Fire on the Mountain

Beth Checks In: I'm Back In Jerusalem

2008-08-07T06:50:00.007-05:00

[It is far too easy for progressives and lefties in the US to let the occupation of Palestine fall off the radar, and awfully hard to keep organizing and protesting our own government's complicity in that crime, in the face of omnipresent pro-Israel propaganda and the depressing "facts on the ground." FotM has been guilty of this neglect, too.

Now Fire on the Mountain is proud to publish the first of what we hope will be several reports from the skirmish lines there, hot from the keyboard of a friend who has not faltered in the fight for justice. Beth is an East Coast trade unionist and antiwar activist, who has returned for a two week visit after last being in Israel in 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the Seven Days War.]

I came to Israel to spend time with a good friend, R, and to see with my own eyes what I can about the situation here. I arrived at Ben Gurion airport a few minutes early and got through customs easily. I think it helped that I said "yerushahlayim" instead of "Jerusalem" when the woman who checked my passport, the fifth time it was checked that day, asked where I was staying. Going to get my bag, there was a line of men holding signs to identify themselves to the people they were there to pick up; the first sign I saw was "AIPAC". Welcome to Israel.

R is an Israeli woman I met in New York. She has lived in NY for many years, came back to Israel in February and is now working with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). The first nights, we went to dinner at her friend's home in a nearby neighborhood, previously home to many poor Mizrachi Jews (those from the Arab countries) and now being gentrified.

Her friend Y has been an activist in the feminist and the women's peace movement in Jerusalem for many years. She no longer wants to act out of anger and despair. She has seen so much conflict and burnout among colleagues here who are committed to a just peace. Now she has decided to work on developing forms for promoting and protecting the well-being of activists.

Also visiting was a dance therapist from France who is here for a few weeks doing workshops with groups of Palestinians and Jews. This is one small piece of the work Y wants to do with activists. Emphasizing the rhythm of the breath and the beating of hearts, the same for Israeli Jews and for Palestinians, using percussion instruments and dance forms, the hope is that people can go beyond their differences to the core rhythms and find community. So far, the workshops have been for Israeli Jews one day and for Palestinians the next, with only a small amount of integration.

A, Y's partner, is a human rights lawyer who defends individual Palestinians in criminal and security cases. I find myself wanting to write "so-called" in front of so many words. Throwing stones at a tank, for instance, is a "so-called" breach of Israeli security. It used to be that 90% of Palestinians who were arrested in such cases were tortured. Not Abu Ghraib torture, but torture none the less-- being made to sit on a slanted stool with your hands shackled behind you, hooded, with music blaring, for hours. That has alleviated somewhat, since the early '90's, he says, in the less serious cases.

When the suicide bombings began, Israel would destroy the house, the home, where that Palestinian had lived. His parents, and/or wife, siblings, children became homeless. There are still many, many Palestinian homes being demolished (more on that in my next post), but, with appeals to the High Court, since 2005, none for security reasons.

Thousands of Palestinians were kicked out of Kuwait when Iraq invaded in 1990; they fled and swamped towns and villages in the West Bank. Many of them had West Bank identification papers but those papers only allowed them to remain for a few months as they had been gone for years and had lost their residency rights.

A took cases of groups of twenty at a time to court to get their visas extended so they and their families could stay in the West Bank. Close to 1,000 cases were brought to the court. Eventually, an agreement was made, out of court so it was not a binding legal decision, and they were allowed to remain in the West Bank. (In fact, there was no where else they could go).

The first morning I woke up in Jerusalem, I decided to do the standard tourist tour at the City Hall. Arriving a few minutes late at Safra Square, just across from the walls of the Old City, I joined a large group of about 30 Israelis from other cities. The guide, speaking in Hebrew, was explaining the history of the area. I listened, and understanding only half of what was being said, searched for the English tour guide. I found her, with a small group, 2 women, 6 girls, all American, all religious. I was in shorts and a t-shirt, like all the Israelis in the other group. These 8 were all in long skirts and long sleeved tops

First in 1890, a wealthy British businessman had a municipal building established in that spot. Then, in 1930, the British Barclay Bank agreed to put up the money for a City Hall if they could use part of the building as a bank. The requirements of providing services to the growing Jerusalem meant that more and more space was required. Eventually, in the late 1980's, the Safra Brothers company from South America, put up the money for the current complex of buildings if the area would be named for them. And so, Safra Square.

