Snuffysmith's Blog, Articles and Commentary of the Day - Vol. 3 Options

[Snuffysmith]

SINOGRAPH
The peace imperative
By Francesco Sisci

http://atimes.com/atimes/China/LA08Ad02.html

SINOGRAPH
The peace imperative
By Francesco Sisci

BEIJING - In 2005, Zheng Bijian, then executive vice-president of the Central Party School, a former political adviser to Communist Party secretary Hu Yaobang, and for years right-hand man to President Hu Jintao, published an essay in the US detailing China's doctrine about its peaceful rise. [1]

The article argued that China would not seek hegemonic status in the world and would not engage in expansionist wars. It explained how historic Imperial China, although very powerful at times, never went out of its own political basin.

Zheng’s argument was a response to Western allegations that China, as it grew strong and powerful, would also grow aggressive, just as 19th-century Germany did, thus leading Europe and the world into the Great War of the early 20th century. Coming as it did from a person with such an illustrious background, it was a public political pledge: China in the future would not become aggressive, and if it did, anybody could turn this article against Beijing, making it lose face and essential international political capital.

According to Chinese political logic, then, this pledge was very significant: it was and remains a commitment about future policies, by which China's internal and international credibility and accountability may be gauged.

However, Western skeptics know full well that political pledges can be warped and turned upside down if political necessities arise. The real question then is, they argue, will China feel it necessary to put aside the pledge about its peaceful rise and engage in an aggressive foreign policy? What would the conditions be for such aggressive behavior? Would a unilateraldeclaration of independence by Taiwan tip the balance? How then can we believe that China is serious about its peaceful rise?

China's love for peace may then look like that of 19th-century Germany - it will keep the peace only as long as doing so fits its goals, otherwise it will resort to war.

Yet the comparison between present-day China and 19th-century Germany is extremely weak. Germany gained its status as a continental superpower thanks to two successful wars against two of the major powers of the time. In 1866, Prussia defeated Austria, putting a definite end to the 1,000-year-old Holy Roman Empire, for centuries the bulwark of Catholicism in the Europe. And in 1870, Prussia defeated Napoleon III, stopping French ambitions over Europe.

Those two wars proved to Europe, then the political center of the world, the prowess of the Prussian army and the Prussian state. The wars also greatly enlarged Prussian territory and transformed it into the German Empire, which eventually fought and almost beat single-handedly all of Europe between 1914 and 1918. Thus we can see that Imperial Germany was born out of wars against the major powers of the time, and thanks to those wars it shaped its own territory, with expansions at the expense of Austria and France.

China has not fought an expansionist war for more than a century. In fact, during that period it has fought wars against enemies trying to carve out its territory. China had its last border war in the early 1970s against the USSR, and its very last military clash occurred in 1988 against some Vietnamese coastal patrols; only a few score people were involved and the incident was soon buried under a flurry of diplomacy.

The major setback to the past 30 years of reforms was after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. For a couple of years, Chinesebusiness and development suffered heavily. Although China was not involved in a foreign war and the protests did not evolve into a civil war, the episode sufficed to scare both domestic and foreign enterprises.

Still, unlike other rising powers, China has managed to grow its economy at the rate of almost 10% a year for the past 30 years without wars or any major domestic or international confrontation. China, in other words, managed to grow thanks to peace. This has guaranteed a peaceful environment, conducive to business, and also, very importantly, no major wastage in costly wars or armament programs that would have drawn investment away from productive goals.

In fact, these 30 years have been the most peaceful of the past 170 years, since the time of the First Opium War. That was followed by the Taiping Rebellion, then battles against Britain, France, Japan and Russia, until the Boxer Rebellion and the humiliating crackdown at the hands of foreign powers in 1900. It was the last straw for the Qing Dynasty, which fell soon after, starting a long period of civil war culminating with the Japanese invasion.

When the Communists took power, it was not the end of Chinesebellicosity. Millions died in domestic political movements, while hundreds of thousands of "volunteers" were dispatched abroad to "support the revolution" in neighboring countries, and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) itself was called to defend the motherland against the Americans and South Koreans (1951), the Indians (1962), the Russians (1971), and the Vietnamese (1979).

All these wars, these movements, and these deaths did not advance China's international profile an inch - quite the contrary. They squandered political and physical capital and made China and the Chinese people very poor.

In the past 30 years, there was just the one violent clash (against the Vietnamese boats in 1988), and the previous intense violence of mass movements and the crackdowns against them has been on the wane. Hundreds of Tiananmen protesters were shot at, but the number of casualties was minor compared with those during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s, or the land reform of the 1950s, when millions lost their lives. And since 1989, even such a large crackdown as that against the Falungong in 1999 was minimal if measured against that of Tiananmen.

One can see that the less violence, the faster and steadier the economic growth. The lesson learned in the past 30 years is that China can rise through peace, not through war. Peace can make China rise; war would stop its rise and move it backward.

Therefore, the reality is much stronger than Zheng argued. China absolutely needs peace for its development. Without peace, its development could be put in jeopardy and gains made in the past three decades could easily be forfeited.

China is fully aware that a series of simple and serious mistakes can easily dent and destroy national position and wealth. The gross domestic product of Qing China in 1840 was more than one-third of global GDP, thus it was about 50% richer than the United States was in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the refusal to engage in trade with European powers, a series of mistakes with foreign countries and a massive domestic rebellion over about 60 years massively impoverished and weakened the country. China's GDP will be for many years still below 10% of global GDP, a fact that clearly tells us how great its interest is in keeping a peacefulenvironment and shunning wars or confrontations.

Furthermore, China for more than a decade has heavily financed the US debt. China is the United States' major creditor, and possibly 70% of its foreign reserves are in US dollars, so China is financing the US armed forces, in theory its major military enemy.

Still, we have to understand that China has no interest in presenting its thesis in these terms. If it were to say "we desperately need peace", this could invite bullying, something China deeply fears given its past 170 years of history. China thus needs to show itself strong to preempt any provocation and challenge. Therefore the doctrine of the peaceful rise is crafted in a clever manner. China promises only not to be aggressive, and thus avoids conceding that it needs peace and thus inviting provocation. However, the objective reality is that it does need peace, the only guarantor of development.

China will sacrifice peace only if an external threat starts an internal power struggle against the balance of power in the Communist Party. For instance, if Taiwan were unilaterally to declare independence, the Chinese president must go to war. To do otherwise would show that the leadership is too dovish, which could trigger a power struggle whereby hawks, accusing the leaders of being spineless weaklings, could try to topple them and change the overall political system, endangering the politicalstability of the whole country.

However, going to war even in such an extreme case would be no guarantee of safekeeping power. If the PLA were defeated in a limited war, this could start a power struggle in Beijing that could topple the leadership. China's semi-defeat in the 1979 war against Vietnam helped to secure the path of Deng Xiaoping's reforms against the left-wingers, who took part in the arrest of the Gang of Four. Reforms were deemed necessary to modernize the PLA, until then predominately considered the backbone of the party, but which did not perform well in Vietnam.

China needs an army strong enough to win a limited war, or even better an army strong enough to make a potential enemy shy away without firing a shot. Every route to war is risky for China and its leadership, and conversely all those in China considering or calling for war may have another agenda - some ax to grind against the present leadership.

China and its leadership are thus walking a very dangerous tightrope that becomes thicker and better as the economy grows stronger, but which remains a tightrope.

A different political system, less fragile then the present secretive and authoritarian one, could offer better guarantees of overall stability in case of crisis because of war. However, as in all rising countries, nationalistic programs can easily become springboards to power for ambitious and unscrupulous men, and a more democratic China could be held hostage by nationalistic elements. They could push their nationalistic schemes and stir up disgruntled youth as a way to gain power.

Overall, one cannot rule out the possibility that the present political system, because of its inherent fragility, is more conducive to peace than a more open political system, which would be stronger in a crisis.

[Snuffysmith]

REUTERS

1/14/10

Ex-Qaeda man links motive to alleged U.S. abuse: report

William Maclean

LONDON (Reuters) - A former Guantanamo inmate who fled to Yemen to help lead an al Qaeda branch after his release says he was motivated by the memory of abuse he says he suffered in U.S. custody, the BBC reported on Wednesday.

Concern about Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has risen sharply since it claimed responsibility for a failed plot to blow up a U.S. passenger jet on December 25.

The group has several former Guantanamo detainees in its ranks, which are believed to number about 300.

The former Guantanamo detainee, a Saudi named Mohammed al-Awfi, said he had been tortured while in detention six years ago at the Bagram U.S. military base in Afghanistan before he was sent to Guantanamo, the BBC reported him as saying.

The memory of this abuse doomed efforts by Saudi officials to ensure he did not resume militant activities, he told the BBC in an interview in Saudi Arabia, where he has been in prison following his surrender to Yemeni and Saudi authorities in 2009.

"When I asked al-Awfi why the rehabilitation program had not worked for him, he said it was because the memories of what he had suffered at the hands of Americans were far more powerful than any corrective inducements he had received in the Care program," BBC journalist Peter Taylor wrote in an online report, referring to a Saudi deradicalization campaign aimed at former Guantanamo detainees.

"Al-Awfi claimed his U.S. interrogators had done terrible things to him. He alleges they sat him on a chair, made a hole in the seat, and then "pulled out the testicles from underneath which they then hit with a metal rod"," Taylor reported.

"They'd then tie up your penis and make you drink salty water in order to make you urinate without being able to do so, until they make you scream," Taylor quoted him as saying.

Pentagon officials in Washington had no immediate comment.

Taylor's interview with Awfi is to be broadcast on Wednesday at 2230 GMT on BBC Television's Newsnight program.

Al-Awfi and another Saudi freed from Guantanamo, Mohammed al-Shehri, announced in an Internet video in January 2009 that they had joined the Yemen-based al Qaeda group as commanders.

Both men had entered a Saudi rehabilitation program after their release from the U.S. detention center in late 2007.

The program involves counseling by Muslim clerics to alter their thinking, extensive contact with their families, and practical help to reintegrate them into society.

The program is credited with helping erode support for al Qaeda in the kingdom. But the two men's well-publicized return to al Qaeda embarrassed the Saudi authorities.

The Saudi Interior Ministry has said Awfi gave himself up in 2009 after contacting his family and asking them to get in touch with officials from the rehabilitation program.

U.S. officials said last week a Pentagon assessment showed about one in five inmates freed from Guantanamo had joined or was suspected of joining militant groups like al Qaeda.
Under pressure to increase safeguards, U.S. authorities on January 5 said they had suspended the transfer of more Guantanamo detainees to Yemen, citing deteriorating security in the country.

[Snuffysmith]

http://dailycaller.com/2010/01/14/triple-t...ership-in-2010/



Triple threat: Three security trends that will test Obama’s leadership in 2010

Posted By Patrick Cronin On January 14, 2010 (12:10 am) In Opinion

President Barack Obama spent most of 2009 trying to restore American legitimacy, and his efforts were met with some success, especially among our European allies. However, it will take more than a good reputation to tackle the problems of 2010. In the coming year, President Obama will have to deal with a flagging economy, two major wars and a myriad of other smaller military engagements, and the ever-present global problems of nuclear proliferation and climate change.

Having entered office with a hefty foreign affairs inheritance–one that included global recession, a deteriorating insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan, burgeoning nuclear ambitions within Iran and North Korea, and heightened fears over both energy and environmental security—our pragmatic commander in chief set out to craft a new narrative, mobilize friends, de-mobilize opponents, redefine problems, get our house in order, and rely on “smart” power and “whole-of-government” solutions.

President Obama has performed these honeymoon-year maneuvers well. But his actions were always meant to be more soothing than healing. His generally cautious use of power abroad has bought the United States some breathing space to reassess strategies, rebuild coalitions, and re-launch policies. Yet he will need good fortune indeed to convert initial international investments into money in the bank. The economy, war, and nuclear issues all threaten to spoil Obama’s second year.

To address the tenuous state of the world economy, President Obama aligned with the Chinese and others to create vast economic stimuli. Forestalling a sequel to the Great Depression was no mean feat. Looking ahead, however, the vital question remains the future disposition of the U.S. economy relative to the economic strength of other developed and emerging nations. At best, the outlook is uncertain.

The stimulus did little to slow a long-term trend in America’s eroding economic position vis-à-vis Asia in general and China in particular. The United States faces titanic trade and budget deficits, while Asian economies have been quick to rebound. China remains set to triple its GDP and double the size of its middle class from 300 to some 600 million people before 2025. President Obama has relied on spending borrowed money to stabilize an economy with 10 percent unemployment; but such pump-priming contradicts the need for history’s largest debtor nation to rein in its spending. How will President Obama hold down our $12 trillion national debt?

Clearly the current wars won’t help our economic outlook. Indeed, cost was one factor in the President’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (rather than the 40,000 or more that General Stanley McChrystal thought necessary to wage an effective counterinsurgency). The President also wanted to avoid an open-ended commitment to a potential quagmire. His deliberate strategy was unveiled simultaneously with a mid-2011 conditional deadline for beginning a drawdown. In addition, the operation was given an improbably short deadline (late-2010) by which time momentum was to tip away from the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and al-Qaida.

Impediments to success loom large. A fundamental problem is our fragile partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan, each of whom has a different agenda from the United States. A second problem is our lack of unity of effort, whether one looks at our sluggish civilian capacity or our multiple and crisscrossing channels into Kabul, Istanbul and the region. A third problem is that we may unintentionally widen the war, whether to Baluchistan and North Waziristan (because of Pakistan’s unwillingness to address those areas); to Yemen (another al-Qaida safe haven, but one mixed with large indigenous movements and a corrupt partner in Sana’a); or to the American homeland (because of anxiety about new terrorist attacks).

In the side-view mirror, the Administration will have to worry about slowly resurgent ethnic and sectarian fighting in Iraq as more U.S. troops redeploy. In the face of all this, and in the midst of a mid-term November election, the President will have to stand steadfast. Will our Nobel Prize-winning President have the resolve to do what is necessary on these complex battlefields?

If this were not enough, the President will also have a difficult year trying to contain nuclear proliferation. The worst-case fear of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists prompted Obama to seek to devalue nuclear weapons by articulating a vision of a world without nuclear weapons. He also put aside domestic public opinion to engage proliferating regimes in Tehran (by supporting European-led international diplomacy) and Pyongyang (by agreeing to bilateral diplomacy within the context of Six Party Talks).

Even in the face of growing domestic opposition, Iran’s hardline leaders are clinging to their nuclear dreams—dreams that threaten to become regional nightmares. Iran’s previously undisclosed facility near Qom suggests that engagement is failing to protect Iran’s neighbors, both in the Gulf and in the Levant. Moreover, Kim Jong-il, he of questionable longevity and equally questionable succession, appears to be exploiting bilateral talks to delay taking any disarmament.

Visions of ‘global zero’ and binding climate change treaties should not impede sober action that halts or mitigates dangerous nuclear proliferation. What will President Obama do if he realizes that even racheted-up sanctions will not compel Iran or North Korea to cough up their nuclear programs?

Nuclear proliferation also encompasses civil nuclear power and attempts to transition to a post-carbon economy. In Copenhagen last month, the President called for cutting U.S. emissions and was partly able to recast the perception of the United States from that of an environmental laggard back to a potential leader; but he has taken few serious steps at home to invest in alternative sources of clean energy. Is President Obama willing to start serious investment in safe, civil nuclear power?

The economy; the current wars; and nuclear power and climate change—each and all of these are likely to test the mettle and not merely the oratory of President Obama in the year ahead. Let’s hope that he retains not only the idealism to inspire others but also the realism to deal effectively with these critical challenges.

Patrick Cronin is a Senior Advisor and Senior Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Previously, he was the Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at National Defense University and has had a 25-year career inside government and academic research centers, spanning defense affairs, foreign policy, and development assistance.

[rla]

SINOGRAPH
The peace imperative
By Francesco Sisci

http://atimes.com/atimes/China/LA08Ad02.html

SINOGRAPH
The peace imperative
By Francesco Sisci

BEIJING - In 2005, Zheng Bijian, then executive vice-president of the Central Party School, a former political adviser to Communist Party secretary Hu Yaobang, and for years right-hand man to President Hu Jintao, published an essay in the US detailing China's doctrine about its peaceful rise. [1]

The article argued that China would not seek hegemonic status in the world and would not engage in expansionist wars. It explained how historic Imperial China, although very powerful at times, never went out of its own political basin.

Zheng’s argument was a response to Western allegations that China, as it grew strong and powerful, would also grow aggressive, just as 19th-century Germany did, thus leading Europe and the world into the Great War of the early 20th century. Coming as it did from a person with such an illustrious background, it was a public political pledge: China in the future would not become aggressive, and if it did, anybody could turn this article against Beijing, making it lose face and essential international political capital.

According to Chinese political logic, then, this pledge was very significant: it was and remains a commitment about future policies, by which China's internal and international credibility and accountability may be gauged.

However, Western skeptics know full well that political pledges can be warped and turned upside down if political necessities arise. The real question then is, they argue, will China feel it necessary to put aside the pledge about its peaceful rise and engage in an aggressive foreign policy? What would the conditions be for such aggressive behavior? Would a unilateraldeclaration of independence by Taiwan tip the balance? How then can we believe that China is serious about its peaceful rise?

China's love for peace may then look like that of 19th-century Germany - it will keep the peace only as long as doing so fits its goals, otherwise it will resort to war.

