Total number of comments: 127 (since 2009-08-05 19:36:57)
Chespirito
Attorney and author in New York with no ethnic or religious ties to anyone in the Middle East, except for a goddaughter in Istanbul. I write for the London Review of Books, Le Monde diplomatique, The American Conservative magazine, The National Interest, TomDispatch and CounterPunch. My book The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, is published by OR Books.
Website: http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/bradley-manning/
Showing comments 127 - 101
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Showing comments 127 - 101
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I think you all are being entirely too hard on Rep. Joe Pitts. Yes his advice for the "peace process" is ignorant, moronic even, but no more so than the inane guidance of folks like Peter Beinart, Michael Walzer, J Street and the whole caboodle of liberals who warble about peace while demanding $3bn/year in unconditional military aid for Israel. Against this backdrop of disingenuous lobbying for a never-ending "war process," Pitts' imbecilic counsel is, in its way, refreshing!
More bad news on the economic front: though high-wage manufacturing jobs continue to bleed away, the new jobs are low-skill, low-wage: security guard, home health attendant, fast food. Economists do report one silver lining, a burgeoning occupational sector that pays very well yet requires no skills, training or knowledge of any kind: counter-terrorism expert/expert on Islam. There is no end to the lucrative gigs that a self-anointed counter-terrorism expert can get training law enforcement, advising government agencies, serving as an expert witness (lol) and now military training as well. Can these fact-free islamophobes be deradicalized? I'm not optimistic. But there is a growing sense of how much toxic b.s. these soi-disant experts are spewing. I just opened the latest Harper's to find a gorgeous centerfold by the great journalist Ken Silverstein, "How to read a terrorism expert's resumé", an efficient dissection of one Matthew Levitt's puffed-up cv. More and more of us are growing weary of the crazies.
Am I wrong in seeing the word Transfer, as used here by Walsh, as a euphemism for Ethnic Cleansing? It might be a good thing to insist on using the term Ethnic Cleansing when we comment on or discuss this proposal, or at least putting the t-word in scare-quotes, "transfer," to indicate that it is a euphemistic falsehood. If there is any meaningful distinction between what Walsh is calling Transfer and what we all called Ethnic Cleansing in other contexts, like the Balkans, I'd be grateful to anyone who could explain it. And yes, I am aware that Ethnic Cleansing has no specific, codified legal meaning, which is not the least of its virtues.
Thank you so much David, that's praise from Caesar as I love your posts & comments. Btw, my handle on this blog does not derive from Che but from this guy!: http://www.chespirito.com
Yes, without a doubt: they were certainly trying to break him, both as an object lesson to other would-be whistleblowers, and probably to force him to implicate Assange. And yes, it's high time we recognized long-term solitary as a form of torture.
marc b., Manning is from all accounts able to stand trial, and has been from the beginning. The government has gone at length to pathologize this whistleblower as a nutcase; for the first 9 months of Manning's imprisonment at the Quantico brig, he was held in solitary, drugged to the gills, and for some of the time, deprived of his clothing and glasses, all, of course, "for his own good."
But it turns out that this purely punitive treatment went against the brig psychiatrist's own advice, who in 15 assessments over this period made it clear that Manning was mentally fine, NOT a suicide risk, and not in need of "prevention of harm" watch. A second psychiatrist brought in by Manning's defense attorney also found the young private to be in decent mental health, DESPITE the brig's punitive isolation.
Whistleblowers are frequently treated like crazy people; the Soviet Union used to lock up political dissidents in "psikuschkas," psychiatric prisons where the inmates were confined and drugged up, all of course "for their own good." Our government's treatment of Manning has not been markedly different. And it also bears comparison to our government's treatment of 70-100,000 other American prisoners in some form of long-term solitary for less exotic crimes.
Hi, Chase Madar here.
There is excellent day-to-day coverage of the Manning pretrial hearings by Kevin Gosztola at his FireDogLake blog, the dissenter: link to dissenter.firedoglake.com
which I highly recommend. Though courtroom procedure is not the major injustice in this case there is plenty to be learned from following the hearings and Gosztola brings a wealth of knowledge and a sharp critical perspective. (Kevin's own book on this case, coauthored with Greg Mitchell, is well worth reading.)
Pathetic.
Thank you MHughes976, that is enlightening. I wonder however if Ms. Goldstein is consciously alluding to the Thompson poem or just parroting the verbiage from the Brown decision.
It's pathetic, and instructive, to read Dana Goldstein's usage of the historically freighted oxymoron "deliberate speed" in The Nation. (Goldstein writes that she "support[s] the international community moving with deliberate speed to pressure the Netanyahu administration to end the occupation and create a viable Palestinian state.")
"Deliberate speed" comes from the Brown v. Board of Ed decision 58 years ago. The oxymoronic phrasing was ridiculed by progressives then as a euphemism for foot-dragging stasis. But here we have a nice liberal using it without any irony whatsoever, and her editor at the Nation didn't see a problem with it either. I'm a former Nation intern and feel some attachment to the magazine so I can't help but wonder, what are they doing publishing "deliberate speed"-freaks like Dana Goldstein and, presumably, Ben Adler on this issue? This is the kind of thing conservative American southerners wrote in the 50s and 60s, it is not remotely liberal or progressive. Ps: Who gives a toss about the "anguish" of middle-class American Zionists? I'm sick of hearing about it. Visit Qalandiya, write about the anguish of a few hundred thousand Palestinians living is refugee camps!
I haven't had a chance to read Beinart's book, but where does he stand on US aid to Israel–the $3bn a year in military aid, the loan guarantees, the unlimited diplomatic support? Until Beinart starts speaking out against Washington's lavish and unconditional support of Israel, his bottom line is no different from AIPAC's, and his pleas for peace and equality are just empty words. Sorry, but I'm sick of American intellectuals evading all responsibility for our own country's vigorous and destructive role in all this. As Woody says, Beinart's got a mile (or more) to go.
I highly recommend John Tirman's new book, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars (OUP, 2011). He is a serious writer, historian and moral voice, in a league apart from all the Peter Beinarts.
Ha! I'm right there with you btw those two stools Phil.
Liza Behrendt for President! Nicely done.
Wow! Great op-ed, I can't believe the WaPo printed it. Progress!
Too right, Citizen, too right! But worth a shot, and the best play to lead with all the same.
Equality under the law regardless of color or creed should be American values, and sometimes we have even practiced them. But very often in our history these have not been our operative values. We are less a "nation of immigrants" than a settler-colonial state, the result of some European tribes conquering territory and subjugating other tribes. Ditto for Israel. The settler-colonial tribalism of Israel speaks on a gut level to a lot of Americans, particularly to white Americans. (This, by the way, is not to disagree in the slightest with Mr McBride above.) I've all but given up on trying to talk values and morality to people like Scott Brown; Republicans and Democrats like that don't really give a toss about "Western democratic values," academic freedom or free speech, with them it's all narrowly self-interested tribalism. The only argument that might even make a dent with these yahoos is the sizable national security liability that our costly special relationship with Israel presents. Fortunately this happens to be an easy argument to make.
So, J Street is against war--that's good--but is all for sanctions. Though the analogy to Iran is far from perfect, it's worth noting that the sanctions against Iraq in the 90s most likely killed far more people than our 2003 invasion with ensuing carnage.
What an excellent interview. Thank you Robin Kelley, Alex Kane and MondoWeiss.
Rejecting all arguments rooted in self-interest is both squeamish and unwise. We left-liberal types badly need to learn the rhetoric of enlightened self-interest, especially when it comes to US intervention in the Middle East. Arguments rooted in national self-interest and arguments rooted in human rights are not always mutually exclusive or antithetical; they can be complementary. It's not on every foreign policy issue that national interest and human rights are in more or less perfect alignment, but when it comes to our imprudent and immoral support for Israel and Egypt's authoritarian government, we have no reason NOT to have our cake and eat it too, and to give it to the neocons/neolibs with both barrels. In other words, I disagree with Stern-Weiner and think the term "Israel firster" is sometimes perfectly appropriate.