The guide talked about the educational system, all four parts of it – the secular national schools, the religious national schools, the ultra-religious schools and the schools for the Arabs. These are all separate systems. I found out later that day that there are 9,000 Palestinian children living in Jerusalem who are not going to school. No new schools are being built.Those who are able to attend school have forty children in a class and they are on double shifts.

We were taken to the City Council chambers and then to see the view from the roof of the building. There are now 750,000 people in what is called the Jerusalem municipality, much of it annexed since the 1967 war. 1/3 of them are Palestinians. There are 31 members of the City Council. The Palestinians have no representation.

"But they get everything," said one of the women in the tour. The guide weakly said that no, the services are not equal. Ambulances often don't go the East side of Jerusalem because there is little signage indicating names of streets so they can't find locations. In fact, I later found out that while 1/3 of the tax money that flows into the Jerusalem tax coffers comes from the Arab population, only 10% of the services go to their neighborhoods.

The tour guide explained that during the last election, the Palestinian Authority told the Arabs not to vote because that would show support for the Zionist state. She said perhaps this time, later in 2008, they would take part in the election and if so, 1/3 of the Council could be Arab. "Which way do you want it?" she said.

For many reasons, this is totally not going to happen. At this point, there are only three members of the Council who are to some extent opposed to the policies of expansion into the Palestinian neighborhoods and the demolition of homes. Most of the other 28 are from the right wing religious parties.

We went to the building's basement to see the City Model for Jerusalem, which now goes, they tell us, from Atarot to Har Homah, Both of those neighborhoods that have been built in the area I would call "occupied" since 1967, and they call "annexed". The model (according to the brochure) depicts "the existing state in the town center and the adjacent neighborhoods and in particular future projects that are being planned in Jerusalem."

It is a huge display of all the buildings, streets, parks that exist and that are planned. She pointed to an area in between French Hill and Maale Adumin, two areas that have been built on land that was part of East Jerusalem until, as the guide said "we came back after 19 years". She showed the plans for that area, saying that the United States is not letting it happen, that Condoleezza Rice has said it is not allowed because of international law.

The Geneva Convention, which Israel has signed on to, has rules against changing the population balance of an occupied land. The annexation of Jerusalem has not been recognized as legal by the world, not even by the United States. The religious woman said, "We’ll see!" When the guide pointed out the Museum of Tolerance--which is being built, I found out later, on the ruins of a Muslim cemetery--I choked at the irony, the chutzpah, of such a project.

I walked back toward my friend's apartment through a large park. There were people out for a walk, with their rifles. I saw two couples, husband and wife with a baby carriages and the men had rifles slung over their soldiers. There's a pervasive sense of tension.

After that, I had to get a reality check. I went to the Alternative Information Center, (AIC), founded in 1984 by Jewish and Palestinian activists who believe that ending the occupation is the immediate goal, but go on to argue that ending the conflict means much more than that and that Palestinians and Israelis have to live together and work together for the society to function in a healthy way.

I met with C, born in the US, living here since the mid-‘70's. She said that it seems to her harder to be an antiwar activist in the States than to be active in the fight here. When she comes back to visit, she sees so many ways to not pay attention to what's going on, while, here, it is in your face all the time. It cannot be ignored so she feels she has less choice but to do what she does.

I argued the contrary, that she was much braver than I doing her work here. She talked about how much money is being made with the expansion of the Jewish areas into what was East Jerusalem and into the West Bank with construction of houses and roads and tunnels. And then, of course, there's the wall, the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in this country. There is no discussion of this process in the mainstream Israeli media, of whether or not this is the kind of society they want to have. She said, "They don't acknowledge we're in the Middle East".

AIC does not get into the endgame of 1 state or 2 states. Rather, they work based on universal principles of justice, equality and feminism. There is a second office near Bethlehem. AIC works to get a Palestinian voice heard on the issues being discussed – keeping a bridge open between the two societies, showing that it is possible to work together long-term. She stressed that the Palestinians should not have to wait for Israeli society to understand what has been going on before they can speak out for justice for themselves.

