Cracks Showing in American Support for Israel

This is what the "debate" over the blockade of Gaza looks like in Israel. It's not pretty. A day after the Israeli Defense Force attacked a relief ship in the Mediterranean, Israelis gathered in the port city of Ashdod to express their support for the IDF. Spoiler alert; they aren't very nice people.

Israel should be a warning to us. This is what happens when the farthest rightwing "patriots" are dominant in your government and in your society. The right is always about authoritarianism in the end, with all the talk of liberty and freedom meaning the liberty and freedom to do what you're allowed to do, to say what you're allowed to say, to believe what you're allowed to believe. It's impossible to disagree with the right's position, it's only possible to commit treasonous political heresy -- I am right, you are wrong, automatically and without question. It should surprise no one that many of the political tactics of the Israeli right -- the "us versus them" moral absolutism, the questioning of people's patriotism, the institutional paranoia --  found their way into Bush-era neoconservatism. For rightwing Israelis, all Palestinians are terrorists and no terrorist is a human being. Therefore, no Palestinian is human. They're a disease to be quarantined.

In American politics, Israel has traditionally enjoyed unquestioning support. No matter how bad things get, it's never the Israelis' fault. Even as the international community condemns the raid on the aid flotilla, American politicians seem to be in some sort of competition to see who can support Israel more. The debate in American politics is nearly as one-sided as what we'll laughingly call "the discussion" represented by the video above. If you're pro-Israel, good for you. If you're critical, you get to shut up about it -- if you know what's good for you.





But cracks in the kneejerk "yay for Israel!" mindset are appearing the the American media. NBC News recently ran a segment calling the Gaza Strip a "120 square mile prison," where an entire population is held responsible for the actions of a few. And McClatchy Newspapers is reporting that Israeli arguments of a self-defensive blockade of Gaza are false.

As Israel ordered a slight easing of its blockade of the Gaza Strip Wednesday, McClatchy obtained an Israeli government document that describes the blockade not as a security measure but as "economic warfare" against the Islamist group Hamas , which rules the Palestinian territory.

Israel imposed severe restrictions on Gaza in June 2007 , after Hamas won elections and took control of the coastal enclave after winning elections there the previous year, and the government has long said that the aim of the blockade is to stem the flow of weapons to militants in Gaza .

...in response to a lawsuit by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, the Israeli government explained the blockade as an exercise of the right of economic warfare.

"A country has the right to decide that it chooses not to engage in economic relations or to give economic assistance to the other party to the conflict, or that it wishes to operate using 'economic warfare,'" the Israeli government said.

But do they?

In another instance of Israel's weakening grip on American media, the Christian Science Monitor asked whether the blockade was legal. The answer was complex, but probably not what Israel-backers wanted to hear.

"There is a clear link between conditions in Gaza and international law that is relevant this week," Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association in London, told CSM. "At the heart of humanitarian law, the laws of war, and human rights law is a need to ensure that civilians are protected and do not disproportionately suffer from the actions of a state... Right now, every objective assessment is that Gazans are suffering. The elephant in the room in flotilla-attack legal debates is the blockade. The real need is a focus on the legality of the conditions of people in Gaza."

As things are now, Gazans are entirely dependent on secret tunnels to meet their needs. Voice of America reports that Gazan have a "tunnel economy for basic supplies and income," according to a report by the International Labor Organization. Israel argues that the tunnels exist almost solely to smuggle in weapons, but the facts show that they're used mostly to smuggle in necessities. According to the ILO, "75 percent of the population is food dependant and 70 percent of the population lives under the poverty line of $1 a day."

Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the prime minister Ehud Olmert, explained the real reason for the blockade in 2006. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger," he said. The blockade exists to use hunger as a weapon, to get Palestinians to turn against Hamas. The legality of this is extremely questionable, especially in light of Israel's claim of being in a state of war.

"Hamas is not a state," Marcelo Kohen, a law professor at Geneva’s Graduate Institute of International Studies, told Christian Science Monitor. "There is also at present a cease-fire on Gaza." Given these conditions, it's hard to see what wouldn't qualify as "war."

"Under [Israel's] logic one could maintain a maritime blockade unendingly," Kohen said. "It only requires one party to consider itself as being in a 'state of war.'"

So when are American politicians going to catch up with reality? You've got me. For his part, President Barack Obama has called the humanitarian situation in Gaza "unsustainable" and has pledged $400 million in aid. But with the other hand, his 2011 budget calls for $3 billion in military aid to Israel. Four million steps forward, three billion steps back.

The kneejerk pro-Israel mindset is starting to weaken in America. We're getting there, slowly but surely. But you wonder how long the people of Gaza can wait.

-Wisco


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Petroleum Metropolis

When I think of America's relationship with the rest of the world, I often think of Fritz Lang's classic silent movie Metropolis. In that movie, most of humanity works deep underground under terrible conditions, making sure the machinery of the world keeps running. Meanwhile, a wealthy elite live above ground, enjoying a careless life of leisure, made possible by all the work going on beneath their feet.

And the people living above ground have no idea what's going on below. All this ease is just the way things are, because it's always been this way. Self-absorbed and incurious, they live lives of little consequence -- the ultimate consumers -- completely unaware of the suffering that makes their lives possible.