Yet the comparison between present-day China and 19th-century Germany is extremely weak. Germany gained its status as a continental superpower thanks to two successful wars against two of the major powers of the time. In 1866, Prussia defeated Austria, putting a definite end to the 1,000-year-old Holy Roman Empire, for centuries the bulwark of Catholicism in the Europe. And in 1870, Prussia defeated Napoleon III, stopping French ambitions over Europe.

Those two wars proved to Europe, then the political center of the world, the prowess of the Prussian army and the Prussian state. The wars also greatly enlarged Prussian territory and transformed it into the German Empire, which eventually fought and almost beat single-handedly all of Europe between 1914 and 1918. Thus we can see that Imperial Germany was born out of wars against the major powers of the time, and thanks to those wars it shaped its own territory, with expansions at the expense of Austria and France.

China has not fought an expansionist war for more than a century. In fact, during that period it has fought wars against enemies trying to carve out its territory. China had its last border war in the early 1970s against the USSR, and its very last military clash occurred in 1988 against some Vietnamese coastal patrols; only a few score people were involved and the incident was soon buried under a flurry of diplomacy.

The major setback to the past 30 years of reforms was after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. For a couple of years, Chinesebusiness and development suffered heavily. Although China was not involved in a foreign war and the protests did not evolve into a civil war, the episode sufficed to scare both domestic and foreign enterprises.

Still, unlike other rising powers, China has managed to grow its economy at the rate of almost 10% a year for the past 30 years without wars or any major domestic or international confrontation. China, in other words, managed to grow thanks to peace. This has guaranteed a peaceful environment, conducive to business, and also, very importantly, no major wastage in costly wars or armament programs that would have drawn investment away from productive goals.

In fact, these 30 years have been the most peaceful of the past 170 years, since the time of the First Opium War. That was followed by the Taiping Rebellion, then battles against Britain, France, Japan and Russia, until the Boxer Rebellion and the humiliating crackdown at the hands of foreign powers in 1900. It was the last straw for the Qing Dynasty, which fell soon after, starting a long period of civil war culminating with the Japanese invasion.

When the Communists took power, it was not the end of Chinesebellicosity. Millions died in domestic political movements, while hundreds of thousands of "volunteers" were dispatched abroad to "support the revolution" in neighboring countries, and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) itself was called to defend the motherland against the Americans and South Koreans (1951), the Indians (1962), the Russians (1971), and the Vietnamese (1979).

All these wars, these movements, and these deaths did not advance China's international profile an inch - quite the contrary. They squandered political and physical capital and made China and the Chinese people very poor.

In the past 30 years, there was just the one violent clash (against the Vietnamese boats in 1988), and the previous intense violence of mass movements and the crackdowns against them has been on the wane. Hundreds of Tiananmen protesters were shot at, but the number of casualties was minor compared with those during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s, or the land reform of the 1950s, when millions lost their lives. And since 1989, even such a large crackdown as that against the Falungong in 1999 was minimal if measured against that of Tiananmen.

One can see that the less violence, the faster and steadier the economic growth. The lesson learned in the past 30 years is that China can rise through peace, not through war. Peace can make China rise; war would stop its rise and move it backward.

Therefore, the reality is much stronger than Zheng argued. China absolutely needs peace for its development. Without peace, its development could be put in jeopardy and gains made in the past three decades could easily be forfeited.

China is fully aware that a series of simple and serious mistakes can easily dent and destroy national position and wealth. The gross domestic product of Qing China in 1840 was more than one-third of global GDP, thus it was about 50% richer than the United States was in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet the refusal to engage in trade with European powers, a series of mistakes with foreign countries and a massive domestic rebellion over about 60 years massively impoverished and weakened the country. China's GDP will be for many years still below 10% of global GDP, a fact that clearly tells us how great its interest is in keeping a peacefulenvironment and shunning wars or confrontations.

Furthermore, China for more than a decade has heavily financed the US debt. China is the United States' major creditor, and possibly 70% of its foreign reserves are in US dollars, so China is financing the US armed forces, in theory its major military enemy.

Still, we have to understand that China has no interest in presenting its thesis in these terms. If it were to say "we desperately need peace", this could invite bullying, something China deeply fears given its past 170 years of history. China thus needs to show itself strong to preempt any provocation and challenge. Therefore the doctrine of the peaceful rise is crafted in a clever manner. China promises only not to be aggressive, and thus avoids conceding that it needs peace and thus inviting provocation. However, the objective reality is that it does need peace, the only guarantor of development.

China will sacrifice peace only if an external threat starts an internal power struggle against the balance of power in the Communist Party. For instance, if Taiwan were unilaterally to declare independence, the Chinese president must go to war. To do otherwise would show that the leadership is too dovish, which could trigger a power struggle whereby hawks, accusing the leaders of being spineless weaklings, could try to topple them and change the overall political system, endangering the politicalstability of the whole country.

However, going to war even in such an extreme case would be no guarantee of safekeeping power. If the PLA were defeated in a limited war, this could start a power struggle in Beijing that could topple the leadership. China's semi-defeat in the 1979 war against Vietnam helped to secure the path of Deng Xiaoping's reforms against the left-wingers, who took part in the arrest of the Gang of Four. Reforms were deemed necessary to modernize the PLA, until then predominately considered the backbone of the party, but which did not perform well in Vietnam.

China needs an army strong enough to win a limited war, or even better an army strong enough to make a potential enemy shy away without firing a shot. Every route to war is risky for China and its leadership, and conversely all those in China considering or calling for war may have another agenda - some ax to grind against the present leadership.

China and its leadership are thus walking a very dangerous tightrope that becomes thicker and better as the economy grows stronger, but which remains a tightrope.

A different political system, less fragile then the present secretive and authoritarian one, could offer better guarantees of overall stability in case of crisis because of war. However, as in all rising countries, nationalistic programs can easily become springboards to power for ambitious and unscrupulous men, and a more democratic China could be held hostage by nationalistic elements. They could push their nationalistic schemes and stir up disgruntled youth as a way to gain power.

Overall, one cannot rule out the possibility that the present political system, because of its inherent fragility, is more conducive to peace than a more open political system, which would be stronger in a crisis.

Can the Democratic Party in the US in 2010 become the Peace Party and reinforce the China Preferance for Peace...

The major division in the Republican Party will be between the, "Tea Partiers who support Ron Paul's
anti-interventionists and the Religious Right Tea Baggers who support the Neocon war mongers...

If the Democratic party promotes a strong peace movement and real populist progressive reforms, we
can leave our war party component that is owned by the Financial Oligarchy behind...

[Snuffysmith]

PRC Scholar Explains Logic Behind China's Development of Anti-Missile Technology
CPP20100119038003 Shanghai Dongfang Zaobao Online in Chinese 15 Jan 10

[Article by Shen Dingli, executive deputy dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University: "Understanding the Logic of China's Anti-Missile Test"]

In the field of national security, China has been consistent in its adherence to a realistic path: When the country faces a security threat with regard to weapons technology, we will first call on the international community to ban such weapons technology, otherwise China has no choice but to keep up with it. This is how it is with regard to nuclear weapons, and it is also this way with regard to missile defense technology.

On the 11th, the Chinese government announced that on that day China had successfully conducted a test of ground-based, midcourse missile intercept technology. Over a decade ago, we vigorously opposed the development by the United States of theater missile defense (TMD) and national missile defense (NMD) technology, but we were not successful. Accordingly, we have also developed our own missile defense technology. In a certain sense, at that time we had no need to oppose it, because after all this was defensive technology. If the United States faces a missile threat, naturally it would want to develop missile-defense technology. The threat that the United States perceives might include China's missile offensive/counterattack capabilities. China has no intention of posing an active threat to the United States, and our development of limited offensive missile capabilities is entirely for self-defense. However, China's limited self-defense capabilities may still be perceived by the United States as posing a threat to its restraint of China.

Naturally, this view of security on the part of the United States will necessarily be seen by China as a threat, and furthermore China believes that it has the right to not be threatened. Therefore, when the United States came to possess nuclear weapons and, in the 1950s, used them to threaten China, China was then forced to develop its own nuclear weapons (this is also the logic behind North Korea's development of nuclear weapons). And when the United States continues to possess nuclear weapons and, at present, continues to threaten China (including the mainland and Taiwan) by selling weapons to Taiwan, China's central government has also decided to continue to possess nuclear weapons (and this is also the reason why North Korea is unwilling to give up its nuclear programs).

Whether or not the United States possesses nuclear weapons is still its sovereign right. However, if the United States actively interferes abroad, it will harm the sovereignty of other countries, and at such times the missile defense capabilities of the United States will help the United States in daring to interfere while not being too worried about being subject to retaliation. When missile defense which originally seemed reasonable is integrated with an aggressive foreign strategy, people's understanding of the complexity of missile defense will deepen -- missile defense can not only increase the chances of countries which possess it to resist missile invasions and improve national security, it can also be integrated with an offensive foreign strategy and prompt those who have missile defense systems to dare to take risks and adopt foreign policies that are highly aggressive.

Accordingly, opposing missile defense will not be successful. Missile defense certainly may enhance the ability of countries which possess such technology to resist aggression, but this need is shared by mankind and every country. Opposing it is not as good as constructing it oneself, and this is because those who oppose it are themselves facing missile threats, and although one can, through cooperative security or collective security, mold a more secure international environment, it is actually difficult to ensure that an invader will never appear in the international system in the future, and one cannot ensure that a missile threat directed at one's own side will never appear. Furthermore, faced with a threat, a sovereign state must have sufficiently credible deterrence capabilities to thwart aggression, and also immediately adopt advanced missile defense technology to disrupt a missile invasion after it is launched.

China is fully aware that it has no way to keep other countries from developing advanced missile defense systems, and therefore it has decided to develop its own ground-based, midcourse missile intercept technology, and it is only for that reason that we have the current successful anti-missile test by China. Obviously, China has achieved a small measure of success in developing anti-missile [technology], but still, faced with the United States, which possesses marked offensive and defensive missile superiority, it is hard to say we are secure. However, in the field of national security, China has been consistent in its adherence to a realistic path: When the country faces a security threat with regard to weapons technology, we will first call on the international community to ban such weapons technology, otherwise China has no choice but to keep up with it. This is how it is with regard to nuclear weapons, and it is also this way with regard to missile defense technology.

Even with regard to the problem of anti-satellite [technology], it is still this principle that we have adhered to. The United States was the first country to carry out an anti-satellite warfare test, and the debris in space produced by the test has directly jeopardized the security of the orbiting space vehicles of other countries, and the anti-satellite capabilities thus acquired by the United States have posed a serious threat to the communications, sensing, and command security of other countries, and were bound to encounter intense opposition from China and Russia. However, out of its absolute-security considerations, the United States has no scruples over this, and this then forces China to conduct a Chinese version of the anti-satellite capabilities project, and through a security balance in space among the related countries, ensure that there is an effective balance of nuclear deterrence on the ground among various countries.

Three years ago, it was also on 11 January when China first successfully conducted a "satellite experiment." However, China really did not want to announce that "experiment," but confirmed it because of the international public opinion environment. Three years later China has conducted an anti-missile test, which it actually reported ahead of other countries, so the increased military transparency is self-evident. Over these three years, there has been a marked change in China's attitude toward publicizing major national defense construction achievements, which is gratifying and auspicious.

Whether or not this announcement was related to the arms sales to Taiwan by the United States, every citizen will acknowledge that China must establish a military system with full offensive and defensive capabilities. So long as we face security threats, we will need to establish our own national defense, including missile defense that undergoes gradual improvement. Where socialist China differs from other countries is only in that we will exercise restraint in the development of offensive capabilities, and furthermore will not be the first to resort to force, but we should not just criticize the development of defense by other countries while not developing such ourselves.


[Description of Source: Shanghai Dongfang Zaobao (Oriental Morning Post) Online in Chinese Website of daily newspaper established by the party-connected Wenhui-Xinmin United Press Group in 2003; URL: http://www.dfdaily.com]

[Snuffysmith]

It's Time to Pressure Netanyahu
http://mediamattersaction.org/blog/201001220002

Back in the 1960's, David Frost hosted a show on NBC that was an early version of Saturday Night Live. It was called "That Was The Week That Was" (nicknamed TW3) and it satirized the week's events. The show ended with a song that concluded: "That was the week that was. It's over. Let it go."

Few Democrats would argue with that sentiment this week. In a week shortened by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, the fortunes of the Democratic Party appeared to turn upside down. That probably isn't true. But that is how it felt. It has been years since the results of a special election in a single state so rattled the governing party. The last time was in 1991, when Attorney General Dick Thornburgh lost the Pennsylvania Senate special to Harris Wofford after leading by 50 points.

That was the moment Democrats realized that they just might win the 1992 Presidential election. Fortunately (for Democrats), the incumbent Republican President, the first George Bush, ignored the Pennsylvania results and kept doing what he was doing -- which was, at least domestically, not much. (It is worth noting that the issue Wofford won on was health care reform, which is why Bill Clinton made it the centerpiece of his successful Presidential campaign against Bush.)

President Obama is not likely to make Bush's mistake. By taking on the banks two days after the Democratic candidate lost in Massachusetts, he gave an early indication that he will fix what needs to be fixed, assuming he can.

It won't be easy. The second Bush left him the worst economy since Herbert Hoover handed an even worse one to FDR. But those were different times. Americans understood -- perhaps because FDR made them understand -- that their quite legitimate anger should be directed at the Republicans who had destroyed the economy over the previous 12 years and not at the person who inherited the mess.

In fact, with the exception of the plutocracy of the day, everyone either loved FDR or, at least, hoped for his success. Sure he had to deal with the equivalents of Rush Limbaugh (Father Coughlin came closest to the Limbaugh model) but his blatant anti-Semitism kept him from achieving the kind of influence Limbaugh has.

Of course, Limbaugh's attitudes toward women, African-Americans, gays, Latinos and Jews (just to name a few of Limbaugh's favorite scapegoats) has not prevented him from essentially taking over the Republican party. But the media was different in those days, as was the Republican party.

Even Coughlin (unlike Limbaugh) never said that he wanted the administration to fail. Maybe that was because Coughlin was a priest and perhaps, every so often, saw the suffering the depression had inflicted on ordinary Americans. Limbaugh never leaves his Xanadu-like compound and has no idea what Obama's failure would mean to working Americans. Or maybe he has the same amount of compassion for jobless Americans that he has for Haitians: None.

The important thing is that Obama not follow the Bush example -- neither domestically nor on foreign policy.

I mentioned the banking reform bill as evidence that he "gets it" on domestic issues, but I'm not so sure about foreign policy.

The Massachusetts election did not turn on foreign policy. In fact, it was barely mentioned. That is not surprising. Even Senator-Elect Scott Brown praised Obama's foreign policy initiatives.

But there has been one conspicuous failure (an "epic fail," as the kids say). It is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No one forced the President to promise to get negotiations started during his first year in office. No one demanded that he go off to Cairo to tell the Muslim world that his administration would resume the role of "honest broker" between Israelis and Palestinians rather than act, as George W. Bush did, as Israel's lawyer.

He did those things because it's right and because he understands that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does more harm to the United States in the Muslim world, does more to destabilize our friends and energize terrorists, than any other single issue. He also seized the Israeli-Palestinian issue because he understands that continuation of the occupation is destroying Israel's chances of long-term survival and because he was appalled by the horrific Gaza war.

The Muslim world was deeply impressed by the President's words.

But they were not followed by action. Sure, Obama dispatched former Senator George Mitchell to the Middle East to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table. But, as was the case with the previous administration, Mitchell was undercut by other administration officials whose rule of thumb is "no pressure on Israel. Ever." So when Obama, Mitchell and Secretary Clinton called for a settlement freeze as an obvious first step toward serious negotiations, Israelis were hearing that they could just resist and Obama would cave. That is exactly what happened.

Actually it was worse than that. The President called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to freeze settlements. Netanyahu responded with a speech accepting a murky version of the two-state solution but rejected the freeze. In fact, he expanded settlements with Israelis moving into the heart of Arab East Jerusalem. (For the first time you can see ultra-Orthodox Jews moving into previously all Palestinian areas right near East Jerusalem's downtown while Palestinians are being pushed out.)

Even worse, when Netanyahu demanded that Obama condemn the Goldstone report on war crimes in Gaza, the administration did -- even though the White House spokesperson admitted that no one at the White House had read it. And then we insisted, after Netanyahu insisted, that the Palestinians condemn the Goldstone report's finding on the treatment of their fellow Palestinians.

The result of all this is predictable. Raising expectations and then dashing them is the sure way to fuel rage. And that is what the administration's lack of follow through has achieved.

I don't argue that any of this produced this week's debacle in the Bay State. However, it is never good for a President's political health when a foreign leader makes him look like a patsy. Obama needs to either engage seriously -- and that means pressure on both sides to negotiate honestly -- or he should call George Mitchell home. In Bush's day, it was Colin Powell who was sent off to serve as Middle East "honest broker" only to be cut off at the knees back in Washington. Now the same thing is happening to another great American.

It's wrong, and it hurts Obama too. Right now he needs to demonstrate that he is clearly in charge. That means telling Netanyahu and Abbas not that he sympathizes with their domestic political situations (as he said in TIME yesterday), but that he doesn't. The settlers, in particular, are not our problem. Nor is the longevity of Netanyahu's coalition government. Abbas and Netanyahu are expendable. The American national interest isn't.

That interest, in the words of George W. Bush as repeated by Barack Obama, is "two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side, in peace and security."