Another great post from Phan Nguyen. Write more!
Great post, efficiently giving the skinny on Woolsey. It's worth asking: what exactly does the CIA do that we can't live without? That makes life in the US, and for that matter outside the US, better and less insecure? Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the conservative Democratic senator from New York who served in the Nixon administration, was hot to eliminate the CIA entirely. He saw them as a useless bureaucracy incapable of providing real intelligence and missing the story entirely on the collapse of the Soviet Union, which they had assessed in early '89 as a potent meance. More often than not the CIA justified its existence with overblown threat assessments. Scrapping the CIA is not on the political menu, but it's a proposal worth airing.
Yeah, where exactly is the complexity?
What a proper American policy towards Israel and Palestine should and should not be is remarkably simple. There is no good reason for arming and bankrolling Israel, its ethnic cleansing and domestic Jim Crow. Not from the point of view of human rights, not from the view of US national self-interest. It's not always that these two values are in such alignment.
Props to PennBDS organizers Naqvi, Noteware & Berkman and to Ali Abunimah for getting under the skin of Woolsey and Schanzer. You know you're getting somewhere when they have to wheel out the big guns to shoot you down--even if all that happens is the usual noisy neocon misfire with a concern-troll sonata as finale. Well done.
A lawyer chimes in: Adam is absolutely right that there is no "freedom of speech" issue raised with these new guidelines, none whatsoever.
All good blogs have a focus and without focus they disintegrate into nattering tedium. I applaud the new rules, they'll make this site even stronger.
A loss for CAP. CAP has many fine people working for it, especially the younger set, doing good policy research and writing good stuff. Glad to hear that Jilani is heading to a decent job.
Still, given the lack of backbone shown by the higher-ups at CAP in the face of this smear campaign, I can't help but wonder if CAP really stands for Chickensh*t And Pusillanimous.
Might be harder to get grant money with that name, but doesn't the shoe fit a little?
That Palestinian woman in shades is so damn cool, love it, love it, love it. What a great photo, the others too but especially that one.
I disagree with Mr Clark; I think Paul's take on the US role in Israel/Palestine is refreshingly straightforward and fair-minded. The problem with American foreign policy is not that we're doing too little in the Middle East, but that we're doing far too much. Simply eliminating US aid to Israel and Egypt would be a giant leap forward, for Americans, Palestinians, Israelis and Egyptians, and it would clear the way for real diplomacy, in which the US could have a limited role, towards a genuine peace settlement. (The current "peace process" is just a war process fueled and lubed by Washington.) The Ron Paul crowd is absolutely right to focus on the US role in Palestine/Israel and to try to rectify that rather than to wax about "social/political/cultural justice in Palestine." After all, what we Americans are most responsible for is our own policy of bankrolling ethnic cleansing and Jim Crow-ish racism. Yet most US intellectuals, even liberals, take our militant support for Israel (and for the Egyptian Scaf) as a fact of nature that cannot be questioned, like gravity. This needs to stop.
Thank you David Samel for your well-calibrated post, I couldn't agree with you more. Boy do I grow weary of professional intellectuals who are so eagerly tarring and smearing any left-lib-rad-prog who acknowledges that Ron Paul and his followers are making a positive contribution to the national discourse on foreign policy, criminal justice and civil liberties.
Those of us who are left-lib-rad-pwog would really do well to learn how to work with Ron Paul people towards common goals rather than posture and preen and point fingers at Glenn Greenwald screeching like pod people at the end of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (70s remake).
Coalition politics means working with people who are DIFFERENT from you, hold some DIFFERENT political views, and it entails getting out of one's comfort zone a bit, keeping silent at times, getting outside one's insular subculture. Dems like Frank, Kucinich & Grayson have had the maturity to team up with Paul to cosponsor legislation; we need to work together like this outside of Congress too, we'll find we can get a lot accomplished and we're not going to wake up with rightwing cooties or Ayn Rand tattoos. Let's find a way to work together towards important common goals.
Not least among the reasons I love MW is this species of post from Phil. Thanks man & happy 2012!
Good rhetorical point, the comparison w/ Russia. We've mostly accepted as normal that US journalists who report on Middle East either served in IDF (Jeffrey Goldberg, Robert Kaplan) or have kids who served in it (Gradstein, the NYTimes guy). If all these people had this intimacy with say Azerbaijan or Slovakia there would be much to-do about it; the weirdness of it would not go unnoticed.
Thank you Pat Carmeli for this terrific piece of reportage and media analysis. I don't know how I can still be shocked by the pervasive media bias against Palestinians, and against our own strategic interests, but hey, here I am, shocked again!
Great story, thanks for posting. Man, that Elliot Abrams really gives convicted felons a bad name, don't he?
The ballistic reaction speaks well of JStreetU, and this Tikvah gang sound horrible. But let's not forget for even a second that J Street proper supports an unconditional $3bn in military aid from the US to Israel. J Street says they are against settlements, but they are unwilling to push the US government to take any meaningful action that would discourage settlement-building; indeed they oppose the only US measures, like cutting off military aid, that might make Israel halt its ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This makes J Street only a more mealy-mouthed wing of the Israel lobby rather than advocates for real justice, prudence or sanity. Honestly, if you truly oppose the settlements how can you support giving Israel more US foreign aid than all of sub-Saharan Africa?
A few thoughts.
First, the use of covert ops in US statecraft is not as new as all that. The 1953 putsch against Mossadegh in Iran was covert CIA as was the overthrow of Arbenz the next year. Plenty of US covert support for authoritarian client states throughout Latin America during the Cold War, support that did not exclude the extrajudicial killing of Americans. (A Chilean judge has just indicted a former US military attaché in the murder of two American Allende sympathizers in 1973.)
Cohen describes this as "Likudization" because his is innocent of much knowledge of US history; also because for him Israel is a primary, if not the primary, point of reference for all things counter-terrorism and national security. And this he shares with the main stream of American intellectuals. Since 9/11, and probably before it too, the experience of Israel has been taken as the ultimate role model for how to deal with terrorists, an example always seen as a tactical success rather than a strategic failure. By contrast the national experiences of Italy, Colombia and the United Kingdom in dealing with terrorism have barely been examined in the US. These models and experiences are, unlike that of Israel, far outside the frame of reference of American intellectuals and policy makers. Of course the circumstances of these countries in dealing with say the Red Brigades or the FARC are very different from our own, but then Israel's particular situation is not any more relevant to the threat that we face in the US.
Cohen, good NYTimes liberal that he is, does a little more handwringing than is usual about "Likudization", but ultimately he signs on; for him the only alternative is Bush-Cheney's insane attempt at remaking the Middle East via invasion, pacification, and nation building.
Of course there is a third alternative, and that is ending US support to both Israel and Egypt's military; using diplomacy to cease tensions with Iran--and recognize that their getting nukes sooner or later is not the threat it is hyped up to be. This point of view is pretty marginal, found only among radical left, black nationalists, libertarians, and paleoconservatives like Ron Paul--political tribes that have a hard time getting along with each other, let alone cooperating, though there has been some progress. Let there be more.
Well it will be a pretty pathetic OWS if they end up primly tiptoeing around one of the main forces of US foreign policy. Look, the special relationship with Israel is not something deep in the fine print of American statecraft that spiteful hippies are peevishly (or worse) singling out, it is a key part of our flailing, destructive, costly foreign policy. And it is impossible to have an honest, unequivocal conversation about the Iraq War, about the saber-rattling with Iran, about our $60bn-over-30-years-support of the Mubarak dictatorship and ongoing support for SCAF without talking about our country's bizarre propensity to bankroll a certain wealthy country's religiously-based ethnic cleansing of its neighbors (and Jim Crow system at home).