I think of this especially when I look at the news. We aren't as disconnected as the upper class of Metropolis, but we are disconnected. Things go on that make our lives possible that we have no clue about. Worse, we don't seem to have any interest in the subject. Unlike the clueless aristocrats of Lang's movie, we work too. But our way of life is supported by war and exploitation, by environmental destruction and sweat shops, by poverty and the repression of human rights.





But sometimes, the real world -- the wider world -- intrudes and we see the world as it really is. That is, if we're interested. Too often we aren't. The oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico gives us a glimpse at how the other half lives, but you wonder how many will actually look.

McClatchy Newspapers:

Like many of her neighbors, Celina Harpe is angry about the oil pollution at her doorstep. No longer can she eat the silvery fish that dart along the shore near her home. Even the wind that hurries over the water reeks of oil waste.

"I get so mad," she said. "I feel very sad."

Harpe, 70, isn't a casualty of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She lives in a remote corner of Alberta, Canada, where another oil field that's vital to the United States is damaging one of the world's most important ecosystems: Canada's northern forest.

Across the globe, people such as Harpe in oil-producing regions are watching the catastrophe in the Gulf with a mixture of horror, hope and resignation. To some, the black tide is a global event that finally may awaken the world to the real cost of oil.

18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater are destroying the rainforest in Ecuador and oil slicks float on the Niger delta. "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oil fields all over the world, and very few people seem to care," said Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York, told McClatchy. "No one is accepting responsibility. Our fingerprint is on those disasters because we are such a major consumer of oil."

And the fact that the world's oil reserves are dwindling only makes extraction more dangerous. The Deepwater Horizon gusher would've been capped almost immediately if it had been on land, but deep in the ocean, it poses real challenges. We're not drilling out there, where it's more expensive to get to, because we think that's fun. We're drilling out there because we're running out of oil. It'll be a while before we're comfortable with drilling off our own shores, but I have my doubts whether we'll feel as strongly about drilling off someone else's. The United States alone accounts for roughly a quarter of the world's oil consumption, yet we seem to believe that the damage caused by oil exploration isn't our problem.

"When [oil companies] go into a country like Ecuador or Peru, where there is no meaningful regulation, they take advantage of that," says Kimerling. "They are more careless, and go in with an attitude that they can do whatever they want... The U.S. government has not shown any interest in the environmental disasters that are being caused by our companies in other countries."

Now that it's happening to us, maybe we'll start to worry about what our oil addiction is doing to other people. Some guy from Ecuador could point to the oil slick threatening the Florida beaches and say, "Welcome to my world." This isn't anything new, it's just new to us. Maybe it will be our wake-up call.

Frankly, I have my doubts.

-Wisco


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Not Prosecuting Torture is a Crime in Itself

George W. Bush wasn't going to be the president forever. That seems obvious to most people, but it almost seems to have caught Republicans in Washington by surprise. The president who brought his party to near irrelevance is gone now, but his actions linger on. Bush, having brought even more disaster to the Republican party than he did to the nation, leaves behind a legacy of crime and scandal. Having once hoped he would rebuild American government to match his vision, Bush left DC in worse shape than he found it -- the nation is impatient to see the vision undone.

Still, some Republicans seem to be completely unaware of these new realities, behaving as if nothing had changed, as if the Republican party were still wildly popular, and as if Bush's legacy is anything other than one of failure.

Politico:

Eric Holder’s confirmation vote before the Judiciary Committee will be delayed for up to a week as Republican senators continue to press him on his views about interrogation and other Bush administration intelligence methods.

The Judiciary Committee was originally scheduled to vote today on Holder’s nomination as attorney general, but Republicans have objected, and under committee rules they can delay the vote for up to a week. Holder was grilled last week by Republicans on his views about interrogations, Guantanamo Bay and his involvement in the 2001 pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is seeking more information from Holder on whether the Department of Justice will pursue criminal prosecutions of "intelligence personnel" involved in detainee interrogations.

It was going to be the pardon of Marc Rich that was going to be the bump in the road to Holder's confirmation, but he went and told the senate in testimony that waterboarding is torture. Of course, it's their fault for asking him -- no one who's given it serious thought thinks it's not. "If you look at the history of the use of that technique, " Holder said, "we prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam... Waterboarding is torture."





The question here isn't whether Holder will be confirmed -- it's a near certainty that he will. The question is what the hell answer was it they expected? The idea that waterboarding doesn't fit the definition of torture was always a legal fiction designed to create a loophole. Only ideologues and fools bought it. Any honest reading of the law would find it to be torture.

Which leaves John Cornyn, whose vocal support for torture would cause any principled human being to be ashamed of himself, in a bit of a quandary; he can try to block Holder's confirmation, but what would be the point? The next nominee would give the same answer -- and the next and the next. See, that's the problem with being dead wrong. You have to look long and hard for someone who'll agree with you.

In fact, the torture debate is pretty much over. Turns out, we're pretty solidly against it. A Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that most respondents opposed torture -- in any circumstance. In a question that suggests even the ridiculous "ticking time bomb" scenario, people where asked, "Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?"

