Posts
Above: John Mc_Cain. This demented soul went on a trip to Iraq. He and some other Republican Politicians (what a dreadful combination) visited a market place and one said “it was like visiting a Mall in Indiana. (Remind me not to visit any Malls in Indiana.) Of course, they were surrounded by 100 soldiers, blackhawk and Apache helicopters overhead, and humvees escorting. Someone said “Even Paris Hilton could ride a bicycle with that sort of protection.” The next day, the place was bombed and sniped.
THIS WEEK IN ABSURDITY
I have a confession to make this week. I simply can not take seriously the events and reactions of the past week. Some of the most prominent stories have been that Don Imus is not the father of Anna Nicole-Smith’s daughter. He has been suspended for using the word “hose” on the pubic airways. I remember vividly when the Nixon administration issued a list of words that would be forbidden on the air and a friend at a local station got a copy three hours before it was to take effect and called me. I was on the air with him immediately (I went to the station) and we discussed the list. “Damn” is ok now. “Hose” must have been added. Anyway, Imus is Howard Stern with a GED. As the now late Kurt Vonnegut put it, one either has to laugh or react with blind rage at life. I do not know how many times others on the air have repeated the offending clip, thus giving it hundreds of times the initial audience. CBS and NBC have fired him. Platitudes abound as to how evil such remarks are. The real problem is not Imus. Hate speech, pornography, etc. has to be defended or else the next target is political free speech.
Now we have a crisis in the area of the first Amendment and Robert Fisk discusses it below. It is an example of what the real target of the reaction really is. Voltaire was right.
I must thank one of you for the final article – a refreshing supplement to the last issue.
1) Tomgram: The Theater of the Imperially Absurd
2) The True Story of Free Speech in America
by Robert Fisk; Independent; April 08, 2007
3) Subject: Israeli Journalist: Israel Does Not Want Peace (Reply-To: Noah@tikkun.org)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Tomgram: The Theater of the Imperially Absurd
This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=183573
[*Tomdispatch recommendations:* /International human rights lawyer Scott
Horton has long had a remarkably informative private newsletter, "No
Comment," which is now lodged at the Harper's Magazine
it. It's an invaluable resource. On the subject of invaluable resources,
don't miss my daily web-stop, Juan Cole's indispensible Informed Comment
recently created a five-minute "Bush intervention"
amused me greatly. Tom/]
Six Crises in Search of an Author
*How the Bush Administration Destabilized the "Arc of Instability"*
By Tom Engelhardt
One night when I was in my teens, I found myself at a production of
Pirandello's /Six Characters in Search of an Author/. I had never heard
of the playwright or the play, nor had I seen a play performed in the
round. The actors were dramatically entering and exiting in the aisles
when, suddenly, a man stood up in the audience, proclaimed himself a
seventh character in search of an author, and demanded the same
attention as the other six. At the time, I assumed the unruly "seventh
character" was just part of the play, even after he was summarily
ejected from the theater.
Now, bear with me a moment here. Back in 2002-2003, officials in the
Bush administration and their neocon supporters, retro-think-tank
admirers, and allied media pundits, basking in all their Global War on
Terror glory, were eager to talk about the region extending from North
Africa through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the
former SSRs of Central Asia right up to the Chinese border as an "arc of
instability." That arc coincided with the energy heartlands of the
planet and what was needed to "stabilize" it, to keep those energy
supplies flowing freely (and in the right directions), was clear enough
to them. The "last superpower," the greatest military force in history,
would simply have to put its foot down and so bring to heel the "rogue"
powers of the region. The geopolitical nerve would have to be mustered
to stamp a massive "footprint" -- to use a Pentagon term of the time --
in the middle of that vast, valuable region. (Such a print was to be
measured by military bases established.) Also needed was the nerve not
just to lob a few cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad, but to
offer such an imposing demonstration of American shock-and-awe power
that those "rogues" -- Iraq, Syria, Iran (Hezbollah, Hamas) -- would be
cowed into submission, along with uppity U.S. allies like oil-rich Saudi
Arabia.
