Long Week

Well, well, well. This week in absurdity. Lemme see. Where to start?

Maybe not start at all – it is, after all, merely a compounding of what has been going on.

Oh, what the hell.

Our illustration was part of an article sent me by one of you, but I could never reproduce the text. I’m going to keep working on it. Meanwhile, let’s call it “Cheney’s Fan Club”.

For one thing, I usually avoid seeing or listening to anything Bush says as I find it irritating to say the least. So, I did see him a couple times the past week for the first time in perhaps a year or so. I was overwhelmed at his mental deterioration. I remember watching the debates with John Kerry and he seemed like the good ol’ boy type with a lot of money. Now, he stumbles every sentence, has trouble putting together a coherant sentence, seems to giggle at himself but acts as if it is a sign of wit. He did. However, have a colonoscopy. They found six polyps and an undigested Haliburton contract.

I came to the conclusion that he was unable, literally, to change a position on anything as even one change would mean several differences in procedure and he could never follow that. He actually is talking about Al Qaeda in Iraq as if it is a part of Bin Laden’s group and always has been, despite more literate members of his administration who manage to finesse the issue. None of them, especially him, will admit how much Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden hated each other and how Saddam would have had Bin executed with a snap of his fingers if he had the power. Bin Laden, on the other hand, was certain that Saddam was destined for hell.

Gonzo was caught in perjury, lying to Congress under oath. Main witness against him is the head of the FBI. The Attorney General is responsible for looking into this, but such an event is unlikely. The Solicitor General could appoint a special prosecutor, but such a move would need administrative (White House) approval. Such a request would never get past Scooter’s desk, but today would probably reach Cheney and then I doubt that he would approve that. This leaves the Senate with the recourse of sending the Seargent at Arms (the guy who announces the Pres when he give the State of the Union Speech) to arrest him and bring him to the senate for trial. I think Gonzo can run faster than him.

This raises another question – ever wonder why the word “Impeach” comes up so much during this administration? Now Conyers’ office was occupied becaquse he would not go ahead with impeachment, even though Kucinich still has a bill pending on that. At least three or perhaps five officials must be impeached.

I did see the debate and the aftermath. The biggest surprise was to see Edwards actually make sense and sound believable. He is terrible on foreign policy in general, but does seem to get the point on Iraq. He is right on target about a government run health care system for EVERYONE. Again, no one answered all the question well except Kucinich. The Clinton Ombama deal seems to be a result of the media as not a single vote will be cast in any primary for quite some time – they all have zero delegates at this point. Gravel is nice to see and fun, but the media will not pay attention to him.

I have seen nothing in the Republican (pardon the expression) primary worth even discussing.

I did hear an interesting point made by an ex-CIA officer pointing out that nothing in the Constitution regarding impeachment is in the “subjenctive.”

The articles below are very diverse on the Middle-East. Hamas never gets much press space in the U.S. where they are usually confused with Al Qaeda (literally, “The Base” or “Foundation”) and Hezbollah. They are three very different organizations.

ZNet | Israel/Palestine

Hamas’ stand

by Mousa Abu Marzook; Los Angeles Times; July 16, 2007

Damascus, Syria — Hamas’ rescue of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.

It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents. But we are not part of a broader war. Our resistance struggle is no one’s proxy, although we welcome the support of people everywhere for justice in Palestine.

The American efforts to negate the will of the Palestinian electorate by destroying our fledgling government have not succeeded — rather, the U.S.-assisted Fatah coup has only multiplied the problems of Washington’s “two-state solution.”

Mr. Bush has for the moment found a pliant friend in Abu Mazen, a “moderate” in the American view but one who cannot seriously expect to command confidence in the streets of Gaza or the West Bank after having taken American arms and Israeli support to depose the elected government by force. We deplore the current prognosticating over “Fatah-land” versus “Hamastan.” In the end, there can be only one Palestinian state.

But what of the characterization by the West of our movement as beyond the pale of civilized discourse? Our “militant” stance cannot by itself be the disqualifying factor, as many armed struggles have historically resulted in a place at the table of nations. Nor can any deny the reasonableness of our fight against the occupation and the right of Palestinians to have dignity, justice and self-rule.