58% -- a clear majority -- said no, torture should never be used, regardless of the circumstance. This would've been higher, but Republicans continue to be outside the mainstream and throw the average. For Democrats, 71% said no. Independents against torture number 56%. Only Republicans support torture, with just 42% believing it should never be used. Still, even that number shows only weak support for torture.

Their support may be a moot point, however. In their grilling of Holder over waterboarding, they may have opened a big can of worms. Not only is torture illegal, but the law requires that it be investigated and prosecuted. By getting Holder to drop the "T" word, the senate may have begun a sequence of events that guarantee prosecutions.

When Ronald Reagan signed on to the Convention Against Torture, he brought us into the realm of international law. The convention is a treaty and treaties are the be-all and end-all if international law -- torture's illegal because we agreed it should be. That convention reads, "Each State Party [i.e., signatory nation] shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law," and that, if torture is committed, the nation must "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution."

There aren't any exceptions here. It must happen. If Holder -- or any other would-be Attorney General, for that matter -- believes that we've waterboarded detainees (and no one thinks we haven't), he has to prosecute. His hands are tied.

In fact, torture prosecutions could happen outside the US, since torture is a violation of international law and a war crime. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, has called on the United States to prosecute George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Citing the Convention Against Torture, Nowak says the US has a "clear obligation" under law. If it doesn't happen here, it might just happen in The Hague.

Republicans seem to suddenly have become aware of reality and, like John Cornyn, are trying to put the brakes on what may very well be inevitable. They're trying to slow things down long enough to figure out what the hell to do and it may just be that there's nothing at all that can be done.

-Wisco

A Return to Reality in Fighting HIV/AIDS

Back in 2006, I wrote a post I called "A Delusion-Based Global AIDS Policy." Since it was way back in the days before we had any hope of reason in the White House, the news on the global fight against HIV/AIDS wasn't all that good. The Bush administration, not wanting to contradict its domestic education policy, created a global AIDS strategy based on the same non-reasoning. That non-reasoning worked like this; since HIV/AIDS is a sexually transmittable disease, then the only way to fight it is to fight human nature -- which the religious right believes is basically evil -- and promote abstinence above all other measures. The only way for the world to fight this contagion would be for everyone in the world to adopt a tiny fraction of global population's world-view -- that of the Evangelical right -- and become "good people" the only way they believed it was possible to be a good person. In other words, by acting like a right wing evangelical. Or, least, like right wing evangelicals pretend to behave.

Of course, this works about as well as you'd expect it to work. The most pious wingnuts have failed at it in very humiliating and public ways. These people made their livings pretending human nature is a matter of choice -- imagine how hard it must be for an amateur. The results were as predictable as they were tragic.



The Bush administration, trying to mend fences after the globally unpopular invasion of Iraq, unveiled a new strategy to fight HIV/AIDS. Called the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Bush promised a worldwide approach to fighting the disease. What it consisted of at heart was mostly spending a lot more money in foreign aid. But this was the Bush administration -- that money would now come with strings. Countries had to drop whatever policies they'd been pursuing in the fight and adopt the policies of right wing American nutjobs. Condom use, which had been front and center in most nations' AIDS policies, was forced to take a backseat to abstinence. Condoms only encourage sex, they argued, which was the root of the problem. Let's do a quick head count; how many people reading this need to be encouraged to have sex?

Yeah, you see the problem.

In Uganda, AIDS had been on the decline. The success of the Ugandan program had been attributed to a policy they called "ABC" -- "Abstinence, Be faithful, use Condoms." For the religious whackjobs who had their own ideas about how to fight an STD, this was completely unacceptable. They didn't care that it was extremely successful, mostly because they saw it as extremely immoral. By putting as much emphasis on condom use as abstinence, the Ugandan government was -- *gasp* -- encouraging people to have sex. Worse, they were working with the international aid group CARE, who saw that prostitution was a big part of the problem. CARE did the completely immoral by providing health care and condoms to prostitutes. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum freaked out, said CARE was "anti-American" and carrying out a "pro-prostitution agenda." In order for Uganda to continue to get funding for its program, they'd have to drop CARE in favor of "Christian" relief organizations. No more free health care and condoms for prostitutes. Because they're bad people and shouldn't be rewarded, much less encouraged.

At the same time, ABC came to mean "Abstinence, Be faithful, Condoms when necessary." Condom use was discouraged and was finally dropped under a new program called AB. AIDS cases did decline and the Bush administration took credit for it. But the reason for the decline had less to do with this new, more "moral" approach than it did with nature taking its course.

Washington Post, 2005:

Abstinence and sexual fidelity have played virtually no role in the much-heralded decline of AIDS rates in the most closely studied region of Uganda, two researchers told a gathering of AIDS scientists [in Boston].

It is the deaths of previously infected people, not dramatic change in human behavior, that is the main engine behind the ebbing of the overall rate, or prevalence, of AIDS in southern Uganda over the last decade, they reported.

"Abstinence and monogamy are very good behaviors," said Maria J. Wawer, a physician at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. "On the other hand, the data support that in this setting, the behavior that seems to have been the easiest to increase over time is condom use." Exactly what the Bush administration had dropped.

PEPFAR, hampered by it's stupid, short-sighted, and ideology-based reasoning, was a $15 billion failure. A failure with tragic human consequence. Luckily, it's a consequence that's easily addressed by a new president more interested in reality than religion-based wishful thinking.