For Israel's sake. For the Palestinians'. But mostly for ours.

[Snuffysmith]

Uri Avnery

23/1/10



The Liebarak

HE BUSINESS is registered in the name of Binyamin Netanyahu. But the reality is different.

Netanyahu has never been more than a slick patent medicine salesman. That is a type that appears frequently in American Westerns and sells an elixir that is good for everything: against the flu and against tuberculosis, against heart attacks and against lunacy. The main weapon of the vendor is his tongue: his stream of words builds castles in the air, blows up glistening bubbles and silences all doubt.

Since the election almost a year ago, his biggest (literally) achievement has been the setting up of a cabinet: 30 ministers and a bunch of deputies, most of them without any perceptible duties, some of them in charge of ministries for which they are the most unsuited of all possible candidates. From then on his main occupation has been the one in which he is most adept: political survival.

In this governmental zoo, the one really important creature is the Liebarak – a two-headed monster that terrifies all the other animals. This animal is 50% Lieberman, 50% Barak, 0% human.

WHEN LIEBERMAN first appeared on the stage, many looked on him with disdain. Such a person, they decided, has no chance in Israeli politics.

For ten years, he has been under investigation by the police on suspicion of corruption, receiving money from mysterious foreign sources and more.

Moreover, in the eyes of many Israelis, he is the most un-Israeli figure imaginable. They have tagged him permanently as a “new immigrant”, even though he has been here for over 30 years. They consider his outward appearance, body language and dialect as blatantly “un-Israeli”, belonging to someone who is “not one of us”. How can Israelis vote for such a person?

Lieberman is a settler based in Nokdim, a settlement near Bethlehem, and the settlers are not popular in Israel. He is openly racist, a hater of Arabs who despises peace, a man whose declared aim is to rid Israel of the Arabs. True, there is in Israel (as in any country) a lot of silent racism, partly unconscious, but this racism is denied. Israelis - it was believed - will not vote for an outright racist.

The last elections put an end to this belief. Lieberman’s party won 15 Knesset seats, two more than Barak’s party, and became the third biggest Knesset faction. Not a few “real” Israeli youngsters, Sabras through and through, voted for him. They saw him as a good address for their protest vote.

The establishment was not too upset. OK, so there was a protest vote. In every Israeli election campaign there appears an election list from nowhere that wilts the next day, like the gourd of the prophet Jonah. Where are they all now?

But Lieberman is not General Yigael Yadin, who created the Dash party, or Tommy Lapid, the leader of Shinui. He is a man of brutal power, lacking any scruples, a man ready to appeal – as Joseph Goebbels put it – to the most primitive instincts of the masses.

We may yet see in Israel a coalition of all the malcontents and the angry, as the Bible says about David when he fled from King Saul: “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves around him, and he became a captain over them.” (1 Samuel 22:2). Lieberman’s home turf is the community of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who have not been absorbed into Israeli society and who live in a spiritual and social ghetto. They may be joined by other sectors: the settlers, the Oriental Jews who feel that the Likud betrayed them, young people who see him as a man who expresses openly what they believe in secret: that the Arabs should be expelled from the state, and from the entire country.

Lieberman’s un-Israeli appearance may yet turn out to be an advantage for him. A person who is so un-Israeli may become the ideal leader of a camp united by its hatred of the “elites”, the Supreme Court, the police, the media and the other pillars of Israeli democracy.

The police investigations, too, may elevate him in the eyes of this public. They believe that he is being persecuted by the hypocritical elites. The dark cloud of suspicion did not deter Netanyahu from giving him control of both the Ministry of Police and the Ministry of Justice, the two ministries charged with upholding the rule of law, which are now under the direction of his lackeys.

This danger should not be underrated. Other historical leaders of his ilk were at first considered clowns and ridiculed, before they came to power and wrought havoc.

BUT THE second head of the Liebarak is more dangerous than the first. The danger of Lieberman lies in the future. The danger of Ehud Barak is immediate and real.

This week, Barak did something that should turn on another red light. On the demand of Lieberman, Barak accorded the Settlers’ college in Ariel the status of a university.

Unlike the “foreign” Lieberman, Barak comes from the epicenter of old-time Israel. He grew up in a kibbutz, was a commander in the elite “General Staff commando” and speaks perfect Hebrew with the right intonation. As a former Chief of Staff and a present Minister of Defense, he represents the might of the most formidable sector in Israel: the army.

Lieberman has not yet succeeded in hurting the chances of peace, except by talking. Barak has acted. I once called him a “peace criminal”, in contradistinction to a “war criminal” – though nowadays many would accord him this distinction, too.

The fatal blow dealt by Barak to the chances of peace came after the 2000 Camp David conference. To recount briefly: when he was elected in 1999 with a landslide majority, on the wave of enthusiasm of the peace camp and with the help of clear peace slogans (“Education instead of Settlements!”), he induced Presidents Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat to meet him at a summit conference. In a typical mixture of arrogance and ignorance, he believed that if he offered the Palestinians the chance to found a Palestinian state, they would give up all their other claims. His offers were indeed more far-reaching than those of his predecessors, but still far from the minimum acceptable to Palestinians. The conference failed.

Coming home from Camp David, he did not make the usual announcement (“Much progress has been achieved and negotiations will continue…”), nor an unusual one (“Sorry, I was wrong, I had no idea!”) Rather, he coined a mantra that has since become the center of the national consensus: “I have turned every stone on the way to peace / I have offered the Palestinians everything they could ask for / They have rejected everything / We Have No Partner For Peace.”

This declaration by the leader of the Labor Party, who often calls himself “the head of the peace camp”, dealt a mortal blow to the Israeli peace forces, who had hoped so much from him. The vast majority of the Israelis believe now with all their heart that “we have no partner for peace”. Thereby he opened the way for the ascent to power of Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu.

Throughout his time in office, Barak established and enlarged settlements. On his orders, the Commanding Officer of Central Command issued a permit for a radio station of the settlers (which has lately started to broadcast, after a long delaying fight by Gush Shalom against it.) In this respect, too, he has trumped Lieberman. His decision about the Ariel university fits into this pattern.

“WAIT A MINUTE!” a sensible person may ask. “What has this to do with Barak? He is the Minister of Defense, isn’t he, and not the Minister of Education!”

Ariel is occupied territory. In the occupied territories, the army is the sovereign power. Barak is in charge of the army. The directive to upgrade the Ariel College was given by Barak to the commanding officer. As Yossi Sarid, a former Minister of Education, pointed out, the “Ariel University Center” is the only civil university in the democratic world set up by the army.

An Israeli academic institution has to go a long way before being accorded university status by the competent authorities. There are many colleges in Israel, far more outstanding than the Ariel College, which aspire to this status. In the occupied territories, a general’s approval is enough.

This fact throws light on the unprecedented Israeli invention: the Eternal Occupation.

An occupation regime is by its nature a temporary situation. It comes into being when one side in a war conquers territory of the other side. The occupying power is supposed to rule it, under detailed international laws, until the end of the war, when a peace agreement must decide the future of the territory.

A war may last some years, at most, and therefore the occupation is a temporary matter. Successive Israeli governments have turned it into a permanent situation.

Why? At the outset of the occupation, the then Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, discovered that the occupation is really an ideal situation. It gives the occupier absolute power without any obligation to accord the inhabitants any citizenship rights whatsoever. If Israel were to annex the territories, it would have to decide what to do with the population. That would create an embarrassing situation. The inhabitants of East Jerusalem, which was formally annexed to Israel in 1967, did not receive citizenship, but only the status of ”residents”. Successive Israeli governments have been afraid that the world would not accept a “democratic” state in which a third of the population have no rights.

A status of occupation solves all these problems. The inhabitants of the occupied territories have, de facto, no rights whatsoever – neither national, nor civil, nor human. The Israel government builds settlements wherever it sees fit, also contrary to international law, and now it is setting up a university, too.

(Lately an original proposal was put forward by Sari Nusseibeh, the president of the Palestinian al-Quds University in annexed East Jerusalem: the Palestinians should demand that Israel annex all the occupied territories, without demanding citizenship. Nusseibeh hopes, so it seems, that in the long run Israel would not be able to withstand international pressure and would be compelled to accord them citizenship, and then the Palestinians would already be the majority in the state and able to do what they want. I appreciate Nusseibeh very, very highly, but feel the gamble would be too risky.)

THE SPANISH government has already declared a boycott of the Ariel college and cancelled its participation in an international architectural competition run by Spain.

I hope that more governments and academic institutions will follow this example and declare a boycott on this “university”.

True, the Liebarak couldn’t care less. This two-headed monster is indifferent to boycotts. But an academic institution cannot be indifferent to a boycott by its peers around the world. And if the Israeli academic community does not rise up against this prostitution of its ideals by the setting up of a university of the settlers under military auspices - it is inviting a boycott on all Israeli universities.
=

[Snuffysmith]

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/0...chell_to_resign
Time for George Mitchell to resign
Posted By Stephen M. Walt Friday, January 22, 2010

If Mideast special envoy George Mitchell wants to end his career with his reputation intact, it is time for him to resign. He had a distinguished tenure in the U.S. Senate -- including a stint as majority leader -- and his post-Senate career has been equally accomplished. He was an effective mediator of the conflict in Northern Ireland, helped shepherd the Disney Corporation through a turbulent period, and led an effective investigation of the steroids scandal afflicting major league baseball. Nobody can expect to be universally admired in the United States, but Mitchell may have come as close as any politician in recent memory.

Why should Mitchell step down now? Because he is wasting his time. The administration's early commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace was either a naïve bit of bravado or a cynical charade, and if Mitchell continues to pile up frequent-flyer miles in a fruitless effort, he will be remembered as one of a long series of U.S. "mediators" who ended up complicit in Israel's self-destructive land grab on the West Bank. Mitchell will turn 77 in August, he has already undergone treatment for prostate cancer, and he's gotten exactly nowhere (or worse) since his mission began. However noble the goal of Israeli-Palestinian peace might be, surely he's got better things to do.

In an interview earlier this week with Time's Joe Klein, President Obama acknowledged that his early commitment to achieving "two states for two peoples" had failed. In his words, "this is as intractable a problem as you get ... Both sides-the Israelis and the Palestinians-have found that the political environments, the nature of their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I think we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that" (my emphasis).

This admission raises an obvious question: who was responsible for this gross miscalculation? It's not as if the dysfunctional condition of Israeli and Palestinian internal politics was a dark mystery when Obama took office, or when Netanyahu formed the most hard-line government in Israeli history. Which advisors told Obama and Mitchell to proceed as they did, raising expectations sky-high in the Cairo speech, publicly insisting on a settlement freeze, and then engaging in a humiliating retreat? Did they ever ask themselves what they would do if Netanyahu dug in his heels, as anyone with a triple-digit IQ should have expected? And if Obama now realizes how badly they screwed up, why do the people who recommended this approach still have their jobs?

As for Mitchell himself, he should resign because it should be clear to him that he was hired under false pretenses. He undoubtedly believed Obama when the president said he was genuinely committed to achieving Israel-Palestinian peace in his first term. Obama probably promised to back him up, and his actions up to the Cairo speech made it look like he meant it. But his performance ever since has exposed him as another U.S. president who is unwilling to do what everyone knows it will take to achieve a just peace. Mitchell has been reduced to the same hapless role that Condoleezza Rice played in the latter stages of the Bush administration -- engaged in endless "talks" and inconclusive haggling over trivialities-and he ought to be furious at having been hung out to dry in this fashion.

The point is not that Obama's initial peace effort in the Middle East has failed; the real lesson is that he didn't really try. The objective was admirably clear from the start -- "two states for two peoples" -- what was missing was a clear strategy for getting there and the political will to push it through. And notwithstanding the various difficulties on the Palestinian side, the main obstacle has been the Netanyahu government's all-too obvious rejection of anything that might look like a viable Palestinian state, combined with its relentless effort to gobble up more land. Unless the U.S. president is willing and able to push Israel as hard as it is pushing the Palestinians (and probably harder), peace will simply not happen. Pressure on Israel is also the best way to defang Hamas, because genuine progress towards a Palestinian state in the one thing that could strengthen Abbas and other Palestinian moderates and force Hamas to move beyond its talk about a long-term hudna (truce) and accept the idea of permanent peace.

It's not as if Obama and Co. don't realize that this is important. National Security Advisor James Jones has made it clear that he sees the Israel-Palestinian issue as absolutely central; it's not our only problem in the Middle East, but it tends to affect most of the others and resolving it would be an enormous boon. And there's every sign that the president is aware of the need to do more than just talk.

Yet U.S. diplomacy in this area remains all talk and no action. When a great power identifies a key interest and is strongly committed to achieving it, it uses all the tools at its disposal to try to bring that outcome about. Needless to say, the use of U.S. leverage has been conspicuously absent over the past year, which means that Mitchell has been operating with both hands tied firmly behind his back. Thus far, the only instrument of influence that Obama has used has been presidential rhetoric, and even that weapon has been used rather sparingly.

And please don't blame this on Congress. Yes, Congress will pander to the lobby, oppose a tougher U.S. stance, and continue to supply Israel with generous economic and military handouts, but a determined president still has many ways of bringing pressure to bear on recalcitrant clients. The problem is that Obama refused to use any of them.

When Netanyahu dug in his heels and refused a complete settlement freeze -- itself a rather innocuous demand if Israel preferred peace to land -- did Obama describe the settlements as "illegal" and contrary to international law? Of course not. Did he fire a warning shot by instructing the Department of Justice to crack down on tax-deductible contributions to settler organizations? Nope. Did he tell Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to signal his irritation by curtailing U.S. purchases of Israeli arms, downgrading various forms of "strategic cooperation," or canceling a military exchange or two? Not a chance. When Israel continued to evict Palestinians from their homes and announced new settlement construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in August, did Obama remind Netanyahu of his dependence on U.S. support by telling U.S. officials to say a few positive things about the Goldstone Report and to use its release as an opportunity to underscore the need for a genuine peace? Hardly; instead, the administration rewarded Netanyau's intransigence by condemning Goldstone and praising Netanyahu for "unprecedented" concessions. (The "concessions," by the way, was an announcement that Israel would freeze settlement expansion in the West Bank "temporarily" while continuing it in East Jerusalem. In other words, they'll just take the land a bit more slowly).

Like the Clinton and Bush administrations, in short, the idea that the United States ought to use its leverage and exert genuine pressure on Israel remains anathema to Obama, to Mitchell and his advisors, and to all those pundits who are trapped in the Washington consensus on this issue. The main organizations in the Israel lobby are of course dead-set against it -- and that goes for J Street as well -- even though there is no reason to expect Israel to change course in the absence of countervailing pressure.

Obama blinked -- leaving Mitchell with nothing to do-because he needed to keep sixty senators on board with his health care initiative (that worked out well, didn't it?), because he didn't want to jeopardize the campaign coffers of the Democratic Party, and because he knew he'd be excoriated by Israel's false friends in the U.S. media if he did the right thing. I suppose I ought to be grateful to have my thesis vindicated in such striking fashion, but there's too much human misery involved on both sides to take any consolation in that.

So what will happen now? Israel has made it clear that it is going to keep building settlements -- including the large blocs (like Ma'ale Adumim) that were consciously designed to carve up the West Bank and make creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, and other moderate forces will be increasingly discredited as collaborators or dupes. As Israel increasingly becomes an apartheid state, its international legitimacy will face a growing challenge. Iran's ability to exploit the Palestinian cause will be strengthened, and pro-American regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere will be further weakened by their impotence and by their intimate association with the United States. It might even help give al Qaeda a new lease on life, at least in some places. Jews in other countries will continue to distance themselves from an Israel that they see as a poor embodiment of their own values, and one that can no longer portray itself convincingly as "a light unto the nations." And the real tragedy is that all this might have been avoided, had the leaders of the world's most powerful country been willing to use their influence on both sides more directly.

Looking ahead, one can see two radically different possibilities. The first option is that Israel retains control of the West Bank and Gaza and continues to deny the Palestinians full political rights or economic opportunities. (Netanyahu likes to talk about a long-term "economic peace," but his vision of Palestinian bantustans under complete Israeli control is both a denial of the Palestinians' legitimate aspirations and a severe obstacle to their ability to fully develop their own society. Over time, there may be another intifada, which the IDF will crush as ruthlessly as it did the last one. Perhaps the millions of remaining Palestinians will gradually leave -- as hardline Israelis hope and as former House speaker Dick Armey once proposed. If so, then a country founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust -- one of history's greatest crimes-will have completed a dispossession begun in 1948 -- a great crime of its own.

Alternatively, the Palestinians may remain where they are, and begin to demand equal rights in the state under whose authority they have been forced to dwell. If Israel denies them these rights, its claim to being the "only democracy in the Middle East" will be exposed as hollow. If it grants them, it will eventually cease to be a Jewish-majority state (though its culture would undoubtedly retain a heavily Jewish/Israeli character). As a long-time supporter of Israel's existence, I would take no joy in that outcome. Moreover, transforming Israel into a post-Zionist and multinational society would be a wrenching and quite possibly violent experience for all concerned. For both reasons, I've continued to favor "two states for two peoples" instead.

But with the two-state solution looking less and less likely, these other possibilities begin to loom large. Through fear and fecklessness, the United States has been an active enabler of an emerging tragedy. Israelis have no one to blame but themselves for the occupation, but Americans -- who like to think of themselves as a country whose foreign policy reflects deep moral commitments-will be judged harshly for our own role in this endeavor.

