Category Archives: Issues

New sanctions, old postures as U.S.-Israel-Iran stalemate drags on

Tony Karon writes: Did Mitt Romney’s hawkish posture in Israel last weekend increase the likelihood of an Israeli attack on Iran? Unlikely. Will Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit to Israel to discuss “various contingencies and how we would respond” hasten the prospect of confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program? Probably not. And will Iran capitulate in response to the increasingly painful economic sanctions tightened by the Obama Administration on Tuesday? Don’t bet on it. Although surprises are always possible given the cast of characters involved, all indications are that the Iran nuclear standoff is set to remain locked in an increasingly tense stalemate, at least through November’s U.S. presidential election.

Panetta’s visit coincides with an executive order signed Tuesday by President Barack Obama imposing punishments on any entities and countries that help Tehran circumvent sanctions imposed over the past year that are driving down living standards in Iran. A new raft of sanctions have also been approved by Congress this week to block Iran from receiving the proceeds of its oil sales, further tightening the economic stranglehold that U.S. officials hope will compel Iran’s leaders to accept Western terms for resolving the nuclear dispute.

There’s no sign of that happening at the negotiating table, however, as the bottom lines of the two sides remain so far apart that they’ve agreed only to keep a perfunctory channel of communication open. But the Administration’s emphasis is clearly on sanctions rather than diplomacy, having made clear to the Iranians that there’ll be no easing of the most painful pressure until Tehran is willing to heed all demands being put to it — something Iran stresses it has no intention of doing, even if it was willing to consider compromise options. Sanctions, of course, are a waiting game.

Obama’s new executive order may have been timed to help Panetta’s mission, which appears to be restraining the Israelis from taking unilateral military action by reassuring them not only that Iran faces the toughest economic sanctions ever imposed on any nation during peacetime, but also that the chokehold is being constantly tightened. It also appears intended to show that the Obama Administration is willing and ready to take military action to stop Iran building a nuclear weapon if the Islamic Republic proceeds down that path.

In a ritual that is familiar by now, U.S. officials plead that Israel allows more time for sanctions to inflict the economic pain that will compel the Iranian leadership to reconsider its defiance of Western demands, while Israeli leaders express public skepticism that sanctions will be enough to change the mind of the leadership in Tehran and question the value of further talks. Their skepticism and implied readiness to take unilateral military action combine to create pressure for still more sanctions and pressure. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Romney, Netanyahu, and George Washington’s warning

David Bromwich writes: Mitt Romney’s campaign stop in Jerusalem has been criticized for the grossness of the subservience that the candidate exhibited toward Israel. This reaction was surely factored in by his handlers. Liberals, internationalists, human rights advocates might demur, but Romney’s intended audience was none of these people. Nor was it the Arab world, nor was it American voters, with a possible exception for the state of Florida. Romney was aiming to reach two distinct but related target groups: first, a small set of extremely wealthy donors, and second, a group composed of one person, Benjamin Netanyahu. Both have long been potent players in American elections. Both were already helping Romney. It was necessary and useful at this time to cement the alliance in public.

Judged in the light of that purpose, Romney’s visit must be counted a success. And it was a success in one other respect. The billionaires and the prime minister wanted Romney to bring the United States closer to supporting a war with Iran. Romney obliged, and we are now closer to war. He recognized, he said, the “right” of Israel to defend itself. Who ever denied that right? He meant: the righteousness of a preventive attack on Iran. This left open the question, Does Iran have the right to defend itself? A question that Americans and Israelis, as effectively propagandized as we have been, can be trusted not even to ask. So Romney’s intervention in Jerusalem amounted to approval of war — and a war before November if Netanyahu happens to find that desirable. As a candidate in an election season, Romney gave the green light to a power whose engagement in war would involve the United States.

Nothing like this has ever happened before in American politics. But then, there has never been anything in history remotely like the present relationship between the United States and Israel. President Obama, who is thought to be lukewarm by Romney’s supporters, in March described our alliance with Israel as “sacrosanct.” A month earlier, he had assured Israel and its warmest American partisans that his administration was marching in “lockstep” with Israel in our approach to Iran. All this Obama said and did in deference to Benjamin Netanyahu and without regard to American interests. For he had been told by the CIA that Iran is not working at present on a nuclear weapon, and he was warned by the Pentagon that a war with Iran would be a regional disaster for the United States. Even so, he gave Netanyahu in effect a yellow light: proceed with caution. And to sweeten the transaction, he promised to issue no traffic ticket if Israel speeds up. It was the same at this year’s AIPAC convention where Obama again assured Netanyahu: “I have Israel’s back.”