AIC compiles and distributes information about Palestinian and Israeli society since both are, for the most part, stereotyped in the media. She talked about how the majority of people in both societies have lost ground since Oslo. One in three Israeli children are living in poverty.

Since Palestinians are no longer allowed to come into Israel for work, much of the manual labor is done by migrants. The agricultural workers are Thai; people from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Eastern Europe are home care workers, Chinese do construction and Africans do cleaning. The situation is, of course, much worse in the West Bank and even worse in Gaza. Israel now has the second largest gap between rich and poor in the developed world--second only to the US.

The group hosts international delegations when they visit and is well-connected with activists around the world in the World Social Forum. They get funding from progressive Christian organizations in Europe and England and from a few governments in Europe. I asked how she, as an individual, functions within her society.

She talked about the importance of being who she really is day-to-day, that Israelis need to be confronted on a personal level. For example, when the bus driver, for no reason, gives the Palestinian who comes onto the bus a hard time, she asks the driver why and stands up for the Palestinian rider as the driver argues and other passengers start defending the driver.

I ask if she feels hopeful. She says that, incredibly, her Palestinian colleagues are more hopeful than she is, so that gives her hope.

Midnight Music 2--"You, Me And The Bourgeoisie"

2008-08-04T10:36:00.010-05:00

Advance warning--the first few seconds of this cut are an ad for some fucking cell phone service that sends you concert announcements via instant messaging or some such. There are at least two other versions of this tune by The Submarines on YouTube, with no commercials, but the words are easiest to understand on this one.

And in case you still had a bit of trouble, this sample from the lyric should show you why it's worth another listen.

Plastic bottles, imported water
Cars we drive wherever we want to,
Clothes we buy, it's sweatshop labor,
Drugs from corporate enablers.
We're not living the good life
Unless we're fighting the good fight,
You and me just trying to get it right.

Of course to take the cheap irony of the opening plug for the cell service in this particular video into whole rich realms of cultural self-negation, consider that if "You, Me And The Bourgeoisie" struck you as slightly familiar, there's a reason. It has recently been used in a commercial for Apple, Inc.'s hot new rollout, the iPhone 3G. Oy...

I still like it, and have always been a sucker for musicians trying to do this kind of linking of the personal and political. So whaddaya think? Have I played myself here, going for the okey-doke from a buncha sellouts? Or is this a song that belongs to the forces of sweetness and light, but is so catchy and persuasive that it can be loved even by those without a clue (think Timbuk 3's "Future's So Bright...")?

Commonwealth Bands: Bottom-up Socialism in Jazz

2008-08-03T05:08:00.006-05:00

I'm reading a book, One O'Clock Jump, on the legendary jazz band, the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, a "territory band" that played, in various incarnations, from about 1923 to 1933. Their fame resides not in their output--they only cut one lone 78 the whole time--but in the players who cut their teeth in Blue Devil ranks en route to bigger gigs and lasting fame. We're talking about the likes of Lester Young, Jimmy Rushing, Oran "Hot Lips" Page and Count Basie, to name a few. Hell, Ralph Ellison jammed with them as a high schooler.

What struck me, for purposes of this post, was the following sentence:

We do know that the Blue Devils were a democratic entity, a "commonwealth band" as they termed it, with no leader who received more money than the others.

The author, scholar Douglas Henry Daniels, goes on to flesh this out, explaining that at different times, different members took on the role of manager for a couple of years, adding that

these members did not make decisions for the band; in other words, they were not managers whose word was final. The Blue Devils' motto was "All for one and one for all--like their heroes of the movie based on Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. Members had some say in their choices and they all voted on major decisions.

According to Daniels, this was a common practice among the jazz bands of the Southwest until the Depression. How do ya like that! Cultural workers, famously individualist, spontaneously choosing an essentially socialist organizational model. And these outfits, evolving toward the swing bands of the thirties, could have a dozen members or more!

If, dear reader, you know anything else about this phenomenon, please drop a word in the comments. Come to think of it, surely there's a book in here someplace, on economic (and artistic) democracy in popular music, with more on the territory bands of the Southwest and later but smaller jazz combos and with plenty of experience from the rock and roll world to look at, both positive and negative.