David Rosen, Counterpunch:

President-elect Obama should move quickly to adopt Congress’ revision of the Bush administration’s PEPFAR programs (for President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief)...

PEPFAR, the centerpiece effort for U.S. "soft" foreign diplomacy, suffers the same failures as other Bush-administration programs that deal with cultural values, including abortion and teen sex education. It is intended to improve the care, treatment and prevention of those suffering from HIV/AIDS in developing countries. While limitedly successful, for anything is better then nothing, it could never achieve its true potential because of its ideological blinders. Put simply, its prevention efforts are inhibited by its restrictions on condoms.

Remember, Uganda wasn't the entire scope of the program, it's just the most studied example. Every nation that has received US funding to fight HIV/AIDS has the same restrictions on the spending of those funds.

That's about to change. Barack Obama has promised to put condom use front and center in a new focus on fighting AIDS.

For once, the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train.

-Wisco

McCain, Musharraf, and The Ways of The World

John McCain is Mr. Foreign Policy, Mr. Experience, the one candidate who's been in government longer than marble. He's seen leaders come and leaders go, he's seen entire nations fall to history, he's seen wars won and wars lost. And all this experience seems to have gone completely over his head. In all those years in government, John McCain doesn't seem to have learned a damned thing.

The lessons of Vietnam are clearly lost on the Vietnam vet. A war based on lies cannot be won, because the objectives aren't based on truth. Beat the living hell out of it all you want, but your aren't going to get that square peg into that round hole. The hammer of the military has its limitations.

But, like free market moonies who believe that the "genius of the market" can do anything -- including predicting terrorist attacks -- McCain is a military moonie who seems to believe that force is the only way to do anything.

As a result, McCain's choices of international allies reflects Bush's -- and a history of failure that goes back throughout the 20th century. Diplomacy is for wussypants appeasers. Stalin's quote -- "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" -- could easily be applied to anyone who shares McCain's thinking. Real allies have guns, because only guns have influence. The world is an awful and dangerous place and only the strong are worth knowing. The Dalai Lama is for photo ops and dictators are for actual work. Nowhere is more apparent than in McCain's support for disgraced Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf.



Prior to 9/11, Musharraf was a nobody -- just another strongman who'd taken over a developing nation in a coup. How much of an nobody is demonstrated in Reuters' Factbox; "Musharraf's evolving relationship with Washington":

November 3, 1999 - In a test of foreign policy acumen, a television news reporter in Boston asks then-Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush to name the leaders of four global "hot spots," including Pakistan. Bush cannot name Musharraf, who had taken power in a coup a month earlier, referring to him as "the general."

No word on whether Bush giggled when he was told Musharraf's first name was Pervez, but I think it's probably a given. Bush didn't know who Musharraf was because he probably thought he'd have no use for him. That changed.

September 11, 2001 - After Al Qaeda attacks the United States, Musharraf reverses Pakistan's support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had sheltered Osama bin Laden's network, and throws its weight behind Bush's war on terrorism. Pakistan's Islamist opposition calls him a U.S. stooge.

June 2003 - Washington promises billions of dollars in aid for Pakistan -- it hands over more than $10 billion between 2001 and 2008 -- while White House officials say Bush presses Musharraf to move toward democracy and stop extremists from launching attacks on Afghanistan from Pakistan. Many al Qaeda leaders had fled across the border to Pakistan when U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan.

March 25, 2004 - Bush waives sanctions on Pakistan imposed after Musharraf seized power in a coup, saying this will facilitate a transition to democracy and help the fight against international terrorism.

Musharraf, the classic military usurper, suddenly fit the mold of other unsavory US allies -- Augusto Pinochet and Saddam Hussein come to mind. He had men, he had guns, and he had the sort of power that only an autocrat has. "[D]ictatorships have the characteristic of being efficient," Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said. "They don't have to worry about the press. They don't have to worry about parliaments. They don't have to worry about a court system. They just do things, efficiently, immediately -- poorly, but quickly."

But the problem with dictatorships is that they're always illegitimate. The dictator holds on to power through any means necessary or he doesn't hold on to power at all. The brutality and corruption of dictatorships are born of desperation -- they're always in danger of being legitimately deposed. Musharraf was lucky; many are removed from existence altogether when they lose power, not just removed from office.

Dictatorships are generally seen as the most stable governments, because their oppressive nature makes immediate change unlikely. And, as Rumsfeld pointed out, they don't waste a lot of time screwing around with debate. A dictatorship would seem to make an ideal ally for a nation concerned more with effectiveness than with human rights, democracy, and the rule of international law.

But the dictatorship is a government in one man. As a result, it must be short-lived. An alliance with a dictatorship is by no definition a long range strategy. It's a momentary convenience. John McCain was a big fan of that convenience.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, McCain couldn't find enough nice things to say about Pervez Musharraf. Where many were calling on Musharraf to step down, McCain was running to his defense. McCain called him a "personally scrupulously honest" man who deserved "the benefit of the doubt" on uniting Pakistan and that I continue to believe Musharraf has done a pretty good job, done a lot of the things that we wanted him to do.