A corny line from the playbook of the younger Bush, suggesting a false analogy between a gunfight and a world war, but Obama at the start of an election year knew very well what the script called for.

It has been said by members of the Israel lobby that Obama’s actions speak louder than his words, and that his actions have hurt Israel. Let us recall some of the actions. In response to the onslaught on Gaza in December-January 2008-2009, in which 1,300 Palestinians were killed and 13 Israelis, Obama observed a silence which he has never broken. When, in November 2010, Netanyahu balked at the proposal of a 90-day partial extension of the freeze on West Bank settlement expansion, Obama offered twenty F-35 fighter jets if he would change his mind; Netanyahu refused, and Obama gave him the jets anyway. Only a week ago, the president donated another $70 million, on top of U.S. assistance already given, to build up the Israeli “Iron Dome” defense against rockets. Yet it is felt that Obama’s love of Israel has been insufficiently demonstrative. The reason is simple but it is seldom mentioned quite candidly. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri: The torture victim the United States is desperate to gag

Andy Worthington writes: A millionaire Saudi businessman, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of being the brains behind the terrorist attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000, in which 17 U.S. soldiers died. He is also a victim of the notorious torture program initiated by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. No less a source than the CIA Inspector General noted in a report in 2004 (PDF) on the “high-value detainee” interrogation program that while he was held in a secret facility in Thailand after his capture in the United Arab Emirates in the fall of 2002, he was hooded and restrained and threatened with a gun and a power drill to scare him into talking, even though the federal torture statute prohibits threatening prisoners with imminent death. Moreover, in February 2008, CIA director Michael Hayden admitted that al-Nashiri was one of three prisoners subjected to waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning.

In Poland, where al-Nashiri was moved after Thailand in December 2002, he has been recognized by a prosecutor investigating the CIA’s secret prison on Polish soil as a “victim.” But in the United States, since his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006, he has been silenced, like the other 13 “high-value detainees” transferred with him, even though the Bush administration put him forward for a trial by military commission in July 2008 and the Obama administration followed suit in November 2009.

Prosecuting a man whose torture is public knowledge while trying to prevent him from mentioning his torture might seem like a lost cause, but the U.S. authorities have a long history of denying reality when it comes to the “war on terror.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Power outage in India and the risk of a climate change tipping point

A power failure in North India has left 620 million people without electricity. That’s a 100 million more than the total population of North America. That’s like the lights going out from Anchorage in Alaska all the way down to Caracas in Venezuela.

The Associated Press reports:

The massive failure — a day after a similar, but smaller power failure — has raised serious concerns about India’s outdated infrastructure and the government’s inability to meet its huge appetite for energy as the country aspires to become a regional economic superpower.

But what’s driving that growing energy demand is not simply economic growth but also a warming planet evident in “a booming market for air conditioning — world sales in 2011 were up 13 percent over 2010, and that growth is expected to accelerate in coming decades.”

The United States has long consumed more energy each year for air conditioning than the rest of the world combined. In fact, we use more electricity for cooling than the entire continent of Africa, home to a billion people, consumes for all purposes. Between 1993 and 2005, with summers growing hotter and homes larger, energy consumed by residential air conditioning in the U.S. doubled, and it leaped another 20 percent by 2010. The climate impact of air conditioning our buildings and vehicles is now that of almost half a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

China is already sprinting forward and is expected to surpass the United States as the world’s biggest user of electricity for air conditioning by 2020. Consider this: The number of U.S. homes equipped with air conditioning rose from 64 to 100 million between 1993 and 2009, whereas 50 million air-conditioning units were sold in China in 2010 alone. And it is projected that the number of air-conditioned vehicles in China will reach 100 million in 2015, having more than doubled in just five years.