As everyone's belts tighten here at home, more and more people are going to start getting wise to what an unjustifiable expenditure of American money and power this client-state subsidy is. Enough. And good on you Occupiers who are not backing down from making this an issue.
By the way, why on earth should the head of RWDSU care about criticism of Israel (if this is indeed the case)? How does this remotely affect the members of his union?
Pamela Anderson-Lévy is right! Point, Seafoid.
If I may toodle my own toy trumpet, I published a malicious 900-word parody of B-HL a year or so ago--- link to theamericanconservative.com
--
not one of my best parodies, but still I toodle it.
G'day Mayhem: one thing you may not know, but should, is that US aid to Israel is not some minor policy deep in the fine print of our foreign relations but a major engine of American statecraft. Israel has received more US foreign aid in the past thirty years than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined--it is the top recipient of US aid--which is bizarre to say the least. To criticize this lavish US subsidy for Israel is not to "single out" this client state out of spite, eccentricity of racism but rather to engage in the essential, unavoidable task of recalibrating a foreign policy that has so catastrophically failed both Americans and the people of the Middle East who are not Israeli. The question of the "special relationship" between the US and Israel is not marginal to us here, it is essential; it is not "unsavory" as you put it but wonderfully salubrious and rather urgent. And it's terrific that the Occupy movement is not afraid to take up this issue.
Oh dear! So some Tablet editor thinks Palestinian solidarity will "drown out" OWS's "compelling economic message"? Thanks for the concern, troll.
Is it callous to point out that if every Tablet subscriber who has participated in OWS opted to stay home and play Angry Birds instead, there would be no discernible difference whatsoever in downtown Manhattan? Who do these people think they're kidding?
America's expensive, destructive and thoroughly counterproductive Middle East policy is painfully related to our current crisis, and America's lavish strategic support for Israel and the Egyptian military absolutely needs to be discussed at Zuccotti Park and at Occupy sites everywhere. No amount of whiny special pleading by the Israel Lobby's liberal-ish fringe will change that. And if you think my sentiment is not "inclusive" enough, how "inclusive" is it for the US to subsidize ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Jerusalem?
Thanks to all the BDS activists out there making the connection between US foreign policy and the domestic economic crisis. You people are heroes.
Great video & great song! Mother Maybelle Carter is smiling in her heavenly home, plinking along on her autoharp.
¡Bienvenido!
Terrific piece. It deserves to have appeared as a feature in the NY Times Magazine or some such with a mass audience, but at least we have this great forum. Many thanks, Ch
Thank you for the reminder. Nothing makes me grind my molars more than when Americans Who Should Know Better pretend that the US is somehow a neutral bystander in Egypt when we have been intervening heavily, so heavily, by arming, training and bankrolling Mubarak and now SCAF sans Mubarak, for three decades. The second biggest recipient of US foreign aid. When pressed, supporters of this cruel and foolish policy argue that it's been a really terrific investment in America's security--forgetting that Mohammed Atta (remember him?) and Ayman Zawahiri were/are both Egyptians angered by the US government's heavy hand in their part of the world, and their attacks on the US are purest blowback.
And yet it's v difficult to get a straight answer from American intellectuals, on the left or right, about why we should be lavishly funding and arming SCAF; this overwhelming geopolitical fact of our alliance structure is either ignored or accepted as a fact of nature, like rain or gravity. (Ditto for our support of Israel too of course.) There is something in our destructive and self-destructive support for SCAF and for Israel that ought to upset American conservatives, liberals, moderates, you name it. And yet MondoWeiss is one of the few forums willing to raise the point. How much longer will this last?
I'm sorry but Remnick is still a turd for his stance on the Iraq invasion. If he (and George Packer, and Jeffrey Goldberg) had a scrap of integrity they'd move to Fallujah for, I dunno, just 6 months even, and write about the violence, chaos, destruction, lasting damage to the public health and environment that the war unleashed. Let these smart Ivy League guys write about the hospitals full of babies born with horrendous birth defects thanks to our depleted uranium shell casings poisoning the elements. Let these macho milquetoast laptop bombardiers drink the tapwater every, single, day and tell us how it tastes in Fallujah, in Sadr City, in Kirkuk. The New Yorker deserves to never live down their moral and intellectual failure that did so much to mainstream the '03 Iraq war. At least Remnick unlike so many others seems to have learned a little something, but the guy should've been tossed out on his ass a long time ago and replaced with Amy Davidson or someone else who has less difficulty consistently writing like a human. Again and finally, it's great that Remnick's learned a little, but we have no right to forgive him and his sleazy little buddies for anything.
Whoa, great pix, thank you so much. Such an eloquent antidote to the petty stereotypes being snarked out by Fox and various uncomprehending Obamabots.
Thanks ToivoS for posting this.
Weird that Kristof doesn't event float the possibility of Washington cutting off its lavish aid to Israel, which he, like nearly all American intellectuals, seems to take as a fact of nature just like Lake Erie or the Tehachapi Mountains. Why is it so hard for American opinion-makers to denounce the vile absurdity of military, economic and diplomatic aid to a country that is a) carrying out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, b) is one of the wealthier nations of the world, c) has a qualitative nuclear advantage over its neighbors, not to mention other reasons? Like Donald, I'm tired of grading establishment Americans on a curve here.
(One rare exception to this weird establishment silence on massive aid to Israel, even in a time of brutal fiscal austerity, is this op-ed by veteran journalist Celestine Bohlen, orginally published in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: link to host.madison.com
People may say that ending the Israel subsidy is a political non-starter, but it is not the job of journalists and intellectuals to voice only plans that are immediately feasible--most policy changes require plenty of cultivation and mobilizing buy-in before they become possible. And cutting off aid is not "radical" or "Lindbergian"; what's truly extreme and chauvinistic is our status quo policy. Honestly, if it were proposed that America start pumping Armenia with $3bn a year in aid so they could retake Nagorno-Karabakh, and be our "landlocked aircraft carrier" strategically close to the oilfields of Baku, would anyone take that seriously? Of course not--but the logic undergirding our massive Israel subsidy is not much different. Oh well, even as Kristof lags behind, at least some of the marchers at Occupy Wall Street are calling for cutting the purse strings to Israel, a modest step towards peace in the Middle East. Until then, Washington is contributing not to a peace process but a war process.
I'm glad that Sullivan is writing this stuff BUT one thing: the targeting of al Qaeda activists and other militants inside Pakistan via drone strike is fundamentally not a success. Rather it's a brewing disaster, radicalizing more and more of the country against the United States. (Just three years ago it was candidate John McCain who was blasting as reckless Obama's stated plan to expand the war into Pakistan; now this expansion of the conflict is Beltway wisdom, as per Sullivan's post.) We americanos and Pakistan have fundamentally different strategic interests in the region and the failure of our foreign policy elite to recognize this is only going to cause us all more and nastier problems. One example: the failed Times Square bomber from May 2010 was a Pakistani upset about all the US military violence directed against his homeland, with its civilian death toll the US media, US government and Pakistani government all pretend is minimal. (Pakistani journalists who look into this wind up dead.) We have every reason to expect our sloppily "targeted" killings inside Pakistan to kill more civilians there and bring about more terrorist blowback here.
Good for Ron Paul. Left-liberal types (like me) really need to learn to work with libertarians, paleoconservatives, & Ron Paul people on common goals. This is already happening to a degree, check out Scott McConnell's encomium of CodePink in the last issue of The American Conservative. It is essential that Americans fed up with an imperial foreign policy and fed up with our senseless support for Israel learn to make not only moral, humanitarian arguments but also arguments from American self-interest. The two rhetorical lines are not contradictory, they are complementary, convergent even, and I advise my fellow left-liberal types to read Paul's statement in full. (I don't interpret it as callous and egocentric as Dan Crowther does; rather it's a realistic assessment of the limits of American policy, the kind sorely lacking in our foreign policy discourse.) Let's face it, we in the largely leftish antiwar movement have accomplished not a whole lot over the past 10 years, more proof that, like it or not (and I don't) most Americans have no time for people who talk like Lisa Simpson. We will not get rightwing cooties if we learn a little from the Ron Paul crowd and cooperate with them where we can.