He even cast Musharraf as the savior of Pakistan:

Speaking to about 50 people packed into a cafe in Iowa, McCain said U.S. politicians should keep in mind that Musharraf has been a largely reliable ally who agreed to hold elections.

"Prior to Musharraf, Pakistan was a failed state," McCain said. "They had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption, and Musharraf basically restored order. So you're going to hear a lot of criticism about Musharraf that he hasn't done everything we wanted him to do, but he did agree to step down as head of the military and he did get the elections."

And, now that Musharraf has stepped down rather than be impeached, McCain can't get far enough away from his former good buddy. And that's what McCain hasn't learned, that dictatorships are only stable for the blink of an eye, historically speaking. That promoting democracy will serve us for centuries, while supporting a dictator serves us for one man's lifetime -- or an even shorter term. That the guys with the guns have no lasting power.

Foreign policy has been poorly focused for more than a century. McCain would continue that myopic focus. As I said, he hasn't learned a damned thing.

-Wisco

Keep It Simple, Stupid

I always get some criticism when I look at a conflict someplace in the world, consider the arguments of both sides, and decide that there aren't any good guys in the fight. There's something in American thinking that requires every fight to be a fight of good against evil. We choose sides, cast the conflict in incredibly simplistic terms, and decide that the team we're backing isn't just faultless, but incapable of wrong. For a long-standing example of this, look at the popular conception of Israel vs. the Palestinians. Israel -- despite consistently damning reports by Amnesty International -- is practically angelic in the average American's mind.

These good guy/bad guy narratives have seemed to spring up overnight in recent history. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait supposedly came out of nowhere. But the truth is that Kuwaitis had been stealing Iraqi oil through "slant drilling" at the Iraqi border. While no one would argue that Hussein's actions weren't excessive, only those who don't know the facts would say they were unprovoked -- which, given the sorry state of our media, would be pretty much everyone. The invasion of Kuwait was never presented as a dictator vs. thieves. For the home audience, it was bad guy vs. good guys.

And we're seeing the same thing in the Russo-Georgian crisis. There aren't any good guys there, no one we should root for on merely moral grounds. In the conflict, there's no real case to make for the legality of Russia's invasion -- it's pretty much unquestionably a crime. But another question is whether Georgia deserves to be seen as heroic. Not every victim of a crime is a solid citizen; criminal on criminal violence is awfully commonplace.



For background, we can turn to Matt Rothschild in The Progressive. The title tells you where he's going with this -- "No Good Guys in Russia-Georgia War":

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was reckless to send in the military to subdue the Russian-leaning province of South Ossetia on Friday.

And Russia, led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, responded with unnecessary force.

As in most modern conflicts, it is civilians who bear the brunt. There have been reports of more than 2,000 civilians killed already. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have urged Russia and Georgia not to fire on civilians, and to give them safe passage. Amnesty International warns that some of the attacks may already have constituted war crimes.

Russia does not have a legitimate claim here. It brutally subdued Chechnya, which was trying to secede from Russia. Georgia was trying to subdue a restive South Ossetia. What’s the difference?

Georgia has been accused of shelling S. Ossetia in the past and of using an abusive police force to put down dissent and unrest. But they've become the good guys in this conflict, because Russia is a convenient bad guy. No history of Georgian abuse is reported, because it would spoil the good guy/bad guy narrative. Just as the Kuwaitis were the lovely, peace-loving, completely blameless victims of an attack by a madman, so Georgians are like freakin' Black Sea Quakers, living humble rustic lives in the shadow of evil.

Of course, the US shares some blame here. Our national belief that every continent is our backyard and that no pie is complete without our finger in it has made what would be a regional eruption an international crisis. Rothschild again:

When Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Washington had a great opportunity to broker a global peace with only country, Russia, still capable of destroying the United States.

Bush Sr. seemed to recognize this, and pledged in 1991 not to try to incorporate the Eastern bloc nations and the former Soviet republics that border Eastern Europe right into NATO’s sphere.

But Clinton reneged on that pledge, and George Jr. has done everything in his power to further the incorporation process and to encircle and humiliate Russia.

Russia is beginning to see itself as boxed in by NATO. We're close to closing a deal on arming Poland with missiles and Ukraine wants in on the action. Imagine the situation reversed -- nations all around the US are signing treaties with Russia and "missile defense" systems are placed in Canada and Mexico. Think that'd go over real well?

Russia saw the need -- real or imagined is irrelevant at this point -- to deal with Georgia and S. Ossetia before Georgia entered NATO. As I say, Russia's action was unquestionably illegal. But it was also fairly predictable.

"But does Russia's behavior cause Obama to rethink reliance on 'soft power' -- dialogue, disapproval, diplomacy, economic carrots and sticks -- which Putin considers almost an oxymoron?" asks columnist George Will. "Does Russia's resort to military coercion, and its arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, cause Obama to revise his resistance to missile defense?" As is so often the case, Will proves his reputation as a brainiac is unearned. It's 'soft power' that's currently defusing this situation -- which, by the way, I can almost guarantee will be forgotten by the wandering American attention span within a year.

