Obama’s Middle East moment of truth
Trying to figure out what Barack Obama intends to do in the Middle East is like trying to read the leaves in a cup of tea stirred by Jackson Pollock. For every signal Obama has given that he intends to break decisively with Bush’s failed approach to the Middle East, he has given another that indicates he plans to simply give the same policies a fresh coat of paint. Continue reading
How to discourage the speaking of truth to power
The aborted appointment of Charles “Chas” Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council inflicts multiple costs on the U.S. national interest, some of which Freeman enumerated in characteristically lucid fashion in his withdrawal statement (reproduced at The Cable). The affair demonstrates anew the strength of the taboo against open and candid discussion in the United States of policy involving Israel. It thus perpetuates damage from U.S. policies in the Middle East formed without benefit of such discussion. It also perpetuates damage to the ultimate interests of Israel itself, where, ironically, no comparable taboo prevails. Not least, the Freeman matter demonstrates the power of calumny and misrepresentation to kill something as desirable as the appointment of an experienced and insightful public servant. Continue reading
It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with “the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept.” For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism. Continue reading
Clinton: U.S. Gaza aid tied to recognition of Israel
Some $900 million pledged by the United States to the Palestinians will be withdrawn if the expected Palestinian Authority coalition government between Fatah and Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, Western and Israeli diplomats said Wednesday. Continue reading
Will Clinton’s overture get Iran to cooperate?
Iran’s former ambassador to France, Sadegh Kharrazi, suggested in the Financial Times on Thursday that Tehran’s cooperation, even on issues of mutual interest such as stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, will be dependent on an overall change in relations with Washington. “In Iran,” he wrote, “there is no willingness to co-operate with the U.S. without being paid back… Today, the two sides need a grand bargain.” He warned that from Iran’s perspective, “U.S. efforts to convince other nations to go along with its policies against Iran on one hand while pursuing the track of negotiations on the other means a continuation of the attitudes of George W. Bush, but with new words.” Continue reading
Ever since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, there has been a familiar pattern in the Occupied Territories: Israel destroys Palestinian civilian infrastructure, and the international community foots the bill. Continue reading
US offers $0 for Gaza reconstruction
Twenty months after becoming Middle East envoy for the Quartet, Tony Blair visited Gaza for the first time on Sunday. His visit came a day before international donors gathered in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for a conference on the Gaza reconstruction effort. Continue reading
Learning to live with radical Islam
Pakistan’s Swat valley is quiet once again. Often compared to Switzerland for its stunning landscape of mountains and meadows, Swat became a war zone over the past two years as Taliban fighters waged fierce battles against Army troops. No longer, but only because the Pakistani government has agreed to some of the militants’ key demands, chiefly that Islamic courts be established in the region. Fears abound that this means women’s schools will be destroyed, movies will be banned and public beheadings will become a regular occurrence. Continue reading
Peace will be achieved only by talking to Hamas
If every crisis is also an opportunity, it is now time to rethink the strategy for achieving peace in the Middle East. The latest and bloodiest conflict between Israel and Hamas has demonstrated that the policy of isolating Hamas cannot bring about stability. As former peace negotiators, we believe it is of vital importance to abandon the failed policy of isolation and to involve Hamas in the political process. Continue reading
Al Jazeera: Focus on Gaza: A crime of war?
SPIEGEL: Mr. Burg, a majority of Israelis voted for right-wing parties, and now Benjamin Netanyahu is prime-minister designate. As someone who supports the Israeli left, are you feeling a bit lonely these days?
Burg: I feel I am losing my political, ideological and spiritual home. My political home today, the Meretz party, shrank to only three seats in the Knesset. As an Israeli I feel lost because so many of my fellow countrymen are in love with war — as the solution for everything. But the most existential loss is spiritual: For me, being a Jew is being a universalist, a humanist. I can’t understand any Jew who votes right-wing. I can’t understand how a Jew can speak a language of xenophobia. And yet so many of them just did. [continued…]
A reliable friend and colleague swears that he saw the following incident in the Israeli-occupied territories a couple of years ago. A Palestinian physician, in urgent need of permission to travel, was trying to persuade a soldier at a roadblock to allow him to hurry on to the next town. He first tried the stone-faced guard in Hebrew, in which many Arabs are fluent, but he received no response. He then made an attempt in English, which is something of a local lingua franca, yet he fared no better. After an unpleasant interval of mutual noncommunication, it transpired that the only word the Israeli soldier knew was no, and the only language in which he could speak it was Russian. Continue reading
The sooner we shed our illusion that people end up financially where they deserve to, the faster we’ll fix the economy.