I leave you with a taste of what the Blue Devils contributed to jazz, a Soundie from the thirties featuring at least two of the band's alumni, singer Jimmy Rushing and pianist/bandleader Count Basie.

Bite Size Bad News 8--Housing Capital

2008-07-30T07:40:00.008-05:00

As of June 30, housing prices in the US are down 15.8% from one year earlier. This is being reported as the destruction of $3.25 trillion worth of value.*

Well, sort of. The capital the business press says has been destroyed has both a fictitious and a real character.

The fictitious aspect has come to the fore because the legendary “newer sucker” of capitalist theory has failed to show up. As long as you could actually sell your house to someone for more than you paid for it, everything was copacetic. You didn’t even have to sell. You could borrow against that increased value and have real money in your bank account (and, alas, owe the lender real money too, plus real interest). Once you can only unload that house at a fire sale rate, if at all, it becomes clear that a lot of that “value” wasn’t very real at all.

But the destruction of very real concrete physical capital is ramping up, though it’s nowhere near $3 trillion worth yet, That’s actual houses which are being abandoned, and will fall into ruin and never be occupied again.

Some of this is hard to weep salt tears over, of course, like the ghastly exurban developments so recently marketed under banners like “affordable luxury.” Now they are being dubbed “ghost towns with granite countertops,” as rising oil prices have helped highlight the downside of living a long, long drive from work or even shopping. Many of those finished or nearly completed in the last year or so will never be inhabited.

Most of it, though, is houses people need to live in. Buffalo, NY is a good example. The city is among the local governments that have initiated lawsuits against big banks like Citicorp and Wells Fargo and other lenders who have foreclosed on properties or where mortgage holders have walked away, unable to afford their payments.

Buffalo sued in February for $2 million to cover not upkeep which had been neglected but the actual cost of demolishing 57 abandoned properties. 21 had already been torn down. And these are far from the only foreclosed houses standing empty in Buffalo. "It’s our first strike in a wave that would obviously focus on more,” said Alisa A. Lukasiewicz, Buffalo’s corporation counsel.

Demolition is a “lagging indicator” of the housing crisis. Houses can stand abandoned and decaying for a long time before anyone gets around to dealing with them.(or even figuring out who owns them with so many mortgages parceled up into CDOs)

And a lot of what’s been foreclosed on in the hardest hit states—fast growth areas like Florida, California and Nevada—was built relatively recently. And that’s more bad news.

These developments aren’t exactly built to last. Even the ugly but pricey new McMansions you see occupying nine tenths of a lot in wealthier suburbs are crap—nice-looking flooring laid over cheap plywood, paper-thin wood veneer on those pre-made kitchen cabinets, foam-core or hollow doors, drywall keeping the place upright as much as or more than the flimsy 24” o.c. frames.

They aren’t going to last the way old Iowa farmhouses or Philly row houses or even NYC tenements do. With no maintenance, never mind squatters, they’ll crumble fast.

And billions more in real capital will be destroyed, while those who created this mess—the predatory lenders, the executives at the big banks, the money market honchos, and the government economists who hailed it all—will not only make out just fine, but are already waiting to invest and profit when the housing market does finally bottom out.

*And that's not including the losses in value of the CDOs, the collateralized debt obligations whose collapse triggered the credit crisis (no one has any idea how much), or in the bear market in stocks which has resulted from the credit crisis ($2.3 trillion just in the U.S. S&P 100 so far).

Teen Breakthrough, Part 2: "Resistance Bisexuality"

2008-07-24T21:17:00.006-05:00

[This post addresses another positive development on the gender front among teens, not as recent as the erosion of male homophobia I reported on earlier this week, but among girls.]

About 3 years ago, I noticed that girls in the NYC high school where I work were starting to call themselves "bisexual." Lots of them. Wearing rainbow logos on all kind of clothing articles. And it was becoming almost impossible for a guy to upset a girl, or pressure her into sex by calling her a "lesbian," because the term was losing its stigma. (It's still possible for guys to pressure a girl into sex, but one maneuver has been eliminated).