The French used diplomacy to broker a peace deal. Meanwhile, the American right was busy accusing Russia of returning to either Empire or the Soviet era, depending on which panicky nut you asked. While our government was busy trying to get us on board with a new Cold War, another nation was busy doing something constructive. Where McCain borrows Hillary Clinton's 3 A.M. phone call argument against Obama, it was the French who actually answered that call, not the US. Whether or not their efforts will have any lasting result is an open question, but anyone who thinks American bluster accomplished anything at all just hasn't been paying attention.

But that's all too complicated. The US government and media believes that every conflict must be presented as Superman vs. Lex Luthor -- a simplified version of right and wrong where nations take actions for no reason other than to be evil. There must always be a good guy and a bad guy. If that narrative isn't exactly true, it will be made true by constant repetition.

-Wisco

The [Your Name Here] Candidate

The big foreign policy expert in the 2008 presidential race is John McCain... Right? Of course, the problem with putting yourself across as an expert means that people are going to expect you to know what you're talking about. So, when the going gets tough, the tough get going -- to Wikipedia.

Taegan Goddard reports that Mr. Big Fancy Foreign Policy Expert seems to have turned to the open source encyclopedia to get the skinny on Georgia in the Russo-Georgian crisis. "A Wikipedia editor emailed Political Wire to point out some similarities between Sen. John McCain's speech today [August 11] on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia," Goddard writes at his Congressional Quarterly blog. "Given the closeness of the words and sentence structure, most would consider parts of McCain's speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia."

Of course, Team McCain denies any Wiki-plagiarism. They claimed it was entirely coincidental. "Nonetheless, at least two political science professors have weighed in saying the similarities are more than coincidental and wouldn't be tolerated from their own students," writes Goddard.

It may be Matthew Yglesias who had the best reaction to the McCain copy-and-paste job; "Given that McCain, by his own admission, can't use the internet it's a bit of an ironic situation though perhaps it counts as progress of some sort."

Isn't that nice? McCain's learning to use the google.



The odd thing about all of this is that Team McCain has a Georgia expert on board. How do we know that? Because Georgia pays this McCainiac to be an American expert on Georgia. McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, is a paid lobbyist for Georgia. And that pro-Georgian lobbying seems to be influencing McCain's stand on the issue.

A CNN piece titled " McCain pushes hard line against Russia; aides attack Obama" gives a perfect example of how Scheunemann's expertise is being used by Team McCain:

On Tuesday, Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy adviser, attacked the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's response to the situation in Georgia, saying his experience with the region amounted to a handful of paper statements.

On the other hand, McCain's experience with Georgia runs deep, Scheunemann said, noting that McCain and the Georgian president were friends.

"There's a depth of knowledge, a breadth of knowledge and an extent of historical experience that doesn't compare between the two on Russia policy," Scheunemann said. "You can't compare a 15-year historical record to three or four statements over the course of 15 months."

Of course, this is CNN -- that paragon of lazy American journalism -- so the piece doesn't mention the inconvenient fact that Scheunemann is an agent of a foreign government that goes by the name of "Georgia." It also fails to note that McCain is such a good, dear friend of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that he can't even pronounce the man's name.

McCain's obvious ignorance of Georgia doesn't stop him from making insane claims about the crisis -- claims that put Russia in the worst possible light.

Boston Globe:

Republican John McCain yesterday [Aug. 13] phoned Georgia's president to tell him that Americans are supporting his "brave little nation" against Russia's military attacks -- and blasted Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom he accused of wanting to restore the czarist empire.

In fact, McCain's defense of Georgia and bellicosity toward Russia is so vigorous that he's wound up saying really, really stupid and hypocritical things about the crisis. Just yesterday, McCain told reporters at a press conference, "In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations."

No, really. I can prove it. There's video.

But if Scheunemann being on the Georgian payroll (a blatant conflict of interest at this point) is influencing McCain's stand on the conflict, you have to wonder what other issues members of Team McCain are being paid to take. I've written before that "McCain is a candidate openly for sale."

And his campaign team is for hire. A new analysis by the Public Campaign Action Fund found that McCain campaign aides and fundraisers have earned nearly $1 billion as lobbyists over the last decade.

"The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they’ll rely on him," said David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch. "In the ‘you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours’ world of Washington, $931 million gets the special interests the best government money can buy. But just think of the payday these lobbyists might expect in a McCain Administration."

With that much special interest support, McCain's positions could almost be safely assumed to come straight out of the wallets of nations and industries. If Scheunemann's any indication, we can take comfort in the fact that they aren't very good at it.

When you have to turn to Wikipedia to get background on your own client, you really haven't done your homework. Of course, it makes you wonder how much homework they've done on anything else.

Maybe McCain should turn to Wikipedia more often. Then he'd know the difference between Sunni and Shia, Iran and al Qaeda, or that Pakistan doesn't border Iraq. Until Mr. Foreign Policy Expert figures these sorts of things out, the nations that bought him should ask for their money back.

-Wisco

The Audacity of Being Realistic

It's not a photo we've seen lately. An American politician in Europe addressing a sea of people -- without any giant papier-mâché heads of Bush and Cheney in prison stripes, no one dressed like the Grim Reaper, no one demanding said politician face war crimes charges. If you ever needed proof that it's not America who's hated around the globe, but the American President, here ya go. I give you Barack Obama in Berlin yesterday.