It would, in fact, be necessary -- in another of those bluntly
descriptive words of the era -- to "decapitate" resistant regimes. This
would be the first order of business for the planet's lone "hyperpower,"
now that it had been psychologically mobilized by the attacks of
September 11, 2001. After all, what other power on Earth was capable of
keeping the uncivilized parts of the planet from descending into
failed-state, all-against-all warfare and dragging us (and our energy
supplies) down with them?
Mind you, on September 11, 2001, as those towers went down, that arc of
instability wasn't exactly a paragon of? well, instability. Yes, on one
end was Somalia, a failed state, and on the other, impoverished,
rubble-strewn Afghanistan, largely Taliban-ruled (and al-Qaeda
encamped); while in-between Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a severely
weakened nation with a suffering populace, but the "arc" was wracked by
no great wars, no huge surges of refugees, no striking levels of
destruction. Not particularly pleasant autocracies, some of a
fundamentalist religious nature, were the rule of the day. Oil flowed
(at about $23
a barrel); the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simmered uncomfortably; and,
all in all, it wasn't a pretty picture, nor a particularly democratic
one, nor one in which, if you were an inhabitant of most of these lands,
you could expect a fair share of justice or a stunningly good life.
Still, the arc of instability, as a name, was then more prediction than
reality. And it was a prediction -- soon enough to become a
self-fulfilling prophesy -- on which George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, and all those neocons in the Pentagon readily staked careers
and reputations. As a crew, already dazzled by American military power
and its potential uses, such a bet undoubtedly looked like a sure
winner, like betting with the house in a three-card monte scheme. They
would just give the arc what it needed -- a few intense doses of
cruise-missile and B-1 bomber medicine, add in some high-tech military
boots-on-the-ground, some night-vision goggled eyes in the desert, some
Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones overhead, and some
"regime-change"-style injections of further instability. It was to be,
as Andrew Bacevich has written
experiment in creative destruction."
First Afghanistan, then Iraq. Both pushovers. How could the mightiest
force on the planet lose to such puny powers? As a start, you would wage
a swift air-war/proxy-war/Special-Forces war/dollar-war -- CIA agents
would arrive in friendly areas of Northern Afghanistan in late 2001
carrying suitcases stuffed with money -- in one of the most backward
places on the planet. Your campaign would be against an ill-organized,
ill-armed, ragtag enemy. You would follow that by thrusting into the
soft, military underbelly of the Middle East and taking out the hollow
armed forces of Saddam Hussein in a "cakewalk."
Next, with your bases set up in Afghanistan and Iraq on either side of
Iran -- and Pakistan, also bordering Iran, in hand -- what would it take
to run the increasingly unpopular mullahs who governed that land out of
Tehran? Meanwhile, Syria, another weakened, wobbly state divided against
itself, now hemmed in not only by militarily powerful Israel but
American-occupied Iraq on the other would be a pushover. In each of
these lands, you would soon enough end up with an American-friendly
government, run by some figure like the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi exile
Ahmed Chalabi; and, /voilà!/ (okay, they wouldn't have used French), you
would have a Middle East made safe for Israel and for American
domination. You would, in short, have your allies in Europe and Japan as
well as your possible future enemies, Russia and China, by the throat in
an increasingly energy-starved world.
Certainly, many of the top officials of the Bush administration and
their neocons allies, dreaming of just such an orderly,
American-dominated "Greater Middle East," were ready to settle for a
little chaos
process. If a weakened Iraq broke into several parts; or, say, the
oil-rich Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia happened to fall off that country,
well, too bad. They'd deal.
Little did they know.
*The Tin Touch*
Here's the remarkable thing, when you think about it: All the Bush
administration had to do was meddle in any country in that arc of
instability (and which one didn't it meddle in?), for actual
instability, often chaos, sometimes outright disaster to set in. It's
been quite a record, the very opposite of an imperial golden touch.
And, on any given day, you can see the evidence of this on a case by
case basis in your local paper or on the TV news. You can check out the
Iraqi, or Somali, or Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani disasters, or
impending disasters. But what you never see is all those crises and
potential crises discussed in one place -- without which the magnitude
of the present disaster and the dangers in our future are hard to grasp.