Yet in my many years of keeping an open mind to all sides of the Palestine question — including those I spent in an American prison, awaiting Israeli “justice” — I am forever asked to concede the recognition of Israel’s putative “right to exist” as a necessary precondition to discussing grievances, and to renounce positions found in the Islamic Resistance Movement’s charter of 1988, an essentially revolutionary document born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago.

The sticking point of “recognition” has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel’s “right” to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian “recognize” the monstrous crime carried out by Israel’s founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

As for the 1988 charter, if every state or movement were to be judged solely by its foundational, revolutionary documents or the ideas of its progenitors, there would be a good deal to answer for on all sides. The American Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident truth of equality, simply did not countenance (at least, not in the minds of most of its illustrious signatories) any such status for the 700,000 African slaves at that time; nor did the Constitution avoid codifying slavery as an institution, counting “other persons” as three-fifths of a man. Israel, which has never formally adopted a constitution of its own but rather operates through the slow accretion of Basic Laws, declares itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews, conferring privileged status based on faith in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.

The writings of Israel’s “founders” — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine’s non-Jewish inhabitants: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.” A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over “recognizing” Israel’s right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the “rights” of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

I look forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: “Here, here is your family’s house by the sea, here are your lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again.” Then we can speak of a future together.

Mousa Abu Marzook is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.

ZNet | Israel/Palestine

An Israeli Love Story

by Uri Avnery; July 16, 2007

NOT SINCE the resurrection of Jesus Christ has there been such a miracle: a dead body buried in a cave has come to life again.

The “Jordanian Option” gave up its ghost almost twenty years ago. Even before that, it never was very healthy. But in 1988, some time after the outbreak of the first intifada, it was officially buried by none other than His Majesty, King Hussein, himself. He announced that he had given up any claim to the West Bank.

It was a pitiful death. There was no proper funeral. Shimon Peres, one of its parents, pretended not to know the deceased. Yitzhak Rabin turned his back. From dust it came, to dust it returned.

And now, suddenly, it seems to have sprung to life again. Three wandering scribblers claim to have seen it with their own eyes. Not in Emmaeus, where the three apostles of Jesus saw their resurrected master, but in Washington, capital of the world!

THE ISRAELI love story with the Hashemite dynasty started three generations ago. (Hashem was the founder of the Mecca family to which the prophet Mohammed belonged.)

In World War II, Iraq rebelled against the Hashemite king, who was imposed on them by the British at the time they installed another branch of the family in Transjordan. The Iraqi king and his entourage fled to Palestine. Here he was warmly received by the Zionist leadership, which provided him with a secret radio station on Mount Carmel. Many years later, I heard this from one of the people directly involved, Minister Eliyahu Sassoon.

The British army returned the Hashemites to power in Baghdad.

But, as Sassoon added in sorrow, they repaid good with bad:

immediately after their restoration they adopted an extreme anti-Zionist line. By the way, the Irgun underground organization was cooperating with the British at the time, and its commander, David Raziel, was killed in Iraq in the course of the operation.

Issam Sartawi, one of the PLO leaders, a refugee from Acre who grew up in Iraq, later claimed that when the Hashemites returned to Baghdad, the British organized a massacre of the Jews in order to gain them nationalist popularity. The documents about this infamous episode are still kept under wraps in the British archives.

But the relations with the Hashemites continued. On the eve of the 1948 war, the Zionist leadership kept in close contact with King Abdallah of Transjordan. Between the King and Golda Meir, several secret plans were hatched, but when the time came, the king did not dare to break Arab solidarity, and so he also invaded Palestine. It has been claimed this was done in close coordination with David Ben-Gurion. And indeed, the new Israeli army avoided attacking the Jordanian forces (except in the Latrun area, in an attempt to open the way to besieged West Jerusalem.)

The cooperation between Abdallah and Ben-Gurion bore the hoped-for fruit: the territory that was allotted by the UN to the putative Palestinian Arab state was partitioned between Israel and the renamed Kingdom of Jordan (the Gaza Strip was given to Egypt). The Palestinian state did not come into being, and Israeli-Jordanian cooperation flourished. It continued after King Abdallah was assassinated at the holy shrines of Jerusalem, and his grandson, the boy Hussein, took his place.