The United States will suffer certain consequences as a result-decreased international influence, a somewhat greater risk of anti-American terrorism, tarnished moral reputation, etc.-but it will survive. But Israel may be in the process of drafting its own suicide pact, and its false friends here in the United States have been supplying the paper and ink. By offering his resignation-and insisting that Obama accept it-George Mitchell can escape the onus of complicity in this latest sad chapter of an all-too-familiar story. Small comfort, perhaps, but better than nothing.

[Snuffysmith]

Haiti isn't the only place that needs help, but in Gaza, Israel is keeping aid away

By Juan Cole

Informed Comment

Jan. 21, 2010

When a relief plane for Doctors Without Borders isn't allowed to land by U.S. military authorities at the airport in Port-au-Prince, there is an outcry.

But Israeli military authorities will not allow any relief planes at all to land in the Gaza Strip (the Israelis destroyed Gaza's airport in 2001).

We cheer when a Haitian child is rescued from the rubble, but ignore the thousands of Gazan children who are suffering malnutrition and being buried by Israeli policy, a policy that is a war crime. I am of course not the only to be struck by this contrast: see also Phil Weiss and others quoted at his essential site.

On Wednesday, 80 international aid groups called upon Israel to change its policy of blockading civilians in Gaza, because it is having severe negative effects on the health of Gazans.

Admittedly, the situation in Gaza is not as dire as that in Haiti. But it is very, very bad, and it is man-made. The Israeli government imposed a blockade on the Gaza strip in 2007 and has maintained it ever since. It limits the import of fuel and staples, and punishes the whole population. Since half of the 1.5 million Gazans are children, the Israeli siege of the little territory is among the more massive ongoing cases of child abuse in the world. There is a virtual news blackout on this atrocity in the US mass media, and attempts of two sets of activists to get humanitarian aid to Gaza in recent weeks were largely ignored by them.

Nor is the Gaza blockade a mere preoccupation of utopian human rights activists. It has become an element of regional geo-politics. It is part of the reason for significant tensions between Israel and one of its few allies in the Middle East, Turkey. As Turkey has democratized and Muslim sentiments have become more important in its politics, and as it has increasingly emerged as a new Middle Eastern power (some speak of neo-Ottomanism), its concern with issues such as Gaza has become more central. The horrible condition of the Gazans is often the lead story on Arab satellite news channels such as al-Jazeera, and public anger about it (expressed as much toward the US and the Egyptian regime as toward Israel) is at a boiling point. That anger feeds into terrorism against the West. The Gaza blockade is isolating Israel and fuelling a widespread boycott movement in Europe, Canada and South Africa. And, of course, the blockade makes even the virulently anti-Shiite Sunni fundamentalists of Hamas willing to take aid from Iran, bestowing a toehold in the Levant on Tehran. The French statesman Talleyrand once observed of Napoleon I's murder of the Duc d'Enghien, "It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder." The same could be said of the Gaza blockade from the point of view of any realistic Israeli and US foreign policy.

Last year UNICEF found that about one in ten children in Gaza is severely malnourished, to the point of stunting. The Israeli blockade is deeply implicated in this semi-starvation of tens of thousands of children, as is the Gaza War launched by Israel a little over a year ago, which wrecked nearly one-fifth of farms and deeply hurt agriculture in general. Gaza once flourished agriculturally, but it was cut off by Israel from its natural markets in the Levant, and the US and Egypt have been induced to support the blockade.

The World Health Organization fact sheet on Gaza's plight, issued yesterday, reads like a post-apocalyptic Hollywood film. WHO says:

The closure of Gaza since mid-2007 and the last Israeli military strike between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 have led to on-going deterioration in the social, economic and environmental determinants of health.

Many specialized treatments, for example for complex heart surgery and certain types of cancer, are not available in Gaza and patients are therefore referred for treatment to hospitals outside Gaza. But many patients have had their applications for exit permits denied or delayed by the Israeli Authorities and have missed their appointments. Some have died while waiting for referral. . .

Supplies of drugs and disposables have generally been allowed into Gaza. However, there are often shortages on the ground mainly because of shortfalls in deliveries . . . Delays of up to 2-3 months occur on the importation of certain types of medical equipment, such as x-ray machines and electronic devices. Clinical staff frequently lack the medical equipment they need. Medical devices are often broken, missing spare parts or out of date. . .

Health professionals in Gaza have been cut off from the outside world. Since 2000, very few doctors, nurses or technicians have been able to leave the Strip for training eg to update their clinical skills or to learn about new medical technology. This is severely undermining their ability to provide quality health care. . . .

GAZA'S ECONOMY IN COLLAPSE

Rising unemployment (41.5 percent of Gaza's workforce in the first quarter of 2009) and poverty (in May 2008, 70 percent of the families were living on an income of less than one dollar a day per person) is likely to have long term adverse effects on the physical and mental health of the population [the unemployment is a direct result of the Israeli blockade]. . .

OPERATION "CAST LEAD" -- IMPACT ON HEALTH FACILITIES AND STAFF [I.e. the Israeli war on Gaza in winter 2009-2010]

- 16 health workers killed and 25 injured on duty

- Damaged health services infrastructure:
+ 15 of 27 Gaza's hospitals
+ 43 of its 110 Primary Health Care services
+ 29 of its 148 ambulances

The lack of building materials is affecting essential health facilities: the new surgical wing in Gaza's main Shifa hospital has remained unfinished since 2006. Hospitals and primary care facilities, damaged during Operation Cast Lead, have not been rebuilt because construction materials are not allowed into Gaza.

The UN complained that while Israel has a fair record of allowing treatment of Gazans in Israeli hospitals, and that record has improved, some 300-400 requests a month are met with substantial delays or turned down. This issue was foregrounded by a lot of the wire services who picked up the story, but it seems to me not the most important problem. The blockade is the problem.

The Israeli blockade is aimed at weakening Hamas, a fundamentalist party-militia that won power in the Palestine Authority in the elections of January 2006. (Ironically, the Israelis had supported Hamas the late 1980s in hopes of splitting the Palestinians) When the Bush administration and Israel successfully induced the Palestine Liberation Organization of Mahmoud Abbas to make a coup in the West Bank and dislodge the elected Hamas government there, Hamas managed to hang on to power in Gaza, in part because of strong public support. Hamas has committed terrorism against Israeli civilians, and launched small rockets at nearby Israeli towns. It had however made a truce with Israel in 2008, which it observed until Israel broke it, and no Israelis had been killed by Hamas rockets in the lead-up to Israel's war on the small territory.

Collectively punishing 1.5 million Gazans in order to weaken Hamas is in any case strictly illegal in international law and is a war crime. According to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949:

Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

Pillage is prohibited.

Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

Not only is today's ongoing blockade a war crime, but it follows on and continues destructive policies of the Israeli military during the Gaza War, as the Goldstone Report for the United Nations concluded. The Boston Globe reported Goldstone's defense of his findings at Brandeis University (hat tip to Mondoweiss).

Goldstone said his central criticism of Israel is that its strategy intentionally applied disproportionate force in Gaza to inflict widespread damage on the civilian population. His report found that the Israeli air and ground attacks destroyed 5,000 homes; put 200 factories out of operation, including the only flour factory in the country; systematically destroyed egg-producing chicken farms; and bombed sewage and water systems. "If that isn’t collective punishment, what is?" Goldstone asked.

Very little of this destruction deliberately visited on civilians has been repaired, in large part because the Israelis won't allow the materiel in necessary for rebuilding.

Until President Obama does something to end the Gaza siege and its attendant horrors, his Mideast policy will remain an abject failure.

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/2010/...30731264177212/

Commentary: Global Fatigue and trust deficit

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large
The United States is now saddled with a dysfunctional system of government that raises the key question for the 21st century: Have we allowed ourselves to become ungovernable with a Congress prone to micromanage many things into unworkable policies?

WASHINGTON, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The 9.2 magnitude earthquake that triggered the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami claimed some 230,000 lives in 13 countries. But the Port-au-Prince 7.0 quake may exceed that toll in one small country. Haiti's capital will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, like German and Japanese cities after World War II. For a city of 3 million that was designed to handle a mere 50,000, there was little modern infrastructure to begin with. But it will still cost billions.

Fighting two trillion-dollar wars abroad while millions are jobless at home doesn't make much sense to well over half the American people. How many favor something closer to home has not been polled.

There is a growing chorus of geopolitical deep thinkers and intellectuals who favor a strategic retreat from the imperial posture of the Cold War, where we are now fighting terrorist cells on a planetary scale, and a reassessment of priorities. One of the Democratic Party's champion fundraisers, speaking privately, said, "At times I feel that we're exhausted, sitting on the sidewalk, applauding the inevitable as Team China marches by."

We are now saddled with a dysfunctional system of government that raises the key question for the 21st century: Have we allowed ourselves to become ungovernable with a Congress that seems prone to micromanage everything into unworkable policies, courtesy of a system that has moved from no child left behind to no lobbyist left behind.

No fewer than 108 congressional committees and subcommittees claim oversight on the Homeland Security Department, up from 88 in 2004. Countless reports have recommended a single point of congressional contact for DHS. But DHS is still required to produce more than 500 annual reports in addition to more than 6,000 individual requests for information per year. Scores of DHS employees are employed full time catering to Congress. The British, German and French governments would have ground to a halt under a similar deluge of parliamentary requests.

If we're going to be successful in Afghanistan, a long-term commitment of five to 10 years is an essential prerequisite. Pakistan does not believe today's America will sustain such an undertaking, notwithstanding repeated pledges about the long haul commitment from national security adviser James L. Jones, frequent travelers to Pakistan Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen and CENTCOM Commander Gen. David J. Petraeus, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and this week from Defense Secretary Bob Gates.

>From his 27 years in the CIA where he is still the only one to rise from entry-level recruit to director, with Pakistan when he was deputy director of the CIA. It was that partnership, which included Saudi Intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, that forced the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan in February 1989 and heralded the downfall of the Soviet empire nine months later. It also led Osama bin Laden to believe that his Arab mujahedin recruits toppled one evil empire and that he had a shot at toppling the remaining one -- imperial America.

Gates disagreed strenuously with the subsequent shabby treatment of our Pakistani ally, including painful economic and military sanctions, as punishment for their secret nuclear weapons program. A whole generation of Pakistani officers was banned from U.S. military facilities and staff colleges. This triggered a long-lasting anti-U.S. culture in the Pakistani military. The trust deficit is still huge. And the lessons of America's defeat in Vietnam 35 years ago lurk just below the surface; it was the U.S. Congress that pulled the plug.

China is only too happy to hold America's coat as it sinks deeper into expensive geopolitical commitments while Chinese leaders win friends and influence people in Asia, Africa, Latin America and a large part of North America (Mexico and Canada). China is also building an ultramodern infrastructure of roads, railroads and airports that is in sharp contrast to America's long-neglected public services, water supplies, power grid, road and rail networks, and air traffic control.

In Afghanistan, a Chinese company is investing $3 billion in Logar province near Kabul to mine 240 million tons of copper ore, worth $88 billion. One must assume they are not worried by the Taliban. The insurgents confide in their Pakistani friends they will need the income when they get back in the saddle. China has 11 nuclear power plants and is planning to add 24. The last U.S. reactor went online in 1997. Only 27 percent of 253 ordered in the 1950s are in operation.

More than 100,000 Chinese students are now studying in the United States. There was a time when most of them would have tried to stay; now they see more exciting horizons in China.

The electoral cataclysm in Massachusetts, where Democrats lost a seat they held for 47 years, is a major game changer in Congress, but abroad, it's yet another demonstration of fickle unpredictability.

Foreign policymakers see that President Obama's magisterial, turning-a-new-leaf policy for, among other achievements, a Palestinian state in the Middle East was a bridge to nowhere. Israel's Netanyahu put his foot down.

If a Middle East solution continues to elude Obama, as it surely will, what leads him to believe that he can be successful in Afghanistan? Ranking Pakistanis privately say they don't believe he can.

Since October 2009 some 30,000 Pakistani troops have been battling Pakistani Taliban guerrillas in South Waziristan, one of the seven tribal areas along the Afghan border. Heavy snow has now forced a halt in operations. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani told Gates it would take another six to 12 months to complete. Not good enough for Gates -- and Obama's national security team.

Because that still leaves North Waziristan as a safe haven for Afghan Taliban operating against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. These are the insurgents originally trained by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency to take over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. Off the record, knowledgeable Pakistanis can see them back in power, posing as moderates, after NATO and U.S. governments tire of fighting an invisible enemy.

[Snuffysmith]

Obama's Foreign Policy at Year One - Foreign Policy Initiative

http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/node/15228

[Snuffysmith]

Top Global Risks in 2010 - Eurasia Group

http://www.eurasiagroup.net/pages/top-risks

[Snuffysmith]

U.S.News & World Report
Monday, January 25, 2010

Why Neither Reagan Nor the United States Won the Cold War
By Alex Kingsbury
Posted January 22, 2010

Ronald Reagan never claimed to have bested the Soviet Union and won the Cold War. Indeed, the very idea that there was a winner of the decades-long rivalry between the superpowers was a political formulation rather than one based on the historical facts. The notion that the United States forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and vanquished communism is not only a myth but a dangerous canard, Jack Matlock says in his new book, Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray—and How to Return to Reality. Matlock, a U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, chatted with U.S. News about the end of the Soviet Union and why Barack Obama is the new Ronald Reagan. Excerpts:
Click here to find out more!

How did the Cold War end?

The Soviet Union didn't collapse because of external pressures. Nor did the Cold War end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It ended because of a negotiated settlement that was potentially to the benefit of both sides. Communist rule ended because Mikhail Gorbachev maneuvered it out of exclusive power. It was Gorbachev who ended Communist rule. He did it in the Soviet Union's own interest. The people who present it as a victory of one country over another are incorrect, but it was the victory of one idea over another. This idea that somehow the U.S. beat the Soviet Union has led to failed policies from Washington but also misunderstandings from other countries, particularly the Russians.

The Russians also believe they lost the war?

Because Americans are prone to repeating this line, that the Soviet Union lost, there is a widespread belief in Russia of the myth that Gorbachev was tricked by Reagan and Bush Sr. to give away the store and that ever since, the U.S. has been set on turning Russia into a colony fit only for supplying cheap energy and raw materials. In the U.S., the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a military victory, which led to a spirit of triumphalism and a feeling of omnipotence as the "sole superpower." If the U.S.S.R. has indeed been brought to its knees by military pressure, then this would mean that the U.S. has the means to take down any ideology or political system it finds dangerous or repugnant. Other countries drew this conclusion, too: If a country had a problem, then the U.S. was expected to set it right.

Is this myth a result of intellectual laziness or malice?

It's some of both. One thing to note is that modern histories of the Cold War start at the end of World War II, which gives a very short and simplified view of history. The histories of the Cold War published in the 1960s started back in 1917. But the modern incarnations of the U.S. victory myth are even more recent. Reagan, for example, never claimed that we won the Cold War. He wrote about it in his memoirs as a negotiated settlement between partners. In 1992, when George H. W. Bush was losing the [presidential] election, he began saying that "we won the Cold War" on the campaign trail. Since then, a lot of this triumphalist mythology has come from the neocons whose ideas were rejected by Reagan, who in the end was more interested in negotiating. Reagan warned early on that in our negotiations with the Soviets, we should never question their legitimacy. That it was important to deal with them with respect. He always did, which is why he was able to accomplish what he did.

Yet conservatives frequently trumpet the virtues of tough talk.

Neocons especially point to Reagan saying, "Tear down this wall," as if that kind of rhetoric is effective. That speech was made in 1987, but the wall didn't come down until years later after the first President Bush refused to make aggressive statements about Gorbachev, who was then able to quietly withdraw support from Eastern Europe that led to the end of the Berlin Wall. The neocons simply misrepresented what happened and claimed that Reagan had followed their approach in dealing with the So­viet Union. The only shreds of evidence to support it are snippets of political rhetoric taken out of context.

How has this view shaped the Russians' foreign policy?

The U.S. may not have won the Cold War, but U.S. leaders did start acting like they had. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. made promises to Moscow not to extend NATO to the borders of the former U.S.S.R. But NATO went ahead and expanded anyway. Then, in the early 1990s, NATO, which had always described itself as a defensive alliance, bombed Serbia without any authorization from the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. left the ABM [Antiballistic Missile] Treaty to develop a missile shield that Russia fears. And the U.S. began to act unilaterally on the world stage, in particular with the Iraq war. My argument is not that all would have been sweetness and light in Europe if only the U.S. had been kind to Russia. The U.S. should have made every effort to bring the European states, West and East and including Russia, into new security agreements. The Clinton administration's action in bombing Serbia without U.N. approval not only enraged Russia; it also sent a message to other countries with policies or practices that met American disapproval: Better get nuclear weapons as fast as you can or become a target of the Air Force. The idea that nuclear weapons are the only way for nonsuperpower states to defend against invasion or regime change is quite strong in places like North Korea and Iran.

What lessons can we learn from all this?

We need creative thinking and political leadership to deal with the agonizing problems of failed states, international criminal activity, and the crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Existing international structures are inadequate to meet these challenges. It's because of the Obama administration's ideas about talking with nations that don't agree with the U.S. that I say that the president whom Barack Obama most resembles is Reagan. Not all their policies are the same, but their leadership qualities are strikingly similar.

