Monthly Archives: April 2012

Israeli military chief: Iran will not build nuclear bomb

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s military chief said in an interview published Wednesday that he believes Iran will choose not to build a nuclear bomb, an assessment that contrasted with the gloomier statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pointed to differences over the Iran issue at the top levels of Israeli leadership.

The comments by Lt. Gen Benny Gantz, who said international sanctions have begun to show results, could relieve pressure on the Obama administration and undercut efforts by Israeli political leaders to urge the United States to get as tough as possible on Iran.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have repeatedly stressed that they do not think sanctions and diplomacy will persuade Iran to halt a nuclear program they describe as a military one, and they warn that the time to stop it is quickly shrinking.

But the Israeli security establishment is believed to be far less convinced about the urgency of military action. Gantz made his own reservations clear in a handful of rare interviews with Israeli newspapers, offering comments that analysts said seemed intended to inject nuance into a debate that has reached frenzied heights this spring. Speaking to the newspaper Haaretz, he said that the Israeli military would be ready to act if ordered, but that he did not think that this year would be “necessarily go, no-go.”

Gantz described Iranian leaders as “very rational people” who are still mulling whether to “go the extra mile” and produce nuclear weapons.

“I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile,” Gantz said of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. While Gantz cautioned that Khamenei could still change his mind, the supreme leader has said repeatedly that Iran does not intend to build a nuclear weapon, and that its uranium enrichment program is for peaceful purposes.

Although striking in its bluntness, Gantz’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions did not differ dramatically from comments made publicly and privately by other current and former Israeli officials in recent months. Others have also concluded, for example, that Iran intends to achieve nuclear weapons capability but would stop short of assembling and testing a bomb, steps that would almost certainly incur a military response from Israel and perhaps the United States.

But Gantz’s comments differed starkly in tone from those made recently by Netanyahu about the diplomatic efforts of the United States and other world powers.

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Never forget… World War II

Shmuel Rosner writes: The seven days between Holocaust Memorial Day (last Thursday) and Independence Day (this Thursday) are packed with national symbolism. Seven days to remind the Jews of Israel of their trajectory from near annihilation to sovereign revival. Seven days for much sorrow and much pride.

And seven perfect days for political messaging.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the season last week by dismissing those who “prefer that we not speak of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat” and “do not like it when I speak such uncomfortable truths.” These “truths” are in fact a matter of much debate, and yet Netanyahu can’t really go wrong asserting them as fact. However remote the possibility that a nuclearized Iran would actually spell calamity for Israel, that outcome is too serious not to strike fear.

It wasn’t the first time Netanyahu used the specter of the Holocaust to characterize the danger posed by Iran. I remember hearing him make the case at the annual gathering of the Jewish Federations of North America in Los Angeles in 2006. “It is 1938,” he said back then. “Iran is Germany, and it is about to arm itself with nuclear weapons.”

Six years later, for Netanyahu at least, it’s still 1938 — maybe 1939 — and Iran is still comparable to Nazi Germany. During his speech last week, Netanyahu told his many critics that those who do not understand in the same terms as he does the gravity of the threat “have learned nothing from the Holocaust.”

Apparently one of those know-nothings is the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. “Iran is a danger, but to claim that it is creating a second Auschwitz? I compare nothing to the Holocaust,” Wiesel told the Globes last week. He believes that to invoke the Holocaust like this is to trivialize it.

Yes, to invoke the Holocaust in response to every Israeli fear is to trivialize it — but it also isolates the Holocaust from the horror of a war in which as many as 70 million people died. Those who beat the drums of war need to remember how hard war is to contain and how unpredictable its outcome. Netanyahu doesn’t just trivialize the Holocaust; he trivializes war itself.

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Veterans and brain disease

Nicholas Kristof writes: He was a 27-year-old former Marine, struggling to adjust to civilian life after two tours in Iraq. Once an A student, he now found himself unable to remember conversations, dates and routine bits of daily life. He became irritable, snapped at his children and withdrew from his family. He and his wife began divorce proceedings.

This young man took to alcohol, and a drunken car crash cost him his driver’s license. The Department of Veterans Affairs diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. When his parents hadn’t heard from him in two days, they asked the police to check on him. The officers found his body; he had hanged himself with a belt.

That story is devastatingly common, but the autopsy of this young man’s brain may have been historic. It revealed something startling that may shed light on the epidemic of suicides and other troubles experienced by veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His brain had been physically changed by a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E. That’s a degenerative condition best-known for affecting boxers, football players and other athletes who endure repeated blows to the head.

In people with C.T.E., an abnormal form of a protein accumulates and eventually destroys cells throughout the brain, including the frontal and temporal lobes. Those are areas that regulate impulse control, judgment, multitasking, memory and emotions.