At that time, the tide of pan-Arab nationalism was running high, and Gamal Abd-el-Nasser, its prophet, was the idol of the Arab world. The Palestinian people, who had been deprived of a political identity, also saw its salvation in an all-Arab entity. There was a danger that the Jordanian king might be toppled any minute, but Israel announced that if this happened, the Israeli army would enter Jordan at once. The king continued to sit on his throne supported by Israeli bayonets.

Things reached a climax during Black September (1970), when Hussein crushed the PLO forces in blood and fire. The Syrians rushed to their defense and started to cross the border. In coordination with Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir issued an ultimatum: if the Syrians did not retreat at once, the Israeli army would enter. The Syrians gave up, the king was saved. The PLO forces went to Lebanon.

At the height of the crisis, I called upon the Israeli government in the Knesset to adopt the opposite course: to enable the Palestinians in the West Bank to set up a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. Years later, Ariel Sharon told me that he had proposed the same during the secret deliberations of the army General Staff. (Later, Sharon asked me to arrange a meeting between him and Yasser Arafat, to discuss this plan: to topple the regime in Jordan and turn the country into a Palestinian state, instead of the West Bank. Arafat refused to meet him and disclosed the proposal to the king.)

THE JORDANIAN OPTION was more than a political concept - it was a love story. For decades, almost all Israeli leaders were enamored of it - from Chaim Weizmann to David Ben-Gurion, from Golda to Peres.

What did the Hashemite family have that enchanted the Zionist and Israeli establishment?

In the course of the years I have heard many rational-sounding arguments. But I am convinced that at root it was not rational at all. The one decisive virtue of the Hashemite Dynasty was - and is - quite simple: they are not Palestinians.

From its first day, the Zionist movement has lived in total denial of the Palestinian issue. As long as possible, it denied the very existence of the Palestinian people. Since this has become ridiculous, it denies the existence of a Palestinian partner for peace. In any case, it denies the possibility of a viable Palestinian state next to Israel.

This denial has deep roots in the unconscious of the Zionist movement and the Israeli leadership. Zionism strove for the creation of a Jewish National Home in a land in which another people was living. Since Zionism was an idealistic movement imbued with profound moral values, it could not bear the thought that it was committing a historical injustice to another people. It was necessary to suppress and deny the feeling of guilt engendered by this fact.

The unconscious guilt feelings were deepened by the 1948 war, in which more than half the Palestinian people were separated from their lands. The idea of turning the West Bank over to the Hashemite kingdom was built on the illusion that there is no Palestinian people (“They are all Arabs!”), so it could suffer no injustice.

The Jordanian Option is a euphemism. Its real name is “Anti-Palestinian Option”. That’s what it’s all about. Everything else is unimportant.

THAT MAY explain the curious fact that since the 1967 war, no effort has been made to realize this “option”. The High Priests of the Jordanian Option, who preached it from every hilltop, did not lift a finger to bring it about. On the contrary, they did everything possible to prevent its realization.

For example: during Yitzhak Rabin’s first term as prime minister, after the 1973 war, Henry Kissinger had a brilliant idea: to return the town of Jericho to King Hussein. Thus a fait accompli would have been established: the Hashemite flag would wave over West Bank territory.

When Foreign Minister Yigal Allon brought the proposal to Rabin, he was met with an adamant refusal. Golda Meir had promised in her time that new elections would be held before any occupied territory was returned to the Arabs. “I am not prepared to go to elections because of Jericho!” Rabin exclaimed.

The same happened when Shimon Peres reached a secret agreement with King Hussein and brought the finished product to the then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir threw the agreement into the waste bin.

(“You face a difficult choice,” I once joked in a Knesset debate, “Whether not to return the occupied territories to Jordan or not to return them to the Palestinians.”)

ONE OF the interesting aspects of this long love story was that not one of the Israeli lovers ever took the trouble to look at the problem from the other side. In the depths of their heart, they despised the Jordanians as they despised all Arabs.

In the middle of the 80s, I received an unofficial invitation to Jordan, then officially still an “enemy country”. True, I entered with a rather dubious passport, but, once there, I registered as an Israeli journalist. Since I was the first Israeli to go around Amman openly, declaring my identity, I attracted quite a lot of attention in higher circles.