Obama returned to the theme of the speech he gave after winning the Democratic primary. "People of Berlin -- people of the world -- this is our moment. This is our time," Obama told a crowd of some 200,000 who didn't hate him for being an American.

Left behind at home, John McCain can't win for losing. After suggesting that Obama needed to spend some time abroad, McCain complained that Obama was spending time abroad. In one of what has been a long string of poorly conceived photo-ops, Baghdad Johnny spoke to reporters at the Columbus, Ohio Sausage Haus in a neighborhood called German Village (No really, I swear), to gripe about Obama in Berlin.

"I'd love to give a speech in Germany," McCain said to the assembled dozens, "a political speech or a speech that maybe the German people would be interested in, but I'd much prefer to do it as president of the United States rather than as a candidate ... for the office of presidency."

The unspoken suggestion was that it was unseemly for a candidate to stump in a foreign country. We're all supposed to forget that McCain just got back from Colombia not to long ago and previously addressed a crowd in Canada.

-Continued after the jump-


Of course, McCain's message has been hopelessly inconsistent. The only thing consistent about McCain has been the message that whatever Obama does is wrong. The McCain campaign, as I pointed out yesterday, wants this election to be a referendum on Obama and that forces their candidate to be reactive and reactionary. It also forces John McCain to be blatantly hypocritical.

When he was running in the GOP primary and the strategy of every Republican candidate was to out-Reagan each other, McCain thought optimism was just the best damned thing any presidential candidate could possess. Now that Barack Obama has taken hope as his lighthouse, optimism is naive and foolish. For the new John McCain, created entirely in reaction to Obama, hope and optimism are for chumps.

For myself, I've never had much use for optimism, to tell the truth. It strikes me as too similar to delusion. It's one thing to hope for the best, it's another to expect it. Hope, on the other hand, is reasonable -- I've always defined hope as the knowledge that the best possible outcome is always a possible outcome. Hope is always realistic, where optimism often is not.

But my definition is my definition. My own little self-help compass to keep myself from veering off into dreamer-land. I'd imagine that most would think hope and optimism are basically synonymous. When McCain runs against hope, he runs against Reagan's optimism. Optimism is wonderful in a Republican, until they run up against an optimistic Democrat -- then optimism becomes a comforting lie.

What struck me most about Obama's speech wasn't its hopefulness, but its amazing... I don't want to say "courage," but that's the only word. He stood in the heart of Berlin and invoked the Holocaust in relation to Darfur. He called for the world to rid itself of nuclear weapons. He acknowledged that climate change was a global problem that needed global solutions. That, likewise, terrorism isn't a solely American problem with a unilateral American solution. He called on the entire world to become people-focused, not state- and corporation-focused.

John McCain just doesn't have that -- he seems incapable of it. It's not that he just disagrees with it, but he doesn't seem to be able to think of the United States as one nation in an entire world. All of McCain's solutions are typical Republican non-solutions -- more money, more troops, more American imperialism. McCain's solutions to the world's problems are all about being the stereotypical American jerk.

The world can't take another swaggering moron who thinks that being an American is the same as being chosen by freakin' God. And neither can the United States. We live in a much wider world than the one we pretend to and the time has come to wake up and realize, once again, that we aren't a separate world unto ourselves.

We may not need optimism, but we damned sure need realism. It's not people like Barack Obama or myself or, perhaps, you who are the fantasists. It's the low dreamers on the right, who believe that people are basically evil and will only do the right thing with a gun to their head, who think that everyone's a potential criminal who must be watched by a government using police state powers, who believe that "non-American" is synonymous with "enemy." The murderous, the brutish, the stupid and low and frightened followers of the neocon mindset are the dreamers. And their dream is a freakin' nightmare. For them, if you're not afraid of everyone on Earth, it means you're naive -- anyone who's a realist spends their life scared stupid, working toward an authoritarian state that will render us rightless in order to protect us.

Of course, that's not realism, that's not even pessimism -- that's paranoia. As I said, hope is realistic.

-Wisco

You can view Obama's Berlin Speech here:



Technorati tags: politics; international; Berlin; Germany; Bush; elections; 2008; Republican; Democrat; John McCain or Barack Obama, that's your choice -- be a neocon or be a realist

We Aren't the World

We, as americans, exist in this broader place called 'the world.' The world is a place where different governments exist, people have wildly divergent political opinions, and everyone -- canadians included -- talks funny. Given what a diverse place the wider world is, it's surprising to find that certain opinions seem to be universal. Among those universal opinions is that George W. Bush shouldn't let the door hit him in the ass on the way out.

At least, that was the one of the conclusions I came to looking through translated editorials and news articles at Watching America -- a great site that translates both the crazy and the sane from several languages and several countries around the world.

As the world's only -- if creaky around the edges -- superpower, events in the US are a matter of public opinion in every corner of the world. What we do and say is watched and commented on worldwide, to an extent that few other countries are. Our old cold war rival China is closely watched, as is the remanent of the USSR, Russia. Japan, being an economic superpower of the moment, gets a lot of space on the business pages. But the big political mover and shaker in the world is the US.

First up is an editorial in the german paper Frankfurter Rundschau that, with the exception of one word that doesn't translate well, could've been written in Cedar Rapids.