As urban China, Japan, and South Korea approach the air-conditioning saturation point, the greatest demand growth in the post-2020 world is expected to occur elsewhere, most prominently in South and Southeast Asia. India will predominate — already, about 40 percent of all electricity consumption in the city of Mumbai goes for air conditioning. The Middle East is already heavily climate-controlled, but growth is expected to continue there as well. Within 15 years, Saudi Arabia could actually be consuming more oil than it exports, due largely to air conditioning. And with summers warming, the United States and Mexico will continue increasing their heavy consumption of cool.

Kurt Cobb notes:

It’s easy to forget that every piece of our current infrastructure — roads, rails, runways, bridges, industrial plants, housing — was built with a certain temperature range in mind. Our agricultural system and much of our electrical generating system (including dams, nuclear power stations and conventional thermal electric plants which burn coal and natural gas) were created not only with a certain temperature range in mind, but also a certain range of rainfall. Rainfall, whether it is excessive or absent, can become a problem if it creates 1) floods that damage and sweep away buildings and crops or 2) if there isn’t enough water to quench crops and supply industrial and utility operating needs.

This summer has shown just what can happen when those built-in tolerances for heat, moisture (or lack of it) and wind are exceeded. The New York Times did an excellent short piece providing examples of some of those effects:

  1. A jet stuck on the tarmac as its wheels sank into asphalt softened by 100-degree heat.
  2. A subway train derailed by a kink in the track due to excessive heat.
  3. A power plant that had to be shut down due to lack of cooling water when the water level dropped below the intake pipe.
  4. A “derecho“, a severe weather pattern of thunderstorms and very high straight-line winds, that deprived 4.3 million people of power in the eastern part of the United States, some for eight days.
  5. Drainage culverts destroyed by excessive rains.

Past attempts to forecast the possible costs of climate change have been largely inadequate. They failed because of unanticipated effects on and complex interconnections among various parts of critical infrastructure.

Back in 2007 Yale economist William Nordhaus wrote in a paper that “[e]conomic studies suggest that those parts of the economy that are insulated from climate, such as air-conditioned houses or most manufacturing operations, will be little affected directly by climatic change over the next century or so.” Having air-conditioning does not do you much good, however, if the electricity is out. And, manufacturing operations depend on reliable electric service. Many manufacturing operations are also water-intensive and so will be affected by water shortages.

India’s current energy demands have been worsened by this year’s weak monsoon and consequent higher temperatures — in some states rainfall has been 70% below average. Monsoons are erratic in four years out of ten, but as Fred Guterl explains, the Indian monsoon may be subject to a much greater vulnerability: the dynamics of a climate change tipping point in which the monsoons could be here one year and then gone the next. In that event, the effects will be devastating not only across India but far beyond.

So far 2012 is on pace to be the hottest year on record. But does this mean that we’ve reached a threshold — a tipping point that signals a climate disaster?

For those warning of global warming, it would be tempting to say so. The problem is, no one knows if there is a point at which a climate system shifts abruptly. But some scientists are now bringing mathematical rigor to the tipping-point argument. Their findings give us fresh cause to worry that sudden changes are in our future.

One of them is Marten Scheffer, a biologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who grew up swimming in clear lowland ponds. In the 1980s, many of these ponds turned turbid. The plants would die, algae would cover the surface, and only bottom-feeding fish remained. The cause — fertilizer runoff from nearby farms — was well known, but even after you stopped the runoff, replanted the lilies and restocked the trout, the ponds would stay dark and scummy.

Mr. Scheffer solved this problem with a key insight: the ponds behaved according to a branch of mathematics called “dynamical systems,” which deals with sudden changes. Once you reach a tipping point, it’s very difficult to return things to how they used to be. It’s easy to roll a boulder off a cliff, for instance, but much harder to roll it back. Once the ponds turned turbid, it wasn’t enough to just replant and restock. You had get them back to their original, clear state.

Science is a graveyard of grand principles that fail in the end to explain the real world. So it is all the more surprising that Mr. Scheffer’s idea worked.

By applying the principles of dynamical systems, Mr. Scheffer was able to figure out that to fix the ponds, he had to remove the fish that thrive in the turbid water. They stir up sediment, which blocks sunlight from plants, and eat the zooplankton that keep the water clear. His program of fixing the Netherlands’ ponds and lakes is legendary in ecology.