A senior government official invited me to dinner in a posh restaurant. On a paper napkin he drew the map of Jordan and explained to me the whole problem in a nutshell:

“We are surrounded by countries which are very different from each other. Here is the Zionist Israel, and here the nationalist Syria. In the West Bank, radical tendencies flourish, and in close-by Lebanon there is a conservative sectarian regime. Here is the secular Iraq of Saddam Hussein, and here the devout Saudi Arabia. From all these directions, ideas and people flow into Jordan. We absorb all of them. But we cannot quarrel with any of our neighbors. When we move a bit towards Syria, on the following day we have to make a gesture towards Saudi Arabia. When we come closer to Israel, we must appease Iraq quickly.”

The obvious conclusion: the Jordanian Option was a folly right from the beginning. But nobody in the Israeli leadership grasped that. As the wise Boutros Boutros-Ghali once told me: “You have in Israel the greatest experts on Arab affairs. They have read every book and every article. They know everything, and understand nothing - because they have never lived for one day in an Arab country.”

OLD LOVES do not die. True, the first intifada pushed aside the Jordanian Option and the leaders of Israel flirted with the Palestinian Option. But their heart was not in the new love, and they acted as if driven by a demon. That explains why no serious effort was made to fulfill the Oslo agreement and to bring the process to its logical conclusion: a Palestinian state next to Israel.

Now, suddenly, people are once more talking about Jordan. Perhaps one could ask King Abdallah II to send his army into the West Bank to fight Hamas? Perhaps we could bury the “Two-State Solution” in a Jordanian-Palestinian federation that would allow the Jordanians to take over the West Bank again?

The King was appalled. That is just what he needs! To incorporate the turbulent and divided Palestinian population in his kingdom! To open the border to a new flood of refugees and immigrants! He hastened to deny any part in the scheme.

Federation? That is quite possible, he said - but only after a free Palestinian state has come into being, not before, and certainly not instead. Then the citizens may decide freely.

A famous book by the Israeli author Yehoshua Kenaz is called:

“Returning Lost Loves”. But it seems that this old love is gone

forever./p>

ZNet | Iraq

*The Democrats’ Iraqi Dilemma

Questions Unasked, Answers Never Volunteered*

*by Ira Chernus; TomDispatch <http://www.tomdispatch.com>; July 23,

2007*

Pity the poor Democratic candidates for president, caught between Iraq and a hard place. Every day, more and more voters decide that we must end the war and set a date to start withdrawing our troops from Iraq. Most who will vote in the Democratic primaries concluded long ago that we must leave Iraq, and they are unlikely to let anyone who disagrees with them have the party’s nomination in 2008.

But what does it mean to “leave Iraq”? Here’s where most of the Democratic candidates come smack up against that hard place. There is a longstanding bipartisan consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the U.S. must control every strategically valuable region of the world—and none more so than the oil heartlands of the planet. That’s been a hard-and-fast rule of the elite for some six decades now. No matter how hard the task may be, they demand that presidents be rock-hard enough to get the job done.

So whatever “leave Iraq” might mean, no candidate of either party likely to enter the White House on January 20, 2009 can think it means letting Iraqis determine their own national policies or fate. The powers that be just wouldn’t stand for that. They see themselves as the guardians of world “order.” They feel a sacred obligation to maintain “stability” throughout the imperial domains, which now means most of planet Earth— regardless of what voters may think. The Democratic front-runners know that “order” and “stability” are code words for American hegemony. They also know that voters, especially Democratic ones, see the price of hegemony in Iraq and just don’t want to pay it anymore.

So the Democratic front-runners must promise voters that they will end the war—with not too many ideologically laden ifs, ands, or buts—while they assure the foreign-policy establishment that they will never abandon the drive for hegemony in the Middle East (or anywhere else). In other words, the candidates have to be able to talk out of both sides of their mouths at the same time.