For teenagers, identifying as "bisexual" has often been a step toward acknowledging that they're lesbian or gay, a milestone on the road to coming out. I knew this from the literature and had heard it anecdotally from friends whose teen kids went to more elite schools. But until that point I had seldom heard the term used as a self-identifier by the predominantly Black and Latino working class kids whom I counsel.

The new self-identification, which has also been observed by my friends in other cities who are either teachers or parents of teens, has many sources as well as multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings for the girls who use it. Some of my colleagues see it as a simply a ploy by girls who are basically heterosexual to attract more boys or have more leverage in a relationship ("I don't need you, I can have romance and sex with girls") or to titillate boys with the thought of two girls doing it (and the paradisiacal possibility of joining in). These colleagues say that this new trend, which I've seen affect maybe up to 25% of the girls in a school, doesn't represent any erosion of or challenge to male supremacy.

I think that this view is a bit one-sided. Kids often try out several identities through the teen years; they'll come back in September with a whole new look, self-label ("emo," "ghetto," etc.) and group of friends. So the fact that some girls may later go straight doesn't mean that their bisexual self-classification was simply phony or a ploy. What I pick up is that they're often turned off to men by seeing how women are put down and abused by men, and they're grappling with how to live and have some agency in what is still a "man's world." That's why I like to call this very mixed and contradictory phenomenon not a conscious political act or rebellion, but a kind of "resistance bisexuality."

One girl, for example, said to me in discussing her bisexuality, "I guess I don't like the way I see men treat women, " She had a stepfather who had tried to cop a feel once or twice when he was drunk (and since that hadn't occurred recently, she didn't want to give her mother heartache by telling her about it). She'd seen her mother hit by an earlier boyfriend. She felt more connection and empathy with her female friends, and that led her to explore physical closeness with them. I heard similar statements from other girls who had experienced domestic violence or sexual abuse.

One encouraging by-product of the bisexual self-identification is that it cuts against the widespread "I don't have no females for friends" attitude, which I used to hear all the time from girls: "They act nice, but then they talk about you behind your back and stab you in the back and steal your man." While I'd be the last to minimize how mean girls can still be to each other, the bisexual girls do seem to value their female friendships more highly and are often very conscious about giving each other support.

On the down side, as someone who does conflict resolution, I have to note that this phenomenon creates endless new possibilities for drama. Two female friends find they're attracted to each other but then often they're also attracted to the same boys. So part of the girls' relationship is comparing numbers of suitors and getting jealous if the other girl is getting more male attention, and confusing or toying with a lot of guys--who then get angry and into beefs with each other...

Still, I would hold that the option of claiming bisexuality represents an advance in the deep, ongoing cultural revolution (or, using Gramsci's formulation, "war of position") against male supremacy.

Wikipedia: "Digital Maoism" As Battlefield

2008-07-22T06:54:00.007-05:00

I hope to write a few short things, mainly pretty practical, about the Internet, the Web and the blogosphere in the next week. I do this mainly to think about and address a new "digital divide" I sense arising. (The first and still pre-eminent one, of course, is economic--the haves online, the have-nots cut out). The one I will be commenting on is more along generational and net-savviness lines, with many folks I know shying away, for a variety of reasons, from a lot of the interactive developments collectively called "Web 2.0".

One such development that has seen massive use, even among the Web-shy, is Wikipedia. This collectively produced and edited, free, open source, online encyclopedia has been termed "Digital Maoism"--with some using the term in condemnation (a "hive mind") and some in praise (a vivid example of Mao Zedong's Mass Line as a method for arriving at truth). It has, in any event, become the most used reference work in the world, with over 680,000,000 visitors in the last year.

For all the people who use Wikipedia, the new digital divide I mentioned becomes clearer when one realizes that only about 75,000 people actively produce and refine the content. That's one in 10,000! (With fewer than 10 paid employees, the Wikimedia Foundation has a one to 70 million staff to annual user ratio.)

I want to cite, in praise and as an example of how the thing works, one recent editing job. It is described, in the excerpt below, taken from the blog Liberation Frequency, which I found because they reprinted the nifty article, "The Young & The Leftless" which was also featured at FotM recently.