Some strategic cooperation with realists/paleocons/libertarians does not mean we lose the ability to disagree about healthcare, immigration, labor, federally enforceable LGBT rights, all areas where I've shed lots of sweat & tears as a bleeding-heart lawyer. But on civil liberties and foreign policy we had better work together. If not, we're effed.
Until reading the details of the case, I had assumed that what the Irvine students did at Oren's speech had been genuinely disruptive-- shouting the ambassador down throughout his talk, preventing him from finishing, creating a major ruckus. Silly me. Turns out all of the Irvine 11's statements combine lasted... less than one single minute. This comes nowhere near to infringing on Oren or anyone else's free speech. Deal with it: a free country is no place for public speakers with eggshell psyches, and Oren and his people are the ones using this incident as a way to silence free speech. The prosecution of these students is yet another disgrace to my country, in a week that's been damn full of them.
Disenchanted American Jews may turn against the AIPAC line, Netanyahu, settlements-- but will they turn against unconditional American aid to Israel? As long as America pledges $3bn/yr in military aid no matter what Israel does in Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, Israel has no real incentive to change its behavior.
Condemning the settlements is not enough. That, after all is the J Street line: criticism of the settlements combined with ironclad support for US aid to Israel--an incoherent line that will never produce any change. American Jews and non-Jews perhaps ought to focus on what we are most responsible for: America's very active and destructive role in bankrolling so much ethnic cleansing and bloodshed.
Why do American intellectuals like to talk about all things in the Israeli-Palestine conflict except for the outsized American role in it? Why is it so hard to get American intellectuals on both left and right to say, unequivocally, that US aid to Israel is wrong?
I'm not given to hyperbole but has there ever been a worse thinkpiece than Keller's? I defy anyone to name it. Keller's verbal plotz was rambling, self-serving, morally callous, incoherent, obtuse, oblivious, numbskulled, poorly argued, willfully clueless and above all just so extraordinarily, amazingly dull. How did I finish reading it? How did anyone? No wonder the Times is slowly tanking.
Yuk. After this you have to wonder: is there anything, ANYTHING that Obama won't say? Disgusting.
J Street, predictably, is against these reasonable and rather mild ads. link to jstreet.org
When it comes to anything beyond rhetoric, J Street is reliably on the side of AIPAC and Pam Geller, supporting dialogue, discussion, and a guaranteed free-gratis supply of US-made cluster bombs and white phosphorus for the IDF.
Well I hope Geller's nutty ads do run, they'll just be dousing the fire with gasoline, bringing more attention to the insanity of our costly and anti-humanitarian support for Israel. Most NYers riding the subway will not greet her ad with anything other than resentment. With unemployment and insecurity running high, do people really want to be told they have an obligation to pony up bigtime for... Israel? There is a limit.
All of which is to say: great job, Be On Our Side! Such a well-designed ad too; so clear, so appealing, so different from the lugubrious Bread & Puppets aesthetic that never fails to get me depressed.
US support for Sadat/Mubarak--estimated at $60billion over thirty years by the National Interest magazine--was and is still usually justified on national security grounds; that this massive subsidy somehow makes the US safer.
But has this lavish aid to the Egyptian dictator had any such effect?
The national security dividend of bankrolling the Mubarak dictatorship can be summed up, I believe, in five words:
Mohamed Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Bankrolling Mubarak was terrible for the human rights for Egyptians and terrible for US national security. It's long past time to stop bankrolling the Egyptian military, and to end aid to Israel as well.
BIG welcome to you Simone Daud. What a terrific addition to MondoWeiss, so exciting, and such a valuable service you provide. You were clearly too good for DailyKos--lord have mercy, what is UP with them?--and as every one said already, their loss = our gain.
And your first post is TERRIFIC.
This is not just a great post, it's a great ESSAY. Yo Phil and Adam you're awesome, don't you two ever stop now.
If J Street is really "pro-peace" as Noam Sheizaf labels them, why do they support unconditional US military aid to Israel? J Street soothingly advocates for dialogue, "expanding the tent," and free-gratis supply of American-made cluster bombs and white phosphorus for the IDF. Honestly, to support lavish American military aid to Israel is to support a war process, not a peace process; it's really that simple. I don't know why more people don't see through J Street's phoniness, but I'm glad to see in this comment thread that I'm far from alone.
Should anyone be interested, my longer analysis of J Street here--link to pulsemedia.org
One of the worst pieces of journalism I've ever read, and on so many levels; no wonder the Times is dying.
Yes, looking forward to more reports on this Levey!
Happy birthday Dershie baby, my favorite Twit, you!
Some seriously awesome posters.
Well I'm disappointed with my neighbor Rabbi Bachman's response here. Writing a nice little check to some nonprofit in Israel is a lovely gesture but it's nothing compared to the US$3bn/year in unconditional military aid that our government gives to Israel, along with unconditional diplomatic support.
We're not talking about an equal situation between the Jordan and the sea, with Americans on the sidelines like an impartial referee trying to help out with a highminded peace process. Truth is we Americans are bankrolling a war process and ethnic cleansing and we have a lot to do with what's going on there. People who, like Andy Bachman, refuse to face up to this are being disingenuous and irresponsible.
It's not clear yet whether or not the BDS resolution will come to a referendum vote by the Coop's membership. The Coop's rules about what it takes to get an issue voted on by the entire membership are pretty loose, and the PSFC's management seems not to want to bring it to a referendum.
Would the BDS resolution win if brought to a general membership vote? I really don't know. But it's a victory just to be airing these issues and getting people talking about them. Huffing and puffing from Dershowitz only fans the publicity higher. (Thanks Al!) There are a lot members new to this issue who are hearing the pro-BDS line for the first time, perhaps even hearing criticism of America's client-state patronage of Israel for the first time. And that right there is a victory.
Great piece, thank you.
I'm a Park Slope Food Coop member (and squad leader!) who supports the BDS initiative, mainly as a protest against our own country's lavish military and diplomatic support for Israel. There is simply no reason to arm and bankroll a country that is committing ethnic cleansing and other crimes, and a relatively wealthy country with nuclear weapons at that. It makes no sense. When our country stops singling out Israel for lavish aid, gifts of weaponry and unlimited diplomatic cover, then I will stop singling out Israel for BDS initiatives. To pretend that the we have the same relationship with Israel as with Syria, Bahrain, Sri Lanka is disingenuous, to put it mildly.
As for the Observer's smug squib against the BDS initiative, what else can you expect from a rag that used to employ Pam Geller as associate publisher? Honestly.
Grrrrracias Taxi.
Excelente. I do love the way that CodePink, coming out of leftist feminism, has become quite proficient in the language of national interest, the language of Mearsheimer, Walt and realism, a language that this country's majority of non-leftists readily groks and grooves to. This is what we need more of if we're ever going to launch a mass movement for a substantially demilitarized foreign policy. The confluence of leftwing idealists and nonleft realists that are rallying against our speical relationship with apartheid client state #1 is a mightily encouraging intellectual development in an otherwise bleak foreign policy discourse. Maximum respect to you CodePink: you rrrrock.
Sorry Kristy the Clown but J Street is not "balance", it's just a smoother, more passive-aggressive wing of the $3bn/year-in-military-aid-for-Israel lobby, and their bottom line is only minimally different from AIPAC's. I wish it weren't true and I hope that what Phil and many others optimistically predict comes true, that J Street will be a gateway drug that will swiftly bring people to a a JVP kind of place.
And at least JVP got mentioned, even if as a --I'm clutching my pearls-- LEFTIST group omigod. JVP you are awesome.