No worries, it turns out. Fluency in doublespeak is a prime qualification for high political office. On Iraq, candidates Dennis Kucinich <http://kucinich.us/iraqplan> and Bill Richardson <http://www.richardsonforpresident.com/issues/iraq> don’t meet that test. They tell anyone and everyone that they want “all” U.S. troops out of Iraq, but they register only 1-4% in the polls <http://www.pollingreport.com/wh08dem.htm> and are generally ignored in the media. The Democrats currently topping the polls, on the other hand, are proving themselves eminently qualified in doublespeak.

Clinton: “We got it right, mostly, during the Cold War”

Hillary Clinton declares forthrightly

<http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/speech/view/?id=2366>: “It

is time to begin ending this war.... Start bringing home

America’s troops.... within 90 days.” Troops home: It sounds

clear enough. But she is always careful to avoid the crucial

word /all/. A few months ago she told

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/washington/15clintontext.html?ei=5070&en=6737e9bc7167ccc7&ex=1184126400&pagewanted=all>

an interviewer: “We have remaining vital national security interests in Iraq.... What we can do is to almost take a line sort of north of, between Baghdad and Kirkuk, and basically put our troops into that region.” A senior Pentagon officer who has briefed Clinton told NPR commentator Ted Koppel <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10947954> that Clinton expects U.S. troops to be in Iraq when she ends her second term in 2017.

Why all these troops? We have “very real strategic national

interests in this region,” Clinton explains. “I will order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region. They will also provide security for U.S. troops and personnel and train and equip Iraqi security services to keep order and promote stability.” There would be U.S. forces to protect the Kurds and “our efforts must also involve a regional recommitment to success in Afghanistan.” Perhaps that’s why Clinton has proposed “that we expand the Army by 80,000 troops, that we move faster to expand the Special Forces.”

Says her deputy campaign manager Bob Nash, “She’ll be as tough as any Republican on our enemies.” And on our friends, he might have added, if they don’t shape up. At the Take Back America conference <http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00115.htm> in June the candidate drew boos when she declared that “the American military has done its job.... They gave the Iraqi government the chance to begin to demonstrate that it understood its responsibilities.... It is the Iraqi government which has failed.” It’s the old innocent-Americans-blame-the-foreigners ploy.

More importantly, it’s the old

tough-Americans-reward-friends-who-help-America ploy. We should /start/ withdrawing some troops, Clinton says, “to make it clear to the Iraqis that ... we’re going to look out for American interests, for the region’s interests.” If the Iraqi government is not “striving for sustainable stability.... we’ll consider providing aid to provincial governments and reliable non-governmental organizations that are making progress.”

Clinton’s message to the Iraqi leaders is clear: You had your

chance to join “the international community,” to get with the U.S. program, and to reap the same benefits as the leaders of other oil-rich nations—but you blew it. So, now you can fend for yourselves while we look for new, more capable allies in Iraq and keep who-knows-how-many troops there to “protect our interests”—and increase our global clout. The draw-down in Iraq, our signal that we’ve given up on the al-Maliki government, “will be a first step towards restoring Americans moral and strategic leadership in the world,” Clinton swears.

“America must be the world’s leader,” she declared

<http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=278112> last month. “We must widen the scope of our strength by leading strong alliances which can apply military force when required.” And, when necessary, cut off useless puppet governments that won’t let their strings be pulled often enough.

Hillary is speaking to at least three audiences: the voters at

home, the foreign-policy elite, and a global elite she would have to deal with as president. Her recent fierce criticism of the way President Bush has handled Iraq, like her somewhat muddled antiwar rhetoric, is meant as a message of reassurance to voters, but also to our elite—and as a warning to foreigners: The next President Clinton will be tough on allies as well as foes, as tough as the old cold warriors. “We got it right, mostly, during the Cold War.... Nothing is more urgent than for us to begin again to rebuild a bipartisan consensus,” she said <http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/speech/view/?id=1233> last year in a speech that cut right to the bottom line: “American foreign policy exists to maintain our security and serve our national interests.” That’s what the bipartisan consensus has always believed.