The whole piece by Brian Van Slyke, "Wikipedia History Wars", talks about Wikipedia's proclaimed underlying principle of "neutrality" and calls it idealist: "Science is not neutral. History is not neutral." I quote below a section of the article relating to revolutionary fighter John Brown, a choice which will not surprise regular readers of Fire on the Mountain.

For instance, I once searched the topic of “slave revolts.” I made my way through the article, and finally came to its discussion on North America. Here’s what it had to say about the abolitionist John Brown:

John Brown had already conducted several massacres of pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, when he decided to lead a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia was not yet a state). This raid was an attempt by a handful of white men to cause a slave revolt in the South. It failed in this attempt; in fact, the first man they killed was a local freed black man.

Obviously, I couldn’t let this stand. Here is what I changed it to:

John Brown had already fought against pro-slavery forces in Kansas for several years when he decided to lead a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia was not yet a state). This raid was a joint attack by former slaves, freed blacks, and white men who had corresponded with slaves on plantations in order to form a general uprising amongst slaves. It almost succeeded, had it not been for Brown’s delay, and hundreds of slaves left their plantations to join Brown’s force - and others left their plantations to join Brown in an escape to the mountains. Eventually, due to a tactical error by Brown, their force was quelled. But directly following this, slave disobedience and runaways sky-rocketed in Virginia.

My change was reverted back to the original, until some re-reverted it to [the] account I had written, and that’s what it has stayed as to this day. Now, it may have helped that my paragraph had a citation and the other did not--even though in many places the first account is often the historical portrait that John Brown is painted in by our textbooks and our national myths.

Teen Breakthrough, Part 1: "I'm Not Racist Against Gays"

2008-07-18T15:40:00.007-05:00

In my workaday world in the NYC public school system, this year's big news was the growing acceptance of and sympathy for gay guys. And because male homosexuality has been, in my experience, so deeply stigmatized among youth, I think this is a tremendous breakthrough. I still don't hear many guys in high school saying flat out, "I am gay," but there's definitely less attempt to deny or repudiate or hide attributes that might brand a young man as gay.

Little things like young men casually mentioning, "My uncle is gay," or an African-American senior who is into fashion design, tends toward the flaming in his manner and shows no romantic interest in girls being elected a class officer. Or a young man saying to a female classmate who called him "fa--ot" in an argument: "Well, I don't appreciate that because you must not think too much of gay people, and my brother is gay. " In the past, the likely response would have been to hurl back an insult, and the main concern would have been to assert his own straightness in front of the peer audience. But now, he takes the offensive and critiques heterosexism!

Another example that impressed me occurred in the context of a school art project for which students chose the theme of taboos. There was a fair amount of art about gay/lesbian relationships, but one of the most intriguing paintings showed what looked like a man in his twenties and a man in his sixties embracing, The young Latino artist, who as far as I know is straight, definitely wanted to provoke reactions and sought out feedback. It really blew me away that he was challenging two stigmas by portraying, in a compassionate way, both gay male sexuality, and the need of older people to express their sexuality (which is often is often a big yuck factor for teens!).

At the same time, teens, like all of us, have contradictory consciousness and they still come up with some disturbing anti-gay practices. One glaring example is the custom of saying "That's gay" when they think something is stupid or silly. I often will challenge this by asking, "How would you like it if when I thought something was stupid, I said 'That's so Dominican' or 'That's so Black'?" Many students will reply, "It's just a saying," "It doesn't mean anything" and vehemently assure me that they get along with gay classmates or friends or relatives, etc.

One young man listened thoughtfully and replied, "No, Miss, I'm not racist against gay people." I really dig this phrasing, because it reflects the reality of racism as the primary form of oppression and put-down that he is experiences and sees in the world. And I'm encouraged that many teens are becoming less racist against gay people.

[Next up, Part 2: Resistance Bisexuality]

Attack On Iran On The Way? Uh, Maybe Not...

2008-07-16T15:24:00.005-05:00

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Dennis O'Neil
[Originally posted at Znet]
[UPDATED, with some corrections based on information received from poligirl in an interesting discussion that developed when this was crossposted at Daily Kos.]

Once again, there's a lot of serious attack-on-Iran talk going around. We've both been following this, admittedly with no deep expertise, for several years now. During that time a number of media/blogosphere storms declaring such an attack imminent have whirled up and then blown away. (Of course, we oughtn't to forget that in the old children's story, the wolf eventually does come and eat the shepherd boy who produced the false alarms.) So we decided to sketch out these few points.