Few in the mainstream world have even tried to put them all together
since the Bush administration rolled back
the media, essentially demobilizing it in 2001-2002, at which point its
journalists and pundits simply stopped connecting the dots
administration credit: Its top officials took in the world as a whole
and at an imperial glance. They regularly connected the dots as they saw
them. The post-9/11 strike at Afghanistan was never simply a strike at
al-Qaeda (or the Taliban who hosted them). It was always a prelude to
war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq was never
meant to end in Baghdad (as indicated in the neocon pre-war quip
to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran"). Nor was Tehran to be the
end of the line.
Under the rubric of the "Global War on Terror," they were considering
literally dozens of countries as potential future targets. Dick Cheney
put the matter
bluntly back in August 2002 as the public drumbeat for an invasion of
Iraq was just revving up:
"The war in Afghanistan is only the beginning of a lengthy campaign,
Cheney noted. 'Were we to stop now, any sense of security we might
have would be false and temporary,' he said. 'There is a terrorist
underworld out there spread among more than 60 countries.'"
Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, they began stitching together
the arc of instability in their minds with an eye not so much to Arabs,
or South Asians, or even Israelis, but to playing their version of what
the British imperialists used to call "the Great Game." They had the
full-scale rollback of energy-giant Russia
well as the containment or rollback of potential future imperial power,
China, already visibly desperate for Iraqi, Iranian, and other energy
supplies. In the year before the invasion of Iraq, they were remarkably
blunt about this. They proudly published that seminal document of the
Bush era, the National Security Strategy of the United States of
America, 2002, which called for the U.S. to "build and maintain" its
military power on the planet "beyond challenge."
Think about that for a moment. A single power on Earth "beyond
challenge." This was a dream of planetary dominion that once would have
been left to madmen. But in what looked like a world with only one Great
Power, it was easy enough to imagine a Great Game with only one great
player, an arms race with only one swift runner.
The Bush administration was essentially calling for a world in which no
superpower, or bloc of powers, would /ever/ be allowed to challenge this
country's supremacy. As the President put it in an address at West Point
2002, "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond
challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras
pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."
The National Security Strategy put the same thought this way: "Our
forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from
pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the
power of the United States." That's anywhere on the planet. Ever. And
the President and his followers promptly began to hike the Pentagon
budget to suit their oversized, military fantasies of what an American
"footprint" should be.
With this in mind, the arc of instability, which, in energy-flow terms,
was quite literally the planet's heartland, seemed the place to control.
And yet -- look hard as you will -? you're unlikely to find a single
piece in your daily paper that takes in that arc; that, say, includes
Somalia and Pakistan in the same piece, even though Bush administration
policy has effectively tied them together in disaster. To take another
example, the rise of Iran (and a possible "Shiite crescent"), Iran's
influence or interference in Iraq, Iran's nuclear program, and Iran's
off-the-wall president have been near obsessions in the U.S. media; and
yet, you would be hard-pressed to find a piece even pointing out that
the Bush administration's two invasions and occupations -- Iraq and
Afghanistan -- which left both those countries bristling with vast
American bases
sprawling American-controlled prison systems
took place on either side of Iran. Add in the fact that the Bush
administration, probably through the CIA, is essentially running terror
raids
into Iran through Pakistan and you have a remarkably different vision of
Iran's geostrategic situation than even an informed American media
consumer would normally see.
After September 11, 2001, but based on the sort of pre-2001 thinking you
could find well represented at the neocon website Project for the New
American Century
administration's top officials wrote their own drama for the arc of
instability. They were, of course, the main characters in it, along with
the U.S. military, some Afghan and Iraqi exiles who would play their
necessary roles in the "liberation" of their countries, and a few evil
ogres like Saddam Hussein.
Today, not six years after they raised the curtain on what was to be
their grand imperial drama, they find themselves in a dark theater with
at least six crises in search of an author, all clamoring for attention
? and every possibility that a seventh (not to say a seventeenth)
"character" in that rowdy, still gathering, audience may soon rise to
insist on a part in the horrific farce that has actually taken place.