Mr. Scheffer and other scientists are now trying to identify the early-warning signals for climate that precede abrupt transitions. Tim Lenton, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in England, has identified a handful of climate systems that could reach tipping points in the not-too-distant future. These are not so much related to global average temperatures — the main metric for climate-change arguments — as they are to patterns of climate that repeat themselves each year.

El Niño is one such pattern — a gigantic blob of warm water that sloshes around in the Pacific Ocean, causing weather changes across wide swaths of the globe. Another is the West African monsoon, which brings rain to the west coast of the continent. Each is subject to behaving like dynamical systems — which means they are prone to “flip” from one state to another, like one of Mr. Scheffer’s ponds, over time periods that vary from a year to a few hundred.

The most frightening prospect that Mr. Lenton has found is the vulnerability of the Indian monsoon. More than a billion people depend on this weather pattern each year for the rain it brings to crops. The monsoon, though, is being affected by two conflicting forces: the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is adding energy to the monsoons, making them more powerful. On the other hand, soot from fires and coal plants acts to blocks the sun’s energy, weakening the monsoons.

This opposition creates potential instability and the possibility that the atmospheric dynamics that bring the monsoons could change suddenly. Mr. Lenton’s analysis shows this could occur in a remarkably short time. The monsoons could be here one year, then gone the next year.

Other possible tipping points are the melting of the North Pole’s sea ice, Greenland’s glaciers and the Antarctic ice sheets, and the destruction of the Amazon rain forest and Canada’s boreal forests.

We know that the dynamical-systems idea worked for Mr. Scheffer’s ponds because he achieved real-world results. But why should we believe that the principle explains things like El Niño and the Indian monsoon? The acid test will be whether the real world behaves the way Mr. Lenton says it will. If the Indian monsoon disappears, we’ll know he is right.

What then? The real worst-case scenario would have one such event triggering others, until you have a cascade of weather flips from one end of the planet to another. It wouldn’t be quite as dramatic as Hollywood might want to depict, perhaps, but it would be dramatic enough to rewrite the predictions for sea level and temperature rises that are part of the current consensus. This worst case is highly speculative, but sudden shifts in climate patterns may already be happening.

The policy makers aren’t likely to be discussing dynamical-systems theory anytime soon. Fortunately, scientists like Mr. Scheffer and Mr. Lenton are trying to work out the details of how closely nature hews to these mathematics, what a true tipping point would look like and what we might do if and when we face one.

We need a tipping point in climate politics, where all of a sudden we start paying attention.

Facebooktwittermail

The conversion of a climate-change skeptic

Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, writes: Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.

These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more recent warming could be natural. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Romney equates economic success with cultural superiority

The Associated Press reports: Mitt Romney told Jewish donors Monday that their culture is part of what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the Palestinians, outraging Palestinian leaders who suggested his comments were racist and out of touch with the realities of the Middle East. His campaign later said his remarks were mischaracterized.

Casino boss and cultural icon, Sheldon Adelson, attending Romney's speech.

“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” the Republican presidential candidate told about 40 wealthy donors who ate breakfast at the luxurious King David Hotel.

Romney said some economic histories have theorized that “culture makes all the difference.”

“And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things,” Romney said, citing an innovative business climate, the Jewish history of thriving in difficult circumstances and the “hand of providence.” He said similar disparity exists between neighboring countries, like Mexico and the United States.

Palestinian reaction to Romney was swift and pointed.

“It is a racist statement and this man doesn’t realize that the Palestinian economy cannot reach its potential because there is an Israeli occupation,” said Saeb Erekat, a senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

“It seems to me this man lacks information, knowledge, vision and understanding of this region and its people,” Erekat added. “He also lacks knowledge about the Israelis themselves. I have not heard any Israeli official speak about cultural superiority.”

As criticism mounted while Romney traveled to Poland, campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said: “His comments were grossly mischaracterized.” The Republican’s campaign contends Romney’s comparison of countries that are close to each other and have wide income disparities – the U.S. and Mexico, Chile and Ecuador – shows his comments were broader than just the comparison between Israel and Palestine.