1. No matter how much Bush and his coterie may want it, we give no more than 10% odds on an attack actually taking place, and that's mainly just covering ourselves.

2. The furor is not a calculated bluff by the administration to put pressure on Iran. Neither is it a planned distraction to weaken opposition to the continued occupation of Iraq. It's the public face of a tense struggle within US ruling circles, concentrated in the state apparatus. Among those pushing for an attack are Bush, who is looking for the Hail Mary pass that will redeem his presidency in the history books; Cheney and the neocons and open advocates of empire, who are certain that the US can by force of will and arms dominate the world; a minority in the Armed Forces, mostly notably in the Air Force which hasn't been permitted to get their lethal jollies in the region; and the Israel lobby people, fronting for ruling class forces there who want to crush anything that might end Israel's regional monopoly on nukes.

Arrayed against an assault on Iran are a whole range of powerful forces in the US and throughout the world. Articles like the well-publicized Seymour Hersh pieces in the New Yorker recently are salvos in that battle. We identify a few more below.

3. First and foremost, it is the majority in the military high command that is blocking any attack on Iran--as they have, unswervingly, for the last four years. They know full well that even an assault as limited as air bombardment of "suspected nuclear sites" would put US land and naval forces in the region in an untenable position, and they are nervous about the longer term damage it would do to US power, "soft" as well as military.

Just look at three key developments in the last weeks, hardly coincidences as the pounding of the war drums by attack advocates in and outside the administration supporters grew louder.

First, the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth issued On Point II, the second volume in its ongoing history of the Iraq war--which focuses the lack of a follow-up plan for after the capture of Baghdad and victory over the regular Iraqi armed forces:

The army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better Phase IV planning and preparations through its voice on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.

This was intended to underline the fact that there is no post-attack plan for Iran, nor any feasible way to develop one, to say nothing of the absence of a plan to deal with likely blowback in other parts of the region--the preparation hasn't happened and the horses just aren't there.

Second, to follow up, the Pentagon released a report on how things are going in Afghanistan, "its first assessment of conditions in Afghanistan since the invasion began in 2001" according to the Wall Street Journal. In short: Armed attacks up, US fatalities up, narcotics production up, corruption up, Taliban influence up, stability down, and worse to come.

Third, to cap it off, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen announced at a Pentagon press gathering that the US is currently in danger of losing in Afghanistan because there aren't enough troops:

I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq. Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there.

Regarding Iran, Mullen added, evidently for those too dim to draw the obvious conclusion:

Opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful for us. This is a very unstable part of the world, and I don't need it to be more unstable.

Nor is this view limited to the Armed Forces' uniformed commanders. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates late last year spoke to the Democratic caucus in the Senate. In his remarks, as reported by Hersh,

Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preemptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, "We'll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America." Gates' comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates' answer, the senator told me, was "Let's just say that I'm here speaking for myself."

4. The most valuable political ally the pro-attack faction has, despite Gates' warning, is the national Democratic Party. Congress voted $400 million earlier this year to fund and operationalize a secret "Presidential Finding" signed by Bush. This Finding steps up incursions into Iran by CIA and elite military units and the passing of arms and intelligence to extremely sketchy "opposition" forces within Iran. The Democrats went right along with this transparently provocative effort to create an incident inside Iran which could be exploited as a casus belli.

Now before Congress we have House Resolution 362, which 102 House Democrats have joined 117 Republicans in sponsoring. More aqgressive than its similar, but milder sib, Senate Resolution 580--introduced by Evan Bayh (Dem, IN)--it demands that Bush take steps "inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran." The basic idea of this non-binding resolution is that the US will take advantage of Iran's refinery shortage by stopping the flow of much-needed gasoline into the oil-producing country.

Despite a clause stating that the bills do not authorize military action, the fact is that no such blockade of shipping into and out of Iran could be conducted without force. To initiate a blockade without UN approval would be a declaration of war against Iran (and an act of aggression against any country peacefully trading with Iran).

Driven primarily by the politics of posing (The Democrats: Tough on Towelheads!) and placating (HR 362 and SR 580 are among AIPAC's top legislative priorities according to the Zionist lobbying group's website), the bills are actually very dangerous in two ways. First, they continue the ongoing demonization of Islam and of Iran and its people, and promote the idea that the US has the right to intervene wherever it wants on any pretext. To do this at a time when the invasion of Iraq has made the US population very wary of rhetoric about why "we" need to go to war is unforgivable.

Second, should Bush & Co. actually manage to conjure up a convincing Gulf of Tonkin-type incident, they could point to this resolution to justify starting an armed blockade--and a war!

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, incidentally, blusters of Iran that the military option "is on the table" and that he will meet Iranian leaders only on his timetable and "if and only if it can advance the interest of the United States." He has not yet announced what he intends to do about SR 580, which, like HR 362, may well pass the Democratic-controlled Congress in the relatively near future.

5. Overall, the signs indicate that the majority of the US ruling class really does not want an attack on Iran. One clear indication came with the release last fall of the National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus opinion of more than a dozen US intelligence agencies (some part of the Armed Forces, others, like the CIA, not), that Iran did not even have an active nuclear weapons program!

After being rolled by the Bushies in the Iraq WMD fiasco, these crucial institutions of capitalist rule are eager to prove their position "above politics" and their worth to their masters.

It is true that the US imperialists are already in a deep, deep hole in Iraq, with no good options--they can't afford to stay (the growing budget deficit, the lack of troops, popular opposition to the occupation) and they believe that they cannot afford to leave (the damage to US interests and prestige, all that lovely petroleum). But at least most of them recognize the folk wisdom that when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

To concentrate their minds, we have crude oil climbing to $145+ a barrel. Economists at major imperialist institutions globally, public and private, are warning of catastrophic outcomes if the trend continues. "Two-hundred-dollar oil would break the back of the global economy," is the blunt estimate of Deutsche Bank AG's chief energy economist Adam Sieminski. Is it possible to imagine a major assault on Iran that wouldn't drive oil prices much higher than that for an indefinite period?

6. Despite chit-chat by pundits, there is no easy way for the administration to finesse these contradictions by having Israel undertake the attack. Even under the extremely questionable assumption that the Israeli Defense Forces (a) have the capacity to devastate what is claimed to be the very dispersed and hardened Iranian nuclear program without US participation and, (b) feel like going it alone in the teeth of international law and world public opinion, one brutal geographic fact stands in the way. Any IDF air and missile assault on Iran would have to pass through Iraqi airspace, which is controlled by the US occupation, and would constitute a US-approved and sponsored attack. Further, the al-Maliki regime in Iraq would have to denounce it as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and turn hard against their own US sponsors or fall in the face of Shiite rage.

So what do we do? Journalists like Hersh are yelling like their hair is on fire, trying to forestall the attacks they predict. Activist experts like Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy work tirelessly to focus the attention of the left liberal blogosphere on Iran and promote options for negotiation. US Labor Against the War and others have called for a massive phone-in directed at Congress. The country's largest anti-war coalition, United For Peace & Justice, has called for protest actions on July 19-21.

Though skeptical of the likelihood of an attack, we strongly support all of these initiatives. Still, the most important thing for us to be doing at this time is to continue building an independent movement focused on ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on winning the 70% of our fellow Americans who are against the Iraq war to act against the war. The stronger that movement is, the more it serves to forestall further imperialist ventures in Iran or elsewhere. Check out the Iraq Moratorium.

And this holds true even if the two of us should prove wrong. An actual attack would mean that even the implacable opposition of the high command and deep concern in the ranks of the powers that be are not enough to forestall a spectacularly unpopular lame duck administration from launching a whole new war in its death throes. Supposing our gritty but fatigued anti-war movement could shift gears to make Iran its main focus, how much more weight would that throw on the scales? They know what we think already.

We have to continue to build on our strengths, to expand the movement and draw in the tens of millions we have helped persuade, over the last half decade, that the occupation is a slow-motion train wreck causing catastrophic destruction in Iraq and irreparable harm to our own country.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the executive editor of www.blackcommentator.com and a co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal. Dennis O'Neil is on the national coordinating body of the Iraq Moratorium.