Bergen's drone strike civilian casualty estimate for the New America Foundation has been taking quite a beating lately, and rightly so. Its rosy estimate that very few civilians have been killed by the strikes since Obama took office has been undone by a British group called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and by an NGO called CIVIC; Pakistani-Scottish academic Idrees Ahmad has also been doing stellar critical analyses of the Bergen estimates on this at Al Jazeera English.
Part of what makes Bergen seem so reasonable is that he is flanked by a great many wingnuts to his right, the Long War Journal crowd of homemade counter-terror experts, whose civilian casualty estimates from the Pakistan drone strikes are lower still. But this should not blind us to the fact that Bergen's methodology is shoddy and its data collecting shockingly credulous ("if the Pakistani military reports 0 civilian deaths, it must be true").
I heard Bergen speak at a panel a few months ago and he blandly stated that the Af-Pak war costs "only" 1% of our GDP, and is therefore no big deal, and worth pursuing, which I found exceptionally cavalier. In his recent book he points out that so much of the 9-11 plotting and training took place outside of the al-Qaeda camps in AFghanistan: indoctrination and plotting happened in Hamburg; flight training in Florida; the money came from (if I remember) Bahrain. I quoted this back to him and asked why then the need for a massive Af-Pak war and he waffled some answer back.
The answer may well be that Af-Pak is Bergen's meal ticket; the day he says that fighting a war there doesn't really help American national security is the day that Jamie Oliver and Rachel Rae hold a press conference to say that the importance of delicious food really has been overstated and shouldn't be made such a big deal. Experts are so often loyal above all to their own expertise and what it can do for them.
And thanks Phil for calling our Terry Gross on her Hollywood tuff talk, one more reason I don't tune in to NPR.
Props where they're due: I disagree with Gov Christie about plenty but here he has really done himself and the state of New Jersey proud.
This post demonstrates once again how essential MondoWeiss is. It cannot be emphasized enough--and yet, rarely is-- that J Street's bottom line is almost indistinguishable from AIPAC's.
That really needed to be said: great post.
Instead of presuming to negotiate away Palestinian rights, we left-liberal americanos (goyim y compris) ought to focus on our most immediate responsibility: changing our own country's atrocious role in the conflict.
Before there can be any real peace process, we have to get our own government to stop fueling and funding the war process. However much we may wish to ignore it, our unconditional diplomatic support for Israel and $3bn a year in aid supports some horribly one-sided aggression (in Lebanon, Gaza) and ongoing ethnic cleansing (East Jerusalem, W Bank).
Why aren't more US left-liberal types pissed off about this? For that matter why aren't more conservatives & moderates upset? Why isn't J Street against this? I don't think the issue is so complicated.
Great essay!
Let me gratuitously note that David Greenberg's recent New York Times op-ed about the roots of Republican "isolationism" was a very sloppy distortion of the historical record... honestly, someone with a PhD in history should know better. (A brief corrective, if anyone's interested: link to pulsemedia.org
)
Atrocious, shoddy, but not surprising that NYT forgets to mention that.
Best analysis of conflicting drone-strike civilian casualty estimates is by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, link to english.aljazeera.net
One ought to be v skeptical of Bergen & Tiedemann's rosier estimates of how Obama lowered civilian casualties over at Center for American Progress. B&T's drone casualty study may look sound compared to those by neocon ultras like the Long War Journal but its methodology still turns to mush after even mild scrutiny, as Ahmad's article shows.
TERRIFIC post, many thanks. Look forward to reading your Berger bio.
James Wolcott on his wonderful blog has been all over the Mamet crackup--- link to vanityfair.com
Mamet's verbal shtick, though occasionally good pyrotechnic fun, has always seemed the expression of a smallish white guy with XXXL manhood issues. All of which the playwright has now made artlessly explicit, his mannered tough talk now indistinguishable from Hannity inanity.
Great post on the selectivity of metropolitan outrage.
This Macmoran, what was he thinking?
Yo, I love it when your wife's voice comes through here. Clearly a great woman.
How about instead of a draft, a year of universal military service for all, young women and young men? Harder for Dick W. Biden to wriggle out of, even for "other priorities."
I get the libertarian arguments against conscription but honestly how else can we force our irresponsible elites to have some skin in the game, pick up the tab for their own recklessness?
Yeah, military brass will be against it. And so what? The country is not run for the benefit of the military, but vice versa, at least in theory. Great cover story in current Harper's about civil-military relations in the US... I used to think only countries like Pakistan and Chile had civil-military relations, turns out, we have 'em too, and more and more every year.
Yes, Slaughter and Rubin say Syrians are brave.
They do not (and would never) say anything about the bravery of Palestinians taking similar actions under similar circs.
Ergo, I say Slaughter and Rubin are not brave.
Thank you for this. But: una preguntita. Who are
"the America Firsters who, nooses just recently stowed in the attic, staff the online battalions of the Palestine electronic solidarity movement and rage over America's 3 billion dollars of "money" sent to Israel, which has “plenty” of money."
Any examples of these AFers most welcome. Gracias!
These demonstrations are an absolute disgrace to my country. Inappropriate, undignified, chauvinistic, ugly, a harbinger of more violent destruction abroad and at home.
I'd bet my wallet that Egypt's new, humane policy on Gaza, pace Gideon Rose, will carry no significant cost to the post-Mubarak government. The US and Israel, once they stop their thuggish huffing and puffing, are simply gonna have to live with it. Egypt's future relations with Israel may well be like Turkey's: normal diplomatic recognition and relations but with plenty of freely spoken criticism of the Occupation and atrocities like Operation Cast Lead.
And Rose's position is anything but "realist" as it presupposes the identity of US and Israeli interests. As if.
Thank you Phil for this dispatch.
Tamimi's smile and defiant, upbeat contrapposto have made my day, thanks guys--
Fantabulous! Finally, a real alternative to AIPAC, not AIPAC-lite. Move-Over-AIPAC-Coalition member orgs, you are a collective Gallant to J Street's Goofus, and I wish you all the best!
Harold Koh is an Establishment hack, from a young age muy íntimo with the Rostows and now busy spinning casuistic justifications for indefinite detention, drone strikes, the criminalization of WikiLeaks, and more wars whenever requested. His opposition to the Iraq invasion was never because it entailed the mass death of civilians and destruction of a country but because the campaign lacked a good-enough legal rationale; those two might at first seem to be the same reason, but they are really quite different. Now Koh is giving small-minded legalism a bad name. If I may toodle my own horn,
link to counterpunch.org
Samantha Power is a genocide minimizer. To write a 500 page book subtitled "America and the Age of Genocide" and somehow not find the time to even mention the active role the US played in arming or aiding genocide in the mid 1960s Indonesia, in Guatemala, or the Iraq sanctions, is a level of moral and scholarly shoddiness that is breathtaking. (Oh, she did mention East Timor in one... single... sentence.) And how is such a work greeted by we American intellectuals? It gets a Pulitzer. If I may toodle my own horn,
link to counterpunch.org
Thank you. Pa' que todos sepan: Chespirito agrees very strongly with Adam on this.
The template for this act of war in most reasonable heads is Kosovo. That act of war seemed like a no-brainer at the time, and is vaguely remembered as a smashing success. A closer look reveals intensified slaughter of civilians on the ground after bombing started, followed by over 200,000 Serbs and Roma ethnically cleansed. The "100,000 unaccounted-for Kosovars" that State spokesman Jamie Rubin announced in the build-up turned out to be the wildest of exaggerations.
Libya is not by no means a perfect analogy, yet I expect hindsight to show ten years from now that our act of war had the effect of pouring gasoline on the fire rather than putting out the flames.
Feliz cumpleaños to you, o MondoWeiss, and a five-champagne bottle salute to Phil and Adam for their work that is so consistently fearless, savvy, stylish and wise.
Yukky, but unsurprising. (And the incident that GL relates took place at Trinity U in the Irish Republic, not in England.)