While speaking to U.S. audiences, Romney often highlights culture as a key to economic success and emphasizes the power of the American entrepreneurial spirit compared to the values of other countries. But his decision to highlight cultural differences in a region where such differences have helped fuel violence for generations raises new questions about the former businessman’s diplomacy skills. [Continue reading…]

As Think Progress notes, Romney was way off the mark in outlining the economic disparity between Israelis and Palestinians — Israel’s GDP of US$31,000 compared to the West Bank and Gaza’s US$1,500. And then of course there is the question as to how economically vibrant Israel would be if it faced military occupation, the relentless confiscation of property, restrictions on freedom of movement, and inadequate infrastructure.

Facebooktwittermail

Mitt’s mission in Israel: optics, Christian Zionists and absentee ballots

Karl Vick writes: There are a number of ways to understand Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel, where he pitches up Saturday night from London.

One is optics, as they like to say in Washington. The presumptive Republican nominee clearly wants to occupy the chilly space visible between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tense personal relationship feeds the impression that Obama is cool toward not only Bibi, as Netanyahu is universally known, but also toward Israel itself. What supposed evidence of which might exist – the Cairo speech, Obama’s insisting on a settlement freeze as a pre-condition to peace talks with the Palestinians – is both receding in time and being pushed into the background by the keen, almost obsessive attention the White House has paid Israel in the last two years, in official visits, security coordination and, yes, dollars.

The latest arrived Saturday, when Obama signed a bill sending $70 million to Israel to pay for more of the anti-missile batteries called Iron Dome, the wonder technology that’s been knocking down 80 percent of the missiles fired toward Israeli cities from the Gaza Strip. Defense minister Ehud Barak promptly issued a statement of thanks, pointedly calling the aid “yet another expression of the consistent support of the Obama administration, and indeed of the U.S. congress, to the security of the State of Israel.” Such is the power of the incumbency. There will be more. Coming in October, as the fall campaign crests: The largest US-Israel joint military operation in history.

But as the Romney campaign appears to know well, body language is a lot more fun to read than official statements. Of six public events on Sunday, five are “photo sprays,” grip and grins with Israeli politicians, plus Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad. The candidate is seeing Netanyahu twice, in the morning for a meeting, and later for dinner with their wives. The husbands already know each other, and even worked together briefly long ago at Bain Capital. Though Netanyahu told TIME Managing Editor Rick Stengel that they weren’t exactly pals – “He was the whiz kid; I was just in the back of the room” — Romney boasts of the shared history. The men also share a professed esteem for capital markets (much to the chagrin of progressives), and of course antipathy to Obama. Romney refuses to criticize the president while traveling overseas, but his entire visit to Israel is framed by his famous accusation, during the GOP primary, that Obama is “throwing Israel under the bus.” [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Mitt Romney tried to pull back Sunday from an adviser’s suggestion that he favored new American aggression on Iran, distancing himself from comments that the U.S. presidential candidate would “respect” an Israeli decision for unilateral military action to prevent Tehran from gaining nuclear capability.

Hours after the aide previewed Romney’s upcoming foreign policy speech in Jerusalem, Romney backpedaled and said, “I’ll use my own words and that is I respect the right of Israel to defend itself and we stand with Israel. We’re two nations that come together in peace and that want to see Iran being dissuaded from its nuclear folly.”

The address by the Republican challenger to President Barack Obama was promoted as the centerpiece of a weeklong trip abroad designed to burnish his foreign policy credentials and highlight his ability to lead on the world stage. But the mixed signals on Iran could undermine that goal.

“Because I’m on foreign soil, I don’t want to be creating new foreign policy for my country or in any way to distance myself from the foreign policy of our nation, but we respect the right of a nation to defend itself,” the former Massachusetts governor told CBS’ “Face the Nation” a few hours before the speech and a day before a major fundraiser in the city.

Obama has affirmed the right of Israel to defend itself, while also warning of the consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran.

Facebooktwittermail

Obama puts Israel’s interests above all others

In the Oval Office on Friday, President Obama said: “This week we are going to be able to announce 70 million dollars in additional spending — 70 billion dollars, excuse me — in additional spending for [Israel’s] Iron Dome [missile defense shield].”

He got the number right the first time but Obama’s “correction” was perhaps of way of saying there need be no dollar limit on any military aid for Israel he is willing to support. AIPAC can draft the bills and he’ll sign them — whatever the cost.