[Snuffysmith]

Hail Christopher Preble
by David R. Henderson, February 01, 2010

The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free
Christopher Preble
Cornell University Press, 2009

Although there has always been some animosity between some Antiwar.com and some Cato Institute people, I don’t share in that animosity. Is either organization perfect? No. Welcome to reality. But both organizations are doing a lot of good and striving to make the world a better place. Among those who are trying to make the world more peaceful is Christopher A. Preble, the director of foreign policy studies at Cato. And in his latest book, The Power Problem, Preble argues against the U.S. military dominance that so many Americans take for granted and even favor. The subtitle of the book gives much of his message: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free.

Preble accomplishes a lot in 170 pages of prose and 34 pages of footnotes. He does so by carefully building his case and, in the end, making a devastating case for a much-reduced role for the U.S. military in the world. I would go even further than he does. Still, the differences between Preble’s and my views are minor compared to the differences between Preble’s views and those of the foreign policy establishment.

Preble states his bottom line in the introduction: "We should reduce our military power in order to be more secure."

In his first chapter, Preble succinctly gives some recent history of how politicians and the intellectuals who influence them have thought about foreign policy. Preble reminds us, for example, that in the mid-1990s, the Republicans in Congress were the antiwar party and voted to prevent President Clinton from spending money on "peacekeeping" operations in the former Yugoslavia. Clinton ignored Congress and committed U.S. troops anyway.

Preble also tells of the fact – which many have forgotten – that in 2000, neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan "had enthusiastically supported McCain, scorning Bush and his coterie of realist foreign policy advisers, led by Condoleezza Rice, a protégé of Brent Scowcroft." Preble adds:

"From Kristol and Kagan’s perspective, the younger Bush seemed too much like his father, willing to contemplate good relations with the dictators in China, willing to tolerate Saddam Hussein remaining in power in Baghdad, willing to cut taxes but not necessarily willing to – as McCain had done – appeal to Americans’ supposedly innate desire for national greatness."

Unfortunately, George W. Bush, he of "humble foreign policy," who had said that the U.S. government shouldn’t "go around the world and say this is the way it’s got to be" decided, after 9/11, to have the U.S. government go around the world and say this is the way it’s got to be.

Preble gives good ways of grasping the huge cost of America’s foreign policy. In 2007, for example, the Pentagon’s budget, plus its special funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $622 billion, or $2,065 for every American resident. He compares that to military spending by Britain (just over $1,000 per resident), France ($845), Japan ($340), Russia ($495 in 2006), and China (a piddling $92 in 2006). Preble goes further, noting that the number for the U.S. should include the part of the Department of Energy’s budget for nuclear weapons ($17.1 billion), the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, and the Treasury Department’s expenditures on military retirement costs. He went too far here: A big part of the Department of Homeland Security’s budget, for example, is for programs that have little to do with foreign policy as most people understand that term. I don’t defend those other programs – I would like to end virtually all of them – but they are not part of foreign policy.

Preble goes too far in another way. He estimates the part of interest on the national debt that is due to military spending and adds that in to the cost of foreign policy. But that’s double counting. The cost has already been taken account of in the original expenditure. The fact that it was paid partly by debt rather than solely by taxes is irrelevant.

When he gets to specifics about military programs, though, Preble shows his mastery of the subject. He has excellent critiques of the expensive Joint Strike Fighter program, the F-22 fighter jet, the Virginia-class submarine, and the disastrous V-22 Osprey. He also lays out just how incredibly expensive military manpower is, noting a Congressional Budget Office study that found the average military compensation to be over $115,000 annually. Moreover, he notes, Americans operating in war zones, including both uniformed military personnel and other government employees and contractors, pay zero federal income tax. Preble includes in the cost of intervention an intangible that is nevertheless real. He writes: "[O]ur possession of great power invites resentment, scorn, and sometimes hatred. In its most extreme forms, this hatred is manifested in violence against Americans wherever they live, work, or travel." Elsewhere, he buttresses this claim with two damning quotes from neoconservatives. The first is from Robert Kagan’s 2003 book, Of Paradise and Power, in which he wrote, "It is precisely America’s great power and its willingness to assume the responsibility for protecting other nations that makes it the primary target, and often the only target." The second is from Paul Wolfowitz, who admitted in 2003 that the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War had "been Osama bin Laden’s principal recruiting device."

There you have it, straight from the horses’ mouths. That makes Rudy Giuliani’s statement during a 2007 Republican presidential debate that he’d never heard anyone claim that the 9/11 attacks were a response to the use of U.S. military power abroad all the more shocking. Either Giuliani was lying to play to his audience or he had never read Kagan’s book, written four years earlier, or Wolfowitz’s statement, made four years earlier. My money is on the latter. For all his talk about 9/11, I would bet that Rudy Giuliani spent less than an hour pondering why it happened.

Preble also introduces the economist’s idea of opportunity costs. By spending as much as it does on the military, the U.S. government takes resources that could have been used elsewhere. Preble quotes former President Dwight Eisenhower making this point in a 1953 speech:

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."

In discussing the draft, Preble argues against it but actually understates the case. He writes that "conscription is strategically unsound, morally reprehensible, and politically unthinkable." Yet he accepts the view of many pro-draft people that a draft would be "lower cost than the all-volunteer military." Not true. As many economists, including Walter Oi, Milton Friedman, William Meckling, and I, have pointed out, a draft actually raises the cost of a given-size military but hides the cost by shifting it onto the shoulders of young people who are unlucky enough to be male and healthy. A page later, Preble approvingly quotes Doug Bandow’s assertion that "Conscription only shifts the burden of paying to those who are drafted," but he doesn’t seem to see the contradiction between that and his earlier statement.

The strongest chapter of a strong book is his chapter "We Use It Too Much," in which Preble argues that the U.S. intervenes far too much in the affairs of other countries. Preble quotes the arguments made by those who favor this intervention and then refutes them beautifully. Niall Ferguson, for example, argues that without a hyperpower such as the United States, the world would experience a dark age. Comments Preble, "It is instructive that Ferguson had to reach back to the ninth century to find a historical precedent on which to base his argument." Preble notes that chaos is hardly in the interest of people in other countries and that they can spend on their own security. Preble points out that other governments spend much less of their GDP on defense for two reasons: (1) they free ride on U.S. expenditures, and (2) they have a different conception of the threat. Preble also notes that as more governments are added to an alliance, as has happened with NATO in recent years, the odds that NATO will get into a war go up, not down.

Not to be missed in this chapter is Preble’s wry sense of humor. He quotes Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff’s explanation that it falls to Americans to "bear the ark of the liberties of the world." He also quotes then-Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, in his address to the U.S. Congress, asking, "Why me? And why us? And why America?" Blair then answered, "Because Destiny puts you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do." Preble comments, "One wonders how these men know so well what destiny intends for Americans." Later, in discussing the view that America is the only country in the world with the ability and foresight to police the world, Preble writes, "Indeed, to read much of what passes for serious discussion in foreign policy circles today, one might conclude that the United States isn’t simply the world’s indispensable nation, but rather that is in the world’s only nation" (italics his).

Preble also nicely handles the issue of oil, covering some of the same ground I covered in my "Do We Need to Go to War for Oil?" He points out that because oil is sold in a world market, one oil-producing nation cannot single out a particular country for punishment. He also quotes my finding in the early 1990s that even if Saddam Hussein had held on to Kuwait and had, implausibly, taken over the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, his exercise of his newfound monopoly power would have caused at most an annual loss of half a percent of GDP.

Preble ends by advocating that the United States government focus on defending the United States rather than kidding itself that it can run the affairs of the world well. In making his case, he references a study in which Georgetown University’s David Edelstein surveyed the record of postwar occupations from the time of Napoleon to the present day and found that two thirds of all occupations failed. I agree with the direction in which Preble wants to move. I disagree with the speed. Preble writes, "I don’t wish the U.S. military to be cut in half overnight." But he never says why.

Most of the criticisms of the book I’ve laid out to this point are relatively small. But I have two major criticisms. The first is Preble’s incessant use of the word "we" when what he really means is a small set of decision-makers in the executive branch of the U.S. government. I have laid out elsewhere (here and here) some of the pernicious consequences of that abuse of language. My second objection is that not once in the whole book does Preble mention one of the huge costs of U.S. military intervention, a cost that I know he recognizes because he and I have discussed it. The cost I refer to is the death and destruction that U.S. military intervention has wreaked on people in other countries. Just as "Paris is well worth a mass," that cost deserves at least a paragraph.

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...art-of-comments

The lessons of Iraq have been ignored. The target is now Iran
The US military buildup in the Gulf and Blair's promotion of war against Tehran are a warning of yet another catastrophe

Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday 3 February 2010

We were supposed to have learned the lessons of the Iraq war. That's what Britain's ­Chilcot inquiry is meant to be all about. But the signs from the Middle East are that it could be happening all over again. The US is escalating the military build-up in the Gulf, officials revealed this week, boosting its naval presence and supplying tens of billions of dollars' worth of new weapons systems to allied Arab states.

The target is of course Iran. Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain are all taking deliveries of Patriot missile batteries. In Saudi Arabia, Washington is sponsoring a 30,000-strong force to protect oil installations and ports. The UAE alone has bought 80 F16 fighters, and General Petraeus, the US commander, claims it could now "take out the entire Iranian airforce".

The US insists the growing militarisation is defensive, aimed at deterring Iran, calming Israel and reassuring its allies. But the shift of policy is clear enough. Last week Barack Obama warned that Iran would face "growing consequences" for failing to halt its nuclear programme, while linking it with North Korea – as George Bush did, in his "axis of evil" speech in 2002.

When Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week renewed Iran's earlier agreement to ship most of its enriched uranium abroad to be reprocessed, the US was dismissive. Obama's "outstretched hand", always combined with the threat of sanctions or worse, appears to have been all but withdrawn.

The US vice-president, Joe Biden, underlined that by insisting Iran's leaders were "sowing the seeds of their own destruction". And in Israel, which has vowed to take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, threats of war against its allies, Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, are growing. "We must recruit the whole world to fight Ahmadinejad," Israeli president Shimon Peres declared on Tuesday.

The echoes of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq are unmistakable. Just as in 2002-3, we are told that a dictatorial Middle Eastern state is secretly developing weapons of mass destruction, defying UN resolutions, obstructing inspections, threatening its neighbours and supporting terrorism.

As in the case of Iraq, no evidence has been produced to back up the WMD claims, though bogus leaks about secret programmes are regularly reproduced in the mainstream press. Most recently, a former CIA official reported that US intelligence believed documents, published in the Times, purporting to show Iran planning to experiment on a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, had been forged. Shades of Iraq's non-existent attempts to buy uranium in Niger.

In case anyone missed the parallels, Tony Blair hammered them home at the Iraq inquiry last Friday. Far from showing remorse about the bloodshed he helped unleash on the Iraqi people, the former prime minister was allowed to turn what was supposed to be a grilling into a platform for war against Iran.

In a timely demonstration that neoconservatism is alive and well and living in London, Blair attempted to use the fact that Iraq had no WMD as part of a case for taking the same approach against Iran. Perceived intention and potential capability were enough to justify war, it turned out. Mentioning Iran 58 times, he explained that the need to "deal" with Iran raised "very similar issues to the ones we are discussing".

You might think that the views of a man that 37% of British people now believe should be put on trial for war crimes would be treated with contempt. But Blair remains the Middle East envoy of the Quartet – the US, UN, EU and Russia – even as he pockets£1m a year from a UAE investment fund currently negotiating a slice of the profits from the exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves.

Nor is he alone in pressing the case for war on Iran. Another neocon outrider from the Bush era, Daniel Pipes, wrote this week that the only way for Obama to save his presidency was to "bomb Iran" and destroy the country's "nuclear-weapon capacity", entailing few politically troublesome US "boots on the ground" or casualties.

The reality is that such an attack would be potentially even more devastating than the aggression against Iraq. Iran has the ability to deliver armed retaliation, both directly and through its allies, which would not only engulf the region but block the 20% of global oil supplies shipped through the straits of Hormuz. It would also certainly set back the cause of progressive change in Iran.

Iran is a divided authoritarian state, now cracking down harshly on the opposition. But it is not a dictatorship in the Saddam Hussein mould. Unlike Iraq, Israel, the US and Britain, Iran has not invaded and occupied anybody's territory, but has the troops of two hostile, nuclear-armed powers on its borders. And for all Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric, it is the nuclear-armed US and Israel that maintain the option of an attack on Iran, not the other way round.

Nor has the UN nuclear agency, the IAEA, found any evidence that Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, while the US's own national intelligence estimate found that suspected work on a weapons programme had stopped in 2003, though that may now be adjusted in the new climate. Iran's leadership has long insisted it does not want nuclear weapons, even while many suspect it may be trying to become a threshold nuclear power, able to produce weapons if threatened. Given the recent history of the region, that would hardly be surprising.

For the US government, as during the Bush administration, the real problem is Iran's independent power in the most sensitive region in the world – heightened by the Iraq war. The signals coming out of Washington are mixed. The head of US National Intelligence implied on Tuesday there was nothing the US could do to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons if it chose to do so. Perhaps the military build-up in the Gulf is just sabre rattling. The preference is clearly for regime change rather than war.

But Israel is most unlikely to roll over if that option fails, and the risks of the US and its allies, including Britain, being drawn into the fallout from any attack would be high. As was discovered in the case of Iraq, the views of outriders like Blair and Pipes can quickly become mainstream. If we are to avoid a replay of that catastrophe, pressure to prevent war with Iran will have to start now.

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar...n_b_446052.html

Leon T. Hadar
Journalist and foreign affairs analyst

Journalist and foreign affairs analyst
Posted: February 2, 2010

Multi-thinking About Iran: Let's be Realist

I've been following with great interest the many heated exchanges online and elsewhere over Council on Foreign Relation (CFR) President Richard Haass's call in a Newsweek commentary for "promoting regime change" in Iran. Haass is a self-described "card-carrying realist" and a former official in the administrations of Bush I and Bush II (he was director of policy planning for the Department of State under Secretary Colin Powell) who after retiring from government has been expressing strong criticism of the neoconservative-driven policy in the Middle East under Bush II, including in his book, War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars.
In fact, in his Newsweek article Haass compared President Barack Obama to George W. H. Bush, suggesting that the current White House occupant unlike Bush 43 and very much like Bush 41, "whose emissaries met with Chinese leaders soon after Tiananmen Square is cut more from the realist cloth." (Interestingly enough, a leading CFR scholar, Walter Russell Mead has compared Obama to the more Wilsonian President Jimmy Carter.) Haass who for a long time seemed to be in agreement with Obama's pursuit of diplomatic engagement with Iran, explained in Newsweek that against the backdrop of the stalled nuclear talks with Iran and the rise of the Green Movement in Iran, he "changed in mind" and he was supporting now of a policy "promoting regime change" in Tehran. His position is also shared now by many neoconservative intellectuals as well as by some of the fans of Iran's pro-democracy opposition on the left and among Iranian-Americanswho like Haass tended to back U.S. engagement with Iran just until recently.
That a "card-carrying realist" seemed to be calling for the launching of a U.S.-led Democratic Crusade against Iran helped cheer-up Iran watchers like author Barbara Slavin who used to be an advocate of engagement with Iran but who has written that (in a post quoted on journalist Laura Rozen's blog) that when "an arch realist like Richard Haass says the time has come to change U.S. policy toward Iran from engagement to supporting regime change, the Obama administration should take notice." At the same time, it was not surprising that Harvard University professor and blogger Stephen Walt who prides himself as being "a realist in an ideological age" has argued - in a post on his blog titled, "Nothing More Dangerous than a Recovering 'realist?'" -- that Haass's policy prescriptions are not very, well, realist. Reflecting the extent to which Haass's policy metamorphosis has ignited a somewhat nasty debate among foreign policy wonks, the Washington Post's Al Kaman reported that Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, two of Haass's former State Department colleagues and long-time realist proponents of engagement with Iran, "blasted Haass for his new position, skewering him for his central involvement in Powell's 'now-infamous' February 5, 2003, U.N. speech, which helped garner support for the invasion of Iraq, 'one of the biggest debacles in post-World War II American foreign policy.'"
As a member of the Realpolitik "Machiavelli Club" I can understand why a foreign policy realist who believes that Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons could pose a direct threat to U.S. national security interests would support recent steps taken by the Obama Administration to increase the anti-missile capabilities by the United States in the Gulf and consider them more of defensive than an aggressive maneuvers (there are now Patriot batteries in four Gulf states - Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and U.S. anti-missile ships are also being stationed in the Gulf. I understand but disagree with that view and agree with the Leverrettsthat President Obama has failed to devise a coherent strategy for engagement with Iran similar to the one that created the conditions for Nixon Going to China. In fact, I had made the same arguments in a long article published in The American Conservative in November 22 2004. From that perspective, the Obama Administration's military moves in the Gulf could help ignite tensions between Tehran in Washington instead of achieving the goal of pressing Iran to make a diplomatic deal with the West.
But as someone who is "card-carrying realist" I find Haass's recommendation to "promote" - he does not actually call for "doing" -- regime change in Tehran as running contrary to any sensible realist viewpoint. As Machiavelli (or your dad) cautioned you, never start a fight -especially with a bully -- you are not sure you could finish and win. There are so many "what ifs" involved in any scenario under which the U.S. pursues a policy of regime change in Iran: What happens if Iran retaliates by destabilizing Iraq? What happens if tensions between the U.S. and Iran degenerate into full-scale war? And what happens if the political upheaval in Iran evolves into a bloody civil war?
Indeed, the third scenario should raise doubts about the morality of trying to intervene in a complex foreign internal political conflict. As demonstrated by the crushing of the pro-democracy movement in Hungary in 1956and the uprising by the Shiites and the Kurds in Iraq in 1991 (after Desert Storm) - in both cases officials in Washington expressed support and even encouraged the opponents of the regime to take action against it - unless Americans are willing to use the full force of their military power to do regime change, promoting it could end-up destroying the opposition and strengthening the power of the current regime. In that case, Washington is perceived - and rightly so - as sharing moral responsibility for that outcomes.
And after the failed U.S.-backed Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and even more significant, the victory of Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary election in the Palestinian territories - which the Bush Administration had promoted in the name of democratizing the Middle East -how is it that Haass and the other advocates of regime change in Tehran so, so confident that the Ayatollahs would be replaced by a regime whose interests and values will be more in line with those of Washington? How about some sense of humility when it comes to predicting foreign policy outcomes?
I am aware that after a realist makes these and similar arguments, critics counter with the accusation that for all practical purposes, he or she is providing support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the other despicable characters that control Iran. Wrong! Those of us who oppose the notion that promoting regime change in Tehran is in the core national interest of the U.S. recognize that such a policy could risk a war with Iran that under the current diplomatic, economic and military conditions could have devastating effects on American interests - which the U.S. President and Congress are obligated to protect - as well as on Iran and the entire Middle East.
From a Realpolitik perspective, Washington and Tehran need to resolve their policy differences, which include Iran's alleged nuclear military program, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. Washington should strive for some sort of a "grand bargain" under which Iran would put a freeze the Iranian development of nuclear military capability as part of a diplomatic deal that will also respond to some of Iran's concerns. If such an effort to reach a deal fails, Washington should work together with other regional and global powers in pursuing a policy of containment vis-à-vis Iran. In that context, Israeli nuclear bombs serving as deterrence against Iran's potential nuclear military capability.
And if the democratic opposition in Iran has so much public backing as many observers suggest (again, that is a questionable assumption), there is no reason why this movement could not continue mobilizing its supporters if and when the U.S. (and the West) make a deal with Iran. If anything, U.S. diplomatic ties as well as trade and investment with Iran should be in the interest of the westernized and educated pro-democracy activists in Iran (which explains why the Ayatollahs do not like the idea).
In any case, President Obama and U.S. Congress as well as various non-government organizations and the media will continue - as they should -- to have an opportunity to express their disapproval of the human rights conduct and other domestic and foreign policies of the Iranian regime - without using American diplomatic and military power to replace it. After all, this is the same kind of policy that we apply today to our relationship with, say, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, or China and Russia. To paraphrase a familiar saying, the degree of a government's diplomatic intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes it can bring to bear on the same foreign policy. Or as poet Walt Whitman once said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