Obama and Edwards: Don’t Tread on Us

That seems to be what Barack Obama, another loyal member of the foreign-policy establishment, believes too. “The single most important job of any president is to protect the American people,” he affirmed in a major foreign-policy statement <http://www.barackobama.com/2007/04/23/the_american_moment_remarks_to.php> last April. But “the threats we face.... can no longer be contained by borders and boundaries.... The security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people.” That’s why the U.S. must be the “leader of the free world.” It’s hard to find much difference on foreign policy between Clinton and Obama, except that Barack is more likely to dress up the imperial march of U.S. interests in such old-fashioned Cold War flourishes.

That delights neoconservative guru Robert Kagan, who summed up

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/27/AR2007042702027.html>

Obama’s message succinctly: “His critique is not that we’ve meddled too much but that we haven’t meddled enough.... To Obama, everything and everyone everywhere is of strategic concern to the United States.” To control everything and everyone, he wants “the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.... A 21^st century military to stay on the offense.” That, he says, will take at least 92,000 more soldiers and Marines— precisely the number Secretary of Defense Robert Gates <http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/11/iraq.plan.1619/index.html> has recommended to President Bush.

Like Hillary, Barack would remove

<http://www.barackobama.com/2006/11/20/a_way_forward_in_iraq.php> all “combat brigades” from Iraq, but keep U.S. troops there “for a more extended period of time”—even “redeploy additional troops to Northern Iraq”—to support the Kurds, train Iraqi forces, fight al Qaeda, “reassure allies in the Gulf,” “send a clear message to hostile countries like Iran and Syria,” and “prevent chaos in the wider region.” “Most importantly, some of these troops could be redeployed to Afghanistan.... to stop Afghanistan from backsliding toward instability.”

Barack also agrees with Hillary that the Iraqi government needs

a good scolding “to pressure the Iraqi leadership to finally come to a political agreement between the warring factions that can create some sense of stability.... Only through this phased redeployment can we send a clear message to the Iraqi factions that the U.S. is not going to hold together this country indefinitely.... No more coddling, no more equivocation.”

But Obama offers a carrot as well as a stick to the Iraqis: “The

redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the parties in

Iraq reach an effective political arrangement that stabilizes

the situation and they offer us a clear and compelling rationale

for maintaining certain troop levels.... The United States would

not be maintaining permanent military bases in Iraq.” What,

however, does “permanent” mean when language is being used so

subtly? It’s a question that needs an answer, but no one asks it

-- and no answer is volunteered.

John Edwards offers variations

<http://johnedwards.com/about/issues/iraq/> on the same themes. He wants a continuing U.S. troop presence “to prevent a genocide, deter a regional spillover of the civil war, and prevent an Al Qaeda safe haven.” But he goes further than either Obama or Clinton in spelling out that we “will also need some presence in Baghdad, inside the Green Zone, to protect the American Embassy and other personnel.”

Around the world, Edwards would use

<http://johnedwards.com/news/speeches/20070523-cfr/> military force for “deterring and responding to aggressors, making sure that weak and failing states do not threaten our interests, and ... maintaining our strategic advantage against major competitor states that could do us harm and otherwise threaten our interests.” His distinctive touch is to stress coordinated military and civilian efforts for “stabilizing states with weak governments.... I would put stabilization first.”

“Stabilization” is yet another establishment code word for insuring U.S. control, as Edwards certainly knows. His ultimate aim, he says, is to ensure that the U.S. will “lead and shape the world.”

Running for the Imperial Presidency

The top Democrats agree that we must leave significant numbers of U.S. troops in Iraq, not only for selfish reasons, but because we Americans are /so/ altruistic. We want to prevent chaos and bring order and stabilization to that country—as if U.S. troops were not already creating chaos and instability there every day. But among the foreign policy elite, the U.S. is always a force for order, “helping” naturally chaotic foreigners achieve “stability.” For the elite, it’s axiomatic that the global “stability” that keeps us secure and prosperous is also a boon for the people we “stabilize.” For this to happen in Iraq, time must be bought with partial “withdrawal” plans. (It matters little how many foreigners we kill in the process, as long as U.S. casualties are reduced enough to appease public opinion at home.) This is not open to question; most of the time, it’s not something that even crosses anyone’s mind to question.

Well, perhaps it’s time we started asking such questions. A lost

war should be the occasion for a great public debate on the policies and the geopolitical assumptions that led to the war. Americans blew that opportunity after the Vietnam War. Instead of a genuine debate, we had a few years of apathy, verging on amnesia, toward foreign affairs followed by the Reagan revolution, whose disastrous effects in matters foreign (and domestic) still plague us. Now, we have another precious—and preciously bought—opportunity to raise fundamental issues about foreign policy. But in the mainstream, all we are getting is a false substitute for real public debate.

With an election looming, the Democrats portray themselves as

the polar opposite of the Republicans. They blame the Iraq fiasco entirely on Bush and the neocons, conveniently overlooking all the support Bush got from the Democratic elite before his military venture went sour. They talk as if the only issue that matters is whether or not we /begin/ to withdraw /some/ troops from Iraq sometime next year. The media report this debate in excruciating detail, with no larger context at all. So most Americans think this is the only debate there is, or could be.

The other debate about Iraq—the one that may matter more in

the long run—is the one going on in the private chambers of the policymakers about what messages they should send, not so much to enemies as to allies. Bush, Cheney, and their supporters say the most important message is a reassuring one: “When the U.S. starts a fight, it stays in until it wins. You can count on us.” For key Democrats, including congressional leaders and major candidates for the imperial Presidency, the primary message is a warning: “U.S. support for friendly governments and factions is not an open-ended blank check. If you are not producing, we’ll find someone else who can.”

The two sides are hashing this one out in a sometimes strident, sometimes relatively chummy manner. The outcome will undoubtedly make a real difference, especially to the people of Iraq, but it’s still only a dispute about tactics, never about goals, which have been agreed upon in advance.

Yet it’s those long-range goals of the bipartisan consensus that

add up to the seven-decade-old drive for imperial hegemony, which got us into Vietnam, Iraq, and wherever we fight the next large, disastrous war. It’s those goals that should be addressed. Someone has to question that drive. And what better moment to do it than now, in the midst of another failed war? Unfortunately, the leading Democratic candidates aren’t about to take up the task. I guess it must be up to us.

/Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594512760/nationbooks08>.

He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu/

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com

<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, /co-founder of the American Empire Project <http://www.americanempireproject.com/> and author of/ Mission Unaccomplished <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259388/nationbooks08> (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.]

ZNet | Iraq

Kurdish Mountain Army Awaits Turkish Incursion

*by Patrick Cockburn; Counterpunch

<http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick07192007.html>; July 23, 2007*

In the Qandil Mountains.

Hiding in the high mountains and deep gorges of one of the world’s great natural fortresses are bands of guerrillas whose presence could provoke a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq and the next war in the Middle East.

In the weeks before the Turkish election on Sunday, Turkey has threatened to cross the border into Iraq in pursuit of the guerrillas of the Turkish Kurdish movement, the PKK, and its Iranian Kurdish offshoot, Pejak.

The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, warns that there are 140,000 Turkish troops massed just north of the frontier.

“Until recently, we didn’t take the Turkish threat that seriously but thought it was part of the election campaign,” says Safeen Sezayee. A leading Iraqi Kurdish expert on Turkey and spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Mr Dezayee now sees an invasion as quite possible.

The Iraqi Kurds are becoming nervous. The drumbeat of threats from Turkish politicians and generals has become more persistent. “The government and opposition parties are competing to show nationalist fervour,” says Mr Dezayee. Anti-PKK feeling is greater than ever in Turkey.

Most menacingly, Turkey is appalled that the Kurds are key players in Iraqi politics and are developing a semi- independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq.

After the election, Ankara may find it impossible to retreat from the bellicose rhetoric of recent weeks and will send its troops across the border, even if the incursion is only on a limited scale.

If the Turkish army does invade, it will not find it easy to locate the PKK guerrillas. Their main headquarters is in the Qandil mountains which are on the Iranian border but conveniently close to Turkey. It is an area extraordinarily well-adapted for guerrilla warfare where even Saddam Hussein’s armies found it impossible to penetrate.

To reach Qandil, we drove east from the Kurdish capital Arbil to the well-watered plain north of Dokan lake. In the town of Qala Diza, destroyed by Saddam Hussein but now being rebuilt, the local administrator Maj Bakir Abdul Rahman Hussein was quick to say that Qandil was ruled by the PKK: “We don’t have any authority there.” He said there was regular shelling from Iran that led to some border villages being evacuated but he did not seem to consider this out of the ordinary. “The Iranians do it whenever they are feeling international pressure,” he said.

We hired a four-wheel drive vehicle and a driver in black Kurdish uniform who was from Qandil. Just below the mountains, we were stopped by the paramilitary Iraqi Frontier Guards. A red-white-and-black Iraqi flag, a rare sight in Kurdistan, flew over their headquarters which is built like a miniature medieval castle.

Kurdish officials close to Qandil are strangely eager to disclaim any authority over their own sovereign territory. In a stern lecture, after consulting with his superiors by phone, Lt-Col Ahmad Sabir of the Frontier Guards said we could go on but “we have no control beyond this point and no responsibility for what happens to you. You may meet PKK, Iranians on the border or shepherds with guns.”

The road to the mountain climbs up the sides of steep hills dotted with small oak trees, past hamlets with flat roofs made from mud and brushwood.

The road is at first pot-holed asphalt, then broken rock and finally, after crossing a bridge over a mountain torrent, it gives up being a road at all and becomes a track, parts of which had been swept away by avalanches.

The first sign of the PKK was a sentry box confidently in the open with two armed men in khaki uniform who confiscated our passports and mobile phones. Driving on, we came to a strange and exotic mausoleum to the PKK dead. Its walls are painted white and red and inside the gates are ornamental ponds and flowerbeds overlooked by a white column 30ft high, on top of which is miniature yellow star in metal or concrete, the symbol of the PKK.

The cemetery, built in 2002, holds 67 graves and stands in the middle of the deserted Marado valley inhabited only by grazing cattle. “Just three of those buried here died from natural causes,” says Farhad Amat, a PKK soldier from Dyarbakir in Turkey who is in charge of the mausoleum.

Founded in the 1970s, the PKK fought a lengthy but ultimately unsuccessful guerrilla war in south-east Turkey in which at least 35,000 people died. A Marxist- Leninist separatist Kurdish organisation, its leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured in 1999 and its 4,000 well- trained fighters sought refuge in northern Iraq.

The inscriptions on the grave-stones tell the tragic history of the PKK. Almost all of those who died were Turkish Kurds, many of them very young. For instance a girl fighter whose nom de guerre was “Nergis” and real name Khazar Kaba was just 16 when she was killed on 30 July 2001.

At a PKK guest house by a brook shaded by ancient trees, we met several women guerrillas, who, contrary to patriarchal Kurdish traditions, play an important role in the PKK. They were wearing uniform and with them was an Iranian Kurdish family consisting of a mother, father and son. Their presence was unexplained until we were leaving when the father, Agai Mohammedi from Sina in Iran, suddenly blurted out that they were trying to find and bring home his 25-year-old son who had run off to join the PKK.

They were going from camp to camp looking for him but were always told he was not there. “Please, can you help us,” asked Mr Mohammedi but there was nothing we could do.

The scale of the fighting is small. Pejak launches sporadic raids into Iranian Kurdistan. The PKK stages ambushes and bombings in Turkey and has escalated its attacks this year, killing at least 67 soldiers and losing 110 of its own fighters according to the Turkish authorities. But this limited skirmishing could have an explosive impact. The attacks provide an excuse for Turkish action against an increasingly independent Iraqi Kurdish state. “They [the Turks] want an excuse to overturn what has been achieved in Iraqi Kurdistan,” says Mr Dezayee. A referendum is to be held in northern Iraq by the end of 2007 under which the oil city of Kirkuk may vote to join the KRG. The incentive for a Turkish invasion is growing by the day.

“Everything depends on the result of the Turkish election,” says Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi Kurdish politician.

If the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wins a two-thirds majority then the pressure for an invasion may be off. But if he believes he lost votes because his anti-PKK and Turkish nationalist credentials were not strong enough then he might want to burnish them by ordering a cross border incursion.

The lightly armed PKK, knowing every inch of the mountainous terrain at Qandil, will be able to evade Turkish troops. But the Iraqi Kurds worry that they and not the PKK are the real target of the Turkish army. After making so many threats before the election, Turkey may find it difficult to back off without looking weak.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq’, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.