The Wall Street Journal reports: With a stroke of a pen on Friday, President Barack Obama gave Israel a long-distance embrace ahead of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s trip to the Jewish state this weekend.

Mr. Obama held an Oval Office photo-op for his signing of legislation that enhances U.S.-Israel security cooperation, saying the move underscores “our unshakeable commitment to Israel security.”

“I have made it a top priority for my administration to deepen cooperation with Israel across the whole spectrum of security issues,” Mr. Obama said. “I hope that, as I sign as this bill, once again everybody understands how committed all of us are – Republicans and Democrats – as Americans to our friends in making sure that Israel is safe and secure.”

Mr. Obama also noted the U.S.’s funding this week of an additional $70 million for Israel’s missile defense system, which the administration had announced months ago.

The moment comes amid a flurry of attention Obama administration officials have been showering on Israel ahead of Mr. Romney’s meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday. Over the past two weeks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and the White House’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan have visited Israel.

On Monday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will make a two-day stop in Israel to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, Egypt and Syria’s political unrest, according to officials involved in the planning. Mr. Obama said Friday that the goal of Mr. Panetta’s trip is “to further consult and find additional ways that we can ensure such cooperation at a time when, frankly, the region is experiencing heightened tensions.”

The president’s team has also been reaching out to American Jewish leaders in recent days to shore up support in advance of Mr. Romney’s trip, a White House official said.

Both Messrs. Obama and Romney are vying for Jewish voters in the November election. Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of straining U.S.-Israel relations, and Republicans have criticized the president for not visiting Israel during his first term.

Ynet reports: “This was a historical landmark in the defense relations between the US and Israel,” said Amos Gilad, the director of policy and political-military affairs at the Defense Ministry.

The legislation, knowns as the “United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012,” allows Israel to purchase American KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft for the first time. Thus far, the Bush and Obama administrations refused to sell planes of this kind to the Jewish state, primarily in order to bar it from launching a massive aerial strike on Iran.

In all likelihood, such a military operation would involve F-15I and F-16I fighter jets, as well as helicopters, all of which will have to refuel on their way to the Islamic Republic, and on the return trip. Mid-air refueling capabilities are therefore essential for the mission.

So far, Israel has had to buy used commercial Boeing 707 airliners and convert them into tanker jets, a far from ideal solution considering the planes were originally designed for passenger flights. Just last week an accident occurred during an exercise involving such aircraft.

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. presents Netanyahu with plans for war against Iran

Haaretz reports: The U.S. national security adviser has shared with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the United States’ contingency plans for a possible attack on Iran.

According to a senior American official, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon briefed Netanyahu on the plans during Donilon’s visit to Israel two weeks ago. According to the official, who requested anonymity, Netanyahu hosted Donilon at a three-hour dinner. For part of the time, Israel’s national security adviser, Yaakov Amidror, was on hand.

Donilon sought to make clear that the United States is seriously preparing for the possibility that negotiations will reach a dead end and military action will become necessary. He said reports of such preparations were not just a way to assuage Israel’s concerns.

Donilon’s talks in Jerusalem were the most significant so far between American and Israeli officials here in recent weeks. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns have been in Israel as well.

Reuters reports: A senior Israeli official denied on Sunday a newspaper report that President Barack Obama’s national security adviser had briefed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a U.S. contingency plan to attack Iran should diplomacy fail to curb its nuclear programme.
[…]
“Nothing in the article is correct. Donilon did not meet the prime minister for dinner, he did not meet him one-on-one, nor did he present operational plans to attack Iran,” the senior official, who declined to be named given the sensitivity of the issue, told Reuters.

Note: the Haaretz report does not claim this was a one-on-one meeting. Perhaps Donilon did not meet Netanyahu for dinner — maybe it was brunch. And Donilon wasn’t, according to Haaretz, presenting operational plans — he was presenting contingency plans.

While the Israelis present this non-denial denial, more significantly the White House is saying nothing. Why would Obama want to offer any revisions to this self-serving narrative while his competitor is in Israel?

Mitt Romney is shut behind closed doors hustling up donations from casino boss Sheldon Adelson and his buddies while Obama is pledging billions in aid, access to military technology previously withheld and the promise of a long-threatened war — all music to the ears of Netanyahu and the Israel lobby.