But we most certainly are and have been intervening in Bahrain's civil war, by continuing lavish military support for the authoritarian government there. link to tomdispatch.com
Nor were we "neutral" towards Egypt as we had bankrolled Mubarak to the tune of $70bn over three decades, and Joe Biden could not bring himself to call his close personal friend a dictator.
Let's be clear: America is not neutral with clean hands towards Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen, or Israel-Palestine.
Thanks for putting this up. Desch has done so much good critical work on US foreign policy, always cogently presented, but I think he is wrong to view militants in the tribal wilderness of northwest Pakistan as a major threat to US security, a threat warranting drone strikes. Drone strikes may or may not be effective at the operational level but at the level of strategy they are dumb, as the excellent Malou Innocent argued recently on this realist-minded blog. link to nationalinterest.org
A few thoughts on Manning.
Manning allegedly released these documents only after going up the chain of command to complain about the role he and many other military personnel were being asked to play in rounding up Iraqi civilians for torture by Iraqi authorities, a clear violation of US military law as well as the Geneva Convention. What he did is covered by the Military Whistleblower Protection Act, though the government will of course interpret this statute as narrowly as possible.
And where is the damage? No one in or out of government has been able to find a specific instance of these leaks harming US national security. SecDef Gates himself has dismissed the overheated rhetoric, and the Pentagon's own PR flack has denied any examples of Afghan informants being targeted for reprisals since the AfPak war logs were released.
US security interests have indeed suffered over the past ten years thanks to the invasion of Iraq; the incoherence and failure of the Af-Pak campaign; ongoing support for Mubarak ("not a dictator" according to Joe Biden) and for Israel; a deliberate and consistent "fuck you" strategy in the soft power arena.
Don't try to blame any of this on some private.
Yo no contaba con tu astucia!
Translation of biorabbi: "Israel is not as homophobic as some other countries, therefore you Americans have to give us $3bn a year in military aid, plus unlimited diplomatic support for our ethnic cleansing. Thanx!"
Gracias Seham. That is truly the best wedding photo I have ever seen, and likely ever will see.
Now that is a pleasant surprise. If the tide is turning in Brooklyn-- the homeland of so many grinning partisans of ethnic cleansing in Palestine-- than we might just be a little stronger than we thought.
Well good for Rand Paul. Don't agree with the guy on responsibility for the BP spill, the Civil Rights Act of '64 or political economy in general, but credit where it's due.
And by the way, why the need to smear Rand Paul or his father as "isolationists"? Paul pere et fils want trade, diplomatic relations, travel just like everyone else. Cutting off aid to Egypt & Israel will not suddenly turn us into a hermit-kingdom like North Korea, that's ridiculous. Let's hope Rand Paul gets more unequivocal and bolder on this topic. Because the center-left in this country just doesn't have the guts to talk like that.
Case in point is Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski, who says aid to Egypt should go on the chopping block only if Mubarak doesn't call off his riot police. Does this mean that the aid to Mubarak was somehow legit before all this? Sorry, there is just no possible justification for US aid to Egypt, or to Israel. Aid shouldn't be conditioned on improvements in human rights or some illusory slowdown in West Bank colonization, aid should just be zeroed out immediately.
And thank you J Street for revealing your true ethno-chauvinist colors by calling Paul's statement "alarming." Honestly, how can nice liberals insist that Israel deserves more foreign aid than Haiti or Nicaragua? Pathetic!
¡Ay dios mio! This reminds me of "Biclops", a superhero comic put out by the American Eyewear Association in an episode of the Simpsons years ago that featured a bespectacled hero. Bart and Millhous by several gross of them while running the local comic book store and don't move a single copy. They go bankrupt I think.
Cappy Israel looks to be right up there with Biclops in terms of desperate lameness, and in terms of thoroughgoing ineffectuality as propaganda. Would any kid want to read this crap? I wouldn't worry about any young minds being corrupted here folks. Oh hasbarites, where is your game?
Too right Djinn. There area bout 25,000 American inmates in long-term solitary. What is being done to Manning is cruel and barbaric. It is far, far harsher what accused service members normally get while awaiting a court martial. All that said, it is not exceptional treatment against a prisoner in the US.
Much of the nastiness visited upon terror suspect at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and even our federal prisons is stuff that gets done to US inmates on a regular, tho' less systematic basis. James Foreman of Georgetown Law has written a very strong, well-documented article about this, "Exporting Harshness," link to scholarship.law.georgetown.edu
We are kidding ourselves if we think our penal system and criminal justice system are wonderful examples for the world, except for the blemishes caused by our Global War on Terror. Truth is, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the treatment of Bradley Manning are a lot less exceptional than we'd like to think.
Um, Coca-Cola and Dell's representatives in Israel proper lobbied the Israeli government for a tighter Gaza blockade?
eee, could you supply some evidence for this interesting assertion?
I am broadminded to a fault but I find this just about impossible to believe.
Thank you Phil for panning this nugget from the Wikileaks stream, and may the gods give Bradley Manning strength.
To state what is perhaps obvious: in America, an outspoken black woman who is left wing in a non-pc, non-Soros-fundable way, will be targeted for all kinds of public vilification.
Brava!
Hear hear! The American Left has a lot to learn from the paleo/realist line of Desch/Mearsheimer/McConnell & the like. It does NOT make you Charles Lindbergh to say (and say loud) that the US national interest--security, defense, diplomatic, economic-- is gravely damaged by our support for Israel. This does not make you an "amoral realist", "coldblooded" or some kind of creepy "nationalist." Adult citizens of all sovereign nations think and talk about national interest, usually quite uncontroversially--unless of course it's an American having second thoughts about our lavish, slavish support for Israel.
Left-liberals really need to learn to speak the language of national interest, and to make this argument well. As our $5bn/year subsidy to Israel & Egypt is both damaging to geopolitical interests and an affront to any notion of human rights, there is no reason to keep cutting the checks. And yet American intellectuals are usually more focussed on whether there should be a two-state or one-state solution, or even, presumptuously, what kind of protest is morally sound for the Palestinians. Let's get our own country's policy in order first--or at least make it a talking point!
Ah yes, the power of Anonymous is surely equal to the power of the big corporations, and it's very brave of you to stand up to the both of them equally. Joer you are an even-handed "equal opportunity offender" in the heroic mold of Dennis Miller (bendito sea) and courageously not "politically correct"! Yeeeah, LOL! LOL!
Now please to tell me in what language "joer" means "troll"?
Yes: FREE BRADLEY! as well.
Bradley Manning is a great American patriot, a great moral actor, a great human. And may Mike Huckabee rot in the hot place for interrupting his own Christmas childrens book signing to grinningly recommend the death penalty for this fine young man. Lordy, what a perfect, fragrant parable of everything ghastly about the Evangelical right in this country.
As the Simpsons' Otto once said, "That Jesus guy must be spinning in his grave."
Is Peter Beinart against his country's $3bn+ per annum bankrolling of Israel? Is suspect not. It's awfully big of him to acknowledge a few of Israel's flaws but where he stands on US diplomatic and military aid to Israel is, I think, the critical issue for American intellectuals. And I'd be surprised if Beinart's bottom line on this issue is any different from AIPAC's or Bibi's.
Three cheers for David Samel!
Question: during the course of the debate in question, did any of the panelists address whether or not the US should continue its $3bn+ a year in military aid to Israel, and its unconditional diplomatic support?
In most instances of "the debate" this issue is usually (and weirdly) absent, tho' it is the one thing that Americans are most directly responsible for. The other issues raised in this exchange-- rights of return, the morality of Zionism, the "delegitimation" of Israel--are interesting and important but isn't the big issue for Americans our own robust, very active and quite destructive role in all this? Why isn't this at center stage?
Last time I checked, J Street wholeheartedly supports US military aid to Israel, diplomatic support as well, making their bottom line no different from AIPAC's. Why any liberal (or for that matter conservative or moderate) would J Street even a nickel is beyond me.
