explode”. The Council also indicated in its report that, “great danger is posed by Bedouins controlling wide areas of state land”. It went on to warn of the influence of “radical” Islamic elements on residents.
A significant part of the report discussed the “demographic problem” including the “increasing percentage of population growth” among Palestinians and Bedouins (both Arabs).
From these reports and “studies”, the government stepped in to curb the population growth by controlling poverty levels, targeting welfare programs aimed at helping single parents, targeting municipal services and so on.
However, given the perceived “urgency” of this demographic time bomb, Israel has been considered population swaps more seriously.
*** been considering population swaps more seriously.
Beth Simmons responded to my personal email to her, and her response was consistent with the one she sent originally to Electronic Intifada — but she rightfully notes that it is not up to Weatherhead to comment on the opinion of one of its fellows. It’s my belief that this is particularly the case where the comment in question did not occur at a Weatherhead sponsored forum.
That said, I proposed to her that the best course of action for Weatherhead would be to sponsor a debate between Kramer and Ali Abinunu at Harvard to discuss the topic. There are some radical Zionists, by the way, that maintain that the “one-state solution” is a form of genocide(!) .
I’m a fan of Beth Simmons.
do these neocons think the entire world is stupid? Don’t they realize that SOMEONE is paying attention and taking names, and that eventually, Jews everywhere as well as Iranians and Americans and more Palestinians will suffer for the crimes against humanity committed by these arrogant bastards.
CASMII does tremendous work.
They’ve mounted a campaign to try to stop the madness Israeli propaganda is ginning up against Iran.
Please take a look and do what you can to stop the insanity that will harm Iranians, Americans, Jews, and Palestinians:
An appeal to anti-war organizations & activists to oppose the increasing threats against Iran link to campaigniran.org
RE: “Rosen–DoD contractor, Kramer’s patron, and dominant male–epitomizes Harvard’s reigning ideology, neoconservatism”
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