Facebooktwittermail

The ruins of empire: Asia’s emergence from western imperialism

Pankaj Mishra writes: The British empire, George Orwell wrote, was “despotism with theft as its final object”. So what has made imperialism an intellectual fashion in our own time, reopening hoary disputes about whether it was good or bad? After five years as a colonial policeman in Burma, where he found himself shooting an elephant to affirm the white man’s right to rule, Orwell was convinced that the imperial relationship was that of “slave and master”. Was the master good or bad? “Let us simply say,” Orwell wrote, “that this control is despotic and, to put it plainly, self-interested.” And “if Burma derives some incidental benefit from the English, she must pay dearly for it.”

Orwell’s hard-won insights were commonplace truisms for millions of Asians and Africans struggling to end western control of their lands. Their descendants can only be bewildered by the righteous nostalgia for imperialism that has recently seized many prominent Anglo-American politicians and opinion-makers, who continue to see Asia through the narrow perspective of western interests, leaving unexamined and unimagined the collective experiences of Asian peoples.

Certainly, as Joseph Conrad wrote in 1902, “the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” Two years after Conrad published Heart of Darkness, Roger Casement, then a British diplomat, revealed in a report that half of the population of Belgian-ruled Congo – nearly 10 million people – had perished under a brutal regime where beheadings, rape and genital mutilation of African labourers had become the norm. Such overt violence and terror is only a small part of the story of European domination of Asia and Africa, which includes the slow-motion slaughter of tens of million in famines caused by unfettered experiments in free trade – and plain callousness (Indians, after all, would go on breeding “like rabbits”, Winston Churchill argued when asked to send relief during the Bengal famine of 1943-44).

The unctuous belief that British imperialists, compared to their Belgian and French counterparts, were exponents of fair play has been dented most recently by revelations about mass murder and torture during the British suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. Nevertheless, in one of the weirdest episodes of recent history, a Kipling-esque rhetoric about bringing free trade and humane governance to “lesser breeds outside the law” has resonated again in the Anglo-American public sphere. Even before 9/11, Tony Blair was ready to tend, with military means if necessary, to, as he put it, “the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant” around the world. His apparently more intellectual rival Gordon Brown urged his compatriots to be “proud” of their imperial past. Sensing a sharper rightward shift after 9/11, many pith-helmet-and-jodhpurs fetishists boisterously outed themselves, exhorting politicians to recreate a new western imperium through old-style military conquest and occupation of native lands. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama or Romney? Who’s most likely to start a war against Iran?

Glenn Greenwald writes: When it comes to praising President Obama’s foreign policy skill and Toughness (in the neocon sense of that term: i.e., a willingness to risk other people’s lives with the use of military force against foreigners), The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg has been one of the most reliable and vocal voices. Considered by Obama aides “as the ‘official therapist’ of the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Goldberg has been particularly important in vouching for Obama to Israelis and American Jews on the ground that nobody will be Tougher on Iran than Obama (in return for this service, Goldberg — like all helpful journalists are — has been rewarded by the White House with substantial career-boosting access). In his Bloomberg column this morning, Goldberg argues that Israeli officials should pray for Obama’s victory in the November election, and makes this argument in support:

On the matter of Iran, however, Netanyahu would be wrong to root for Romney. Barack Obama is the one who’s more likely to confront Iran militarily, should sanctions and negotiations fail. He has committed himself to stopping Iran by any means necessary, and he has a three-year record as president to back his rhetoric. Romney has only rhetoric, and he would be hamstrung in many ways if he chose military confrontation.

He goes on to argue that despite the GOP challenger’s Tough rhetoric, “Romney would face several critical challenges in a conflict with Iran that Obama would not”; specifically:

Romney, by all accounts, is uninterested in inheriting the mantle of President George W. Bush, who invaded two Muslim countries and lost popularity and credibility as a result. Romney, despite his rhetoric, is more of a pragmatist than Bush, and far more cautious. An attack on Iran is an incautious act, one that even Bush rejected.

The unilateral use of force in the Middle East for a liberal Democrat like Obama is a credential; for a conservative Republican like Romney, it could be an albatross. I argued in a previous column that Romney is more likely than Obama to oversee a revitalized Middle East peace process. That’s because conservatives are better positioned to make peace; liberals are generally better positioned to launch preventive strikes at the nuclear programs of rogue nations. We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world.) Romney will get no comparative slack.