What a magnificent piece of activism. Chicago-area CJPIP, I salute you. Your message is clear, well-packaged, and aimed squarely at what we Americans are most responsible for: American policy.
(It drives me nuts that American intellectuals are more likely to have an opinion about Israeli policy, or even Palestinian resistance tactics, than the very destructive role that our own country is playing in all this. The cluelessness! The arrogance!)
Great job CJPIP. Honestly, with groups like yours around I don't know why anyone would give even 5 cents to the kinder, gentler AIPACers at J-Street, whose support for unconditional US aid to Israel, military and diplomatic, makes them just one more part of the problem.
I remember sitting in on some meeting of the Democratic Party-oriented American Constitutional Society at NYU Law back in the Fall of '03 or Spring of '04... Noah Feldman, faculty sponsor of the ACS, solemnly told us he thought our invasion of Iraq was "probably not in our national interest, but morally the right thing to do." He seemed to get a little choked up in the middle of that last phrase.
He then lectured us that we should never, ever compromise our moral values for political gain.
Somehow I managed not to burst out laughing during this meeting.
I wish I could be happy for J Street's fundraising success... but no.
J Street is in complete agreement with AIPAC on the toxic fundamentals of US policy towards Israel: $3bn/year in weaponry and nearly unlimited diplomatic cover, not to mention condemnation of the Goldstone report.
It ought to be so, so easy for American liberals, and conservatives and centrists for that matter, to condemn US support for Israel as the strategic and moral blunder that it is--the issues are neither ambiguous nor complex. J Street however will be guaranteed to muddy the waters and obstruct any truly meaningful change of US policy. Like AIPAC, they are part of the problem; with increased budget, they become a bigger part of the problem.
I do hope that Phil is right in his contention that J Street will come to serve as a "gateway drug" to a universalist, non-chauvinist, perspective on Israel-Palestine and America's destructive role therein. But I'm not optimistic.
Hey, great! George Packer! Peter Beinart! Two of our finest foreign policy intellectuals! One reviewing the other! In the New Yorker! Awe-some! Great!
Um, does anyone know a good onomatopoetic representation of vomiting? Not the quick easy kind but the painful sustained retching that goes on at least 30 minutes? Thanx!
That's absolutely right. The cost of arming and bankrolling Israel is far greater than the sum total of the money spent. This aid and ceaseless diplomatic support have cost the US much prestige and goodwill in the world, and earned us great rancor. America's special relationship with Israel is a strategic liability. Pointing this out cannot rationally be considered "singling out" Israel or "demonizing" it in any way.
We have all heard the complaint that Israel is unfairly singled out for criticism as other nations behave worse. Fowke's response to this is an eloquent response from a Brit.
But for Americans, the response is far simpler. The US government singles out Israel for more foreign aid than any other country. Americans therefore have every reason to single out Israel for special scrutiny because we are all bankrolling and arming what they do. This cannot be said of Zimbabwe or North Korea.
Yet how many Americans even know about our $3bn per annum of military aid to Israel? How many know about our $2bn per annum gift to the Mubarak dictatorship? Most of us Americans ignorantly believe that we are somehow honest brokers in a "peace process" even as we lavishly support one side against the other. This is no peace process, it's a war process.
Does anyone know of any polls or surveys measuring how many Americans actually know who our top two recipients of foreign aid are?
Until we stop arming and bankrolling Israel and Egypt--a day which cannot come soon enough--we americanos have a categorical duty to single out those countries for criticism.
Er, did anyone expect the US to be a moral arbiter of the attack on the flotilla?
Hard to believe they do. Nobody in the rest of the world is looking for the US to be a moral arbiter here. They know full well that the US supports and bankrolls its client state no matter what they do. They know that nothing is going to mess with our unconditional annual gift to Israel of $3bn in military aid. (A gift which J Street supports to the max, which says pretty much all you need to know about this "kinder gentler" faction of the Israel Lobby.) They also probably know about our $2bn annual gift to Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian government.
I would hazard that a solid majority of my fellow americanos are not even aware of these special relationships, and therefore really do tend to see the US as an honest broker in the Middle East, something I never cease to find amazing. And frustrating.
Drone strikes aside, any American role as a neutral arbiter in the Israel-Palestine conflict was already quite impossible.
YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME!
I salute you Ms Abileah and the great Codepink!
And your fake AIPAC flier was great too, so much defter than the leaden, embarassingly unfunny antics of the Yes Men and Billionaires for Bush. (Sorry but it just has to be said.)
Amen Avi.
Or rather, Israel certainly is engaged in an asymmetrical conflict--with immense military advantages to the IDF.
No one at last Thursday's "Lawfare" conference mentioned the heavily asymmetrical death tallies on each side in the assault on Gaza, with 100 Palestinians killed for every Israeli killed.
The self-pitying tone of American neocons and their Israeli allies is, given these figures, all the more grotesque.
Great post, counselor!
Ahh, asymmetry and the self-pity of war...
International law has traditionally belonged to the Great Powers; the recent attempt by the US and Israel to reshape jus in bello to their advantage with this ridiculous "lawfare" offensive is not, alas, new.
For example: today's unprivileged non-uniformed combatants are the direct descendants of the colonial "savages" of the late 19th century, against whom international law permitted unrestrained violence-- dum dum bullets, the wiping out of entire villages, you name it.
Fréderic Mégret of McGill Law School has a great piece on this here-- link to papers.ssrn.com
It was v. frustrating that this conference had such little Q&A... I was dying to ask any of the panels what they thought about one recent instance of lawfare , one which was mysteriously not mentioned, even tho' it has done grave damage to America's legitimacy in the world... the manipulation of the Geneva Conventions by Yoo & Bybee to authorize torture! I mean, if that isn't lawfare, then what is? Ditto for efforts by some neocon lawyers (like the redoubtable Ken Anderson) to fashion a legal rationale for our drone strikes.
'Cause when it comes to "using or misusing international law to gain political or military advantage"--the definition of lawfare recited numerous times at the conference--then the US government is and has been the world leader in the field. A couple of the panelists had just enough intellectual honesty to admit this, and that the supposedly newfangled trick of lawfare is actually older than Sun Tzu. (This was then speedily denied by other panelists, like the ghastly Jeremy Rabkin, the giggly Glen Beck of international law.)
Also, please note one of the 6.5 CLEs offered at the confab was a hard-to-come-by "ethics" credit. Ethics! They were teaching us ethics!
Great report.
Trivia buffs will note that the program's NYCLA host was Nicholas Rostow, nephew of Walt Rostow (Kennedy and then Johnson's national security advisor, and a leading architect of the Vietnam War who championed aerial bombardment of North Vietnam) and son of Eugene Rostow, former dean of Yale Law who served in LBJ's state department was a major force behind the the second iteration of the Committee on the Present Danger. Walt was named after Walt Whitman and Gene after Eugene Debs. A good pulpy history of this family needs to be written.
ps: I believe it's Brooke Goldstein, not Brooke Gladstone.
Hear hear, Donald. Power is awful. In her lengthy Pulitzer-prize winning book subtitled "America in the Age of Genocide"she does not find time to mention the active role the US has played in the genocide of 100,000 Guatemalan peasants, of a few hundred thousand Indonesian communists, or of the arguably genocidal results of our 1990s sanctions against Iraq. But, in fairness, she does devote a single sentence to the US-supported genocide in East Timor.
Not sure if she's really much of a realist today. Yeah, she's relatively civilized about Israel/Palestine but she has for advocated for a while escalating the Af-Pak conflict, also, I believe, bombing Khartoum even though the effects of such an attack might not be at all beneficial for the Darfuris and other refugees. Is that realism? Even her admirable assertion back in 2002 that the US should quit bankrolling Israel's military and invest in Palestine is immediately followed by stating the need for a massive military occupation of the region--from one occupier to another?
Sunstein is no prize either, he believes he's found mathematical proof the death penalty works.
Even when confined to the university, mugs like this are a pain in the neck enough. Do we really need them in high government positions?