That Marine was the first Iraq veteran found to have C.T.E., but experts have since autopsied a dozen or more other veterans’ brains and have repeatedly found C.T.E. The findings raise a critical question: Could blasts from bombs or grenades have a catastrophic impact similar to those of repeated concussions in sports, and could the rash of suicides among young veterans be a result? [Continue reading…]

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Rare inside view of Syria’s rebels finds a force vowing to fight on

McClatchy reports: After more than six months of fighting, Syria’s largest rebel group appears to have developed into a resilient guerrilla force, unable perhaps to hold large swaths of territory for very long but still capable of inflicting heavy casualties on the Syrian military and operating fluidly within supportive populations.

The story of the Katiba Farouq, or the Farouq Brigade, has been eclipsed over the past year by news coverage that’s remained focused on the Syrian government’s shelling of urban neighborhoods. But in the months since they took up arms in August, Farouq fighters have discovered the Syrian military’s weaknesses, and despite some reversals, still appear capable of inflicting heavy casualties whenever the Syrian army attempts to enter rebel-held areas.

The rebels plan only to gain strength. “Now we are reorganizing ourselves and creating a military council,” said Mohamed Idris, who was the leader of Farouq’s branch in Baba Amr, the Homs neighborhood that was heavily damaged by Syrian rockets and heavy artillery before the rebels there finally withdrew at the end of February as they ran short of ammunition.

Idris said he and Farouq’s overall commander, Abdel Rizaq Tlass, were wounded in the Homs shelling and escaped together by swimming the Orontes River. Tlass stayed in Homs, while Idris moved south with his men to this all but abandoned city that once was home to 35,000 people near the border with Lebanon.

Tlass appeared in a short video posted on YouTube by Syrian anti-government activists on Sunday, offering to protect U.N. observers if they would stay in rebel-held areas of Homs.

There are many rebel factions fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but Farouq now is considered the largest of the groups claiming to fight under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, the name adopted by the loosely organized army of defectors and volunteers who make up the armed wing of the anti-Assad uprising. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan’s prime minister found guilty of contempt

The New York Times reports: Pakistan’s top court convicted Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of contempt on Thursday, imposing a token sentence that deflated some of the political pressure around the case, but which could result in Mr. Gilani’s ouster.

Facing a courtroom packed with lawyers, cabinet ministers and journalists, Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk issued a strongly worded verdict that found Mr. Gilani guilty of “disobedience” toward the Supreme Court and bringing “ridicule” on its judges.

But instead of jailing the prime minister for six months, as the law provides, the judge imprisoned him only until the court adjourned — an event that occurred seconds later when Mr. Gilani, by then smiling toward his supporters, was still seated.

The courtroom drama brought an immediate sense of relief that a feared institutional clash had at least temporarily abated. But it also signaled that the drama was moving from the judicial into the political arena.

After the hearing, Mr. Gilani, dressed in a traditional long coat, left the court amid a scrum of cheering supporters before speeding off to a cabinet meeting about the crisis. Political rivals, declaring that his moral authority had collapsed, called for his immediate resignation.

“Prime minister should immediately resign,” the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, told the private television station Geo. “He should step down without causing further crisis.”

But at a news conference hours later, the information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said the cabinet had decided there were no grounds for resignation.

The lenient sentence was a victory for Mr. Gilani and the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, which has been locked in legal battle with the Supreme Court since January. At issue is a letter that the court has ordered Mr. Gilani to write to prosecutors in Switzerland, effectively urging them to revive a dormant corruption case against his boss, President Asif Ali Zardari.

Mr. Gilani has flatly refused the order, citing Mr. Zardari’s immunity from prosecution, drawing the ire of senior judges who viewed his stance as a brazen challenge to their authority.

But some analysts said that, after months of high-profile hearings that drew uncompromising rhetoric from both sides, Thursday’s verdict signaled a retreat for the court in legal terms.

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Thank you to 60 Minutes

Jewish Voice for Peace says: “On April 22, Bob Simon and the US news show 60 Minutes shared the painful truth with 13 million viewers — the primary cause for the exodus of Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land is the nearly 45 year-old illegal Israeli occupation. Now 60 Minutes is being attacked for telling the truth. A range of Israel-first partisan groups have gone on the attack against CBS, and they have received over 29,000 emails of complaint. If 60 Minutes backs down, then other media outlets will do the same.”

Click here to sign JVP’s petition which has already gathered over 5,000 signatures in a couple of hours. (JVP is a national grassroots organization dedicated to promoting equality, democracy and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians.)

Churches for Middle East Peace also have a petition for the same purpose. (CMEP is a coalition of 24 national Church denominations and organizations in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.)

And if you missed Bob Simon’s report, here it is:

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Paul Krugman’s silence on Israel: the power of the lobby or the weakness of its critics?

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote a brief post on his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal:

Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book The Crisis of Zionism.

The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.

But it’s only right to say something on behalf of Beinart, who has predictably run into that buzzsaw. As I said, a brave man, and he deserves better.

So if Krugman felt the need to say something about Beinart’s book, I guess this was it — he’s said something.

To borrow one of President Obama’s favorite words when it comes to Israel, Beinart has made a stalwart defense of the two-state solution. He did so at a time that there is a widening consensus that the expansion of Israeli settlements across the West Bank has made the creation of a Palestinian state virtually impossible.

While Beinart has been widely praised for his courage, it’s less obvious to me whether he is being bold or simply astute. He’s young enough to not want to find himself on the wrong side of a generational divide and to that extent he seems to be following rather than leading opinion among younger American Jews. Indeed, he still has plenty of catching up to do.

As for Krugman, his own focus is domestic and economic, so I understand that he has other battles to fight. But when he says, “I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going,” he might as well have said he chooses to keep his head in the sand. He will only refer to the Israel lobby by the euphemism “organized groups” and knowing that he risks attack, raises his head above the parapet simply to declare that he is unarmed.

No doubt the lobby and its attack dogs like Alan Dershowitz can be viscous and unrelenting, but there are at least two ways of responding to intimidation: to be intimidated or to be defiant.

When the lobby attacks, too many people respond by bemoaning its might and its ruthlessness; too few offer the right wing Zionists the scorn they deserve.

Maybe if Israel’s most rabid defenders were more frequently mocked, their power would turn out not to be as great as it is feared.

From his secure positions as a tenured professor at Princeton and New York Times columnist even if Krugman wasn’t to make it a regular habit, he could stand up and take an occasional shot at the lobby without putting his life in danger.

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Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?

Slavoj Žižek writes: What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world?

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

“They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time.”

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the “occupied” places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called “class struggle essentialism” for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, “capitalism” is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem.

The first two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it:

“The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality.”

Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch’s Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies:

“Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?”

Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled. [Continue reading…]

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Now Glencore’s gone public, will its ties to dictators and spies stand up to scrutiny?

Ken Silverstein reports: When Glencore, the world’s biggest commodities brokerage firm, went public in May 2011, the initial public offering (IPO) on the London and Hong Kong stock exchanges made headlines for weeks in the Financial Times and the trade-industry press, which devoted endless columns to the company’s astonishing valuation of nearly $60 billion — higher than Boeing or Ford Motor Co. The massive new wealth turned nearly 500 employees into overnight multimillionaires and made billionaires of at least five senior executives, including CEO Ivan Glasenberg. "We are not going to change the way we operate," vowed Glasenberg, who had started as a lowly coal trader for the Swiss firm nearly three decades earlier and, with the IPO, immediately became one of Europe’s richest men. "Being public will have absolutely no effect on the business."

And what a business it is. The firm was forced to pull back the curtain on its famously secretive doings to go public, and what it revealed shocked even seasoned commodities traders. Glencore, which Reuters once called "the biggest company you never heard of," turned out to be far more globally dominant than analysts had realized. According to its 1,637-page IPO prospectus, the company controlled more than half the international tradable market in zinc and copper and about a third of the world’s seaborne coal; was one of the world’s largest grain exporters, with about 9 percent of the global market; and handled 3 percent of daily global oil consumption for customers ranging from state-owned energy companies in Brazil and India to American multinationals like ExxonMobil and Chevron. All of which, the prospectus said, helped the firm post revenues of $186 billion in 2011 and employ some 55,000 people in at least 40 countries, generating an average return on equity of 38 percent, about three times higher than that of the gold-standard investment bank Goldman Sachs in 2010. Since then, the company has only gotten vaster in scale. It recently announced a $90 billion takeover of Xstrata, a global mining giant in which it already holds a 34 percent stake; if the deal goes through, Glencore will rule over an "empire stretching from the Sahara to South Africa," as the Africa Confidential newsletter put it. As it is, Glencore already trades, manufactures, refines, ships, or stores at least 90 commodities in some three dozen countries. "Glencore is at the center of the raw material world," said Peter Brandt, a longtime commodities trader. "Within this world there are giants, and Glencore is becoming a giant among giants."

What the IPO filing did not make clear was just how Glencore, founded four decades ago by Marc Rich, a defiant friend of dictators and spies who later became one of the world’s richest fugitives, achieved this kind of global dominance. The answer — pieced together for this article over a year of reporting that included numerous interviews with past and current Glencore employees and a review of leaked corporate records, dossiers prepared by private investigative firms, court documents, and various international investigations — is at once simpler and far more complicated than it appears. Like all traders, Glencore makes its money at the margins, but Glencore, even more so than its competitors, profits by working in the globe’s most marginal business regions and often, investigators have found, at the margins of what is legal. [Continue reading…]

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