Yes, it should have been obvious before, but now that a seemingly endless parade of bankers have made fortunes while gutting their institutions and sinking the economy, we’re finally having our eureka moment.
Wealth in America increasingly comes not as the proverbial reward of the “free market,” but from rigged compensation systems that reward mediocrity or outright failure. This is causing a brain burp among many professionals — a group I call the Lower Upper Class – because it’s an affront to an idea they’ve cherished since they first started bringing home A’s from school and acing their SATs. [continued…]
U.S. clears path to bank takeovers
The Obama administration yesterday revamped the terms of its emergency aid to troubled financial firms, setting a course that could culminate with the government nationalizing some of the country’s largest banks by taking a controlling ownership stake.
Administration officials said the change, which allows banks to repay the government with common stock rather than cash, is intended to give banks more capital to withstand a continued deterioration of the economy, and not to nationalize the banking system.
But in seeking to bolster investor confidence in troubled companies such as Citigroup, the government said it is willing to acquire large chunks of their shares. [continued…]
Recipe for disaster: the formula that killed Wall Street
A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide. Continue reading
Amnesty calls on US to suspend arms sales to Israel
Detailed evidence has emerged of Israel’s extensive use of US-made weaponry during its war in Gaza last month, including white phosphorus artillery shells, 500lb bombs and Hellfire missiles.
In a report released today, Amnesty International listed the weapons used and called for an immediate arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups. It called on the US president, Barack Obama, to suspend military aid to Israel.
The human rights group said those arming both sides in the conflict “will have been well aware of a pattern of repeated misuse of weapons by both parties and must therefore take responsibility for the violations perpetrated”.
The US has long been the largest arms supplier to Israel; under a 10-year agreement negotiated by the Bush administration the US will provide $30bn (£21bn) in military aid to Israel.
“As the major supplier of weapons to Israel, the USA has a particular obligation to stop any supply that contributes to gross violations of the laws of war and of human rights,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa programme director. “To a large extent, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza was carried out with weapons, munitions and military equipment supplied by the USA and paid for with US taxpayers’ money.” [continued…]
Binyam Mohamed returns to Britain after Guantánamo ordeal
Binyam Mohamed, the former UK resident who has been incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay for more than four years, arrived back in Britain today.
The twin-engined chartered Gulfstream jet carrying him from the US detention base in Cuba landed at the RAF Northolt airbase near London at 1.11pm, finally ending a total of seven years in custody abroad.
Shortly beforehand, a welcoming party consisting of Mohamed’s UK lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith and Gareth Peirce, his US military attorney, Yvonne Bradley, and his sister, Zuhra, arrived at the airport to meet the flight. [continued…]
See also: Revealed: full horror of Gitmo inmate’s beatings Continue reading
What we don’t know will hurt us
And so on the 29th day of his presidency, Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill. But the earth did not move. The Dow Jones fell almost 300 points. G.M. and Chrysler together asked taxpayers for another $21.6 billion and announced another 50,000 layoffs. The latest alleged mini-Madoff, R. Allen Stanford, was accused of an $8 billion fraud with 50,000 victims.
“I don’t want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems,” the president said on Tuesday at the signing ceremony in Denver. He added, hopefully: “But today does mark the beginning of the end.”
Does it?
No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — There is a pathological optimism inherent in every colonial enterprise. And while a pillar of America’s founding mythology is that this is nation which cast off the chains of a colonial power, that myth serves to obscure the fact that with or without British oversight, the American project always required that America be conceived as a quasi-divine creation and not a colonial imposition on an already inhabited land.
This image of an immaculate conception has thus always made it difficult for America to develop a healthy sense of the tragic. Yet a fixation on a hopeful future inevitably requires a denial of death.
We want renewal but we hesitate to imagine that first must come destruction. Death precedes rebirth.
—
As yet another small sick tale of the profligacy of bankers emerges — a 43,000 pound binge on champaigne spent on banker’s night out in London a few days ago — and as growing outcry says that what banking executives call “compensation” is in the eyes of the rest of us simply theft, it might seem hard to imagine that there could be such a thing as a good banking story.
Muhammad Yunus has already been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, but if his message until recently might have seemed quaintly out of sync with the raucous engine of capitalism, now that that engine is not merely sputtering but is emitting the death rattle, there has never been a better time to pay attention to the story of Grameen banking.
The granting of the Nobel Prize to Grameen Bank did a lot to focus the world’s attention on microfinance as a tool for alleviating global poverty, and it is encouraging to see so many countries adopting microfinance at the local and national levels. But in other ways, the last two years have been difficult. Continue reading
From captive to suicide bomber
As President Obama takes the first tentative steps toward fulfilling his campaign promise to close Guantanamo, the case of Abdallah Ajmi has become a symbol of the vexing challenge his administration faces in adjudicating the fates of terrorism suspects held by the United States, a process that almost certainly will result in the release of additional detainees among the approximately 245 now in custody there.
What makes Ajmi’s journey from inmate to bomber so disturbing to top government officials is the fact that he never was deemed to be among the worst of the worst. He was not one of the former top al-Qaeda operatives considered “high value” detainees; nor was he regarded as someone who posed a significant, long-term threat to the United States.
Compared with what other Guantanamo detainees were believed to have done, the principal accusation leveled against him — that he fought for the Taliban — was unremarkable. At his Combatant Status Review Tribunal, he was not accused of perpetrating any specific violent acts other than “engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance,” according to a summary of evidence presented by the military.
As one former U.S. government official involved in detainee issues put it, Ajmi was “never on anyone’s top 10 list of people we expected to return to the fight.”
Since his death, U.S. intelligence agencies have sought to determine when Ajmi became a hard-core jihadist. Was it in the late 1990s, when he came under the sway of a radical preacher while serving in the Kuwaiti army? Was it in 2001, when he allegedly joined the Taliban? Was it upon his release in 2005, when extremists back home celebrated him as the “Lion of Guantanamo”?
Or is the answer potentially more alarming: Was his descent into unrepentant radicalism an unintended consequence of his incarceration? [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — In America immediately after 9/11, if intelligent public debate had not been crushed by fear and national hysteria, a vital question could have been considered and its answer then could then have become instrumental in policy making.
The question: Did the Egyptian government’s sytematic use of torture have a crucial role in molding the jihadist philosophy and psychological outlook of men such as Ayman al-Zawahiri?
This incredibly important question has received amazingly little attention. An exception would be Chris Zambelis’s essay published by the Jamestown Foundation last summer: Is there a nexus between torture and radicalization?
If, as was surely possible, policymakers had concluded very early on, that torture was not merely illegal and immoral but that it actually fuels terrorism, Guantanamo would never have been opened. The “dark side” that Cheney proposed entering would have been seen to be nothing more than an emotive and utterly wrong-headed response to an issue that had to be addressed with intelligence.
Alleged torture victim to be freed from Guantanamo
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who has been held without charge for seven years, is expected to be released from Guantanamo Bay and return to Britain early this week.
Mr Mohamed’s detention and allegations that he was tortured while subject to the “extraordinary rendition” programme adopted by the Bush administration and yet to be abandoned by the Obama administration, have led to legal proceedings in both the US and the UK. Continue reading
Prepared introductory remarks for the Arthur N. Rupe Great Debate: Torture and the Law, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, February 19, 2009.
T
his is my second trip to Santa Barbara to speak at your university and the journey itself provides inspiration. I made the drive up this morning from Los Angeles, and coming on the highway to one breath-taking vista of the Channel Islands, I thought about Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels. It’s a book that I loved as a child, and then in my college years, I read it again and discovered something entirely different and more subtle. If you strain back to remember it, you’ll recall that Swift’s hero follows a curious geography—a combination of the real world and the fantastic. But one of the most amazing passages of the book must, I think, involve the hills, fields and coastline right around us. Lemuel Gulliver travels in part II to the kingdom of Brobdingnag, which Swift tells us with some precision is an island off the coast of California and its adjacent mainland: I make it out to be Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties. The voyage provides Gulliver with a number of adventures, but the high point comes when he is introduced to the king and strikes up a conversation with him about Brobdingnag’s society and culture. At one point the king of Brobdingnag tells his visitor about lawyers and their usefulness. The best lawyers are those who can show that black is white as he says, “laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them.” The king places stock in such lawyers because they allow him to rule above the law; he can use it as a tool to achieve his will. But his kingdom is ruled by man not by law. Swift’s book isn’t just for children of course; it is a bitter political satire, and in it he’s pointing to just the problem we face today. What do we do when a government twists the words and purposes of the law beyond recognition, establishing the principle that it is a government of men, not of laws? For Swift this wasn’t a laughing matter. From his whiggish perspective, all of history has been a struggle for the rule of law and for government of principle. It has been a struggle to hold the high and mighty to account before the law. [continued…]
Obama backs Bush: No rights for Bagram prisoners
The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys. Continue reading
Laissez-faire capitalism has failed
It is now clear that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst economic crisis in the last 60 years. While we are already in a severe and protracted U-shaped recession (the deluded hope of a short and shallow V-shaped contraction has evaporated), there is now a rising risk that this crisis will turn into an uglier, multiyear, L-shaped, Japanese-style stag-deflation (a deadly combination of stagnation, recession and deflation).
The latest data on third-quarter 2008 gross domestic product growth (at an annual rate) around the world are even worse than the first estimate for the U.S. (-3.8%). The figures were -6.0% for the euro zone, -8% for Germany, -12% for Japan, -16% for Singapore and -20% for Korea. The global economy is now literally in free fall as the contraction of consumption, capital spending, residential investment, production, employment, exports and imports is accelerating rather than decelerating. [continued…]
Greenspan backs temporary state control of banks
The US government might have to nationalise some banks on a temporary basis to fix the financial system and restore the flow of credit, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has told the Financial Times. Continue reading
The most dangerous place in the world
W
hen you land at Mogadishu’s international airport, the first form you fill out asks for name, address, and caliber of weapon. Believe it or not, this disaster of a city, the capital of Somalia, still gets a few commercial flights. Some haven’t fared so well. The wreckage of a Russian cargo plane shot down in 2007 still lies crumpled at the end of the runway.
Beyond the airport is one of the world’s most stunning monuments to conflict: block after block, mile after mile, of scorched, gutted-out buildings. Mogadishu’s Italianate architecture, once a gem along the Indian Ocean, has been reduced to a pile of machine-gun-chewed bricks. Somalia has been ripped apart by violence since the central government imploded in 1991. Eighteen years and 14 failed attempts at a government later, the killing goes on and on and on—suicide bombs, white phosphorus bombs, beheadings, medieval-style stonings, teenage troops high on the local drug called khat blasting away at each other and anything in between. Even U.S. cruise missiles occasionally slam down from the sky. It’s the same violent free-for-all on the seas. Somalia’s pirates are threatening to choke off one of the most strategic waterways in the world, the Gulf of Aden, which 20,000 ships pass through every year. These heavily armed buccaneers hijacked more than 40 vessels in 2008, netting as much as $100 million in ransom. It’s the greatest piracy epidemic of modern times.
In more than a dozen trips to Somalia over the past two and a half years, I’ve come to rewrite my own definition of chaos. I’ve felt the incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I’ve spent freezing-cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. But nowhere was I more afraid than in today’s Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the thick, ambush-perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is quite simply the most dangerous place in the world. [continued…]
Obama’s war on terror may resemble Bush’s in some areas
Even as it pulls back from harsh interrogations and other sharply debated aspects of George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism,” the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for other major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting Al Qaeda.
In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently, Obama nominees endorsed continuing the C.I.A.’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone.
The administration has also embraced the Bush legal team’s arguments that a lawsuit by former C.I.A. detainees should be shut down based on the “state secrets” doctrine. It has also left the door open to resuming military commission trials.
And earlier this month, after a British court cited pressure by the United States in declining to release information about the alleged torture of a detainee in American custody, the Obama administration issued a statement thanking the British government “for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information.”
These and other signs suggest that the administration’s changes may turn out to be less sweeping than many had hoped or feared — prompting growing worry among civil liberties groups and a sense of vindication among supporters of Bush-era policies. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — “I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”
We all knew that was a great line when Obama came out with it a year ago but we should all have been wondering: does he really mean it and if he does, does he have the guts to follow through?
The mindset that got us into war was one in which a combination of fear, anger, humiliation and vengefulness offered license for the use of torture, kidnapping, assassination, extra-judicial punishment and led to a belief that the unambiguous defense of human rights posed a threat to America’s national security.
It appears that the president has yet to free himself from that mindset. Continue reading
Israel launches covert war against Iran
Israel has launched a covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed.
It is using hitmen, sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime’s illicit weapons project, the experts say.
The most dramatic element of the “decapitation” programme is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations.
Despite fears in Israel and the US that Iran is approaching the point of no return in its ability to build atom bomb, Israeli officials are aware of the change in mood in Washington since President Barack Obama took office. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Stories like this don’t come out of nowhere. There has to be an agenda at play. Is this a story about a covert operation to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, or an operation designed to undermine a diplomatic initiative?
What does Israel fear more: a nuclear Iran or an Iran that poses no strategic threat?
Suppose the US was to make a grand bargain with Iran and that the Islamic state received security guarantees and full acceptance by the international community in return for abandoning its uranium enrichment program. Where would that leave Israel? Continue reading