[Snuffysmith]

Apartheid: Stigmatizing Israel?

Questions Not Asked

by Kim Petersen / February 5th, 2010 (0)

Israel defense minister Ehud Barak has spoken to apartheid in Israel.

As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

Israeli media Haaretz responded:

His [Barack's] stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of …
(Full article …)



http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/aparthei...atizing-israel/

[Snuffysmith]

Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine

by Stephen Lendman / February 5th, 2010

Founded in 1972, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) is its leading human and civil rights organization through activities involving litigation, legal advocacy, education, and public outreach. Each year it publishes an annual report covering flagrant violations, positive trends, if any, and “significant human rights-related processes” affecting Israelis and Palestinians.

Its latest December 2009 one is examined below, discussing “a disturbing (government-sponsored) trend that has (gained) currency in Israel over the past year — both in public discourse and sometimes in practice — to make human rights conditional: on fulfilling some obligation, having financial means, or belonging (or not belonging) to certain groups.”

For example, free expression is targeted, and Israeli Arabs threatened, denied equality, education, employment, and their citizenship without “declaring loyalty” to Israel — in other words, on condition they abandon their national identity, culture, language, and historic heritage that’s the equivalent of asking Jews to renounce Judaism.

Financial means involves regarding social rights, including healthcare and education, as commodities, accessible to those who can pay. And for Occupied Palestinians, Gaza was devastated by war, remains under siege, and sustains near daily assaults, killings, and targeted assassinations.

In the West Bank, security forces enforce land seizures, home demolitions, displacement, segregation, isolation, closures, movement and travel restrictions, the Separation Wall’s construction, daily home invasions, arrests, attacks on peaceful protestors, imprisonments, and torture of detainees under a rigid “matrix of control” involving checkpoints, bypass roads, roadblocks, curfews, electric fences, and various other harassments to cow all Palestinians into submission or make them give up and leave.

Since 1948, Israel denied its Arab citizens fundamental human and civil rights and increasingly fewer of them to many Jews. In the Territories, it’s far worse under military occupation and Israeli laws affording no protections to Palestinians. Nor has the Supreme Court upheld the law that should be sacrosanct in a legitimate democracy. When it’s compromised, no one is immune from abuse and neglect as greater numbers in Israel are learning, including Jews.

Threatening Free Expression

Losing it threatens all other freedoms. It’s a basic legal right even Israel’s Supreme Court recognizes, but not absolutely having repeatedly ruled that curtailing it is justified in extreme public danger situations or if national security may be undermined.

However, the “true test of freedom of expression lies in allowing the airing of views that are extreme, controversial, or infuriating.” It’s the state’s obligation to protect them, especially in times of crisis, including war. But during Operation Cast Lead, Israel failed the test.

Protest demonstrations were attacked, dispersed, and silenced. Participants were arrested, then intimidated by dubious charges. Against Israeli Arabs, excessive force and preemptive detentions were used, then bogus indictments made based on charges of “participating in unlawful gatherings.”

Legally, authorities overstepped so egregiously that harsher measures may follow, and against Palestinians they’re commonplace, including targeted killings and torture.

Israel also restricted the foreign media, prohibiting on the scene access to report accurately on the conflict. For their part, the Israeli media largely supported the government. Overall, war coverage restrictions caused Israel’s journalistic freedom rating to drop sharply as measured by international human rights organizations. Dissent was minimally tolerated, and repressing it continued post-war. “Not only were critics silenced, they were accused and vilified, and their critiques unaddressed.”

During 2009, anti-democratic Knesset bills also limited free expression, including the Nakba Law threatening individuals with imprisonment for mourning on Israel’s Independence Day. Organizations risked loss of their public funding for doing it.

The Incitement Law threatens prison for anyone denying Israel’s existence as a Jewish, democratic state, and the proposed Loyalty to Israel Law rescinds Israeli citizenship for anyone unwilling to pledge loyalty to the state.

These mostly target Arab Israelis and get strong government backing. Also introduced was a bill almost completely banning demonstrations adjacent to the homes of public officials and service providers, or others responsible for public welfare. After passing its first Knesset reading, the Internal Affairs Committee asked for revisions.

Harassing Human Rights Organizations and Activists

In 1998, the UN General Assembly adopted the “Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.” It obligates all state parties to respect them and protect organizations and activists from violence, threats, retaliatory action and any discrimination connected to their work.

Israel is a signatory, but systematically violates the letter and spirit it expresses. Over the past two years and earlier, anti-democratic and free expression constraints have increased. Targeted senior political figures sought to undermined the legitimacy of their critics lawlessly.

For example, when the discharged combat veterans organization, Breaking the Silence, published a pamphlet critical of Operation Cast Lead, government response was harsh. Instead of investigating eyewitness war crimes testimonies, officials vilified the group to undermine its credibility, and the Foreign Ministry asked the Netherlands, Britain, and Spain to half their funding.

After the July Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report about physicians’ involvement in torture, Israeli Medical Association (IMA) chairman Dr. Yoram Blachar asked its members to sever ties with PHR-Israel.

The Prevention of Inflation Law passed its first Knesset reading in May 2008 – “in brazen violation of the basic precepts of providing protection and care to asylum seekers.” One of its provisions includes long prison terms for convicted “infiltrators” and human rights activists helping them.

Harassing Human Rights Activists in the Occupied Territories

Harassment and other measures there are far worse than in Israel, including violence committed by security forces and settlers. IDF actions include:

* declaring West Bank areas closed military zones to deny activists access to them;
* arresting, detaining, indicting, convicting, and imprisoning activists as a deterrent; and
* dispersing demonstrations with excessive force, using rubber-coated metal bullets, at times live rounds, stun grenades, tear gas, and other repressive measures against peaceful protesters.

Discriminating Against Israeli Arabs

The Israeli government appointed the Or Commission to investigate early violence at the beginning of the second Intifada in which police killed 12 Israeli Arabs and one Palestinian. It recommended that the state “act to erase the stain of discrimination against Arab citizens in all its various forms and expression,” but thereafter they worsened in even more severe forms.

Israeli Arabs enjoy no rights in a state affording them only to Jews. Worse still, they’re portrayed as enemies, and in the past year, proposed racist laws threaten their free expression, political participation, language, culture, historic heritage, and all their rights unless they swear loyalty to the Jewish state and Zionist vision.

The Proposed Nakba Law

Public outrage over its original version got it revised to exclude imprisonment, but included is a clause withdrawing public funding from any state-supported body holding activities commemorating the Nakba in any way. It’s now removed from Arab school curricula, and banning it denies Arab Israelis their collective identity, memory, and free expression right to their opinions, especially one this important.

Removal of Arab Place Names from Road Signs

In July, Minister of Transportation Yisrael Katz ordered Arab road signs replaced with Arabic transliterations of Hebrew names, but doing so violates the Supreme Court’s recognition of Arabic as an official language in Israel.

Conditioning Rights on Military Service

In August, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the Ministry’s diplomatic training will be conditional on completing military or national service henceforth. As a result, the Israeli Railways fired 40 Arab train junction crossing guards when a condition was added to the vacancy announcement requiring all employees to have performed IDF service.

Conditional Citizenship

If passed, the proposed Loyalty to Israel Law will make Israeli citizenship conditional on signing a loyalty oath to “the Jewish, Zionist, and democratic State of Israel, its symbols and values.” It will also obligate all citizens to perform military or other national service, and will authorize the Interior Minister to revoke the citizenship of anyone refusing to sign. In late May, the Ministerial Committee for Legislative Affairs rejected the bill.

Globally, citizenship is a basic right, but not in Israel where it’s conditional, especially for Arabs. For example, in May, Interior Minister Eli Yishai ordered the citizenship of four Arabs revoked because they were suspected of harming state security. Doing so tells Israeli Arabs that their citizenship is conditional, not guaranteed, and can be revoked for any reason if state authorities wish.

Violating the Right to Housing

At issue again is making it conditional on swearing loyalty to Israel to keep Arabs out of Jewish communities. In addition, a June agreement between the state and Jewish National Fund (JNF) authorizes the transfer of some privately (central region) owned land to the state in exchange for undeveloped Negev and Galilee substitute areas. The idea again is discrimination, treating Jews one way and Arabs another by seizing their land for Jews only development.

Violating Free Expression and Political Involvement

It primarily affects Arabs, one example being in towns and villages where they protested against the Gaza war. They were met with harassment, violence, and mass arrests, unlike the guidelines for Jews. Also, preemptive arrests were made, targeting Arab activists and public figures on suspicion they might protest the war.

These are police state tactics, reflected in all ways Israeli Arabs and Palestinians are treated. They portray a troubling picture portending worse ahead to deny non-Jews equal rights and strike hard when they peacefully protest. And yet the Orr Commission stressed that:

It is imperative that we act to uproot manifestations of prejudice against the Arab sector that were demonstrated even by the most respected senior police officers. The police must impress upon its officers the idea that the Arab public as a whole is not their enemy, and must not be treated as such.

They are, worse than in October 2000, proving Israeli Arabs aren’t respected or safe under Jewish rule, let alone given equal rights.

Racist Views

By considering Arabs enemies and unwanted, mistreating, excluding, and discriminating against them is sanctioned, and Jews support it. According to the Israel Democracy Institute’s 2009 Democracy Index:

* 53% of Jews support Arab emigration from Israel;
* 54% of Jews and Arabs agree that only citizens loyal to the state deserve civil rights;
* 38% of Jews believe Jews deserve more rights than others; and
* only 33% of native Jews and 23% of new immigrants want Arab parties in the government, even though their members are Israeli citizens.

Overall, the survey authors say the data indicate broad support for revoking Arab political rights, ones only to be afforded Jews as more evidence that a democratic Israel is more illusion than fact.

Bedouin Rights

Tens of thousands live in so-called unrecognized villages, some pre-dating Israel’s founding. Yet Israel won’t recognize them, excludes them from regional and municipal planning, denies them basic services, calls Bedouin settlements illegal, and forcibly expels their residents from land they own.

Those remaining are given two choices — live under appalling conditions or voluntarily move to one of seven recognized townships or rural villages, live in poverty and unemployment, and relinquish all rights to their land, heritage, and traditional lifestyle.

Yet in December 2008, the Commission for the Resolution of Arab Settlement in the Negev, chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Eliezer Goldberg (the Goldberg Commission), issued some unprecedented statements. It called Israel’s policies against Bedouin citizens inappropriate, saying they’re recognized residents, not “trespassers,” and the state should legalize their status and allow them to build on their land.

Nonetheless, the report didn’t unequivocally say how, and presented impediments that could indefinitely delay or even halt village recognition. Also, it didn’t clearly recommend guidelines to assure basic services and essential infrastructure to spur economic development. As a result, Bedouin rights are still denied, and they continue being uprooted from their land.

Criminal Justice Rights

In 2006, a Supreme Court ruling bolstered the right to legal representation by affording persons suspected of a serious crime the right to have all interrogations videotaped, in cases involving a possible sentence of 15 or more years. Otherwise, forced confessions can be extracted through torture or other harsh means.

Nonetheless, due process is ignored if individuals are suspected of a security offense. In these cases, they may be detained and interrogated for several days in isolation, with no access to counsel, their family, or a judge. After arrest, oversight can last up to 96 hours. Afterwards, meeting with a lawyer can be delayed another three weeks and video documentation isn’t required, so the most abusive practices can be employed out of sight and unreported, yet confessions gotten this way can convict.

In Occupied Palestine, it’s far worse for any offense. Suspects can be held for eight days before being brought before a military judge, not a civil one. In addition, draconian regulations prevent contact with a lawyer, and authorities aren’t obligated to document interrogations.

According to the 2002 Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, suspects can be held up to 14 days with no judicial oversight and prevented from attorney contact for up to three weeks during which he or she can, and most often is, brutalized under the most horrific conditions. B’Tselem reported that 85% of Palestinian detainees are tortured, a longstanding practice, unconstrained and unreported.

Hatred and Racism

In mid-2008, the Oz unit replaced the Immigration Police and began intensifying residency law enforcement against asylum-seekers and migrant workers invited to work as nurses, in agriculture, and for construction. Now they’re accused of causing unemployment and dehumanized by being called “burglars, junkies, and street people.”

As a result, human rights activists and others expressed outrage, and so didn’t some cabinet and Knesset members. In July, it forced Prime Minister Netanyahu to announce a three month expulsion suspension to provide time to devise a more equitable policy, so far not done for either refugees, migrant workers or asylum seekers.

In addition, in the past year, they’ve been targeted, called “foreigners,” racially slurred, made to feel unwelcome, and sometimes harmed by violence and killings. Subsets of Israeli society are also affected, including Arabs, ethnic Ethiopians, Russians, gays and lesbians, and even ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Rights of the Elderly

They’re one of Israel’s fastest growing groups, the result of a falling birth rate and increased life expectancy. Yet the collapse of the Pensioners Party in the last parliamentary election reduced their status to an excluded and deprived population. As a result, many suffer from ageism, exclusion, discrimination and poverty. In fact, elder Israeli poverty ranks among the highest in western countries.

Pensions are no longer linked to the average wage, but to the Consumer Price Index, so their future value will likely drop. In addition, long-term care issues are deteriorating because to qualify, elders and their adult children must pass a means test. Chronic care facilities are getting less funding, and growing numbers of institutions can’t maintain minimal medical standards, or must reduce staff and the care they afford.

In employment, the 2004 Retirement Age Law lets employers ousts workers who reach retirement age, regardless of their skills, desire, or need to stay employed. Unlike other western countries, Israel fires on the basis of age.

The 1988 Equal Opportunity in Employment Law, prohibiting discrimination age bias, is now weak and not enforced. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that for persons past their retirement age, the state can deny them jobs in preference to younger workers – saying this doesn’t constitute age discrimination.

Even persons as young as 50 are affected as employers illegally get away with discriminating against them on the basis of age.

Chronic care insurance is another issue. The 1995 National Insurance Law assured it, but economic pressures weakened it and social benefits overall as Israel succumbed to the same neoliberal pressures afflicting all western countries, some more than others, but all heading in the same direction. The result is society’s most vulnerable are greatly impacted, including seniors. In Israel, elders are increasingly viewed as dependent, weak, less wanted, and burdensome. The result is less care and more impoverishment when they most need help.

The Right to Education

Private schools have long existed in Israel, but now they’re proliferating at the expense of public ones. The term “private” refers to ones not under state auspice or regional councils, including those in the Amal or ORT network, kibbutz schools, Arab schools run by the Church, and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) schools.

Now private secular ones have appeared with specific educational agendas or philosophies, and others noted for their small class size, high-quality teachers, or particular distinction making them desirable to some Israelis.