*Six Crises in Search of an Author*
Sweeping across the region from East to West, let's briefly note the six
festering or clamoring crisis spots, any one of which could end up with
the play's major role before George W. Bush slips out of office.
*Pakistan:* The Pakistani government was America's main partner, along
with the Saudis, in funding, arming, and running the anti-Soviet
struggle of the /mujahedeen/, including Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan
back in the 1980s; and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, was the
godfather of the Taliban (and remains, it seems, a supporter to this
day). In September 2001, the Bush administration gave the country's
coup-installed military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, the basic
you're-either-with-us-or-against-us choice. He chose the "with" and in
the course of these last years, under constant American pressure, has
lost almost complete control over Pakistan's tribal regions along the
Afghan border to various tribal groups
al-Qaeda, and other foreign /jihadis/, who have established bases there.
Now, significant parts of the country are experiencing unrest in what
looks increasingly like a countdown to chaos
nuclear-armed nation.
*Afghanistan:* In the meantime, from those Pakistani base areas, the
revived and rearmed Taliban (and their al-Qaeda partners) are preparing
to launch a major spring offensive in Afghanistan, using tactics from
the Iraq War (suicide bombers
Omar's Missiles,"
as they call them, and the roadside bomb
or IED). They are already capable of taking over
districts for periods of time. The Bush administration used the Northern
Alliance -- that is, proxy Afghan forces -- to take Kabul in November
2001. It then set up its bases and prisons
established President Hamid Karzai as the "mayor of Kabul," only to
abandon the task of providing real security and beginning the genuine
reconstruction of the country in order to invade Iraq. The rest of this
particular horror story is, by now, reasonably well known. The country
beyond booming Kabul remains impoverished and significantly in ruins;
the population evidently ever more dissatisfied; the American and NATO
air war ever more indiscriminate
is again the planet's largest producer
of opium poppies and, as such, supplier of heroin. Over five years after
its "liberation" from the Taliban, Afghanistan is a failed state, home
to a successful guerrilla war by one of the most primitively
fundamentalist movements on the planet, and a thriving narco-kingdom. It
is only likely to get worse. For the first time, the possibility that,
like the Russians before them, the Americans (and their NATO allies)
could actually suffer defeat
in that rugged land seems imaginable.
*Iran:* The country is a rising regional power, with enormous energy
resources, and Shiite allies and allied movements of various sorts
throughout the region, including in southern Iraq. But it also has an
embattled, divided, fundamentalist government capable of rallying its
disgruntled populace only with nationalism (call it, playing the
American card). Energy-rich as it is, Iran also has a fractured,
weakened economy, threatened with sanctions; and its major enemy, the
Bush administration, is running a series of terror operations
trying to cause dissension in its oil-rich minority regions. It is also
deploying an unprecedented show of naval and air strength in the Persian
Gulf. (An aircraft-carrier, the /USS Nimitz/, with its strike group, is
now on its way
to join the two carrier task forces already in place there.) In
addition, the administration has threatened
air assault on Iran's nuclear and other facilities. Though Iraq runs it
a close race, Iran may be the single potentially most explosive hot spot
in the arc of instability. In a nanosecond, it would be capable, under
U.S. attack, or even some set of miscalculations on all sides, both of
suffering grievous harm and of imposing enormous damage not just on
American troops in Iraq, or on the oil economy of the region, but on the
global economy as well.
*Iraq:* Do I need to say a word? Iraq is the poster-boy for the Bush
administration's ability to turn whatever it touches into hell on Earth.