What is it that has the entire world talking so enthusiastically about candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, when the election is still 15 months away? No small part of this peculiarly early start can be explained by the internal acceleration of the modern world, the "Devilish Speeding-Up [Veloziferication]" as Goethe complainingly called it - that satanic force which ensures that every year, the world turns a little faster. And since the advent of the Internet and cable television, it turns a little faster every week.

But there's another that may be much more important: The Bush era has come to an end long before its formal conclusion. In the wake of the rapid purging of the U.S. President's authority, an unparalleled political vacuum has developed. Inside the United States, this has provoked the early election campaign; and for the rest of the world, this has brought about the (pleasant) anticipation of a new beginning after Bush.

As I said, "don't let the door hit you in the ass" is a common attitude toward our president worldwide. The decline of Bush's power may not be as complete as Frankfurter Rundschau puts it, but the truth is that he's now only a few steps above a caretaker. No one looks at Bush -- with still more than a year to go in his final term -- as a president with great things still in front of him. As a politician, Bush is a man without a future. What was his to accomplish -- for good or for bad -- has already been accomplished.

One problem with being the world's oldest existing democracy is that sometimes the old girl has her 'senior moments.' Presidential candidates represent political thoughts wandering through our collective mind and, in presidential races, many of these notions from the fringe of our nation's subconscious are psychotic.

Case in point, right wing lunatic Tom Tancredo. "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that [a terrorist] attack on this homeland of that nature [i.e., nuclear in nature] would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina," Tancredo said. Yeah Tom, holding Islam's holiest sites hostage would sure go a long way toward calming people who are permanently freaked out. Why, it wouldn't piss off extremists even more than they are now at all. The guy's got all the intelligence of a cinderblock. Although cinderblocks are, at least, useful.

You can imagine how that played abroad.

Pak Tribune, Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD: In the National Assembly on Friday, opposition and ruling coalition members protested remarks by U.S. Republican Presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo, who said that Muslim holy sites should be bombed. The MPs demanded that the Government clarify its position on whether the War Against Terror - which our army is fighting - is really in the national interest, or just part of America's agenda.

[...]

Speaking on a point of order, MP Farhana Khalid Banori said that the Government should adopt a clear and strict stance on this anti-Islamic statement.

The Federal Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Sher Afghan Khan Niazi informed the house that the U.S. Republican Presidential hopeful's statement is a serious matter. Tom Tancredo, he said, is mentally ill, and that we have the capacity to protect the Islam's Holy sites. He said that a unanimous resolution to this effect would be passed in the National Assembly soon.

Luckily for the entire world, the vast majority of americans, Democrat or Republican, agree with Sher Afghan Khan Niazi -- Tom Tancredo is mentally ill. He's got as much chance of winning the election as the aforementioned cinderblock. But he's also a stupid, stupid man and with his brief turn in the international spotlight, he's managed to damage our reputation, reinforce fundamentalist opinion worldwide, and cause nations to question their alliances with us. Smooth, Tom. Presidential material, you're not.

Other candidates have made comments that can only be described as simpleminded. Take Democratic hopeful Barack Obama's statement that "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets [in Pakistan], and President Musharraf won't act, we will." The pakistani newspaper, The Nation, brings up an unfortunate reality.

Considering Washington's ultimate goal of rooting out terror, it will have to act more constructively and rationally. The tribesmen are religious conservatives - in other words sticklers for outmoded traditions and with an abysmally low literacy rate. With this reality on the ground, ruthless measures to curb their sympathies for ethnically-identical Pushtuns [Taliban] would prove counterproductive.

To change their mindset will require an extensive program of social and economic development and, indeed, a complete review of American policies toward the Muslim world.

In other words, invade the Pashtun region and the Taliban tells everyone, "See? Didn't we tell you?" Pakistan is a nuclear armed country with a barely stable (and illegitimate) government. Pakistani Dictator and ally-of-convenience Pervez Musharraf has survived several assassination attempts as it is. Further destabilizing the country could put nuclear arms into Taliban -- or, at least, Taliban-friendly -- hands. A hard line with Musharraf is probably a good idea, but he has his own realities to deal with. He probably could do more and should be pressured to do it, but he can only reasonably be expected to do so much. Pakistan is a bottle of nitroglycerin and you don't use a hammer to deal with it.

As we go into the elections, it pays to remember that we're also citizens of the world. We take up only 6% of the world's land area and 4% of the world's population, yet we have unprecedented military and economic power. Like it or not, the next president really will be the leader of the free world -- although this is much less true after Bush than it was before.

As citizens of the world, we need to remember that the world map isn't divided into two sections stamped "USA" and "Places That Don't Matter." We have a responsiblity and it's a responsibility we've taken on voluntarily. We didn't become the only surviving superpower by accident -- it was by design. It's easy to make simpleminded or crazy statements that may play well at home, but other people are listening and the ripple from a bad idea put across in a debate in Iowa may become a tsunami by the time it reaches a foreign shore.

The next president will inheret a foreign policy nightmare, FUBAR because of Bush's idiotic policies. It's important for good people to fight for that position, but it pays to take care that your fight doesn't make things worse along the way. People are paying attention -- worldwide.

--Wisco

Technorati tags: politics; Bush; 2008; elections; Tom Tancredo; Barack Obama; US; international; terrorism; America is not the world