Private or not, they’re all part of the “recognized but unofficial” education system and get 75% of the funding given official state schools. In May 2007, an amendment to the State Education Law passed requiring regional councils to provide comparable funding.

“The entire subject of ‘recognized but unofficial’ schools is a complex one that raises profound questions about the right of parents to make decisions about their children’s education, equality in education, the legitimacy of State intervention (in deciding content) and the character of a given school (by setting conditions for public funding), and more.”

Violating the Right to Equality in Education

Admissions policies restrict entry to recognized but unofficial schools to relatively few students. Criteria include entrance exams, admission committee decisions, and more. Discrimination thus exists, favoring some over others despite Ministry of Education directives prohibiting them.

Because these schools are heavily subsidized, the entire public must have access without discrimination, but they don’t. High tuition charges create another barrier, leaving out most Israeli children because of affordability.

Public schools are also affected. For example, parents prefer schools offering targeted curricula – such as the Nature School and School for the Arts, both in Tel Aviv. Despite the prohibition, both require entrance exams and charge high tuitions.

Although some specialized schools offer financial aid to needy families, few, in fact, are helped, even for “specialized track” public schools that also charge additional tuition and require a personal interview to determine child eligibility for a special program. The result is a two-track system – one for well-off families, the other for those with limited means, unable to provide their children with the best.

Decline of Public Schools

They’ve declined as recognized but unofficial schools have grown in popularity. As a result, compared to OECD countries, class sizes are larger, teacher salaries lower, and student achievement mediocre. It’s no surprise that 61% of parents polled prefer private to public education. They’re publicly funded, have better teachers, and attract children from more affluent families.

In contrast, public education is deteriorating, and the more it does, the greater the incentive for parents to prefer private ones – if they can afford them.

Recently, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar said he’ll introduce legislation to broaden the ministry’s discretionary powers “to weigh whether or not to grant recognition to an institution based on educational and financial considerations,” including if doing so would adversely affect public schools. It’s a positive step, but much more is needed, so far not gotten to reverse a discriminatory trend showing no signs of being stopped.

The Right to Housing

The August 2004 Israel Lands Administration (ILA) decision #1015 created admissions committees to agricultural communities and small communal settlements. They consider applications from candidates wanting land to settle there, and recommend whether or not to permit them, using dubious criteria based on “social compatibility” standards, heavily discriminating against minority or other unwanted groups.

“These are up-scale, rural, or private home developments built on what was once kibbutz and moshav fields, not the property of the State and offering a high standard of living at an affordable price,” based on a discriminatory selection process.

Sectoral Marketing and Acquisition Groups

Discrimination also affects apartments letting private developers market them to specific groups of their choosing, thus screening in “quality neighbors” as a selling point to attract others like them. It results in closed communities leading to social gaps as wealthier neighborhoods get the best public services, while others deteriorate.

The Right to Social Security

In 2009, the global economic crisis impacted Israel hard, especially jobs with a sharp rise in unemployment, and those without them discovered that since 2000, social safety net protections have deteriorated.

In addition, unemployment insurance has eroded to one of the lowest among western countries, and eligibility became more stringent. As a result, those qualifying have decreased by about 50%. In 2007, less than one-fourth of Israel’s unemployed were entitled to monthly stipends. Those without them struggle for any means of support, making them vulnerable to exploitation.

“The drastic cut to income-support and unemployment insurance has been one element in Israel’s high ranking in the (OECD’s) Inequality Index.”

The Wisconsin Plan

In summer 2005, it began as an experimental pilot project administered by private companies with the goal of reintegrating income-support recipients into the workforce. However, its primary focus was to reduce the number of people on income-support roles, so widespread criticism resulted.

Private companies have a conflict of interest for being compensated by the number they remove. They also don’t invest sufficiently in services to encourage employment, such as retraining, on-site childcare, and programs to complete academic degrees.

Rather than help the unemployed, they try to “re-educate” them with sanctions to force them to cope in the current adverse job market “through means that weaken their ability to stand up for their rights.” Participants thus feel degraded and helpless, with no government measures to stop this.

The Right to Health Care

The 1994 National Health Insurance Law was enacted to provide all Israelis with universal healthcare coverage. That was then. This is now under budget cutting pressure and privatization, leaving workers and the most vulnerable isolated and helpless.

The public health system most rely on has deteriorated greatly in quality, forcing recipients to pay more and get less. The result is two parallel unequal, systems — high quality for the well-off and less of it for all others, with gaps between them measured by statistical health indicators across regions, socioeconomic levels, and ethnic groups.

Several features in particular stand out, showing how Israeli health care shifted from a right to a commodity based on the ability to pay, as well as a new proposal to establish another healthcare fund as a profit-making enterprise.

Dental care isn’t covered at all, forcing many families to forego it. However, in May 2009, the Health Ministry announced that it would assume funding of basic preventive dental care for every school child, thus assuring it regardless of financial means, and funding it from the allocation for new medicines. It’s a small step in the right direction, but the broader one looks bleak.

Co-payments

The 1998 Economic Arrangements Law let the national health funds increase co-payment amounts for medical services and drugs as well as additional fees. Ever since, they’ve been rising, and according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 32% of 2008 national health expenditures was funded by direct payments, including dental care.

The result is greater numbers of Israelis foregoing care because they can’t afford it. The Israeli Medical Association believes co-pays should be abolished for some services, mainly preventive care, and proposes other ways “to achieve the appropriate balance between ensuring medical care for all and efficiency in the system.”

Supplementary Insurance

They fill gaps uncovered in the standard health basket for those who can afford it. About 24% of the population doesn’t have it. Of these, 52% declined because of cost. In addition, 32% of those in poor health have none, including the elderly impacted by higher premiums with age. Not only does supplementary insurance not provide solutions for everyone, it’s actually “widening the gap between lower and middle classes, and expediting the process that is turning health care from a right into a commodity.”

Two trends have thus emerged:

– an ongoing decline in services and drugs provided by the state, and the increase in what individuals receive based on their ability to pay; and

– the promotion of supplementary insurance to well-off people, leaving the rest disempowered and left out.

Instead of fixing the system, policy makes it worse by catering to the needs of people who can afford them, not the rest.

The Fifth Health Fund

It’s another symptom of commoditization, contradicting the National Health Insurance Law defining national health funds as public bodies and declaring new funds must be non-profit. However, spending cut priorities pressured national health funds to privatize, and got the idea included in the 2009-2010 Economic Arrangements Law, so far not voted on in the Knesset, but may be to enhance competition and efficiency. Instead of solving public healthcare problems, it will further undermine social solidarity and deepen the existing inequality, the very direction Israel is heading.

Rights in the Occupied Territories

Israel’s preemptive, indiscriminate, Operation Cast Lead attack against Gazan civilians took a devastating toll, compounding the existing humanitarian crisis with the Territory under siege. Of course, medical services were greatly impacted, including willful attacks against hospitals, other health facilities, ambulances, and providers. In addition, Gaza’s entire infrastructure was savaged, affecting electricity, water and sewage facilities already severely compromised.

Israel committed wanton crimes of war and against humanity continuing to this day, causing incalculable human suffering further impacted by closure and isolation. Post-conflict, Israel obstructed and vilified independent investigations, then denied serious charges in their aftermath, including by their own combat veterans based on their personal experiences they went public on to reveal.

A year later, nothing is resolved. Gaza remains under siege. Sub-minimal amounts of basic goods are allowed in, including construction materials, essential equipment, raw materials, and spare part necessary to function and rebuild. Tens of thousands have no shelter, relying on temporary facilities, crowded quarters with relatives, or tents that aren’t suitable in Gaza’s winter. Israel violates every obligation imaginable to protect civilians under international humanitarian law, and attacking them indiscriminately is a grievous war crime.

West Bank Discrimination and Segregation

Around a half million West Bank settlers have created a “regime of separation and institutionalized discrimination, voiding the principle of ‘equality before the law’ of all (meaning). Within the same territorial boundaries and under the same regime, two populations live side-by-side, (separated and unequal), with entirely (different) infrastructure and bound by two (judicial) systems” that are entirely dissimilar.

Jews have full rights, Palestinians none under oppressive military occupation. Inequality is pervasive in all respects, with Palestinians forced into shrinking cantons surrounded and isolated by settlements, expanding by expropriating their land and making conditions for them untenable, “in absolute contravention of the principles of international law” assuring the rights of protected people under occupation.

Separate Roads

In October 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that closing the main road connecting Beit Awa and Dura in the western Hebron Hills, affecting tens of thousands of Palestinians, was disproportionate. But it failed to address the greater issue: that separate roads for Jews only are illegitimate, illegal, and must cease.

Citing disproportionality only, the Court avoided the core issue of segregation and discrimination favoring Jews over Arabs, leaving the impression of its support.

Separate roads are only one example of how Israel restricts West Bank free movement for about 2.5 million Palestinians, keeps another 1.5 million under siege in Gaza, and gets away with it.

Criminal Injustice: Separate and Unequal Systems

West Bank settlers are governed by civil law, protecting the rights of the accused, “anchored in Israeli legislation and legal precedents.” In contrast, Palestinians live under military law that’s far more repressive in military courts under IDF officers, affording no judicial fairness.

One example is different periods of detention for Jews and Arabs. Under military rule, it’s harsh, excessive, and inconsistent with the obligation to respects basic rights under international law, including for suspects not charged. Instead, administrative detentions are ordered during which interrogations include torture and other abusive treatment.

Some differences for Jews and Arabs include:

* preliminary detainment until judicial review — 24 hours for Jews most often; eight days for Palestinians;
* maximum detainment for interrogation, prior to remand request – 15 days for Jews; 20 for security crimes; 30 days for Palestinians;
* total detainment for investigative purposes — 30 days for Jews; 35 for security crimes, and only the Supreme Court can authorize extensions; 98 days for Palestinians with additional three month extensions; and
* arrest until the end of legal proceedings and before a verdict — 9 months for Jews with only Supreme Court ordered extensions; two years for Palestinians, with renewable six month extensions.

Moreover, youths are treated no differently, with those as young as 16 considered adults. For Jews, it’s 18.

For Palestinians, prison sentences are the norm. They may be long or indefinite whatever the charged offense, with or without cause, and are often based on secret evidence unavailable to counsel. Convicted or administratively detained minors are then incarcerated with adults.

Access to Resources

West Bank Palestinians endure water shortages, an irregular supply, and poor quality, especially in summer and arid years. As a result, health is adversely impacted as are farmers needing water for agriculture and their livestock.

According to the WHO, the minimal daily human water needs (for home, municipal and industrial use) is 100 liters per person. Palestinians get about 66 liters despite enough West Bank water for everyone. The problem is who get it and for what, with Jews afforded disproportionate amounts at the expense of Palestinian needs.

One-third of Palestinian communities, comprising 10% of its West Bank population, aren’t connected to the water system, so must collect rainwater in cisterns near their homes for all their needs. Even so, the Civil Administration often destroys them, even in particularly arid areas, forcing residents to rely on well groundwater, supplemented by expensive water from private suppliers. For many families, it’s too great a burden because of widespread poverty.

Even communities connected to the main water system receive limited and irregular supplies, well below their needs, and in summer conditions may be acute with water available only once every few days and only for a few hours. Again, other sources must compensate.

Right to Personal Security: Discrimination in Law Enforcement

Israeli security forces protect Jews well, employing diverse measures for their safety. For Palestinians, it’s another matter, including not preventing settler violence that harm their livelihoods, property and lives. Incidents include violent assaults, harassment, trespassing, land theft, and property destruction, yet security forces do nothing to stop them, nor are settlers prosecuted for their crimes.

At times, attacks are known about in advance, yet hardly ever stopped. As a rule, IDF soldiers and commanders don’t enforce the law against Jews. Their only obligation is to protect them and intervene when Palestinians defend themselves.

Police, in fact, typically don’t use their authority against Jewish criminal suspects. Nor do they consider Palestinian complaints seriously or investigate properly when they’re lodged. Cases most often are closed due to “unknown perpetrators” or insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Undermining Democratic Foundations: Legislative Initiatives

In recent years, numerous laws and amendments have been improper, including ones affecting civil liberties like free expression and the right to protest peacefully. Examples include:

– the Biometric Database Law: in 2009, a bill advanced to create a biometric database to store fingerprints and facial features of all Israeli citizens and residents – a measure no other democratic country has and one that will give government officials police state power, to use abusively, especially against Israeli Arabs;

– The Economic Arrangements Law: it’s a legal travesty giving the executive branch power to make radical changes in Israel’s socioeconomic policies, with no checks and balances, in violation of basic human, civil and social rights; even worse, since enactment, new provisions have been added without debate or proper consideration; critics call it a “legislative monster” with good reason;

– Expanding the Wisconsin Plan nationally without public debate: as a pilot project in four Israeli regions, it reduces the number of people getting income support, and forces them into low-paying jobs instead of better ones they once held; and

– Land Reform – Land Grab: the proposal involves privatizing land, the composition of the council to administer it, and procedures for planning and building — all having social, environmental, and financial impact; even so, the reform “was bulldozed through the Knesset in a problematic legislative process.”

Contempt of Court: Ignoring Supreme Court Rulings

Proposed laws are undermining the Court by allowing the circumventing of its decisions, violating human rights in the process. For example, a proposed amendment will prevent Palestinians from submitting compensation claims against the state for IDF-committed injury to their person or property during non-wartime activity. In December 2006, the High Court rejected a similar amendment.

Of concern also is the trend over the past two years of governments disregarding High Court of Justice and Administrative Court rulings. Doing so is police state tyranny, not democratic rule now fading even for Jews.

For example:

– “binding arrangements” of migrant workers to their original employers – earlier, the High Court ruled them illegal and instructed the state to make new employment arrangements within six months for workers employed in nursing, agriculture and industry; it wasn’t done so “binding arrangemens” are unchanged;

– national priority areas – in February 2006, an expanded seven justice Supreme Court panel ruled that assigning this status to certain regions for the allocation of educational resources was illegal and discriminatory against Israeli Arabs and ordered change in 12 months; as of November 2009, it hasn’t been implemented;

– dismantling sections of the Separation Wall – several times, the High Court ordered its route changed because it illegally and disproportionately violated the basic rights of Palestinian residents; most often the state treated Court rulings as “recommendations only,” ignoring them;

– fortification of Sderot schools – in May 2007, the Court ordered it for Sderot and western Negev communities near Gaza; delays and extensions followed;

– East Jerusalem classroom shortages – several times the Court ordered the Ministry of Education and Jerusalem Municipality to build hundreds of additional classrooms for Palestinian children; so far, compliance has been minimal, and no serious effort has been made to alleviate a critical shortage; and

– Interior Ministry disregard for the Administrative Court rulings – these courts are the main venue for adjudicating entry and immigration to Israel; yet the Interior Ministry doesn’t abide by its rulings or change its policies when ordered.

Final Comments

Israel is in crisis mode — in all respects for Israeli Arabs and occupied Palestinians, and increasingly for Jews having their human, civil, and social rights compromised and eroded.

Israeli democracy is flawed and illusory. Its denied entirely to non-Jews, afforded solely to privileged ones, governing how America does for the rich at the expense most others. It mocks the rule of law, and is heading the country for police state-imposed dystopia if the present trend continues. That should concern Jews and Arabs alike to want it stopped, and ally in common cause to do it.

Imagine a different kind of Israel, free and democratic, treating all its people equitably. Imagine the same kind of America, not the broken society now in place. Imagine if enough people in both countries stopped imagining and became activist. That’s how change always comes, from the grassroots by committed people not quitting until they get it. What worked before can work again, and it better before conditions become so bad it won’t matter.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/human-ri...pied-palestine/

[Snuffysmith]

The apartheid will end when Israelis have to face its cost

Tony Karon

* February 06. 2010

The former US president Jimmy Carter set off a firestorm in 2006 when he said that Israel would have to choose between maintaining an apartheid occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians. That Mr Carter brokered Israel’s most important peace treaty with an Arab country was immaterial; he was branded an enemy of Israel, an anti-Semite and even a Holocaust-denier.

Israel’s friends in the US reacted out of instinct, knowing that an association with apartheid – South Africa’s erstwhile system of racial oppression – would bring international condemnation and isolation. But there was no word of protest from that quarter last week when Israel’s defence minister said what Mr Carter had. “If, and as long as between the Jordan (River) and the (Mediterranean) Sea there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic,” warned Ehud Barak, speaking at Israel’s annual Herzliya security conference. “If the Palestinians vote in elections it is a binational state and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”

Which, of course, is exactly what Mr Carter was arguing. The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned in November 2007 that without a two-state solution, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights”, which it would be unable to win because American Jews would not support a state that denies voting rights to all of its subjects.

Mr Olmert and Mr Barak, of course, raised the spectre of “apartheid” to remind Israelis that they could face international isolation if they remain indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians. Sometimes, such warnings from Israelis come as if attached to a demographic time-bomb – the idea that once Palestinians become a majority of the population between the Jordan River and the sea, Israel will be left in an apartheid situation. But apartheid is a qualitative, not a quantitative notion: it’s the denial of basic democratic rights to a whole category of people, regardless of their numerical strength, that defines apartheid.

While it may have been couched as a warning about the future, Mr Barak’s statement was actually a confession of the present state of affairs: one state has controlled the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean since 1967, and that state denies the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza the right to vote for the government that rules them. That is the essence of apartheid.