In Iraq, the vaunted American military has been stopped in its tracks by
a minority Sunni insurgency. (In recent weeks, however, the war there is
threatening to turn into something larger, as the American military
launches attacks
on radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.) Iraq now
is the site of a religio-ethnic civil war of striking brutality, loosing
waves of refugees within the country and on neighboring states;
neighborhoods are being ethnically cleansed and deaths have reached into
the hundreds of thousands. Amid all this, the occupying U.S. military
fully controls only Baghdad's fortified citadel within a city, the Green
Zone (and even there dangers are mounting
as well as a series of enormous, multibillion-dollar bases it has built
around the country. Iraq is now essentially a failed state and the
situation continues to devolve under the pressure of the President's
latest "surge" plan. If that plan were to succeed, the citadel-state of
the Green Zone would, at best, be turned into the city-state of Baghdad
in a sea of chaos. Like Iran, Iraq has the potential to draw other
states in the region into a widening civil-cum-religious-cum-terrorist war.
*Israel/Palestine/Lebanon:* From an early green light for Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon to join the Global War on Terror (against the Palestinians)
to a green light for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to launch and continue a
war against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, the Bush administration
has largely green-lighted Israel these last years. It has also ignored
or, in the case of the Lebanon War, purposely held back any possibility
of serious peace talks. The provisional results are in. In Lebanon, the
heavily populated areas of the Shiite south were strewn
bombs, making some areas nearly uninhabitable; up to a quarter of the
population was, for a time, turned into refugees
cities including Beirut
the Israeli air force; and yet Hezbollah was strengthened, the
U.S.-backed Siniora government radically weakened, and the country drawn
closer to a possible civil war. In the Palestinian areas, Bush
administration democracy-promotion efforts ended with a Hamas electoral
victory. Starved of foreign aid and having suffered further Israeli
military assaults, the Palestinian population is ever more immiserated;
Hamas and Fatah are at each other's throats; and the U.S.-backed
President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is in a
weakened position. In the wake of a disastrous war, Israel, with a
government whose head has a 3% approval rate
triumphant, dominant power in the Middle East that various Bush
administration figures imagined once upon a time. This looks like
another deteriorating situation with no end in sight.
*Somalia (or Blackhawk Down, Round 2):* In 2006, Director Porter Goss's
CIA bet on a group of discredited Somali warlords, threw money and
support behind them, and -- typically -- lost out
Islamist militia that took most of the country and imposed relative
peace on it for the first time in years. The ever proactive Bush
administration then turned to the autocratic Ethiopian regime and its
military (advised
by the U.S. with a helping hand from the North Koreans
to open "a new front" in the Global War on Terror. The Ethiopians
promptly launched their own "preventive" invasion of Somalia (with
modest U.S. air support), installed a government in the capital,
Mogadishu, proclaimed victory over the Islamists, and -- giant surprise
--promptly found themselves mired in an inter-clan civil war with Iraqi
overtones. Today, Somalia, long a failed state and then, for a few
months, almost a peaceful land (even if ruled by Islamists
fundamentalists), is experiencing the worst fighting
and death levels in 15 years. The new government in Mogadishu is shaky;
their Ethiopian military supporters bloodied; over 1,000 civilians
in the capital are dead or wounded, and tens of thousands of refugees
are fleeing Mogadishu and crossing borders in a state of need. Rate it:
a developing disaster -- with worse to come.
In short, from Somalia to Pakistan, the region is today a /genuine/ arc
of instability. It is filled with ever more failed states (Somalia,
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, which never even made it to statehood
before collapse), possible future failed states (Lebanon, Pakistan),
ever shakier autocracies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan); and huge
floods of refugees, internal and external (Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon,
Afghanistan) as well as massively damaged areas (Afghanistan, Iraq,
Gaza, Lebanon). It is also witnessing the growth of extremist and
terrorist organizations and sentiments.
*A Rube Goldberg Machine*
At any moment, somewhere in the now-destabilized "arc of instability,"
that seventh character could indeed rise, demand attention, and refuse
to be ejected from the premises. There are many possible candidates.
Here are just a few:
*Al-Qaeda*, an organization dispersed but never fully dismantled by the
Bush administration, has now, according to Mark Mazzetti
of the /New York Times/, rebuilt itself in the Pakistani borderlands
with new training camps, new base areas, and a new generation of leaders
in their thirties, all still evidently serving under Osama bin Laden.
(In the future, Mazzetti suggests even younger leaders are likely to
come from the hardened veterans of campaigns in Bush's Iraq). Al-Qaeda
is a wild card throughout the region.