At any rate, thanks so much Phil for posting this wince-making speech. Next time I'm dragged to a tedious wedding I will bring a printout of Wieseltier's speech to make me realize how much worse it could be!
A fine post. Goldstone is a great man, far more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Obama.
But the Goldstone Report does have a major flaw. Yes the report thoroughly documents the violations of international law in how each side fought--the jus in bello. But there is no analysis of the jus ad bellum--the legality of launching the attack in the first place. Israel's defenders of course say that the assault on Gaza was in self defense, and therefore warranted, but this is not at all consistent with the facts--though it is of course consistent with the usual, bogus narrative of the IDF reluctantly engaging in "reprisals" only. Both Jennifer Loewenstein in the latest print edition of CounterPunch (Vol 17, no1!) and Muhammad Idriis Ahmad in Pulse Media (link to pulsemedia.org
have eloquently addressed this.
Alas, NGOs typically typically run away from the issue of jus ad bellum when it comes up. For one thing, groups like Human Rights Watch need to be perceived as neutral arbiters when they enter a war zone to document violations in whether the rules of war are being followed. This is a good reason! But human rights NGOs are also desperate to cultivate an air of apolitical neutrality, difficult to do when you weigh in on whether a country was right or wrong in going to war. Also, restrictions to jus ad bellum, though established in the UN Convention, the Nuremberg Principles, and partially in the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, are rarely followed, certainly not by great powers and their client states. Consequently it is embarrassing to the whole enterprise of international law to be pointing out how this very important bit of international jurisprudence is wantonly disregarded, especially by great powers and their client states.
By the way I would not put any stock in international law to bring about a just solution for Palestinians or for anyone else. Some international law is nice, yes, but so many structures of international law are just awful when you look at it--the World Bank, the IMF, not to mention the that the whole UN system is built on an oligarchical structure with the five permanent security council members holding all the good cards. Do we really want more of this? A modicum of international justice will only be possible as a result of politics, not as a product of lawyers and special tribunals. It is time we wised up about the very limited potential of international law to achieve justice and peace here or elsewhere. Just because rotten people like Dick Cheney and Avigdor Liebermann are against something doesn't mean it's the answer.
Ha! Great advice... let us keep the flame of Eddie Haskell burning...
America First, are you some false-flag neocon provacateur? Yo, we got enough problems in America without you making things worse, First.
A quibble: "collapsed" is here used as an intransitive verb rather than a transitive verb. It is transitive verbs that have direct objects and generally own up to some kind of active agency.
PW's friend's point however remains dead right.
J Street supports continuing American military aid to Israel. From their website: "American assistance to Israel, including maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge, is an important anchor for a peace process based on providing Israel with the confidence and assurance to move forward on a solution based on land for peace." Am I being too harsh, or does this statement of position say 90% of what one needs to know about them?
It ought to be so, so easy for American intellectuals, journalists, elected officials, clergy, and academics to demand an immediate cut-off of aid to Israel. Israel is on the global scale a wealthy country, a strategic liability to the US, and continuously violating well-established norms of human rights. What rationale can there be for giving Israel $3 billion a year? (And as we all know on this site, that is more than we gladhand to any other nation.)
A bit weirdly, debate about Israel among American liberals immediately jumps to the issue of a one-state versus a two-state solution, or to the desirability of a BDS campaign. Shouldn't the first order of business be to stop our massive gifts of military aid? Isn't this the pith of the US-Israel alliance? The US will never be an even halfway credible arbiter of peace if we are shipping free-gratis cluster bombs to the IDF, expediting them when so requested.
So it's super that J Street rallied behind congressional rep Donna Edwards after she voted "present" on a resolution in support of the IDF's attacks on Gaza. (I wonder how they would have reacted if she had voted against it?) Sure, J Street is some progress over Aipac.
That said, J Street's positions should never mark the outer limit of acceptable debate on America's role in the region. American policy towards Israel, Palestine and the Middle East in general is not some minor private matter to be hashed out by rival wings of the Israel lobby. By the same token, US policy towards Russia should not be determined by the Polish-American and Georgian-American lobbies. Our foreign policy, especially in parts of the world where much is at stake, is of immense importance to all Americans, including especially those who don't have a religious or ethnic connection to the region.
Does anyone know where does J Street stand on America's annual gift to Israel of $3 billion in military and nonmilitary aid?
J Street's website voices support for a strong US-Israel alliance, one that assures "Israel's qualitative military edge." link to jstreet.org
It seems that J Street's bottom line here is no different from AIPAC's. Or am I missing something?
Enlightened Americans often grapple with the issues of whether a binational state or a two-state solution is better for Palestine and Israel; whether a boycott and divestment policy is appropriate. It seems to me however that the first order of business is to demand an end to all US aid to Israel. And not just military aid, but all aid, as money is fungible.
There is no case for giving foreign aid to Israel. It is by global standards a wealthy country. It uses the military aid we send them to commit war crimes and copiously documented human rights abuses. The alliance with Israel confers far more geostrategic liabilities than advantages.
Why is it so difficult for American intellectuals, journalists and politicians to call for a clear and unequivocal end to US aid for Israel?
I appreciate that J Street is pushing the debate in the right direction inside the Israel Lobby, and surely it takes guts to brave all the insults and rage from the Commentary crowd. But J Street's positions should in no way mark the acceptable outer limit of debate on what the proper relationship should be between the US and Palestine and Israel. And a group that supports continuing military aid to Israel is simply not providing much of an alternative to the dismal status quo.
It is long past time to end our counterproductive and costly aid packages to Colombia, to Egypt, and to Israel.
Callooh callay, the scales have fallen from this whiz kid's eyes. But it is far too easy to blame our failing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan on neocon extremists, awful as they are. The problem is bigger, and wider.
Let's just look at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, which Rory Stewart currently heads. It is no neocon hotbed, it's full of nice liberals. And yet...
Stewart's predecessor as director of the Carr Center, Sarah Sewell, wrote a slavering introduction to the new US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. For Sewell, a former Pentagon official, human rights work can be an excellent helpmeet to counterinsurgency warfare in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. I doubt she identifies as a neocon, and yet she's happy to lend a hand with invading and occupying.
Sewell's predecessor at the Carr Center, Michael Ignatieff, is also no neocon, yet he was a big, big fan of the Iraq War, not to mention the invasion of Afghanistan.
Samantha Power, Stewart's former colleague, did not support the Iraq War, but it would be too much to say she has ever opposed it, with speeches as peace rallies, in her columns at Time Magazine or elsewhere. From her perch in Obama's National Security Council, she supports the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and has argued that our allies who don't contribute troops or treasure to this campaign should be punished. (See her Time Magazine column of April 17 2008.) She's no neocon, but still an ardent supporter of imperial adventures and yes, nation-building. (Power has in the past espoused some very sane views on America, Israel and Palestine; I hope she still does.)
There are plenty of other liberal hawks (like Packer), humanitarian interventionists, neoliberals, centrists, and NGOs (Center for American Progress; Feminist Majority Foundation) who are fully on board with America's invasion and occupation in Afghanistan and the spread of the war into Pakistan. They are not neocons, not part of an extremist counterculture, but their bottom line is pretty much the same. It is understandable that Rory Stewart, who supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and is having second thoughts about both, should now try blame these disasters on another faction of the foreign policy elite. But it is also shoddy and dishonest.
Great thread on these ludicrous "Spartan" wanna-bes.
Andrew Bacevich, who retired with the rank of colonel from the US Army, wrote the definitive review of Imperial Grunts in The Nation four years ago, link to thenation.com
If I may toodle my own squeaky horn, I posted a parody of Kaplan on antiwar.com a couple weeks ago, in which the Thucydides of The Atlantic reports from Iowa. Warning: Perrier-swilling coastal elite intellectuals may not be able to handle the bad news Kaplan sees looming on the midwestern horizon.
link to original.antiwar.com