The rubric of “occupation” actually serves as a convenient fiction for Israel because it suggests a temporary condition. But at home, the Israelis have stopped pretending that their presence in the West Bank is temporary. They plan to keep major settlement blocs, illegal under the rules of occupation as defined by the Geneva Convention, in the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem and so on. For Israelis, there is no distinction in lifestyle or access between living in the West Bank and living inside Israel’s 1967 borders – the settlements are now little more than an extension of Israeli suburbia.

Equally fictitious is the notion that there is a “peace” in the works that will change the situation. Israel’s leaders are not prepared to offer a credible Palestinian state, and they are under no pressure, domestically or internationally, to do so. Israeli public opinion has soured on the need for peace with the Palestinians, bottled up in Gaza and behind a security wall in the West Bank. Why risk provoking a civil war with militant settlers who are the backbone of the Israeli army and threaten violence to hang onto the West Bank? In the old days, Yitzhak Rabin would say that Israel would “pursue peace as if terror did not exist and fight terror as if peace did not exist”. For today’s Israelis, why pursue peace if terror has been contained?

By opening the peace process (but never concluding it) Israel found itself increasingly integrated in a global society with Europe and the US. It’s football teams play in European leagues; its supermodels grace the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition; its hi-tech entrepreneurs are key players in the digital marketplace. Most Israelis never see Palestinians, except during stints in the military. The “demographic” threat is an abstraction.

It should come as little surprise that Israelis are cool towards Mr Obama’s peace effort: Israel’s cost-benefit analysis weighs against pursuing a peace agreement that carries risk. There are no consequences for maintaining the status quo. Unless Mr Obama and others can change that cost-benefit analysis, they’re wasting their time.

It wasn’t a moral epiphany that prompted Rabin to embrace the Oslo peace process; it was his reading of the geopolitical situation at the end of the Gulf War, and the assumption that Israel could not rely on unconditional US support. But Mr Sharon and Mr Netanyahu subsequently proved that Israel can, in fact, count on US support without concluding a two-state peace – it simply must go through the motions of a “peace process”.

The apartheid fear for Israeli leaders is not of the moral turpitude of maintaining such a system – which they already do – it’s a fear of this being recognised for what it is.

Mr Barak’s recent confession came in the same week that South Africa celebrated the 20th anniversary of its former president FW de Klerk’s announcement that he would free Nelson Mandela and negotiate a political settlement. Like Rabin, de Klerk was motivated by a strategic calculus. Sanctions were beginning to bite, and with the Cold War all but over the US government made clear that they would not come to de Klerk’s aid. Maintaining apartheid would leave the regime isolated and increasingly impoverished. The cost of maintaining the status quo offset the risks of heading down the uncertain road of peace.

The Israelis are not going to dismantle what Mr Barak has essentially admitted is an apartheid system unless the consequences of maintaining it become prohibitive. As long as they can count on unconditional support in the West, the Israelis will go through the motions but maintain the status quo.

The optimist might even read Mr Barak’s “apartheid” admission as a cry for help: certainly, those Israeli leaders serious about a two-state solution are unlikely to make any headway unless they can demonstrate to their own people that the cost of maintaining the status quo have become too high. But they can only do this if Mr Obama shows Israelis the consequences.

LINK:
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/ar.../702069887/1080

[Snuffysmith]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175203/tom...izing_pakistan/
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Destabilizing Pakistan
February 7, 2010.

Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA’s “secret” battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles -- that is, pilot-less drones -- shoot missiles (18 of themin a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and then the news comes in: a certain number of al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders or suspected Arab or Uzbek or Afghan “militants”have died. The numbers are often remarkably precise. Sometimes they are attributed to U.S. sources, sometimes to the Pakistanis; sometimes, it’s hard to tell where the information comes from. In the Pakistani press, on the other hand, the numbers that come back are usually of civilian dead. They, too, tend to be precise.

Don’t let that precision fool you. Here’s the reality: There are no reporters on the ground and none of these figures can be taken as accurate. Let’s just consider the CIA side of things. Any information that comes from American sources (i.e. the CIA) has to be looked at with great wariness. As a start, the CIA’s history is one of deception. There’s no reason to take anything its sources say at face value. They will report just what they think it’s in their interest to report -- and the ongoing “success” of their drone strikes is distinctly in their interest.

Then, there’s history. In the present drone wars, as in the CIA’s bloody Phoenix Program in the Vietnam era, the Agency’s operatives, working in distinctly alien terrain, must rely on local sources (or possibly official Pakistani ones) for targeting intelligence. In Vietnam in the 1960s, the Agency’s Phoenix Program -- reportedly responsible for the assassination of 20,000 Vietnamese -- became, according to historian Marilyn Young, “an extortionist’s paradise, with payoffs as available for denunciation as for protection.” Once again, the CIA is reportedly passing out bags of money and anyone on the ground with a grudge, or the desire to eliminate an enemy, or simply the desire to make some of that money can undoubtedly feed information into the system, watch the drones do their damnedest, and then report back that more “terrorists” are dead. Just assume that at least some of those “militants” dying in Pakistan, and possibly many of them, aren’t who the CIA hopes they are.

Think of it as a foolproof situation, with an emphasis on the “fool.” And then keep in mind that, in December, the CIA’s local brain trust, undoubtedly the same people who were leaking precise news of “successes” in Pakistan, mistook a jihadist double agent from Jordan for an agent of theirs, gathered at an Agency base in Khost, Afghanistan, and let him wipe them out with a suicide bomb. Seven CIA operatives died, including the base chief. This should give us a grim clue as to the accuracy of the CIA’s insights into what’s happening on the ground in Pakistan, or into the real effects of their 24/7 robotic assassination program.

But there’s a deeper, more dangerous level of deception in Washington’s widening war in the region: self-deception. The CIA drone program, which the Agency’s Director Leon Panetta has called “the only game in town” when it comes to dismantling al-Qaeda, is just symptomatic of such self-deception. While the CIA and the U.S. military have been expending enormous effort studying the Afghan and Pakistani situations and consulting experts, and while the White House has conducted an extensive series of seminars-cum-policy-debates on both countries, you can count on one thing: none of them have spent significant time studying or thinking about us.

As a result, the seeming cleanliness and effectiveness of the drone-war solution undoubtedly only reinforces a sense in Washington that the world’s last great military power can still control this war -- that it can organize, order, prod, wheedle, and bribe both the Afghans and Pakistanis into doing what’s best, and if that doesn’t work, simply continue raining down the missiles and bombs. Beware Washington’s deep-seated belief that it controls events; that it is, however precariously, in the saddle; that, as Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal recently put it, there is a “corner” to “turn” out there, even if we haven’t quite turned it yet.

In fact, Washington is not in the saddle and that corner, if there, if turned, will have its own unpleasant surprises. Washington is, in this sense, as oblivious as those CIA operatives were as they waited for “their” Jordanian agent to give them supposedly vital information on the al-Qaeda leadership in the Pakistani tribal areas. Like their drones, the Americans in charge of this war are desperately far from the ground, and they don’t even seem to know it. It’s this that makes the analogy drawn by TomDispatch regular and author of Halliburton’s Army, Pratap Chatterjee, so unnerving. It’s time for Washington to examine not what we know about them, but what we don’t know about ourselves. Tom

Operation Breakfast Redux
Could Pakistan 2010 Go the Way of Cambodia 1969?
By Pratap Chatterjee

Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the "enemy" to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids. The secret computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office. They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy’s central headquarters whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting daily.

In remote villages where no reporters dared to go, far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: "The ball game is over."

The campaign was called "Operation Breakfast," and, while it may sound like the CIA’s present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn’t. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact. The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids. Later ones were named "Lunch," "Snack," and "Supper," and they went under the collective label "Menu." They were authorized by President Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) "Bamboo Pentagon," a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.

Like President Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."

Return to the Killing Fields

In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy,” comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that U.S. military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.

A more provocative -- and perhaps more ominous -- analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent. To briefly recapitulate that ancient history: In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a “neutralist” king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found “sanctuaries.”

Sihanouk, helpless to do anything, looked the other way. In the meantime, sheltered by local villagers in distant areas of rural Cambodia was a small insurgent group, little-known communist fundamentalists who called themselves the Khmer Rouge. (Think of them as the 1970s equivalent of the Pakistani Taliban who have settled into the wild borderlands of that country largely beyond the control of the Pakistani government.) They were then weak and incapable of challenging Sihanouk -- until, that is, those secret bombing raids by American B-52s began. As these intensified in the summer of 1969, areas of the country began to destabilize (helped on in 1970 by a U.S.-encouraged military coup in the capital Phnom Penh), and the Khmer Rouge began to gain strength.

You know the grim end of that old story.

Forty years, almost to the day, after Operation Breakfast began, I traveled to the town of Snuol, close to where the American bombs once fell. It is a quiet town, no longer remote, as modern roads and Chinese-led timber companies have systematically cut down the jungle that once sheltered anti-government rebels. I went in search of anyone who remembered the bombing raids, only to discover that few there were old enough to have been alive at the time, largely because the Khmer Rouge executed as much as a quarter of the total Cambodian population after they took power in 1975.

Eventually, a 15-minute ride out of town, I found an old soldier living by himself in a simple one-room house adorned with pictures of the old king, Sihanouk. His name was Kong Kan and he had first moved to the nearby town of Memot in 1960. A little further away, I ran into three more old men, Choenung Klou, Keo Long, and Hoe Huy, who had gathered at a newly built temple to chat.

All of them remembered the massive 1969 B-52 raids vividly and the arrival of U.S. troops the following year. "We thought the Americans had come to help us," said Choenung Klou. "But then they left and the [South] Vietnamese soldiers who came with them destroyed the villages and raped the women."

He had no love for the North Vietnamese communists either. "They would stay at people's houses, take our hammocks and food. We didn't like them and we were afraid of them."

Caught between two Vietnamese armies and with American planes carpet-bombing the countryside, increasing numbers of Cambodians soon came to believe that the Khmer Rouge, who were their countrymen, might help them. Like the Taliban of today, many of the Khmer Rouge were, in fact, teenaged villagers who had responded, under the pressure of war and disruption, to the distant call of an inspirational ideology and joined the resistance in the jungles.

"If you ask me why I joined the Khmer Rouge, the main reason is because of the American invasion," Hun Sen, the current prime minister of Cambodia, has said. "If there was no invasion, by now, I would be a pilot or a professor."

Six years after the bombings of Cambodia began, shortly after the last helicopter lifted off the U.S. embassy in Saigon and the flow of military aid to the crumbling government of Cambodia stopped, a reign of terror took hold in the capital, Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge left the jungles and entered the capital where they began a systemic genocide against city dwellers and anyone who was educated. They vowed to restart history at Year Zero, a new era in which much of the past became irrelevant. Some two million people are believed to have died from executions, starvation, and forced labor in the camps established by the Angkar leadership of the Khmer Rouge commanded by Pol Pot.

Unraveling Pakistan

Could the same thing happen in Pakistan today? A new American president was ordering escalating drone attacks, in a country where no war has been declared, at the moment when I flew from Cambodia across South Asia to Afghanistan, so this question loomed large in my mind. Both there and just across the border, Operation Breakfast seems to be repeating itself.

In the Afghan capital, Kabul, I met earnest aid workers who drank late into the night in places like L'Atmosphere, a foreigner-only bar that could easily have doubled as a movie set for Saigon in the 1960s. Like modern-day equivalents of Graham Greene's "quiet American," these "consultants" describe a Third Way that is neither Western nor fundamentalist Islam.

At the very same time, CIA analysts in distant Virginia are using pilot-less drones and satellite technology to order strikes against supposed terrorist headquarters across the border in Pakistan. They are not so unlike the military men who watched radar screens in South Vietnam in the 1960s as the Cambodian air raids went on.

In 2009, on the orders of President Obama, the U.S. unloaded more missiles and bombs on Pakistan than President Bush did in the years of his secret drone war, and the strikes have been accelerating in number and intensity. By this January, there was a drone attack almost every other day. Even if, this time around, no one is using the code phrase, "the ball game is over," Washington continually hails success after success, terrorist leader after terrorist leader killed, implying that something approaching victory could be somewhere just over the horizon.

As in the 1960s in Cambodia, these strikes are, in actuality, having a devastating, destabilizing effect in Pakistan, not just on the targeted communities, but on public consciousness throughout the region. An article in the January 23rd New York Times indicated that the fury over these attacks has even spread into Pakistan's military establishment which, in a manner similar to Sihanouk in the 1960s, knows its limits in its tribal borderlands and is publicly uneasy about U.S. air strikes which undermine the country’s sovereignty. "Are you with us or against us?" the newspaper quoted a senior Pakistani military officer demanding of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates when he spoke last month at Pakistan's National Defense University.

Even pro-American Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has spoken out publicly against drone strikes. Of one such attack, he recently told reporters, "We strongly condemn this attack and the government will raise this issue at [the] diplomatic level."

Despite the public displays of outrage, however, the American strikes have undoubtedly been tacitly approved at the highest levels of the Pakistani government because of that country’s inability to control militants in its tribal borderlands. Similarly, Sihanouk finally looked the other way after the U.S. provided secret papers, code-named Vesuvius, as proof that the Vietnamese were operating from his country.

While most Democratic and Republican hawks have praised the growing drone war in the skies over Pakistan, some experts in the U.S. are starting to express worries about them (even if they don’t have the Cambodian analogy in mind). For example, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School who frequently advises the military, says that an expansion of the drone strikes "might even spark a social revolution in Pakistan."

Indeed, even General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, wrote in a secret assessment on May 27, 2009: "Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan… especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties." Quoting local polls, he wrote: "35 percent [of Pakistanis] say they do not support U.S. strikes into Pakistan, even if they are coordinated with the GOP [government of Pakistan] and the Pakistan Military ahead of time."

The Pakistani Army has, in fact, launched several significant operations against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and in South Waziristan, just as Sihanouk initially ordered the Cambodian military to attack the Khmer Rouge and suppress peasant rebellions in Battambang Province. Again like Sihanouk in the late 1960s, however, the Pakistanis have balked at more comprehensive assaults on the Taliban, and especially on the Afghan Taliban using the border areas as “sanctuaries.”

The New Jihadists

What happens next is the $64 million question. Most Pakistani experts dismiss any suggestion that the Taliban has widespread support in their country, but it must be remembered that the Khmer Rouge was a fringe group with no more than 4,000 fighters at the time that Operation Breakfast began.

And if Cambodia's history is any guide to the future, the drone strikes do not have to create a groundswell for revolution. They only have to begin to destabilize Pakistan as would, for instance, the threatened spread of such strikes into the already unsettled province of Baluchistan, or any future American ground incursions into the country. A few charismatic intellectuals like Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot always have the possibility of taking it from there, rallying angry and unemployed youth to create an infrastructure for disruptive change.

Despite often repeated claims by both the Bush and Obama administrations that the drone raids are smashing al-Qaeda's intellectual leadership, more and more educated and disenchanted young men from around the world seem to be rallying to the fundamentalist cause.

Some have struck directly at American targets like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009, and Dr. Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, the 32-year-old Jordanian double agent and suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives at a military base in Khost, southern Afghanistan, five days later.

Some have even been U.S.-born, like Anwar al-Awlaki, the 38-year-old Islamic preacher from New Mexico who has moved to Yemen; Adam Pearlman, a 32-year-old Southern Californian and al-Qaeda spokesman now known as "Azzam the American," who reportedly lives somewhere in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions; and Omar Hammami, the 25-year-old Syrian-American from Alabama believed to be an al-Shabaab leader in Somalia.

Like the Khmer Rouge before them, these new jihadists display no remorse for killing innocent civilians. "One of the sad truths I have come to see is that for this kind of mass violence, you don't need monsters," says Craig Etcheson, author of After the Killing Fields and founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. "Ordinary people will do just fine. This thing lives in all of us."

Even King Sihanouk, who had once ordered raids against the Khmer Rouge, eventually agreed to support them after he had been overthrown in a coup and was living in exile in China. Could the same thing happen to Pakistani politicians if they fall from grace and U.S. backing?

What threw Sihanouk's fragile government into serious disarray -- other than his own eccentricity and self-absorption -- was the devastating spillover of Nixon's war in Vietnam into Cambodia’s border regions. It finally brought the Khmer Rouge to power.

Pakistan 2010, with its enormous modern military and industrialized base, is hardly impoverished Cambodia 1969. Nonetheless, in that now ancient history lies both a potential analogy and a cautionary tale. Beware secret air wars that promise success and yet wreak havoc in lands that are not even enemy nations.

When his war plans were questioned, Nixon pressed ahead, despite a growing public distaste for his war. A similar dynamic seems to be underway today. In 1970, after Operation Breakfast was revealed by the New York Times, Nixon told his top military and national security aides: "We cannot sit here and let the enemy believe that Cambodia is our last gasp."

Had he refrained first from launching Operation Breakfast and then from supping on the whole “menu,” some historians like Etcheson believe a genocide would have been averted. It would be a sad day if the drone strikes, along with the endless war that the Obama administration has inherited and that is now spilling over ever more devastatingly into Pakistan, were to create a new class of fundamentalists who actually had the capacity to seize power.

Pratap Chatterjee is a freelance journalist and senior editor at CorpWatch who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has written two books about the war on terror, Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004) and Halliburton's Army (Nation Books, 2009). For more information on Nixon’s secret campaign, he recommends Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross. (Simon and Schuster, 1979)

Copyright 2010 Pratap Chatterjee