*Iraqi Kurdistan* is now a relatively peaceful area, but from the
disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk to its Turkish and Iranian borders it
is also a potential future powder keg
and the focus for interventions of all sorts.
*Oil pipelines*, which, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf,
crisscross the region, are almost impossible to defend effectively. At
any moment, some group or groups, copying the tactics
insurgents in Iraq, could decide to begin a sabotage campaign against
them (or the other oil facilities in the region).
*Saudi Arabia*, an increasingly ossified religious autocracy, faces
opponents ready to practice terrorism against its oil infrastructure and
rising unrest in its oil-rich Shiite areas as well as an ascendant Iran.
*Syria*, a rickety minority regime, under internal pressure, now faces
the launching of a renewed Bush administration campaign
to further undermine its power. Though we have no way of knowing the
scope of this campaign, it seems the President and his top officials
have learned absolutely nothing
about what their meddling is likely to accomplish.
Outside the "arc of instability," but deeply affected by what goes on
there, let's not forget:
*The U.S. Army*: 13,000 National Guardsmen
have just been notified of a coming call-up, long before they were due
for another tour of duty in Iraq. The Army, like the Marine Corps, finds
itself under near-unbearable pressure
and Afghan Wars and, as a result, is sending less than fully trained
troops, recruited under ever lower standards, with worn equipment, into
battle. The Army, for instance, is having trouble holding on to its best
soldiers. Beyond their minimum five years of service, to take an
example, "just 62% of West Pointers re-upped, about 25 percentage points
lower than at the other service academies." And the public grumbling of
the top brass is on the increase
Who knows what this means for the future?
*The American People* -- Oh yes, them. They haven't really hit the
streets
they've hit the opinion polls
hard and last November some of them hit the polling booths --
decisively. Who knows when they will "stand up" and insist on being
counted. Perhaps in 2008.
In other words, in addition to the normal cast of characters dreamt up
by the Bush administration in its fantasy production in the global
round, a whole set of unexpected characters are already moving up and
down the aisles, demanding attention, and at any moment, that seventh
character -- whether state, ethnic group, terrorist cadre, or some
unknown crew in search of an author is likely to make its presence felt.
And let's not forget that there is one more obvious "character" out
there in search of an author; that there is one more Bush-destabilized
place on the planet not yet mentioned, even though it may be the most
important of all. I'm talking, of course, about Washington D.C.; I'm
talking about the Bush administration itself.
Consider the process by which it turned Washington into a mini-arc of
instability: First, it fantasized about the "arc of instability," then
stitched it together into a genuine Rube Goldberg
where any group, across thousands of miles, might pull some switch that
would set chaos rolling, the flames licking across the oil heartlands of
the planet. Then, remarkably enough, the administration itself and all
its dreams -- both of a /Pax Americana/ globe and a /Pax Republicana/
United States -- began to disintegrate. The whole edifice, from
Rumsfeld's high-tech military to Karl Rove's political machine, became
destabilized under its own tin touch. The putative playwright became
just another desperate character.
It's no longer far-fetched to say that, with the President's polling
figures in the low 30s
resistance to his war still growing, a Democratic Congress beginning to
feel its strength, the Republican Party shaking and its presidential
candidates preparing to head for the hills, corruption and political
scandals popping up everywhere, and high military figures implicitly
reading the riot act to their political leaders, the already listing
Bush imperial ship of state seems to be making directly for the next
floating iceberg.
Imagine then, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney still clinging tenaciously
to what's left of their dreams and delusions
amid the ruins of their plans -- as the /USS Nimitz/ sails toward the
Persian Gulf; as American agents of various sorts "advise" and, however
indirectly, shuffle aid to extremist groups eager to fell the Iranian
regime; as a new campaign against the Syrian regime is launched; as
stolen Iraqi oil money is shuttled to the Siniora government in Lebanon
(and then, according to Seymour Hersh
to Sunni /jihadi/ groups in Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in
Syria); and as American agents continue to "interrogate" suspected
/jihadis/ in their latest borrowed secret prisons in Ethiopia
American-backed Ethiopian troops only find themselves more embroiled in
Somalia. Imagine all that, and then ask yourself, what levers on that
Rube Goldberg machine they've done so much to create are they still
capable of pulling?
/Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project
most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch
Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews./
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*ZNet | Repression*
*The True Story of Free Speech in America*
*by Robert Fisk; Independent; April 08, 2007*
Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation
Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would
be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of
his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls -
monitored, of course - and he was growing steadily weaker.
Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days
to protest the government outrage committed against him, a
burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to
rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York,
Washington and Los Angeles.
All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa,
Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian’s little Golgotha for
months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.
The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was
a respected computer professor at the University of South
Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real
tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according
to Sugg, Israel’s lobbyists were enraged by his lessons -
al-Arian’s family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in
2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was
arrested and charged with conspiring “to murder and maim”
outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic
Jihad in “Palestine”. He was held for two and a half years in
solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet
shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.
Al-Arian’s $50m (£25m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the
government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400
intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation
that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for it - a
dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any
remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security
Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger
the impartiality of the jurors.
In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious
charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for
acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make further charges,
al-Arian’s lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any
further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however,
al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment,
followed by deportation - found Moody talking about “blood” on
the defendant’s hands and ensured he would have to spend another
11 months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that
the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think
tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonored and
refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to
languish in prison.
Not so, of course, most of America’s torturers in Iraq. One of
them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a “contract
interrogator”, who has bared his soul in the Washington Post -
all praise, here, by the way to the Post - about his escapades
in the Fallujah interrogation “facility” of the 82nd Airborne
Division. Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he
deprived of sleep during questioning “by forcing him to stand in
a corner and stripping him of his clothes”. Now it is Fair who
is deprived of sleep. “A man with no face stares at me … pleads
for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It s a
pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I
realize the screams are mine.”
Thank God, Fair didn’t write a play about his experiences and
offer it to Channel 4 whose executives got cold feet about The
Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse in Basra. They
quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony
Marchant’s play might affect the now happy outcome of the far
less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15
“Servicepersons” - by angering the Muslim world with tales of
how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis. As the
reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa
in British custody in Basra - I suppose we must always refer to
his demise as “death” now that the soldiers present at his
savage beating have been acquitted of murder - I can attest that
Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys
are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are
not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it
- and who knew all about Mousa’s fate long before I reported it
for The Independent on Sunday.
Because it’s really all about shutting the reality of the Middle
East off from us. It’s to prevent the British and American
people from questioning the immoral and cruel and
internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the
Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East
reality continues even in the country’s schools. Now the
principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by
pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in
Iraq. Entitled Voices in Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski,
James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School
compiled the reflections of soldiers and others - including a
19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq - to create
their own play. To no avail. The drama might hurt those “who had
lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak”,
proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High’s principal. And - my
favorite line - Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal
time to ensure the play would provide “a legitimate
instructional experience for our students”.
And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty’s point. Students who
have produced Arthur Miller’s The Crucible were told by Mr Canty
- whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded - that
it wasn’t their place to tell audiences what soldiers were
thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with
offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think Mr Canty
may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his
students to perform Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a drama of
massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honor killing.
It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of
Connecticut. A “legitimate instructional experience” if ever
there was one.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
Subject: Israeli Journalist: Israel Does Not Want Peace
Reply-To: Noah@tikkun.org
An important message!
{Tikkun Editorial Comment: It is not Israel but the current political leadership of Israel that
does not want peace. In fact, since Ariel Sharon (and now his deputy Olmert) took power
in 2001, they've done everything possible to block any negotiations or solutions that
might possibly require Israel to give back to the Palestinians the 22% of pre-1948 Palestine
that is called "The West Bank" and "Gaza." Yet never has this been clearer than in the
last week, and it is incumbent on us to forward this analysis, plus the articles about
the 40th anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, that will appear in the
May/June issue of Tikkun. But please do not think that all Israelis rally around the
Occupation. What is true is that there is a high level of despair about doing anything
about the Occupation, particularly as long as Palestinians rally around Hamas and
Hamas insists that it will never accept the very existence of the State of Israel as any-
thing more than a horrible fact that it is intending to overthrow the moment it would
get the power to do so. Of course, many in the U.S. felt the same way about the Soviet
Union, and vice versa, but that didn't prevent both sides from negotiating arms
reduction deals. The problem on both sides of the Israel/Palestine dispute is that
people take the other sides' wish to delegitimate or destroy the other as grounds
to not negotiate, whereas it should be the opposite, namely, that precisely because
the other side is so problematic they need to work out a solution that benefits each side.
Yet the anger generated by the Occupation in Palestine, and by the terror attacks in
Israel, blind both sides to their best interests. And as we see this week, that
extends for Israel to not being able to see that a deal with Syria would strengthen
not weaken Israel's security.}
Israel doesn't want peace
By Gideon Levy
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/846420.html
The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.
It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?
Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.
Entire generations grew up here weaned on self-deception and doubt about the likelihood of achieving peace with our neighbors. In our younger days, David Ben-Gurion told us that if he were only able to meet with Arab leaders, he would have brought us peace in his time. Israel has demanded direct negotiations as a matter of principle and Israelis have derived great pride from the fact that their daily focus on "peace" has concealed their state's lofty ambitions. We were told that there was no partner for peace and that the ultimate ambition of the Arabs is to bring about our destruction. We burned the portraits of "the Egyptian tyrant" at our bonfires on Lag Ba'omer, and were convinced that all blame for the lack of peace lied with our enemies.
After that came the occupation, followed by terror, Yassir Arafat, the failed second Camp David Summit and the rise of Hamas to power, and we were sure, always sure, that it was all their fault. In our wildest dreams, we wouldn't have believed that the day would come when the entire Arab world would extend its hand in peace and Israel would brush away the gesture. It would have been even crazier to imagine that this Israeli refusal would have been blamed on not wanting to enrage domestic public opinion.
The world has been turned upside down and it is Israel that stands at the forefront of refusal. The policy of refusal of a select few, a vanguard of the extreme, has now become the official policy of Jerusalem. In his Passover interviews, Olmert will tell us that, "The Palestinians stand at the crossroads of a historic decision," but people stopped taking him seriously a long time ago. The historic decision is ours, and we are fleeing from this crossroads and from these initiatives as if from death itself.
Terror, used as the ultimate excuse for Israeli refusal, only helps Olmert keep reciting, ad nauseum, "If they [the Palestinians] don't change, don't fight terror and don't adhere to any of their obligations, then they will never extract themselves from their unending chaos." As though the Palestinians haven't taken measures against terrorism, as though Israel is the one to determine what their obligations are, as though Israel isn't to blame for the unending chaos Palestinians suffer under the occupation.
Israel makes a point of setting prerequisites and believes it has an exclusive right to do so. But, time and time again, Israel avoids the most basic prerequisite for any just peace - an end to the occupation. Of all the questions asked during his Passover interviews, no one bothered to ask Olmert why he didn't react with excitement to the recent Arab initiatives, without preconditions? The answer: real estate. The real estate of the settlements.
It's not only Olmert who is dragging his feet. A leading figure in the Labor party said last week that "it will take five to 10 years to recover from the trauma." Peace is now no more than a threatening wound, with no one still talking about the massive social benefits it would bring in development, security, freedom of movement in the region and by establishing a more just society.
Like a little Switzerland, we are focusing more these days on the dollar exchange rate and on the allegations of embezzlement leveled against the Finance Ministry than on the fateful opportunities fading away before our very eyes.
Not every day and not even in every generation do we encounter an opportunity like this. Although it's not for sure if the initiatives are completely solid and believable, or if they are based on trickery, no one has stepped up to challenge or acknowledge them. When Olmert is an elderly grandfather, what will he tell his grandchildren? That he turned over every stone in the name of peace? That there was no other choice? What will his grandchildren say?
*****************************************************
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Join us as we protest the Occupation on its 40th anniversary in June. Details will follow.
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