In other words, Obama will be freer to attack Iran than Romney would be because Democrats, progressives, and the “international community” (that’s neocon for: Europeans) passively accept or even cheer for violence, aggression and executive power abuses when ordered by a sophisticated, urbane, Constitutional Law Professor with Good Progressivism in his heart, and only cause a messy ruckus when done by an icky, religious, overtly nationalistic Republican. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Millions of Americans now fall within government’s digital dragnet

Ars Technica reports: Will government surveillance finally become a political issue for middle-class Americans?

Until recently, average Americans could convince themselves they were safe from government snooping. Yes, the government engaged in warrantless wiretaps, but those were directed at terrorists. Yes, movies and TV shows featured impressive technology, with someone’s location highlighted in real time on a computer screen, but such capabilities were used only to track drug dealers and kidnappers.

Figures released earlier this month should dispel that complacency. It’s now clear that government surveillance is so widespread that the chances of the average, innocent person being swept up in an electronic dragnet are much higher than previously appreciated. The revelation should lead to long overdue legal reforms.

The new figures, resulting from a Congressional inquiry, indicate that cell phone companies responded last year to at least 1.3 million government requests for customer data — ranging from subscriber identifying information to call detail records (who is calling whom), geolocation tracking, text messages, and full-blown wiretaps.

Almost certainly, the 1.3 million figure understates the scope of government surveillance. One carrier provided no data. And the inquiry only concerned cell phone companies. Not included were ISPs and e-mail service providers such as Google, which we know have also seen a growing tide of government requests for user data. The data released this month was also limited to law enforcement investigations—it does not encompass the government demands made in the name of national security, which are probably as numerous, if not more. And what was counted as a single request could have covered multiple customers. For example, an increasingly favorite technique of government agents is to request information identifying all persons whose cell phones were near a particular cell tower during a specific time period — this sweeps in data on hundreds of people, most or all of them entirely innocent.

How did we get to a point where communications service providers are processing millions of government demands for customer data every year? The answer is two-fold. The digital technologies we all rely on generate and store huge amounts of data about our communications, our whereabouts and our relationships. And since it’s digital, that information is easier than ever to copy, disclose, and analyze. Meanwhile, the privacy laws that are supposed to prevent government overreach have failed to keep pace. The combination of powerful technology and weak standards has produced a perfect storm of privacy erosion. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Don’t believe the Skype: it may not be as private as you might think

Dan Gillmor writes: When Skype became popular just under a decade ago, I repeatedly asked the company a question that I considered crucial. The online calling and messaging service encrypted users’ communications, and it was based outside the United States. But the encryption methods were kept secret, so outside researchers couldn’t verify their quality – a technique that experts in the field sometimes deride as “security through obscurity” – and I wanted to know whether Skype had a software backdoor that it or anyone else could use to listen into users’ calls. I was repeatedly given a non-denial denial – that is, an assurance that the information was being encrypted but no guarantee beyond that. So I assumed that Skype shouldn’t be considered a foolproof way to have an absolutely private conversation.

That assumption grew firmer when eBay bought Skype in 2005, putting Skype under American legal jurisdiction at a time when the Bush administration was routinely and illegally spying on citizens’ communications and Congress was a partner in destroying civil liberties. Moreover, eBay had a reputation for giving law enforcement just about anything it requested under just about any pretext.

Washington’s attitudes are, if anything, more police-statish than before. The Republicans don’t believe in any restraints on police, while Democrats who hated the Bush policies are supine now that the Obama administration has, if anything, expanded on the worst of the prior administration’s practices. And Skype now is part of Microsoft. So I am yawning at a spate of reports, most recently in the Washington Post, that Microsoft is giving law enforcement what torture fans might call “enhanced access” to Skype users’ conversations. The company’s statement on the matter says no recent changes have been made; but Skype also says this: “Skype takes appropriate organisational and technical measures to protect your information within our control with due observance of the applicable obligations and exceptions under the relevant law.”

To be clear, I don’t know one way or the other whether Skype has been secretly helping police and security officials listen in on conversations. I do know that the company, as in its statement above, persists in giving non-answers to the question. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail