Rational Manifesto

MSNBC's Flawed Coverage of Libya, Economy

2011-06-05T18:16:00.002-04:00

Stephen Maher and Michael Corcoran

The channel, viewed by far as the most progressive on cable television, keeps its critiques well within the narrow framework of "acceptable" discourse in the corporate media.

When US bombs began to drop on Libya last month, representing the start of the third simultaneous US war (not including covert wars being waged by US Special Forces and the CIA in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere), it was not surprising to see the media jump into a pro-war frenzy, as it so often does. One might hope, however, that perhaps MSNBC - on the liberal side of acceptable discourse in US cable media - would at least offer significant skepticism toward another expensive and bloody US war. This is especially true given that 74 percent of the US population opposed US intervention.

A close look, however, reveals the opposite is true. MSNBC, whose hosts align themselves closely with Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, has been perhaps the most hawkish station on cable news. Literally every single one of the channel's nighttime hosts (Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews,Lawrence O'Donnell and Cenk Uygur) has failed to oppose the war (the morning hours are hosted by Joe Scarborough, a reliable conservative). In many instances, they have vigorously supported the war, or at the least, have deflected criticism away from Obama and the Democrats. In fact, MSNBC has arguably defended President Obama's war policies with nearly the same vigor as their Fox News competitors did with President George W. Bush, when he pushed the US into Iraq in 2003. MSNBC's coverage of the intervention in Libya shows one of the great flaws of even the most critical corporate media in the United States. Such limitations do a great disservice to the prospects of a much-needed class-based movement. And given that a recent poll done byAlternet showed how influential MSNBC is - Maddow was overwhelmingly voted as the most influential progressive, and a number of other current or former MSNBC hosts were in the top 20 - it is important that the limits of MSNBC's independence and criticism be well understood.

A Pro-War Agenda

"The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC, probably viewed as the most liberal show on television, provided arguably the most disappointing example of MSNBC's support for the war and used the war in Libya as a chance to provide further praise to Obama. Maddow observed that Obama, like Bush, was invading a Middle Eastern nation. But by initiating the attack without so much as a press conference to the American people, she argued, he was avoiding the "chest thumping" of previous administrations in an effort to "change the narrative" of US foreign policy. Obama's decision, she said in a March 21 broadcast, "to forego the chest-thumping commander-in-chief theater that goes with military intervention of any kind, that in itself is a fascinating and rather blunt demonstration of just how much this presidency is not like that of George W. Bush." This was a rather absurd position: Maddow is literally celebrating Obama's brand of US imperialism because it is hidden from the public and carried out in a way that makes state violence more palatable to the world.

At least Maddow tried to make a point beyond platitudes, which cannot be said for Ed Schultz. In an interview with Jeremy Scahill, Schultz literally uttered phrases such as "Gadaffi is a terrorist ... Obama said he has killed US troops - that that is all I need to hear." In fact, Schultz refused to directly engage in any of the points Scahill made and simply responded each time with hyperbolic platitudes about "freedom"' and "trusting the president." Despite Schultz's claims that this "is not Bush talk," it clearly is very similar to the "debates" pro-war advocates were having in the media in 2002-03 leading up to Iraq.

As noted above, the rest of MSNBC's liberal hosts have been doing almost anything besides criticizing the war, or the president. Chris Matthews criticized Obama for not being hawkish enough at the outset of the unrest in Libya. Lawrence O'Donnell, host of "The Last Word," did find some moral outrage within him, but it was all targeted at the Republicans, when he, wrongly, argued that a March 1 resolution calling for Qaddafi to step down negated the need for Congressional approval. (Of course, the extent to which it is accurate or fair to call O'Donnell or Matthews "liberal," even within the typical corporate media framework, is very much up for debate.) This example shows the primary function of the channel; it is not to challenge power, but rather to defend one arm of power: the Democratic Party. In this case, O'Donnell did not bother to seriously examine Obama's decision to lead the nation into an expensive military campaign without vital national debate or a Congressional vote, but simply deflected the issue on to the GOP.

This was also evident in the channel's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the case of Iraq, MSNBC was one of the chief culprits that celebrated the "end" of the war in Iraq, failing to recognize that more than 100,000 contractors, tens of thousands of US troops and permanent military bases remain. And when Maddow went to Afghanistan, she painted the US counterinsurgency strategy as a noble, if tactically difficult, endeavor. She made no major critique of the morality of the war, which has now been going on a decade, calling the mission "constructive, not destructive." In short, MSNBC has arguably been as pro-war as any channel in US cable since Obama was elected president.

Giving Obama a Pass on the Economy

MSNBC's emphasis on defending the policies of one of the ruling, corporate-backed political parties in the US political system is the rule, not the exception. Many examples of such coverage exist beyond foreign policy. In the case of Obama's economic policies and specifically his negotiations with Republicans, the channel has shown a remarkable ability to pretend Obama has not played a role in extending tax cuts for the rich - breaking a key campaign promise - or in contributing to the fetishization of budget cuts that now permeates Washington, DC.

Consider Obama's recent speech about budget priorities. While Obama did indeed engage in some glowing rhetoric about the importance of social programs, the real policy he proposed was to cut $2 in spending for government services, for every $1 in tax increases (while, as Jon Stewart pointed out, in true Orwellian fashion. Obama called tax increases "spending reductions in the tax code"). Bear in mind, this is his starting position; he is sure to concede more when he actually negotiates with the GOP. And yet, MSNBC acted as if Obama had finally found his progressive soul.

Maddow said the president's speech confirmed Obama's progressive values and ought to keep his base happy. Ed Shultz said the speech "could be a real game changer." "President Obama's full-throated defense of liberalism was in full steam today," Shultz said. "The president gave new life to the progressive values that I think made this country great. And instead of being on the defensive, the president went on offense today and described the Republican vision of America for what it is."

This is remarkably naive. Despite Obama's pledge to protect the social safety net, he has made it clear his plan is really about austerity measures. He concedes that Social Security and Medicare are on the table. Further, he is not making the case for any kind of Keynesian stimulus package or jobs program (as he did in early 2009), the traditional social democratic approach to financial crises, and is actually advancing the conservative economic solutions, such as austerity measures. As the Nation magazine said in an editorial, "The president's vision of 'shared sacrifice,' ... hits the poor and the middle class hardest," while "wealthy Americans and the military are asked to sacrifice less, even though it was unfunded tax cuts and wars that got us a deficit in the first place."

Purportedly Liberal Media Serving Dominant Ideology

The famous French philosopher Louis Althusser once described the way private entities - schools, the church, labor unions and, of course, the media - serve as "Ideological State Apparatuses" reinforcing state ideology. In the US, such ideology includes the idea that capitalism is the natural order of things, and that US intentions abroad are noble and selfless. MSNBC, despite its reputation as a critical, "liberal" voice of dissent, actually serves this function precisely. MSNBC hosts are indeed rightly critical of GOP failings and the excesses of the Tea Party, to give two examples. But they fail to challenge any of the major tenets of US ideology and, thus, serve to reinforce these tenets. The class war that is waged on workers by elites - who own MSNBC - is never mentioned. There is also virtually no discussion of the inherent flaws of having a two-party system dominated by corporate money represent the full spectrum of political choice in a "democracy." In fact, the channel in many cases serves to perpetuate the narrow debate inherent in the two-party system, ignoring class issues and effectively acting as a communications arm for one elite political party.

In some ways, the limits of MSNBC reflect an even further problem: the limits of contemporary liberalism as a whole, Chris Hedges most recent book, "Death of the Liberal Class," argues liberalism as a force for change and justice is dying. Liberal institutions, he argues, have become "useless and despised appendage[s] of corporate power." The "greatest sin" of the liberal class is "its enthusiastic collusion with the power elite" in silencing, banning and blacklisting "rebels, iconoclasts, communists, socialists, anarchists, radical union leaders and pacifists." Hope, argues Hedges, can only be found in a "return to the language of class conflict and rebellion."

Hedges' analysis is fitting in the context of MSNBC. A recent interview between Maddow and Dean Baker over local budget cuts was telling. When Baker was sharply critical of Obama ("Republicans are playing against no opposition"), Maddow quickly came to the president's defense, arguing that there was little the president could do, since many cuts were coming from the state level. This is a common refrain among MSNBC's "liberals," who often argue that Obama wants so badly to have progressive change, but is shackled by Congress, the system, and so on. At the end of the interview, she added that Democrats on the state level might fight the good fight on the issue, rather than Obama. This, in a nutshell, sums up the tragic limits of the corporate-owned "liberal" media. The solution is always to see what the Democratic Party can do. There is never any talk of movement building; it is always about why all change must come from above, through a corrupted political party.

While there is no doubt that MSNBC hosts do engage in some quality work and that Maddow is preferable to the likes of Tucker Carlson, who used to occupy her 9 PM time slot. But the channel is, at its root, a profit-seeking enterprise for corporate America, and beyond that, is tightly connected to a major power center, the Democratic Party, which needs to be challenged. The left should look more to the likes of Amy Goodman, the Real News Network, and other independent left-wing outlets, which do indeed challenge these power centers, for analyses of society that rightly seek out the root causes of problems and recognize the need for class consciousness, not merely partisan cheerleading. Such outlets provide voices to the voiceless and seriously examine the problems inherent within capitalism and within our broken democracy, which is corrupted by corporate power. It is also vital that more activists, journalists and editors create more independent media outlets, which serve as the main defense against the all-too-narrow presentations of reality created by corporate-owned media, such as MSNBC.

MSNBC's recent coverage of Libya and the economy show clear-cut examples of the failure of corporate-owned so-called "progressive" media. It also further demonstrates the need for those concerned with social justice to look beyond liberalism and the Democratic Party and fight - as a united working class - for change outside of these corrupted institutions, including MSNBC.

The Myth of U.S. Humanitarian Intervention in Libya

2011-05-26T17:53:00.002-04:00

Stephen Maher and Michael Corcoran

Originally published by the ISR

THE MYTH of humanitarian intervention has once again surfaced as the key justification for Western imperial adventurism. This time, Libya has been targeted by the United States and France for a bombing campaign that is alleged to be primarily about “protecting” the people of Libya, who joined others in the “Arab Spring” in demanding freedom from a ruthless dictator.

As this so-called humanitarian intervention takes place, the United States continues its support for the brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrations in states allied with the United States, such as Bahrain and Yemen. This clearly demonstrates the brazen level of hypocrisy of the U.S. position and illustrates just how concerned U.S. state managers are with human rights. Clear geopolitical motives for the intervention in Libya, as well as the suppression in Yemen and Bahrain, show the true purpose of the U.S. policy: to maximize its control of a vital, resource-rich region while hiding its true intentions, as always, behind the veil of benevolent intentions. This has been made possible, in part, because the media has worked to spread the party line of U.S. humanitarian intervention and benevolent intentions, serving as what the neo-Marxist writer Louis Althusser referred to as an “Ideological State Apparatus” (ISA).1

This article seeks to dismantle the arguments made by apologists for U.S. imperialism in Libya by examining the true nature of U.S. foreign policy and its concern (or lack thereof) for human rights, the illegality of the Libyan invasion through the lens of both domestic and international law, and by demonstrating how corporate media complicity has helped to sell this narrative, serving, as always, as an arm of official ideology.

Humanitarian intervention as imperial ideology

The ideological nature of much of the debate over the intervention is painfully clear, even among critics. “At the end of the day,” writes Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, who sits at the dovish extreme of the permitted spectrum, “the Libyan intervention is more than anything about the role of the United States in the world,” and “the United States cannot and should not intervene in every internal dispute where bad or even evil is on display.”2 On the surface, Haass is correct, of course; no one would suggest the United States intervene in every country in which it saw “bad or even evil.” Yet his statement is actually a manifestation of state ideology: the United States either acts in the name of good (to stop “bad or even evil”) or it does not act at all. The idea of the United States itself committing “evil” is not a possible category, it is outside the bounds of “thinkable thought” to borrow Noam Chomsky’s phrase.3 Haass’s evaluation reveals his uncritical acceptance of this principle, and thus his fitness to serve at the head of a respectable and important ideological institution. Yet the full support the United States has lent to the violent crackdown on protests in Yemen, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia—not to mention Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians—reveals that U.S. policy lacks the moral quality Haass and others inherently ascribe to it.

This is not the first time that a U.S. president has justified intervention on the basis of supposed humanitarian imperatives. The most noted example in U.S. history is President Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. Though he claimed at the time—much like Obama—that such an intervention was necessary to prevent the massacre of civilians, “uncontroversially, the vast crimes took place after the bombing began: they were not a cause but—it is hard to deny—a consequence.”4 In a book strongly endorsed by Clinton’s deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott (who worked closely on the intervention), John Norris writes, “It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform—not the plight of Kosovar Albanians—that best explains NATO’s war.”5 When one takes notice of simultaneous U.S. support for Indonesia’s genocidal occupation of East Timor,6 as well as its support for Turkey’s horrific ethnic cleansing of its Kurdish population,7 this conclusion becomes even harder to avoid.

Those who wish to understand the world around them must shrug off the yoke of ideology and examine matters for what they are. What is most striking about the demands of the recent revolutionary uprisings across the Middle East is that they are overwhelmingly secular, universal demands for freedom, human rights, and economic justice; not fanatical cries to impose a supreme leader, nor fundamentalist calls to holy warfare. Despite official rhetoric of humanitarian intervention and “promoting freedom,” the United States is struggling to repress the revolutionary awakening. Though the popular uprisings have largely been free of anti-imperialist slogans, the challenge they pose to U.S. client regimes through which imperial power is projected into the Middle East, the chief oil producing and most strategically important region of the world, is very real.

The independence that would result from the liberation from dictatorship and oppression demanded by the region’s people is the dialectical opposite of U.S. control: more power for the masses means less control for the United States. This explains the management of the region through a network of client dictatorships, overseen and stabilized by Israeli nuclear hegemony. It is a system enforced by an expansive disciplinary apparatus of interlocking state coercion, which relies on terror to maintain order; if it does not respond when tested, it loses all effectiveness. In recent months, we have seen masses of people across the Middle East challenging that coercive mechanism, which is none other than empire itself—and it has responded. It should go without saying that such a system of raw power and domination does not take account of “humanitarian concerns.”

In reality, this imperial system was constructed to ensure continued U.S. control of the Middle East’s energy resources, particularly the vast Saudi reserves, deemed “the greatest material prize in history” by the U.S. State Department.8 In pursuing this objective, the United States strengthens the regimes it controls—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, and so on—while threatening and attacking those that oppose its objectives—Iran, Syria, and Libya. Human beings only matter insofar as they get in the way. This poses a simple rejoinder to Mr. Haass: the easiest way for the United States to put an end to “bad or even evil” in the world (in Haass’s sense of “infringements on human rights”) is to stop carrying it out.

Expanding empire, repressing opposition

As the brutal repression of recent uprisings makes clear, the main purpose of growing U.S. military assistance programs to Yemen and Bahrain (Obama increased military assistance to Yemen from $67 million in 2009 to $150 million in 2010) is to repress “their people,” and maintain the U.S.-prescribed regional order.9 The violent crackdown against protesters in Bahrain has included tactics such as a 3:00 a.m. attack by hundreds of riot police on unarmed sleeping protesters, “including families and children,” supported by tear gas and live ammunition fired from U.S.-manufactured Apache helicopters.10 Doctors trying to help the hundreds of wounded and dying were savagely beaten, one example of what Human Rights Watch has called “a troubling pattern of security forces preventing medical staff from providing urgent care to wounded protesters and assaulting doctors and paramedics dispatched to provide treatment to the injured.”11 Though the U.S. government has issued muted public statements deploring the violence, full American support for the repression has continued.12

Bahrain is an important and close U.S. ally, housing the Fifth Fleet of the U.S. Navy, and is located adjacent to Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, which contains the majority of Saudi oil reserves.13 Ominously for Washington, there are some signs of rebellion spreading to the Saudi Kingdom, including protests in the Eastern Province.14 Such a threat is not likely to be taken lightly.

While the United States intervenes directly in Libya on behalf of armed rebels, it authorized Saudi Arabia’s deployment of its U.S.-supplied military to Bahrain to support the brutal crackdown on nonviolent demonstrations there, which arrived just days after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had visited the island.15 Far from being faced with sanctions and bombardment for its repressive role not just within its own borders, but elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia has received substantial American support for its longstanding imperial service, including the largest arms sale in U.S. history—$60 billion—in October 2010.16

Massive protests in Yemen, another strategically located U.S. client, have likewise been suppressed with ferocious violence. U.S.-armed paramilitaries attacked students staging a sit-in at Sanaa University, and, backed by U.S.-made tanks, have gunned down unarmed demonstrators in the streets.17 One such attack recently killed fifty-two people and wounded hundreds, and was followed by the enactment of an emergency law that “effectively suspends the constitution.”18 The government crackdown reached such levels of brutality that several military leaders defected and joined the protesters, yet Obama has not announced his support for their cause nor called on President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down, and “U.S. special forces continue to operate across the country in support of the government.”19 Hollow, tepid condemnations of the wave of violence Saleh has released on the demonstrators by the White House Press Secretary20 have been carefully balanced by Robert Gates’s reminders that the United States has vital interests in Yemen,21 and have so far not been followed by action. Despite support for such crimes by allied regimes, the Washington establishment is still able to push the narrative that it is acting primarily, and selflessly, in the interest of human rights in Libya.

U.S. backing of Israel’s barbaric, monthlong slaughter of half-starved, defenseless Palestinians in Gaza in 2009, including widespread use of U.S.-manufactured white phosphorous against civilians likewise reveals the true role played by “humanitarian concerns” in U.S. foreign policy.22 Rather than sanction Israel or intervene militarily to safeguard the rights of Palestinians, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution at the height of the massacre expressing its support for the attack, while the Bush administration blocked international efforts to reach a cease-fire. The Obama administration has worked tirelessly to discredit those documenting the crimes,23 and remains the chief supporter of Israeli strangulation of Gaza, causing a severe humanitarian crisis, including a “complete economic collapse” and “a substantial drop in the availability of necessities” such as food, clean water, and medicine.24

Through intervention in Libya, the United States reifies the illusion that it is siding with the popular rebellions throughout the region, even as it is the most powerful force working to crush them. While it arms the despots the masses seek to overthrow, it focuses attention on its supposedly noble humanitarian defense of Libyans from the brutal dictatorship of Muammar Qaddafi.25 No doubt the decision to intervene was helped by the Benghazi shadow government’s indication that if in power, it would adopt positions favorable to Western interests, which has already won it French recognition.26 Further, many of the Benghazi opposition leaders are former prominent Qaddafi regime officials27 (in addition to a possible CIA operative),28 who it is difficult to believe have suddenly become pro-democracy activists. Apart from public statements, there is little reason to think that empowering the Benghazi regime will lead to any substantial change in Libya whatsoever—aside from the country’s geopolitical alignment, as it would then be under U.S. control. What is clear is that the U.S. establishment knows little about the opposition (it has even been suggested that it includes members of “al-Qaeda”),29 and probably does not care; it simply wants to empower those who support its interests and enhance its geopolitical dominance.

With the region in a state of unprecedented revolutionary upheaval, including ongoing uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt—both of which border Libya—intervention against Qaddafi was designed to capitalize on the circumstances and enhance U.S. dominance. As ongoing military catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthen the perception of the United States as an overstretched empire in decline, by attacking Libya the United States also seeks to reestablish the “credibility” of its “military deterrent”—in other words, ensure that the world is still too terrified of the response to risk challenging U.S. dictates. Obama’s bellicose rhetoric is intended to send a clear message and reinforce the cardinal principle of U.S. foreign policy: as George H. W. Bush put it in 1991, “What we say goes.”30 Retribution is swift and total for those who refuse to comply.

There is also a dangerous message that will greatly weaken future international nonproliferation efforts: had Libya kept its nuclear and chemical arsenal instead of “voluntarily” renouncing all WMDs in 2003, the regime would have been able to deter the attack, as would have Iraq in the case of the 2003 U.S. invasion.31 North Korea, on the other hand, appears safe from such intervention.

Protecting civilians: “A non-negotiable ultimatum”

Whatever complex geopolitical motivations exist for yet another Western bombing campaign in the Middle East, what is perfectly clear is that by engaging in this undeclared war, President Barack Obama has violated domestic law and has engaged in a radical expansion of executive power.

While Obama did attempt to justify the war by using the 1973 War Powers Act, the action clearly goes beyond the scope of the law.32 The War Powers Act does indeed allow for the president to use military force for sixty days (with a possible thirty-day extension) in the case of a “national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” This was clearly not the case with the conflict in Libya, which posed no threat to the United States or its neighbors, and essentially constituted a civil war. While there is clearly no doubt that Qaddafi has lost the support of much of the population of Libya due to his many abuses, this in no way enables a U.S. president to start a war without approval from Congress.

“In taking the country into a war with Libya, Barack Obama’s administration is breaking new ground in its construction of an imperial presidency—an executive who increasingly acts independently of Congress at home and abroad,” wrote Bruce Ackerman in Foreign Policy magazine, a journal run by the Carnegie Institute. “He was elected in reaction to the unilateralist assertions of John Yoo and other apologists for George W. Bush-era illegalities. Yet he is now moving onto ground that even Bush did not occupy…putting Bush-era talk into action in Libya—without congressional authorization.”33

That an elite publication would voice such a view is telling (although in the mainstream media, only Representative Dennis Kucinich has been allowed to articulate this argument, calling Obama’s action without congressional authorization an “impeachable offense”)34 and illustrates how unambiguously illegal Obama’s war in Libya is. This did not stop Obama from laying out an incredibly flawed justification for the endeavor, perhaps most ludicrously declaring in a February 25 letter to House Speaker John Boehner that Libya constituted “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”35 With few exceptions, members of Congress seemed to uncritically accept that an imperial president had effectively usurped the war-making powers of the legislature. Even Speaker Boehner, one of Obama’s chief political opponents, would only encourage Obama to “do a better job of briefing members of Congress,” but made no mention of a vote of authorization.36

The intervention violates international law as well. The United Nations Security Council did authorize all necessary actions “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” But, as former head of the National Lawyers Guild Marjorie Cohn noted, the attack “exceeds the bounds” of this authorization.” All necessary measures “should first have been peaceful measures to settle the conflict. But peaceful means were not exhausted before Obama began bombing Libya,” Cohn wrote.37

Indeed, Chapter I of the UN Charter forbids the “threat or use of force” in international relations.38 Though the resolution was passed under Chapter VII, which allows the Security Council to take action that “may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security,” provisions demanding a determination that all measures short of force are exhausted before resorting to intervention were clearly not satisfied.39 Moreover, even if we leave aside the language in the resolution calling for a peaceful settlement and assume the intervention is authorized by the Security Council, a UNSC resolution is not a blank check to violate these fundamental principles of the UN Charter: article 24 mandates that the Security Council “shall act in accordance with the Principles and Purposes of the United Nations.”40

Neither the Security Council resolution nor the UN Charter could be interpreted to authorize regime change, yet Obama boldly announced, “It is U.S. policy that Qaddafi needs to go.”41 Obama seemed to hedge a bit when he added that, “when it comes to our military action, we are doing so in support of United Nations Security Council resolution 1973 that specifically talks about humanitarian efforts, and we are going to make sure that we stick to that mandate.”42 This argument also forms the basis for the White House legal strategy to work around the need for congressional authorization by claiming, as White House Middle East advisor Dennis Ross did, that the attack constitutes a “limited humanitarian intervention, not war.”43

But clearly, the United States is looking to oust Qaddafi through one lawless method or another. “When the mission was launched, it was largely seen as having a limited, humanitarian agenda: to keep Colonel Qaddafi from attacking his own people,” claimed a New York Times article from March 29. “But the White House, the Pentagon and their European allies have given it the most expansive possible interpretation, amounting to an all-out assault on Libya’s military.” The article notes that while the “Obama administration has been reluctant to call the operation an actual war,” American involvement “is far deeper than discussed in public and more instrumental to the fight than was previously known.”44 There are also new reports of CIA agents on the ground in Libya, despite Obama’s proclamations that there would be no ground troops in the country, and the UN resolution’s express prohibition on such a presence.45

Likewise, reasonable alternatives to intervention that fall short of regime change have been ignored, revealing the true motivation for the attack. A political “Roadmap” passed by the African Union on March 25 calling for an end to the bombing and immediate negotiations between the opposition and the government was agreed to by the Qaddafi regime, but has been ignored by Washington.46 And Congress, with limited exceptions, has expressed support for this policy. The always hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut also vigorously promoted illegal regime change, telling CNN that “Once the president of the United States says, as President [Barack] Obama did, that Qaddafi must go, if we don’t work with our allies to make sure Qaddafi does go, America’s credibility and prestige suffers all over the world.”47 Despite the fact that Al Jazeera and others reported before the bombing that the Libyan leader “was looking for an agreement allowing him to step down,” the bombing was initiated anyway, showing that the West was not even considering a peaceful resolution to the situation.48 The United States never even acknowledged such reports, and Obama defiantly declared that the dictator faced a “non-negotiable ultimatum.”49

Corporate media as “Ideological State Apparatus”

The U.S. mainstream media has predictably served to advance the U.S. narrative, accepting the war as a just act of benevolence by the United States, which is selflessly working to save the lives of Libyan civilians. This is predictable: the media in a capitalist country largely serves as what Louis Althusser called an “Ideological State Apparatus,” accepting and spreading the ideological doctrines of the state.

Perhaps The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, largely viewed to be the extreme left of the editorial shows on cable television, provided the most glaring example of the way state ideology pervades the media. Maddow observed that Obama, like Bush, was invading a Middle Eastern nation. But by initiating the attack without so much as a press conference to the American people, she argued, he was avoiding the “chest-thumping” of previous administrations in an effort to “change the narrative” of U.S. foreign policy.

Obama’s decision, she said in a March 21 broadcast, “to forego the chest-thumping commander-in-chief theater that goes with military intervention of any kind, that in itself is a fascinating and rather blunt demonstration of just how much this presidency is not like that of George W. Bush.”50

This pathetic display reveals precisely the way the media function as an ISA. As the media’s best known “liberals” celebrate U.S. imperialism because it is hidden from the public, and carried out in a way that makes state violence more palatable, we see the extremely narrow parameters of debate. Liberal journals, such as the Nation, followed suit. The magazine published a piece by Professor Juan Cole, titled “An open letter to the left on Libya,” in which he argued that “If we just don’t care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren’t people of the Left”—implying that the only reason one could oppose the intervention is “not caring” about the Libyan people.51 It is simply assumed by “serious” mainstream outlets that the war is noble. Debate is encouraged within these narrow boundaries, which gives official propaganda a system-reinforcing character.52

Obama’s role in starting a third U.S. war in the Middle East also seems to indicate the extent of his commitment to militarism, and shows a major similarity with President George W. Bush. Yet, the media has scrambled to portray this as a different kind of war, a “liberal war,” as Russ Douthat described it in a New York Times op-ed. “In its month-long crab walk toward a military confrontation with Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi, the Obama administration has delivered a clinic in the liberal way of war,” he wrote. The rebranding of imperialism and militarism under Obama has indeed proven to be effective.

Indeed, the Times op-ed page serves as an especially effective ideological tool for the state. In fourteen op-eds and two editorials written about Libya from March 14 to 28, only two could be described as offering anything resembling opposition to the war. One was a piece by Bob Herbert, who condemned “pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war…while simultaneously demolishing school budgets.”53 The other was by Thomas Friedman, who expressed his desire to support what he considers a noble mission in Libya, but admits, “Sadly, we cannot afford it.”54 Clearly, even these criticisms are within the “bounds of the expressible” laid out by the ideological system—assuming that our motives in Libya are virtuous, but arguing that our commitment to justice must be tempered by other pressing needs.55 The more typical op-eds run by the paper of record were similar to that of Nicholas Kristof, whose “Hugs from Libyans” told stories of Libyan “Thank you rallies” in honor of the U.S. war.56

Few corporate outlets dared mention the heights of U.S. hypocrisy or the excessive cost of the operation—estimated at $2 billion a day, according to Forbes—just as the government seeks to make cuts to vital programs like Medicare and Social Security.57 These costs may explain why, despite the near unanimity of the media in favor of the intervention, 63 percent of those polled by the Pew Research Center did not think the United States had a responsibility to act with violence in Libya.58

Business as usual for the American Empire

The Libyan war is yet another clear example of the imperial nature of U.S. foreign policy and the effectiveness of state ideology in blinding the public to the true nature of violence carried out abroad. Piercing the veneer of official propaganda, we discover that the United States is again engaged in a war of choice, using the military as a weapon, not as a last resort to defend itself, but rather to display and entrench Western power and shape the world in its interest during a time of massive change. The media—most shamelessly liberal apologists for Obama—perpetuate this lie in near-monolithic fashion, while allowing for “debates” merely over tactics, and ignoring geopolitics and the brute reality of U.S. Empire.

Michael Corcoran (michaelcorcoran.blogspot.com) is a journalist and media critic from Boston who has written for the Boston Globe, the Nation, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, NACLA Report on the Americas, Extra!, and other publications. He is a master’s candidate at the John McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Stephen Maher (rationalmanifesto.blogspot.com) is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., and a master’s candidate at American University School of International Service. His work, covering a wide range of issues, has appeared in the Guardian, on the Electronic Intifada, Truthout, Extra!, and elsewhere.

1 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” La Pensée, 1970, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.
2 Richard Haass, “Too much, too late,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 21, 2011, www.cfr.org/libya/libya-too-much-too-late/p24444.

3 Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (Boston: South End Press, 1999), 33.

4 Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor, and the Standards of the West (New York: Verso Books, 2000), 96.

5 John Norris, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (New York: Praeger, 2005), xxiii.

6 Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line, 76–78.

7 Ibid., 11.

8 The United States Department of State Foreign Relations of the United States: diplomatic papers, 1945. The Near East and Africa: vol. VIII, 45, University of Wisconsin digital collection, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1945v08.

9 Nir Rosen, “How it started in Yemen: From Tahrir to Taghyir,” New Statesman, March 21, 2011.

10 “Bahrain: End deadly attacks on peaceful protesters,” Human Rights Watch, February 17, 2011; See also: Scheherezade Faramarz, “Bahrain crackdown routs protesters; clashes kill 5,” ?McClatchy Newspapers, March 16, 2011, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2014516840_bahrain17.html.

11 Faramarz , “Bahrain crackdown routs protesters”; “Bahrain: End deadly attacks on peaceful protesters”; and “Bahrain: Injured people denied medical care,” Human Rights Watch, March 17, 2011.

12 Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement from the Press Secretary on violence in Yemen and Bahrain,” March 13, 2011, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/13/statement-press-secretary-violence-yemen-and-bahrain.

13 Brad Knickerbocker, “U.S. faces difficult situation in Bahrain, home to US Fifth Fleet,” Christian Science Monitor, February 19, 2011.

14 Ulf Laessing and Cynthia Johnston, “Saudi police fire in air to disperse protest,” Reuters, March 10, 2011; See also Frank Langfitt and Renee Montagne, “Saudi forces out in force to stop ‘Day of Rage,’” Morning Edition, National Public Radio, March 11, 2011.

15 Though the Pentagon initially claimed it did not know of the Saudi moves in advance, reports later surfaced that the United States had in fact been informed. See “Saudi told US of Bahrain intervention: US official,” Agence France-Presse, March 14, 2011.

16 Anthony Cordesman, “The New Saudi arms deal: Serving vital U.S. security interests,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 24, 2010.

17 Rosen, “How it started in Yemen” ; See also Ahmed Al-Haj, “Yemeni soldiers attack students,” Associated Press, March 8, 2011.

18 “Yemen: Emergency law does not trump basic rights,” Human Rights Watch, March 23, 2011.

19 Seumas Milne, “There’s nothing moral about Nato’s intervention in Libya,” Guardian, March 23, 2011.

20 Andrew Malcolm “Yemen president gets stern warning from Obama press secretary.” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2011.

21 “US says post-Saleh Yemen would pose ‘real problem,’” Agence-France Presse, March 27, 2011.

22 Jonathan Weber, “Goldstone report slams IDF warfare in Gaza,” YNet News, September 16, 2009.

23 Stephen Zunes, “The Gaza war, Congress, and International Humanitarian Law,” Middle East Policy Council, http://www.mepc.org; Edith Lederer, “U.S. blocks UN Security Council action on Gaza,” Associated Press, January 3, 2009; Jack Khouri, “Goldstone tells Obama: Show me flaws in Gaza report,” Ha’aretz, October 22, 2009.

24 “The Gaza Strip—Background,” B’Tselem–The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, www.btselem.org/english/Gaza_Strip.

25 Eben Kaplan, “How Libya got off the list,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 16, 2007.

26 “France recognizes Libya rebels, to surprise of EU,” Associated Press, March 10, 2011.

27 David Wood, “Gaddafi’s army, Libyan rebels square off for showdown,” Huffington Post, March 29, 2011.

28 Chris Adams, “Libyan rebel leader spent much of past 20 years in suburban Virginia,” McClatchy Newspapers, March 26, 2011.

29 Greg Miller, “Libyan opposition includes a small number of al-Qaeda fighters, U.S. officials say,” Washington Post, March 29, 2011.

30 Mitchel Cohen, “What we say, goes! How Bush Sr. sold the bombing of Iraq,” CounterPunch, December 28, 2002.

31 Paul A. DeSutter, “Libya renounces weapons of mass destruction.” eJournal USA, America.gov.

32 Lauren Rozen, “Averting ‘Srebrenica on steroids’: White House defends Libya operations,” Yahoo! News, March 23, 2011.

33 Bruce Ackerman, “Obama’s unconstitutional war,” Foreign Policy, March 25, 2011.

34 Quoted in Jennifer Epstein, “Kucinich: Libya action ‘impeachable,’” The Politico, March 21, 2011.

35 Quoted in Josh Rogin, “Obama Declares National State of Emergency over Libya,” Foreign Policy, February 25, 2011.

36 Stephanie Condon, “Boehner, GOP want Obama to consult with Congress on Libya,” CBS News, March 21, 2011.

37 Marjorie Cohn, “Stop bombing Libya,” Huffington Post, March 21, 2011.

38 Charter of the United Nations, www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Aprille Muscara, “Obama leaves door open to regime change in Libya,” InterPress Service, March 21, 2011.

42 Ibid.

43 Rozen, “Averting ‘Srebrenica on steroids.’”

44 Eric Schmidt, “U.S. gives its air power expansive role in Libya,” New York Times, March 28, 2011.

45 National Public Radio, “CIA operatives gathering intelligence in Libya,” March 31, 2011, www.npr.org/2011/03/31/135005728/cia-operatives-gathering-intelligence-in-libya.

46 Luc Van Kemenede, “Libya says it’s ready to implement a ‘road map,’” Yahoo! News, March 25, 2011.

47 As quoted in Josh Rogin, “Obama declares national state of emergency over Libya,” Foreign Policy, February 25, 2011.

48 “Libyan rebels reject potential Gaddafi offer to step down: Reports,” Reuters, March 7, 2011.

49 Quoted in “Q&A: The Libyan ceasefire, the UN resolution and military tactics,” Guardian, March 18, 2011.

50 For transcript, see The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC.com, March 21, 2011, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42214552/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/.

51 Juan Cole, “An open letter to the left on Libya,” Nation, March 26, 2011.

52 Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 48.

53 Bob Herbert, “Losing our way,” New York Times, March 25, 2011.

54 Thomas Friedman, “Tribes with flags,” New York Times, March 22, 2011.

55 Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 45–73.

56 Nicholas Kristof, “Hugs from Libyans,” New York Times, March 23, 2011.

57 Linda Thompson, “The real cost of U.S. in Libya? 2 billion dollars per day,” Forbes, March 28, 2011, http://blogs.forbes.com/
beltway/2011/03/28/the-real-cost-of-u-s-in-libya-two-billion-?dollars-per-day/.

58 For poll results, see: www.usnewsweekly.info/americans-?appear-wary-over-u-s-role-in-libya-reuters/.

Al-Jazeera, as endorsed by Hillary Clinton

2011-03-10T19:01:00.006-05:00

With its Arab Spring coverage, al-Jazeera won new fans. Isn't it time to end the channel's virtual blackout on US cable networks?

Originally published by the Guardian newspaper

Stephen Maher and Michael Corcoran

Al-Jazeera's esteem in the United States has reached unprecedented heights in the aftermath of its coverage of the revolutionary uprising in Egypt, which clearly displayed how embarrassingly inadequate US cable news outlets are by comparison. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was compelled recently to concede that al-Jazeera English (AJE) provides "real news" coverage and actual on-the-ground journalism, unlike its American counterparts, which, she said, rely too heavily on cheap punditry.

Despite the US's unique position of power and influence, cable providers in America do not offer a single world news channel. Not even CNN International, the grownup sister channel of CNN, is available in the US; American audiences are forced to endure the entertainment-centric, domestic version of the channel – as Clinton described it, "a million commercials … and arguments between talking heads."

Al-Jazeera's impressive coverage of the uprising in Egypt has reopened a debate over whether cable providers should offer AJE as an option for US viewers. The channel is pressing the issue as never before, devoting a page on its site to encourage Americans to "Demand al-Jazeera", and using Twitter and Facebook to build a national movement for cable companies to offer the channel. With recent reports that Comcast is in negotiations with the Qatar-based network, now is the time for the effective blackout of al-Jazeera English in the US to end.

The evolution of AJE's reputation in the United States is remarkable. For years, the channel was demonised by a hysterical and largely successful campaign that labelled it "terrorist-promoting". As if this rhetorical hostility was not enough, the US bombed al-Jazeera's offices in Kabul in 2001 andBaghdad in 2003, and Donald Rumsfeld called the network's reports "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable", when, in 2004, it aired pictures of dead Iraqis in Fallujah. Rumsfeld's Pentagon also attempted to arrange a spying operation to monitor the activities of AJE staff.

And al-Jazeera still has its detractors today. In response to Clinton's concession that al-Jazeera runs an effective news operation, Glenn Beck responded with predictable hysterics, asserting that the secretary of state was defending the "propaganda arm of the Middle East and Islamic extremists". Such hyperbolic rightwing attacks are utterly without merit. Al-Jazeera's only offence is to offer critical coverage and include perspectives not heard in mainstream US media. While US shows largely consist of political strategists rehashing partisan talking points in superficial "debates" that last only minutes between commercials breaks, al-Jazeera programmes, like Marwan Bishara's "Empire", feature much longer, in-depth conversations, without excessive commercial breaks, that are far more informative than anything seen on US cable news.

Likewise, the channel's hard news segments put US media to shame. Al-Jazeera had on-location, nuanced reports from the very start of the Egyptian uprising, virtually every US news channel was reduced to broadcasting images from al-Jazeera, having no footage of their own. Notably, the Drudge Report regularly linked to AJE's coverage of the Arab Spring.

As a result, the American public is showing an increasingly openminded attitude towards the station. Online viewership of al-Jazeera jumped 2,500% during the Egyptian uprising, and 50% of the website's 22m monthly visitors are North American. Clearly, an audience exists for the channel, especially since US cable companies carry channels specifically for niche activities such as golf, tennis, cycling and hunting.

But, as of now, AJE is only available to residents of Burlington, Vermont, Washington, DC and Toledo, Ohio – and even in those cities, the hostings of al-Jazeera has not been without controversy. In 2008, opponents pressured city-owned Burlington Telecom to pull the channel from its lineup. Residents of the town, however, responded angrily, and convinced the channel's board at a public hearing to keep the channel.

As subjects of a government with vast global interests and a considerable international military presence, it is absurd that American citizens do not have the option of an international cable news channel. Even as the US fights two massive wars in the Middle East, and is deeply involved in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe, the lack of critical, international news leaves the American people largely isolated. Given the many flaws with US world news coverage and a lack of diverse perspectives, increasing the availability of al-Jazeera could only help US citizens be more informed about the effects of US policies abroad.

Media Don't Bite the Ruling that Feeds Them

2011-01-08T18:57:00.000-05:00

Citizen United fills airwaves—and corporate coffers

Originally published by Extra!, the journal of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

The 2010 midterm elections were the first since the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited corporate funding of political broadcasts in elections. As was widely predicted at the time, spending hit unprecedented highs this election cycle, including record sums on television ads. In the words of the Associated Press (10/29/10), Citizens essentially constituted a “stimulus package” for broadcast and cable media corporations, which saw major increases in revenue, thus benefiting from the ever-deepening relationship between money and politics.

In fact, media corporations raked in a record $3 billion this midterm election cycle, not only breaking the previous midterm spending record of $2.4 billion in 2006, but also surpassing the $2.7 billion spent in the 2008 presidential election cycle (AP, 10/29/10). Much of this windfall can be attributed directly to the Citizens decision, according to a report from the media tracking group SNL Kagan, which described the 2010 election climate as “a political ad revenue treasure trove for broadcasters” (Hill, 9/22/10).

CBS, according to AP (11/4/10), “pounced on an advertising revival in the broadcast media to produce a 53 percent increase in its third-quarter net income”; other media companies likewise “reported robust ad gains.” Media giantTime Warner—owner of cable channels like CNN, TNT and TBS—saw profits rise by more than one-third in the quarter, in part due to a 23 percent increase in ad revenue (CNET, 11/4/10).

Local stations likewise have their snouts in the trough. Political ads are expected to account for 11 percent of the total revenue for local broadcasters this year, up from 7 percent in 2006 (AP, 10/29/10). In Boston, where a 30-second election spot costs about $25,000, demand for ads was so high that local channels were actually turning them down. “There are not enough commercial breaks and too many advertisers. It’s been absolutely crazy,” said Andy Hoffman, a sales manager for Channel 5 in Boston (Boston Globe, 10/30/10). The informational benefits for the public of swimming in partisan political ads, it goes without saying, are dubious (USA Today, 10/25/10).

Media companies not only benefit from ads, but also now have the ability to donate as much money as they want to politicians’ campaigns. This new leverage will enable media corporations to fight for issues that impact their bottom line, such as relaxing telecommunications regulations and fighting against net neutrality to ensure them a competitive advantage over smaller, independent news sites.

This election cycle News Corporation made a massive $1 million contribution to the Republican Governors Association (New York Times, 8/18/10), while General Electric, which owns NBC, made more than $2 million in donations to both parties. (See sidebar.) Time Warner andDisney, which own CNN and ABC respectively, also donated money to both political parties (CNN.com, 8/17/2010), ensuring that politicians from both sides of the aisle will be considering big media interests when legislating.

As major participants in and beneficiaries of the influence-buying orgy, it’s hardly surprising that television outlets did not seriously examine the impact of the Citizens United decision. In the month leading up to the election, NBC Nightly News didn’t mention the decision a single time; on each of its two broadcast competitors, the issue came up only once (CBS Evening News, 10/11/10; ABC World News, 10/11/10). CBS Evening News’ sole mention came in an interview with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, who accused the GOP of accepting illegal foreign contributions from the Chamber of Commerce. In ABC’s segment, correspondent Jake Tapper did a “factcheck” of that Democratic Party talking point. (Tapper’s verdict? There’s no “proof”—which, of course, is one of the problems of the Supreme Court’s OK of unlimited, undisclosed contributions.)

Importantly, the media narrative ignored the large sway corporations have over both parties, reducing a serious threat to democracy to just another partisan back-and-forth. For example, on MSNBC NewsNation (11/4/10),NBC’s Michael Isikoff discussed the issue in terms of how “a number of other groups on the Republican side...[took] advantage of that big Supreme Court decision back in July which allowed unlimited contributions from corporations [and] labor unions.”

By contrast, the independent TV/radio program Democracy Now! (10/28/10) deeply probed the connection between money, politics and the media. This included interviewing Common Cause executive director Robert Edgar, a former congressmember, who said the new spending will result in “a Congress made up of those supporting the energy companies, the healthcare industry and foreign corporations more than public citizens.” AsDemocracy Now! host Amy Goodman wrote in her syndicated column (Truthdig, 11/3/10): “We hear no debate about this, because the media corporations are making such a killing by selling campaign ads. Yet the broadcasters are using public airwaves.”

Other stations beyond the control of U.S. corporations, such as foreign outlets, also provided more critical analysis on the effects corporate money would play in the electoral process. Russia Today (10/21/10) ran a segment titled “America, Inc.,” which addressed in depth the potential implications for American democracy. Likewise, the BritishGuardian (6/8/10) raised “questions about the link between politics and special interests seeking influence,” and the “close links between politics and big corporations.”

The lack of U.S. corporate media interest included the print media, which covered the election in much the same way as broadcast outlets. “Don’t follow the money,” urged New York Times columnist David Brooks (10/18/10), arguing that money is not a crucial factor in elections, since candidates who spend more money on campaigns often lose. Of course, both corporations and candidates believe money makes a difference—otherwise corporations wouldn’t spend so much and politicians wouldn’t put so much energy into courting donors. Which means that the vastly increased flow of corporate money gives politicians of both parties even more incentive to legislate in favor of potential donors—providing the wealthiest contributors still greater leverage in dictating policy.

Brooks also used misleading and inaccurate numbers, as Glenn Greenwald noted (Salon, 10/19/10). For example, Brooks wrote that the Chamber of Commerce only spent $22 million, while Greenwald pointed out that the Chamber itself claimed it would “spend at least three-and-a-half times that amount,”and that “the Chamber is proudly announcing that it ‘will ramp up its political activity in the three weeks remaining before the November 2 Congressional elections.’”

When Newsweek (10/13/10) covered the impact of money on the 2010 election, it quickly became obvious that their emphasis was not on what it would mean for democracy or the public: “Being an anonymous political donor is completely legal. But is it good for business?”

Another distortion echoed throughout the print and broadcast media was the implication that labor unions benefited as much from the Citizens decision as corporations. “Though the decision does not directly address them, its logic also applies to the labor unions that are often at political odds with big business,” the New York Times(1/22/10) reported in its initial coverage of the Supreme Court decision. This false equivalency persisted into the election coverage as well. In an article about the increased outside money in U.S. elections, the AP (11/8/10) described Citizens United as a decision “that gave unions and corporations a greater voice in politics” and “will push the boundaries further.”

Employment-oriented nonprofits, a category that includes most labor unions, reported total revenues of $18 billion in their latest filings, according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Meanwhile, U.S. corporations are currently making profits—not revenues—at an annual rate of $1.7 trillion (New York Times, 11/27/10). With that kind of disparity in resources, it’s clear that big business will be by far the biggest beneficiary of unlimited political spending—along with big media.

Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.

Stephen Maher (RationalManifesto.blogspot.com) is an MA candidate at the School of International Service at American University. His work has appeared in the Electronic Intifada, Truthout and other publications.

Shunning progressive critics while hailing success of TARP: Media Continue Bank Bailout Advocacy

2010-10-07T11:50:00.012-04:00

Originally published by Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

by Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

For corporate media, the verdict is already in: The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), the unpopular program that redistributed some $700 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds upwards, to the very financial institutions that contributed to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, is an unabashed success.

It is hardly stunning that corporate media would react favorably to one of the biggest boons for big corporations in U.S. history. When the bailout initially failed to make it through Congress in 2008 due to House opposition, journalists quickly accepted and reinforced the narrative that the unpopular legislation--which gave unprecedented power to the Treasury Department with virtually no mechanism for oversight or review--needed to be passed so urgently that a serious national debate was not even possible (Extra!, 1/09).

"In the Congress of the United States, the insane are now running the asylum," wrote Dana Milbank in the Washington Post (9/30/08). The Post editorial page produced three editorials in three days (9/30/08=10/2/08) in support of the policy. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (10/1/08) claimed, "We have House members, many of whom I suspect can't balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don't understand, swamped them with phone calls."

As Dean Baker and Kris Warner of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted (Extra!, 1/09), despite claims echoed throughout the media that the bill was too urgent to even be subject to reasonable scrutiny, the Treasury Department "took no action for 10 days after the bill had been passed."

Now that the program is coming to an end, media--with a few notable exceptions like Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times (4/18/10)--are claiming the corporate bailout they so fervently supported has been a monumental success. Two primary claims have been pervasive: that TARP was a good idea that’s “working,” and that it was a “great deal for taxpayers” (Washington Post, 4/1/10). Progressive critiques challenging the official narrative have been almost entirely ignored by the corporate press, despite the fact that such challenges have appeared throughout alternative media (Pew Research Center, 4/28/10; FireDogLake, 7/15/10).

In the words of the Post editorial board (7/5/10), even though "pretty much everyone hated" the "$700 billion bailout fund," it has "arguably saved the U.S. economy.... Any member of Congress who supported TARP, Republican or Democrat, took a sensible risk that has been vindicated by the program's result."

Similarly, Reuters (8/19/10) reported that TARP's success would "dilute the previously potent political attack that lawmakers who voted for the bailout were rewarding Wall Street greed while putting taxpayers at risk." Former George W. Bush administration official James K. Glassman declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (8/26/10), "It has to be said that the TARP and the other financial rescues were necessary and efficient."

Prominent progressive critics contend TARP is a program that is doomed to failure. Even if it succeeds in temporarily rescuing the financial sector, the failure to enact broad systemic changes only increases the risk of future, more expensive bailouts. Dean Baker, for instance, suggested (CEPR, 7/5/10) that the "financial Armageddon" averted by TARP

would have meant the demise of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and most of the other Wall Street titans, but probably would not have led to a qualitatively worse economic situation for the rest of us than what we actually saw. In fact, there would have been a great benefit from this financial Armageddon in that it would let the market wipe out the fast-dealing, high-flying Wall Street gang in a single blow.

This would eliminate the culture of synthetic CDOs and naked credit default swaps that provide ever more sophisticated and expensive ways to gamble. It would also eliminate many of the huge multi-million dollar paychecks that the Wall Street boys take home every year (or week). In other words, this is not obviously a bad story.

Financial blogger Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, 6/23/10) likewise criticized the Obama administration’s choice to “patch the system up with duct tape and baling wire, and if it looks even remotely operational, tout it as tremendous success,” rather than enacting serious reform. The choice, she continued, reflects the administration’s "decision to reconstitute, as much as possible, the banking industry that had just driven itself and the global economy off the cliff” and “to cast its lot with an unreformed banking industry."

Yet these important ideas were rarely presented to the American people by the corporate-owned press, thus limiting their impact and damaging citizens’ ability to come to informed conclusions. "I have almost never had my criticisms of the TARP in the media," said Baker in an e-mail to Extra!.

Indeed, media adhered to their time-honored practice of framing the debate between centrist Democrats and far-right conservatives (Extra!, 9=10/04)--in this case, restricting the “debate” to pro-TARP voices on one side and militant free-market absolutists on the other, who oppose the program as a violation of laissez-faire principles. That was the form the debate took on Fox Business Channel (12/22/09), TARP supporter Lawrence Ausubel, economics professor at University of Maryland, faced off against Cody Willard, a right-wing libertarian critic.

A New York Times article (7/1/10) looking back on TARP included critiques of the plan from conservatives like Sen. Richard Shelby (“blatant accounting fraud”) and Rep. Spencer Bachus (“a ridiculous scheme”), but ignored progressive critics in Congress, such as Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The claim that the taxpayers are being fully reimbursed by beneficiaries of TARP is likewise being vigorously advanced by the corporate press. The New York Times has been ebullient regarding the program's outcome for some time now (8/30/09): "Nearly a year after the federal rescue of the nation’s biggest banks, taxpayers have begun seeing profits from the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid.... So far, that experiment [TARP] is more than paying off."

More recently, the Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin asked (4/12/10), "What if, after all that panting over Washington’s bailout of the financial system, we learned that it actually worked?" He continued:

Some officials [are] suggesting that if the economic recovery continues apace, the bailout program could eventually turn from red to black. That may seem far-fetched to anyone who remembers the dire predictions about banks like Citigroup, but the numbers tell a different story. The government’s $45 billion investment in Citigroup alone is on track to make a profit of nearly $11 billion, plus $8 billion or so in interest and other fees. People inside the administration no longer refer to Citigroup as the "Death Star"; now it is a "profit center.”

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/5/10) wondered whether the assertion that TARP did not cost the taxpayers anything is “based on ungodly stupidity or is just plain dishonest”:

The TARP money was a form of insurance. The vast majority of insurance policies are never paid off, but that does not mean they have no value. The point here is that the banks were on the edge of going bankrupt. The government, through the TARP and the Fed, gave the banks the loans and the guarantees that assured the markets that the banks would survive.... This is all a gift from the taxpayers to some of the richest people in the country.

In a rare instance where a progressive critic was quoted by the mainstream press on the issue--albeit buried in an otherwise upbeat TARP story by Sorkin (New York Times, 4/13/10)--Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz said widespread efforts to glorify TARP's success are "disingenuous and a real attempt to distract people," as they don't factor in lost interest on the money spent. "Did we get back anything commensurate with the risk?... Clearly the answer is no," he said. Sorkin dismissively reminded readers that Stiglitz "has made a career of seeing every glass as half-empty."

Even Elizabeth Warren, who has been featured in the news as a potential leader for the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, has been largely ignored by the press when she reported on TARP’s flaws. As the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the use of TARP funds, she issued a strong critique of TARP's impact on small banks in the panel's July report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 7/14/10), saying TARP "served Wall Street much better than anyone else." Neither the Post nor the Times published a single article citing Warren's findings. The panel’s May report (Congressional Oversight Panel, 5/12/10), also quite critical of aspects of TARP, was mostly ignored as well, getting only two small mentions in the Post (5/19/10, 8/4/10).

When TARP was pushed through with no sizable programs attached to help the average American (Economic Policy Institute, 9/29/08), the priority for policy makers became clear. As Baker observed in CounterPunch (6/2/10), the same people who praise TARP are now saying we must “act aggressively now to reduce the budget deficit” and “accept large cuts in Social Security and other important programs.”

"Why on earth," Baker asks, "should anyone trust what the bankers' economist accomplices are telling us?"

Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.

Stephen Maher (RationalManifesto.blogspot.com) is an MA candidate at the School of International Service at American University. His work has appeared in the Electronic Intifada, Truthout and other publications.

Ignoring Evidence that Counters Israeli Claims: The Flotilla Story the US Media Won't Report

2010-08-11T20:31:00.001-04:00

By Michael Corcoran and Steve Maher

Originally published in Extra!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

At a June 10 press conference (Cultures of Resistance, 6/10/10), passengers from the Mavi Marmara released new footage of the Israel Defense Forces’ deadly May 31 raid on the ship, which killed nine activists attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of the Israeli blockade. Days earlier, another video was released allegedly showing the IDF beating and then executing a U.S. citizen, although the identity of the passenger in the video has not been confirmed (Informed Comment, 6/10/10; Tikun, 6/10/10).

Obviously, two videos alone could not possibly tell the whole story of what happened that night, but they did offer some of the only images of the tragic event that had not been hand-picked for release by Israel, which confiscated virtually all of the photo and video footage taken on the ship and released only heavily edited snippets (Lede, 6/2/10). This new footage offered revealing glimpses into the bloody raid on the ship that countered the narrative Israel had been successfully spinning in the U.S. (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/1/10).

In addition to possibly showing the execution of a U.S. citizen by the IDF, the footage included images of the IDF shooting either rubber-coated steel bullets or live ammunition from a helicopter, seemingly before commandos boarded (Democracy Now, 6/10/10), and firing indiscriminately at crowds (Ali Abunimah, 6/13/10). Separate photos from Turkish papers and survivors’ testimony also revealed that flotilla passengers were treating injured IDF soldiers (Democracy Now!, 6/10/10; Ali Abunimah, 6/6/10), contradicting Israeli claims that soldiers had been taken hostage, as well as its insistence that the passengers of this "hate boat," as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it (Reuters, 6/2/10), were not humanitarian activists but violent extremists.

While independent media (Democracy Now, 6/10/10) and the foreign press (Guardian, 6/11/2010) covered the new evidence, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today all failed to even mention it in their newspapers--although Times blogger Robert Mackey did post the footage (Lede, 6/11/10), arguing that it gave "a better sense of the timeline of the raid," and making the video's absence in the Paper of the Record's print edition all the more troublesome.

The U.S. corporate press similarly ignored other important evidence that contradicted Israeli claims. This included detailed testimonies of the activists and journalists onboard the vessel, as well as GPS coordinates showing the flotilla accelerating and turning away from Gaza and deeper into international waters at the time of the attack (Ali Abunimah, 6/7/10). This blackout of evidence continues the long-held practice in the U.S. media of ignoring stories that reflect poorly on Israel and other U.S. allies (Extra!, 1/10).

After the attack, U.S. media wasted no time enabling Israel's aggressive public relations campaign (Extra!, 7/10). TV outlets uncritically replayed dubious video clips that were heavily edited, out of context and lacking timestamps (e.g., Hardball, 6/1/10). These clips showed passengers fighting off commandos with kitchen knives and whatever else they could find, but did not show the moments preceding the raid, leaving crucial questions unanswered. Despite there being no way to know the whole story, publications such as the Washington Post (6/6/10) offered no caution in reporting that "Israeli commandos were violently beaten by passengers as they boarded the Mavi Marmara," and then "opened fire in self-defense, killing nine activists."

Many Israeli claims reported unflinchingly by the U.S. media quickly turned out to be egregious lies or distortions. For instance, as journalist Max Blumenthal noted (Max Blumenthal, 6/22/10), a press release Israel issued claiming that associates of Al-Qaeda were on the boat would later be "corrected" by the IDF when it was unable to provide any evidence. The Washington Post editorial page, (6/1/10) which suggested that the activists--"a motley collection that included European sympathizers with the Palestinian cause, Israeli Arab leaders and Turkish Islamic activists"--had "ties to Hamas and Al-Qaeda," failed to issue its own correction.

Israel also released an audio tape it claimed to be of passengers on the Mavi Marmara making antisemitic slurs ("go back to Auschwitz") and warning the IDF to "remember 9/11." The tapes contradicted others the IDF itself released earlier depicting the same exchange between the Israeli navy and the activists on the flotilla that did not contain the bizarre comments (Max Blumenthal, 6/4/10).

Israel soon admitted that these tapes were doctored, though it said they were merely condensed for length, and released a longer version that still contained the slurs (Max Blumenthal, 6/22/10). However, this subsequent release was also problematic. On the new version, the IDF is again heard calling a different boat in the flotilla, the Defne Y, not the Mavi Marmara. Similarly, Huwaida Arraf, the activist who is heard responding to the IDF, saying, "we have permission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter," was not on the Mavi Marmara, but the Challenger One, another flotilla boat (Ma'an, 6/5/10). But the U.S. media again failed to report on this manipulation, and some outlets (e.g., Washington Post, 6/5/10) reported on the audio clips without hinting that there were doubts about their authenticity.

The op-ed pages were also predictably one-sided. The New York Times, for example, published an op-ed by Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren (6/03/10), who alleged the activists were "religious extremists" committing an "assault, cloaked in peace," and claimed, without a shred of evidence, that the activists had made propaganda videos before the assault showing "passengers 'injured' by Israeli forces" (Max Blumenthal, 6/26/10). The Times, it seems, did not bother to ask for copy of this alleged video before publishing such an extraordinary claim.

Given the large amount of time and space devoted to excusing and justifying Israeli actions, the lack of attention provided to the activists’ stories and evidence has given the public an incomplete and one-sided portrayal of events.

"Sadly, the U.S. press just decided to pretend we really don't exist,” said Iara Lee, the activist that smuggled out the hour-long video of the scene, in an interview with Extra!. “The media there is very controlled and almost all of the coverage [about the videos] came from the foreign press and the independent media."

Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe.

Stephen Maher (rationalmanifesto.blogspot.com) is an MA candidate at the School of International Service at American University.

Human Rights Watch flotilla stance mirrors that of US, Israel

2010-07-24T16:22:00.002-04:00

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

Originally published in The Electronic Intifada, 23 July 2010

Supporters of Israel often accuse Human Rights Watch (HRW), one of the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, of having an anti-Israel bias or even being anti-Semitic. For instance, a recent lengthy article in The New Republicaccused the group of paying "disproportionate attention to Israeli misdeeds." Similarly, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has said that HRW exhibits a "willful blindness when it comes to Israel, and its enemies have completely undermined the credibility of a once important human rights organization." Indeed, there is no shortage of other similar critiques of the organization by supporters of Israel.

Given such strong condemnations, one might have anticipated that HRW would have been especially vocal in its criticism of Israel's 31 May attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attempting to deliver aid to Palestinians in Gaza and break Israel's three-year old siege of the territory.

Yet despite the alarms sounded by its most staunch critics, HRW has been mostly silent on the horrific attack. When they have spoken out, they have been notably timid, essentially sharing the same positions as the US government, Israel's closest ally. According to a search of the group's website, the flotilla attack has only been addressed four times. By contrast, Amnesty International (the organization's closest peer) has tackled the issue 17 times, issuing much stronger statements of condemnation than those released by HRW. The jarring difference in how these two human rights organizations have responded to the flotilla attack raises important questions about the functioning of the largest and most reputed human rights organization in the United States.

During the course of the raid on the civilian convoy, the Israeli military killed nine activists, many of whom were shot in the head from close range, according to subsequent autopsies. In response, with millions taking to the streets worldwide, one government after the next, the UN and other nongovernmental organizations, human rights groups and activists condemned the raid and called for an immediate international investigation and an end to the blockade of Gaza. Even Turkey, a close ally of both the US and Israel, responded furiously to the attack, calling it an act of "state terrorism" that threatened to damage relations between the two states. Ankara also demanded that Israel lift the siege on Gaza. Indeed, in previous statements HRW said that the siege "constitutes a form of collective punishment" ("Letter to Olmert: Stop the Blockade of Gaza, 20 November 2008 ).

In the face of this international pressure, the US and Israel stood virtually alone in rejecting an international investigation. Israel not only objected to an independent investigation, but also refused to release all of the footage and photographs it confiscated from activists and journalists onboard the ship, only releasing small fragments that were heavily edited and otherwise tampered with. Instead, Washington urged Israel to conduct an investigation of its own, in the hopes that such a probe would assuage the rising chorus of international outrage without subjecting Israeli actions to independent scrutiny. Shockingly, HRW -- an organization which claims to stand up to state violence and protect human rights -- essentially supported the US-Israeli position by calling for an Israeli investigation.

HRW's support for an Israeli investigation contradicted previous findings by the organization on the likelihood that such an inquiry would be successful. "Given Israel's poor track record of investigating unlawful killings by its armed forces," the group acknowledges in its 31 May statement on the flotilla, "the international community should closely monitor any inquiry to ensure it meets basic international standards and that any wrongdoers are brought to justice" ("Israel: Full, Impartial Investigation of Flotilla Killings Essential"). This statement again stands in stark contrast to the position of Amnesty International, which insisted on an international investigation, along with the rest of the world, demanding in a 1 June statement "an international inquiry into the deaths caused by the raid on the aid flotilla in international waters outside Gaza" ("Israeli Authorities Urged To Commission International Inquiry," 1 June 2010).

In a further attempt to limit the damage caused to its image in the wake of its nighttime commando assault on the unarmed civilian convoy, Israel announced an "easing" of the blockade. However, in reality these cosmetic changes were intended not to end the siege but to make it more palatable to the so-called international community. The most significant difference was the shift from a positive list of what is allowed to a negative list of what is not. Though the changes might allow a few more kinds of goods in, the new measures would hardly be enough to lift Palestinians in Gaza out of the desperate poverty into which they have been thrust by Israeli cruelty, let alone develop a viable and independent economy.

Since the attack, the Israeli military spokesperson has proudly declaring the number of trucks entering Gaza each day over the social networking site Twitter. Yet these tweets only serve to prove how inadequate the "easing" of the blockade is, as the announced number of trucks permitted to enter Gaza is well below the 400 that the UN says is needed to provide residents of Gaza with even a minimal standard of living.

Amnesty International responded to the shift in policy by stating that Israel "must now comply with its obligations as the occupying power under international law and immediately lift the blockade," adding that as "the occupying power, Israel bears the foremost responsibility for ensuring the welfare of the inhabitants of Gaza" ("Israel Gaza Blockade Must Be Completely Lifted," 17 June 2010). By contrast, HRW offered a statement that tepidly praised Israel, calling it a productive "first step" in a 21 June release (Israel/Gaza: Easing Blockade of Imports a First Step"). This response was also dramatically different from that of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which in the wake of the flotilla massacre called the siege "a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law," and demanded Israel to "put an end to this closure" ("Gaza closure: not another year," 14 June 2010). Likewise, Oxfam International called the flotilla incident "a direct result of the Israeli blockade on Gaza" ("Monday's tragedy is a direct result of the Israeli blockade on Gaza," 2 June 2010).

Though HRW rightly pointed out that there was little chance of Palestinians in Gaza developing an independent, sustainable economy with the continued total blockade of exports, and amorphously called on Israel to end any "unnecessary restrictions" on the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza, it failed to clearly and unequivocally call for a full lifting of the illegal siege. As with its failure to call for an international investigation, HRW was once again essentially echoing the position taken by Tony Blair, the current envoy of the Quartet (the US, UK, Russia and UN), who said in a 5 July statement that the move was a "big first step."

In its 21 June release, HRW states that some restrictions are permitted under international law provided that they are "limited to what is necessary." In the same release, the organization balanced its criticism of Israel by vigorously calling on Hamas to release its Israeli prisoner -- virtually echoing the Israeli government's justification for the siege of Gaza.

Similarly, on 27 June, Bill Van Esveld, a Middle East researcher for [[HRW]], penned an editorial in the Los Angeles Times which attempts to shift the blame for Gaza's suffering from the merciless siege to the strip's elected Hamas government. "The people of Gaza are now prisoners twice over," he writes, "from the outside, Israel and Egypt have locked down Gaza's borders," while "within Gaza, Hamas is forcing people to live within the confines of a harsh moral code, and punishing those who try to exercise their few remaining rights and liberties" ("Danger of an Islamized Gaza").

Though the offenses against personal freedoms committed by Hamas are well-documented and certainly noteworthy, Van Esveld ignores that it is the desperation created by far more serious Israeli violence and suffocation, and the collaborationist nature of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, that is the ultimate source of Hamas' empowerment. Thus, he is essentially employing the classic tactic of blaming the victims, and echoing Israeli justifications for maintaining the siege by waving the spectre of "the danger of an Islamized Gaza." "The world is rightly focused on Gaza's Israeli prison guards," he concludes, "but it shouldn't forget the confinement imposed by Gaza's own Hamas." Such assertions closely mirror the disingenuous claims of Israeli officials, particularly Israel's ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, who declared in a 2 June New York Times op-ed, that "We, too, want a free Gaza -- a Gaza liberated from brutal Hamas rule" ("An Assault, Cloaked in Peace").

Thus, on two major issues related to the siege of Gaza and the raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, HRW has largely taken the same position as Israel and its supporters. In the aftermath of the flotilla attack, Israel, Tony Blair, the United States and HRW stood on one side, and virtually the entire rest of the world stood on the other.

Not all of HRW's reports are so flawed, and the organization has produced some valuable material. However, they serve as a sharp contrast to its statements on the flotilla raid. In a 2006 report on Israel's invasion of Lebanon, HRW calls on the UN Secretary General to create an "an International Commission of Inquiry to investigate reports of violations of international humanitarian law, including possible war crimes" ("Why They Died," 5 September 2007). Similarly, in a 13 August 2009 statement on Israel's 2008-09 winter invasion of Gaza HRW calls for "an international investigation into alleged laws-of-war violations by both sides," citing "the past failure of Israel, as well as Hamas, to investigate their own forces " ("Israel: Investigate 'White Flag' Shootings of Gaza Civilians," 12 August 2009).

The organization's pathetic display in the wake of the flotilla attack, however, does a great disservice to the cause of human rights. Unfortunately, HRW's failures reflect a disturbing and well-documented pattern, especially regarding its work on the Middle East and the United States (the chief enabler of Israeli aggression). In 2006, journalist Jonathan Cook noticed a "shameful imbalance" in Human Rights Watch's reportage on Israeli and Palestinian violations, "both in the number of reports being issued against each party and in terms of the failure to hold accountable the side committing the far greater abuses of human rights." Cook concluded that such an "imbalance" had "become the HRW's standard procedure in Israel-Palestine" ("Human Rights Watch denying Palestinians the right to nonviolent resistance," The Electronic Intifada, 30 November 2006).

In fact, Cook's conclusion applies more broadly to US policy and allies elsewhere around the world as well. Edward Herman, David Peterson and George Szamuely observed in a well-researched report on HRW in 2007 that "at critical times and in critical theaters [the group has] thrown its support behind the US government's agenda, sometimes even serving as a virtual public relations arm of the foreign policy establishment." The authors note that HRW exhibits "crude apologetics," maintaining a steadfast "denial that the United States commits war crimes" ("Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party ...," Zmag, 25 February 2007).

Properly educating the public about Israeli crimes, and American culpability in them, is essential if Israeli policy is to be changed and a just peace established. As the only large, international human rights organization based in the United States, HRW's weak response to these attacks, for which the US has lent strong support in the face of massive criticism from around the world, is even more outrageous. It is time for advocates for human rights to push HRW to be a more consistent and responsible voice on behalf of Palestinian human rights.

Michael Corcoran is a journalist who has written for the Boston Globe, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere. He is also a master's candidate at the John McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where he majors in international relations.

Stephen Maher is an MA candidate at American University School of International Service. His work has appeared in Extra!, Truthout, ZNet and other publications. His blog is http://rationalmanifesto.blogspot.com.

Third World Diplomatic Cooperation and the Future of US Empire in the Middle East

2010-06-05T14:36:00.001-04:00

Originally published at Truthout

Last week, Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Erdogan announced a breakthrough agreement on the Iranian nuclear impasse that they claimed would make further sanctions on Iran "unnecessary." The agreement, accepted by Iran, was immediately rejected by the US and its European allies, who chose instead to continue the three-decade long US effort to strangle and isolate Iran by all means available. In what Graham Fuller, a top-ranking former intel official, called "a stunningly insulting response," Hillary Clinton proudly announced consensus for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran days later, which she called "as convincing an answer to the efforts undertaken in Iran in the past few days as any we could provide."

With multiple aircraft carrier battlegroups right off Iran's coast and threats of attack emanating from Washington and Tel Aviv on a regular basis, the US is literally demanding at gunpoint that Iran surrender a large portion of its enriched uranium in exchange for delivery of nuclear fuel for its reactors to be supplied by Europe or Russia and cease all enrichment activities at once. Meanwhile, Iran has insisted that it cannot trust the West after decades of aggressive and hostile US policies - including the overthrow of Iran's democratically-elected government in 1953 - and that, consequently, the uranium should be exchanged on Iranian territory and only after it receives the nuclear fuel. Under the Lula-Erdogan agreement, the swap would take place on Turkish soil under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Though barely mentioned in the US press, the Lula-Erdogan agreement is a truly remarkable and historic event that may have "changed the Middle East forever" as David Rothkopf wrote in Foreign Policy. It has "seemingly ushered in a new era of diplomacy," he continued, and "could well signal a change in how international diplomacy works." In direct defiance of US orders, these two lesser, "third world" countries, which were once treated as mere vassals, have challenged a key US regional objective. Should China, Russia and/or the IAEA get behind the deal, US efforts to build international support for sanctions would suffer an even graver setback.

American strategists have struggled mightily against independent nationalism for decades as they constructed and maintained a worldwide system of indirect empire. This has meant propping up corrupt and self-interested local rulers who reliably carry out US orders, maintain regional systems favorable to US power and enrich themselves while diverting much-needed resources from domestic needs to serve the interests of wealthy, Western investors. To put down resistance both domestically and among potential regional rivals, these client regimes are given military and diplomatic assistance from the US that allows them to use any means available to maintain a favorable balance of power.

It is this threat the US was combating in 1953, for instance, when it intervened to overthrow the democratically-elected Iranian national hero, Mohammed Mossadegh, replacing him with the shah, a vicious torturer and murder who had been driven out of the country. Mossadegh was a danger not just because he insisted on nationalizing Iran's oil resources, denying the west control of them, but also because he was an "intolerable symbol of anti-British sentiment in the world," as New York Times journalist Stephen Kinzer wrote in his book "All The Shah's Men." He represented "the wretched of the earth against the rich and powerful" and was becoming "the preeminent spokesman for the nationalist passion that was surging through the colonial world," a serious threat to any empire. The United States has been punishing the people of Iran to the fullest extent of its abilities since 1979, when, again, the shah was again overthrown by the Iranian people. After backing Iraq's barbaric invasion, including the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against population centers, the US has sought to strangle the Iranian economy and prolong the damage of war as long as possible.

As planners have acknowledged, such an approach leaves the US and its allied regimes "militarily strong but politically weak." It is natural that a power in such a position would not be willing to entrust its hegemony with the whims of the natives and its power of persuasion and would instead prefer violence. In the Middle East, the US relationship with Israel has served just this purpose. As elsewhere in the world, the danger has always been that an independent, nationalist movement would take root, challenging US dominance and emboldening others to follow suit, a threat that has not been taken lightly in Washington. As they constantly puzzle over the inability of the United States to secure support for its objectives among the locals, planners and strategists have inevitably reverted to the use of brutal, overwhelming violence instead - a solution easily supplied by Israel.

The Lula-Erdogan agreement represents an important and major defeat for these longstanding efforts to suppress democracy and freedom in the third world. It was fear of these threats to US dominance that led to strong US backing for the overthrow of the democratically-elected Brazilian leader Joao Goulart by Castelo Branco in 1964. President Johnson ordered that the US take "every step that we can" to aid in the overthrow of Goulart, while large multinational corporations and international financial institutions bankrolled the cruel, right-wing dictatorship as it dismantled the Congress, banned all political parties, eliminated press freedoms and savagely repressed the population for 20 years. In exchange, military rulers ensured Brazil was a reliable US vassal in the effort to thwart independence and self-determination in Latin America, a glimpse of the grim fate millions of people in Brazil and elsewhere in the region would suffer over the subsequent decades.

Similar motivations have led successive American governments to attempt to isolate and suffocate Iran and force it to comply with US orders or to destroy the independent government that emerged after the overthrow of the shah in 1979. After supporting Saddam's barbaric invasion of Iran in 1980, the US has stopped at nothing to block Iran's access to international credit, while pressuring Europe and Asia to cooperate in preventing its shattered economy from rebuilding. Despite the decades-long, herculean effort it has expended, the US has been unable to secure support for a military attack on Iran nor for sanctions as harsh as those it has desired. The effort to isolate Iran has itself been a remarkable illustration of the limits of US power. In order to secure the backing of Russia and China, sanctions have been weakened and watered down practically beyond recognition. Should Russia and China, possibly with the backing of the IAEA, choose to throw their weight behind the Lula-Erdogan proposal, the sanctions effort would be completely undermined.

The difficulties of the Clinton administration in getting Europe and even American corporations to cooperate with US sanctions were reversed somewhat by the Bush administration, which managed to get the UN Security Council to sanction Iran and demand it surrender its right to peacefully enrich uranium. By engaging in "dialogue" with the Islamic Republic, the Obama administration has been able to claim key diplomatic successes in getting other powers on board with a new round of sanctions and, thus, increase Iran's isolation. That two third world countries came together in direct defiance of US orders and undercut such a longstanding, key diplomatic effort is without precedent in this strategically crucial region, both revealing and contributing to the decline of US power.

The evolving tripolar world order, in which Asia and Europe are integrating and forming independent poles of influence that rival the US, serves to amplify the leverage of many states which are often derisively labeled as "third world" and summarily dismissed. The formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO) is illustrative in this regard. The SCO is an independent, regional organization that denied the US application for observer status, while accepting that of Iran, and seeks to act as a counterbalance to NATO's influence and the US economic agenda. Simultaneously, growing European integration and independence and the re-emergence of Russia are also serious challenges to US rule. As Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his book "The Grand Chessboard," for instance, "European unity" will require the US "to adjust to the new reality of an alliance based on two more or less equal partners, instead of an alliance that ... involves essentially a hegemony and its vassals."

To challenge near-complete US dominance of the Middle East, Russia has reached out to those who stand in opposition to US objectives and empowered a broader degree of resistance to US commands. While the Obama administration renewed sanctions on Syria for another year, and the US and Israel continue to insist that Syria has transferred Scud missiles to Hezbollah despite UN observer mission's finding that there is "no evidence" to support this claim, Medvedev traveled to Damascus on the first-ever visit to Syria by a Russian head of state since the Bolshevik Revolution. As he arrived last week, it was reported that Russia is "supplying Syria with warplanes, armoured vehicles and air defence systems." Medvedev also said that nuclear cooperation between the two countries "may get a second wind," and suggested that Russia could build Syria a reactor. Such a move could threaten the position of Israel as the region's sole nuclear power and, thus, "prompted concern from Washington." While in Syria, Medvedev also met with exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.

Before heading back to Moscow, Medvedev visited Turkey, an important US ally since World War II. Turkey has cooperated openly with Israel, prompting US policymakers to hold the relationship up as a "model for how a Muslim country can pursue a ... cooperative relationship with the Jewish state." In return, Israel and the US have long supplied Turkey with sophisticated military equipment. Yet, as Medvedev arrived, the typically pro-Western Turkish military announced that it had installed anti-aircraft batteries on the Syrian border as "a message" to deter Israel or the US from entering Turkish airspace during a potential attack on Syria or Iran.

While in Ankara, Medvedev and Erdogan signed agreements for Russia to construct Turkey's first-ever nuclear power plant and for the development of an oil pipeline project to carry Russian oil to the Black Sea. While Erdogan proclaimed "solidarity with Russia" and Medvedev stressed their "strategic partnership," both states agreed to ease entry visa restrictions while talks proceed for Russia to supply Turkey with helicopters and air defense systems. Such efforts to improve ties should not be surprising, given that Russia's gas exports have now made it Turkey's second-largest trading partner.

Turkey's response to the nighttime Israeli commando assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, killing at least nine civilians, reveals further the growing unwillingness of Turkey to be a US collaborator in its regional project. It publicly invoked the NATO Charter, thus requiring a response from other NATO countries, and promised to send another aid convoy to Gaza with Turkish Naval escort. As massive protests broke out throughout the world to condemn the atrocity, Erdogan called the attack a "bloody massacre." "Today is a turning point in history," he said, "nothing will ever be the same again." The sentiment was echoed by Tel Aviv when a "senior official" told Yediot Aharonot that "the alliance is dead." "The Turks are right about one thing," he continued, "irreversible harm has been caused to the relations. In the situation that has been created, Turkey will no longer be a strategic ally of Israel."

In fact, the Lula-Erdogan deal and Turkey's response to the flotilla attack are just the latest in a recent sign that increasingly-violent US/Israeli rule over the Middle East may actually be alienating an important US regional ally. As many observers have noted, Turkey has become increasingly independent, and recent events "may suggest that Turkey's continued cooperation with the West is far from guaranteed," as Soner Cagaptay wrote in Foreign Affairs. This shift was highlighted in October 2009, when Turkey canceled Israel's participation in an annual Turkish air force exercise that it has held with Israel, Europe and the US since the mid-1990s, likely a result of public outrage over Israel's barbaric slaughter of Palestinians in Operation Cast Lead. One day after barring Israel from participation, Turkey invited Syria to conduct joint exercises instead. In the wake of the flotilla attack, Turkey has again canceled planned war games with Israel. Meanwhile, Turkey has strengthened ties with Libya and Syria.

The rise of China will also have far-reaching regional consequences and the day is not far off when its power will surpass that of Russia. In the meantime, China is beginning to establish its foothold in the highly strategic, energy-rich region by forging strong ties with regional powers and gradually challenging US\Israeli regional dominance. As its share of oil purchases from large regional producers like Saudi Arabia increases along with investments and other ties, the Saudis' traditional dependence on the United States is reduced and the space for dissension from US commands is increased - even if only by a few degrees at this stage. China's response to the Lula-Erdogan proposal is in sharp contrast to that of the US. Despite China's apparent agreement to another round of sanctions, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said, "we value and welcome the agreement reached between Brazil, Turkey and Iran on Tehran's research reactor."

And so the longstanding rule in the Middle East that "what we say goes" is beginning to change, with resistance to US dictates increasing as its global power declines. Syrian President Bashar Assad recognized this fact over the weekend during the visit of French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner to Syria as the Israel Defense Forces declared a massive military drill and Hezbollah expressed its readiness for war in response. He urged the US and Europe to accept the Lula-Erdogan deal and "pleaded with the West to restrain the Jewish state," saying, "the West must understand that the region has changed," and that the use of Israel as an attack dog to terrorize and beat the region into submission is "no longer acceptable."

Dog Wags Tail: A Response to Charles Freeman

2010-05-08T13:54:00.005-04:00

Also appeared on Mondoweiss

Mondoweiss recently posted an email exchange with Ambassador Charles Freeman in which he insists that the argument I made in a recent article published by The Electronic Intifada failed in its attempt to demonstrate that the "Israel Lobby" is not the primary driver of US policy toward the Middle East.

In that article, I show that the Lobby thesis of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer is inadequate to explain US policy in the region by relying on two lines of argumentation: a) US policy in the Middle East fits with its imperial policies elsewhere in the world, in regions free of the proclaimed distortions of the lobby, and b) Israel has served the strategic interests of the US very well, and has been a crucial part of making its Middle East policy a profitable, strategic success.

In addressing a), Freeman curiously asserts that "Washington has never had to exercise a veto or pay a similar political price to protect any of [it's other allies] from condemnation or sanctions by the international community," despite the facts I presented showing the exact opposite. I showed how the US systematically shields its allies from international condemnation, citing the examples of Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds and the brutal Indonesian invasion and thirty-year occupation of East Timor, both of which the US worked vehemently in international forums to shield from condemnation.

It is true that a review of US vetoes in the UN reveals that Israel is the leading beneficiary of their use. But it hardly stops there. Another frequent beneficiary of such shielding was the South African apartheid regime, on whose behalf the US vetoed numerous resolutions condemning the government for attacks and violence, or criticizing its Apartheid nature. One could also look at US efforts to block the UN from criticizing Iraqi use of chemical and conventional weapons against Iranian population centers after his invasion in 1980, or the protection of Turkey's slaughter of the Kurds as examples of diplomatic shielding of crimes of allied states, and the list does not stop there.

As with other proponents of the Lobby thesis, Freeman points to the tremendous level of support provided by the US to Israel as evidence of the Lobby's nefarious influence. As I addressed in my article, and briefly explore below, the exceptional level of support Israel receives is a rational response to the particular strategic importance of the Middle East, and the reliability of Israel in advancing US interests. One of the most important sources of US global power is its control of energy resources; a loss of this control would result in significant damage to US hegemony. Thus what happens in the Middle East has global implications for the US empire. The overwhelming firepower provided to Israel, which is aggressively used against any who challenge the established order, has played a central role in maintaining US control of the region, providing security for US-backed oil dictatorships as well as keeping a check on them.

Though the interests of the two states are not identical, when they do diverge Israel is forced into line and US interests prevail. This was evident in the severe military sanctions applied to Israel by the Bush administration in 2004/5, as well as successful pressure from the Clinton administration to call off an arms deal with the Chinese in 2000, just to pick two.

Just recently, despite Obama's unwillingness to move beyond mere words in his condemnations of Israel, Haaretz reports that "the fear of the diplomatic crisis with the United States caused the [Israeli Jerusalem Planning] system to act 'hysterically,' and even plans with no potential to cause national harm were postponed." The chairman of the planning committee stopped "even signing off on orders that have already been approved," and "upcoming meetings have been cancelled." "When they ask about the reason for the freeze on committee activity," architects and contractors are "told it is because of U.S. President Barack Obama." All this, without even the hint of sanctions.

As I mentioned, if one wants to claim that the influence of the Lobby causes the US to uniquely act against its interests in the Middle East, this uniqueness must be demonstrated. Unless this is done, the Lobby thesis cannot be seriously considered. This need is particularly acute once one considers the immensely greater power of such interests as the defense establishment and state-linked multinational corporations, whose contributions to political campaigns, not to mention institutionalized power within the executive branch, dwarfs that of the Lobby. The vast political influence of these groups could shut the Israel lobby down easily if they so chose, but they permit it to exist and often even amplify its voice. Do they fail to understand their interests, or are they, too, part of the Israel lobby?

The most explosive and eye-catching of Freeman's claims is his statement that "Israel is useless for the purposes of strategic logistics or power projection." To support this assertion, he writes that "none of Israel's neighbors will facilitate overflight for military aircraft transiting Israeli territory, let alone taking off from there." Yet he does not engage (or mention) the evidence I presented, which explored in detail the vital role Israel has played in maintaining American hegemony in the region, terrorizing the Middle East into compliance with the imperial will through its overwhelming military strength (including nuclear weapons).

Israel's overwhelming military dominance ensures devastating punishment for those who refuse to accept that "what we say goes," in the words of George H. W. Bush. For instance, Israel did not ask permission to overfly Lebanon before its savage attacks in 1978, 1982, 1996, or 2006, nor for its numerous attacks against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Nor do such logistical concerns have any effect on the threat Israel poses to Iran, a confrontation which has the US imperial desire to control energy resources at its heart, as I explained in EI.

Freeman's claim that Israel is "worse than irrelevant" for controlling Middle Eastern energy supplies rings somewhat hollow when we take a careful look at the facts. Apart from crushing opposition movements and threats to the established order (as in its confrontation of Arab Nationalism and Iran), Israel is and has been a constant threat to US foes in the region, and is both a source of security for and a check on America's large, oil-producing clients. It thus serves an important role in projecting US power throughout the heart of the Middle East, the most strategically vital region on Earth. Having a reliable client that is the dominant military hegemon, and the only nuclear power in the region, overseeing the "greatest material prize in history" is, I would say, very relevant.

The example Freeman briefly points to in support of his claim that the US relationship with Israel has "frequently jeopardized [US control of oil] supplies, not contributed to securing them" is the 1973 oil shock. Indeed, it was more intense than the 1967 oil embargo, because it was accompanied by production cuts (since oil is a fungible commodity, an embargo is meaningless without cuts in production as well). In truth, the Saudi monarchy collaborated with the US on the embargo to the fullest extent possible, even secretly continuing to ensure supplies of oil to the US Navy in the Mediterranean and its forces in Vietnam.

There can be no doubt that one reason for such compliance on the part of the Saud - the most important US ally in the world - was the overwhelming power of the Israeli military. Not only does such military power pose an implicit threat to the Saudi regime, but it is also an essential provider of security for the regime against potential rivals – both internalluy and externally - who may seek to take greater advantage of widespread public anger.

Had the Saudis not used the "oil weapon" against the US in '67 and '73 (widely seen even at the time as Israel's patron), widespread anger would have put the continued rule of the monarchy at risk. As in 1967, faced with little alternative, the Saudis enacted an embargo while doing their best to manage and minimize its effects in constant coordination with US officials. Subsequently, the oil wealth that was accumulated from the increased oil prices was used like an executive branch discretionary fund, which financed imperial activities all over the world.

The pressure that the population of Saudi Arabia was able to put on the regime in the case of the oil embargoes also helps explain another of Israel's values as an ally -- its reliability. Unlike in the Arab states, there is no chance of a coup or revolution there that would produce a government that would resist US objectives, as happened in Iran in 1979. The US can safely transfer the most advanced weaponry to Israel, without fear of it falling into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists or independent nationalists.   

Freeman's assertions that "the US has no bases or troop presence in Israel," and that "Israeli bases are not for US use" can be dismissed as irrelevant, since the main purpose of maintaining Israel as a client is precisely to avoid the need to use US forces directly. Instead, planes provided by the US "gratis," as Freeman says, are flown by Israeli pilots, dropping US bombs and enforcing regional order and "stability" -- in other words, US control. Thus, contrary to the view of Freeman and other proponents of the Lobby thesis, the armaments, material support, and economic benefits supplied Israel by the United States guarantee it this regional primacy, and are a central part of its regional strategy.

Unfortunately, not all the criticism published has been as civilized or honest as that offered by Charles Freeman. The intellectually vacant rant that Idrees Ahmad posted both here and on Pulse is one example which caught my eye. In his piece, he refuses to engage the arguments I advance, but says I "purloined" the work of others, "misused sources," and "constructed a slipshod argument." Since he offers no challenge to my argument, the third of these charges can be dismissed immediately. If I have indeed constructed a "slipshod argument," it is up to Mr. Ahmad to demonstrate it. Instead, in the true fashion of great heroes of rhetorical debate like Allan Dershowitz, he proceeds instead to smear me, making one baseless accusation after the next and grossly distorting what I wrote.

Since I don't want to dignify such a cheap smear by elevating it to the same level as Mr. Freeman's respectful critique, I will keep my response to Mr. Ahmad brief. His accusation that I misused sources is based on the charges that a) Ahmad claims both Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Kennan oppose the Iraq war and b) in the same Brzezinski article I used a quote from ("Hegemonic Quicksand," The National Interest, Winter 2003/4), Brzezinski expresses that US and Israeli interests are not always congruent.

Obviously, the reason I cite Kennan's term "veto power" and Brzezinski's phrase "critical leverage" is to show that there is a consensus among strategic planners, including the most liberal, that the control of Middle Eastern energy resources is strategically beneficial. Whether or not those particular individuals support military action in Iraq as a strategy for securing long-term US strategic control of oil, or wish to use other, more indirect means is not in any way relevant. The important point is that there is broad acknowledgment that control of oil gives the US huge strategic leverage, a point not contradicted at all by Brzezinski's article nor by anything Kennan ever wrote.

Ahmad's second point is even more absurd, since a central component of my argument is that we can measure the effects of the Lobby by the outcome of instances when the interests of the US and Israel diverge. I argue that in such cases Israel (which Brzezinski refers to in the same article as "America's favorite client") is brought to heel by the US, thus negating the notion that the "tail wags the dog," that is, that the Israel lobby forces the US government to be a slave to Israeli interests at the expense of its own.

As if Ahmad's outrageous and totally unsupported smears against me weren't enough, he also attacks The Electronic Intifada for even publishing my article, which he labels an "attack on Walt and Mearsheimer." Anyone who has read my article, I would hope, would find it to be a respectful critique, not an "attack." The whole purpose of intellectual engagement should be to discuss and debate competing hypotheses, and promote the healthy discussion and debate that are surely a healthy part of any democracy. It is this that makes Ahmad's insistence that EI should not even present the sensible and well-researched argument I am making, and that I should be silenced, particularly shocking and dangerous. It is my hope that if Ahmed cannot refrain from smearing me, that he at least will refrain from doing so to the dedicated editors of the Electronic Intifada, who work tirelessly in the fight for Palestinian rights and provide an invaluable service to us all.

US hegemony, not "the lobby," behind complicity with Israel

2010-04-27T21:07:00.008-04:00

Originally published by The Electronic Intifada on April 27, 2010

Many of Israel's critics blame an "Israel lobby" for the near-total complicity of the US in Israeli annexation, colonization and cleansing programs in the occupied West Bank. This complicity continues to the present, despite the "row" that erupted after the Israeli government humiliated US Vice President Joe Biden by announcing the construction of 1,600 settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem while he was visiting the country. Indeed, despite the apparent outrage expressed by top White House officials, the administration has made clear that its criticism of Israel will remain purely symbolic. However, as we shall see, the lobby thesis does little to explain US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Years after Noam Chomsky, Stephen Zunes, Walter Russell Mead and many others published their critiques of the Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer "Israel lobby" thesis, many of the sharpest critics of Israel continue to attribute US foreign policy in the Middle East to the influence of the lobby. Given the prevalence of the Israel lobby argument, and the latest diplomatic confrontation between the US and Israel, it is important to revisit the flaws in the thesis, and properly attribute US behavior to the large concentrations of domestic political and economic power that truly drive US policy.

US foreign policy in the Middle East is similar to that which is carried out elsewhere in the world, in regions free of "the lobby's" proclaimed corrupting effects. The inflated level of support that the US lends Israel is a rational response to the particular strategic importance of the Middle East, the chief energy-producing region of the world. By building Israel into what Noam Chomsky refers to as an "offshore US military base," it is able to protect its dominance over much of the world's remaining energy resources, a major lever of global power. As we shall see, those blaming the lobby for US policy once again misunderstand US's strategic interests in the Middle East, and Israel's central role in advancing them.

Geopolitics and the US-Israeli relationship

A central claim of the "Israel lobby" thesis is that the "lobby," however defined, overwhelmingly shapes US policy towards the Middle East. Thus, if the argument were true, its proponents would have to demonstrate that there is something qualitatively unique about US policy towards the Middle East compared with that in other regions of the world. Yet upon careful analysis, we find little difference between the purported distortions caused by the lobby and what is frequently referred to as the "national interest," governed by the same concentrations of domestic power that drive US foreign policy elsewhere.

There are states all around the world that perform similar services to Washington as Israel, projecting US power in their respective regions, whose crimes in advancing Washington's goals are overtly supported and shielded from international condemnation. Take for instance the 30 years of US support for the horrors of the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor. In addition to the use of rape and starvation as weapons, and a gruesome torture regime, Indonesian president Suharto slaughtered 150,000 persons out of a population of 650,000. These atrocities were fully supported by the US, including supplying the napalm and chemical weapons indiscriminately used by the Indonesian army, which was fully armed and trained by the US. As Bill Clinton said, Suharto was "our kind of guy."

Daniel Patrick Moynahan, US ambassador to the UN at the time of the Indonesian invasion, later wrote that "the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook" to end the butchering of the East Timorese, a goal he carried out with "no inconsiderable success." Yet this support was not due to the influence of an "Indonesia lobby." Rather, planners had identified Indonesia as one of the three most strategically important regions in the world in 1958, as a result of its oil wealth and important role as a link between the Indian and Pacific oceans.

In some regions, as in Latin America where US clients like Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and terrorist armies like the Nicaraguan contras spent years murdering defenseless peasants demanding basic human rights, the threat is mostly one of "successful defiance;" that is, a country defying US orders and getting away with it. Should the US tolerate one such case, the logic goes, it will embolden resistance to its dictates elsewhere. The danger underlying such defiance -- referred to as "the threat of a good example" by Oxfam -- is that a country will implement a successful model for independent development, refusing US dictates and seeking to direct much-needed resources to serve the needs of the domestic population instead of wealthy foreign investors.

Such thinking is deeply institutionalized and exhibited by US policy worldwide, going back to the very beginnings of the modern imperial era after World War II. It was clear from early in the war that the US would emerge as the dominant world power in its aftermath, and so the State Department and Council on Foreign Relations began planning to create a post-war international order in which the US would "hold unquestioned power." One way it planned to do so was gaining control of global energy resources, primarily those of Saudi Arabia, which were referred to at the time as "the greatest material prize in history" by the US State Department.

As Franklin Roosevelt's "oil czar" Harold Ickes advised, control of oil was the "key to postwar political arrangements" since a large supply of cheap energy is essential to fuel the world's industrial capitalist economies. This meant that with control of Middle Eastern oil, particularly the vast Saudi reserves, the US could keep its hand on the spigot that would fuel the economies of Europe, Japan and much of the rest of the world. As US planner George Kennan put it, this would give the United States "veto power" over the actions of others. Zbigniew Brzezinski has also more recently discussed the "critical leverage" the US enjoys as a result of its stranglehold on energy supplies.

Thus in the Middle East it is not simply "successful defiance" that the US fears, nor merely independent development. These worries are present as well, but there is an added dimension: should opposition threaten US control of oil resources, a major source of US global power is placed at risk. Under the Nixon Administration, with the US military tied down in Vietnam and direct intervention in the Middle East to defend vital strategic interests unlikely, military aid to pre-revolution Iran (acting as an American regional enforcer) skyrocketed. Amnesty International's conclusion in 1976 that "no country has a worse human rights record than Iran" was ignored, and US support increased, not because of an "Iran lobby" in the US, but rather because such support was advancing US interests.

Strategic concerns also led the US to support other oppressive, reactionary regimes, including Saddam Hussein's worst atrocities. During the Anfal genocide against the Kurds, Iraqi forces used chemical weapons provided by the US against Kurdish civilians, killed perhaps 100,000 persons, and destroyed roughly 80 percent of the villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, while the US moved to block international condemnation of these atrocities. Again, supporting crimes that serve the "national interest" set by large corporations and ruling elites, and shielding them from international criticism is the rule, not the exception.

It is no coincidence that the US-Israel relationship crystallized after Israel destroyed the independent nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in a preemptive attack in 1967, permanently ending the role of Egypt as a center of opposition to US imperialism. Since before World War II, Saudi Arabia had happily served as an "Arab facade," veiling the hand of the true ruling power on the Arabian peninsula, to borrow British colonial terminology. With Nasser's Arab nationalist rhetoric "turning the whole region against the House of Saud," the threat he posed to US power was serious. In response, the State Department concluded that the "logical corollary" to US opposition to Arab nationalism was "support for Israel" as the only reliable pro-US force in the region. Israel's destruction and humiliation of Nasser's regime was thus a major boon for the US, and proved to Washington the value of a strong alliance with a powerful Israel.

This unique regional importance is one reason for the tremendous level of aid Israel receives, including more advanced weaponry than that provided to other US clients. Providing Israel with the ability to use overwhelming force against any adversary to the established order has been a pivotal aspect of US regional strategy. Importantly, Israel is also a reliable ally -- there is little chance that the Israeli government will be overthrown, and the weapons end up in the hands of anti-Western Islamic fundamentalists or independent nationalists as happened in Iran in 1979.

Today, with the increased independence of Europe, and the hungry economies of India and China growing at breakneck speed along with their demand for dwindling energy resources, control over what is left is more crucial than ever. In the September 2009 issue of the Asia-Africa Review, China's former Special Envoy to the Middle East Sun Bigan wrote that "the US has always sought to control the faucet of global oil supplies," and suggested that since Washington would doubtless work to ensure that Iraqi oil remained under its control, China should look elsewhere in the region for an independent energy source. "Iran has bountiful energy resources," Bigan wrote, "and its oil gas reserves are the second biggest in the world, and all are basically under its own control" (emphasis added).

It is partially as a result of this independence that Israel's strategic importance to the US has increased significantly in recent times, particularly since the Shah's cruel, US-supported dictatorship in Iran was overthrown in 1979. With the Shah gone, Israel alone had to terrorize the region into complying with US orders, and ensure that Saudi Arabia's vast oil resources remain under US control. The increased importance of Israel to US policy was illustrated clearly as its regional strategy shifted to "dual containment" during the Clinton years, with Israel countering both Iraq and Iran.

With Iran developing technology that could eventually allow it to produce what are referred to in the February 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review as "anti-access weapons," or weapons of mass destruction that prevent the US from being able to freely use force in any region of the world, this is a crucial moment in Washington's struggle to seize control of Iran. This confrontation, stemming from the desire of the US to control its oil and destroy a base of independent nationalism, makes US support for Israel strategically crucial.

The "Israel lobby" and US Pressure

If we adopt "the lobby" hypothesis, we would predict that the US would bend to Israel's will when the interests of the two states diverge, acting against its "national interest." Yet if US policies in the Middle East were damaging its "national interest," as proponents of the lobby argument claim, that must mean that such policies have been a failure. This leads one to ask: a failure for whom? Not for US elites, who have secured control of the major global energy resources while successfully crushing opposition movements, nor for the defense establishment, and most certainly not for the energy corporations. In fact, not only is US policy towards the Middle East similar to that towards other regions of the world, but it has been a profitable, strategic success.

Indeed, the US's policy towards Israel and the Palestinians is not to achieve an end to the occupation, nor to bring about respect for Palestinian rights -- in fact, it is the actor primarily responsible for preventing these outcomes. To the US, Israel's "Operation Defensive Shield" in 2002 had sufficiently punished the Palestinians and their compliant US-backed leadership for their intransigence at Camp David. While the Palestinian Authority was already acting as Israel's "subcontractor" and "collaborator" in suppressing resistance to Israeli occupation, in the paraphrased words of former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's deliberate destruction of Palestinian institutions provided the opportunity to rebuild them, and ensure an even greater degree of US control.

The settlement and annexation programs help guarantee Israeli control over the most valuable Palestinian land and water resources, ensuring Israel will remain a dominant society not easily pressured by its neighbors. To help achieve these goals, the US shields Israeli expansion behind a "peace process" in hopes that given enough time the Palestinians will concede more and more of what was once theirs. The primary concern is to present the appearance that the US and Israel are ardently crusading for peace, battling against those who oppose this noble objective. Though it is true that people across the region are appalled and outraged by Israeli crimes, such anger is a small consideration next to the strategic gain of maintaining a strong, dependent ally in the heart of the Middle East.

The reconstitution of an even more tightly-controlled Palestinian Authority, with General Keith Dayton directly supervising the Palestinian security forces, enabled the US to meet these goals while more effectively suppressing resistance to the occupation. Likewise, redeploying Israeli soldiers outside of Gaza allowed Sharon a free hand to continue the annexation of the West Bank while being heralded internationally as a "great man of peace."

The treatment of Israel by the mainstream US media is also standard for all US allies. Coverage in the corporate press is predictably skewed in favor of official US allies and against official enemies, a well-documented phenomenon. Thus, proponents of the lobby thesis are missing the forest for the trees. What they see as the special treatment of Israel by the mainstream press is actually just the normal functioning of the US media and intellectual establishment, apologizing for and defending crimes of official allies while demonizing official enemies.

Of course, this is not to argue that there are not organizations in the US, like the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, that seek to marginalize dissent from Israeli policy in every forum possible. Rather, I am pointing out that the power of these groups pales in comparison to other, far more powerful, interests and concerns. While the AJC or ADL may mobilize for the firing of a professor critical of Israel, for example, that argument is amplified by the elite-owned and controlled press because doing so serves their interests. Likewise, AIPAC can urge unwavering support for Israel on the part of the US government, but without the assent of other far more powerful interests, like the energy corporations and defense establishment, AIPAC's efforts would amount to little. US policy, like that of other states, is rationally planned to serve the interests of the ruling class.

Israel could not sustain its aggressive, expansionist policies without US military aid and diplomatic support. If the Obama Administration wanted to, it could pressure Israel to comply with international law and resolutions, join the international consensus, and enact a two-state solution. While the "Israel lobby" thesis conveniently explains his failure to do so and absolves US policy-makers of responsibility for their ongoing support of Israeli apartheid, violence and annexation, it simply does not stand up under closer scrutiny.

Israel's manufactured outrage over a presidential palace

2010-04-26T15:58:00.016-04:00

This article originally appeared in The Electronic Intifada on April 15, 2010

The headlines were ablaze last week after the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that it would build the new presidential compound on a street named after Yahya Ayyash. Ayyash, whose nickname was "The Engineer," was a Hamas military commander who orchestrated several attacks against Israeli civilian targets in the mid-1990s in response to the 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshipers at Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque by an Israeli-American settler named Baruch Goldstein. In 1996, Ayyash was assassinated by Israel in Gaza City.

"This is a shocking incitement to terrorism by the Palestinian Authority," boomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement. "Arch-terrorist Ayyash," as Netanyahu called him, had "murdered hundreds of innocent Israeli men, women and children," and so building the presidential compound on this street was an act of "wild incitement by the Palestinians for terror and against peace." The United States reacted with strong support for the Israeli position. "Honoring terrorists who have murdered innocent civilians, either by official statements or by the dedication of public places, hurts peace efforts and must end," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

The hysterical reaction of the Israeli government, and US support for it, is hardly surprising. Of note however is the double-standard exhibited by Israel and its patron, the US. The assumption throughout is that Israel's actions are just, defensive and in pursuit of peace for all. Conversely, Palestinian actions are aggressive and evil, and worthy of worldwide condemnation. The strength of this narrative allows the US and Israeli governments to make the construction of a new government building on a street whose name Israel disproves of into a major incident, worthy of outrage and international condemnation, while grotesque Israeli crimes and far more flagrant provocations go unquestioned.

A Jerusalem Post editorial headlined "Glorifying Terrorism" exemplifies this point. The "inescapable message is that such crimes are the PA's ideal," the editorial stated, since it "acclaims malevolence instead of denouncing it." The Jerusalem Post declared that the act was "an affront to the very notion of coexistence," and yet another example of the PA's "consistent policy" of "deception" and "insincerity" which has undermined "the Oslo promise." "Our misfortune," The Jerusalem Post lamented, "is that the world's outrage is very selective and very misplaced."

That such manufactured outrage could be delivered without a hint of irony is startling in light of recent events. This includes a series of internationally-condemned deliberate Israeli provocations -- supported by Washington -- in reaction to the UN-commissioned Goldstone report.

Investigated and published in the wake of Israel's invasion of Gaza last winter, the Goldstone report documents the deliberate targeting of civilians, including the "systematically reckless" use of white phosphorous, showering densely-populated and impoverished refugee camps with the burning chemical, resulting in horrific burns and death. It also describes deliberate Israeli attacks on mosques, hospitals, schools, ambulances, UN facilities and indiscriminate bombardment of crowded slums. "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one Israeli soldier said of the attack, which killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and left thousands more injured, mutilated and homeless.

In a shocking example of "acclaiming malevolence instead of denouncing it," the US and Israel have attacked the report relentlessly and attempted to marginalize it, and Israel has refused to even conduct a credible investigation into its findings. While concerned citizens in cities around the world took to the streets to express their anger at the horrific atrocities documented in the report, the US called it "unbalanced" and "flawed" and moved to block its consideration at the UN, promising to veto any action in the Security Council if necessary. Likewise, Israeli President Shimon Peres referred to the report as "a mockery." The US and Israel then pressured PA President Mahmoud Abbas to defer action on the report in the General Assembly (though overwhelming popular pressure later forced him to reverse that position).

Israel has gone out of its way in recent months to goad the Palestinians into confrontation, including naming two places deep in the West Bank "Israeli Heritage Sites," sparking days of protests. Israel has also escalated its provocations around the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. Along with the Dome of the Rock, the mosque sits inside the Haram al-Sharif, which is known as the Temple Mount to Jews. In addition to repeatedly deploying soldiers around the compound, Israel has announced that it will expand the Jewish prayer area at the Western Wall, despite a Jerusalem court's decision that such a move would violate the status quo agreement that has governed Jerusalem's holy sites since Israel seized the Old City in the June 1967 War.

A further escalation was the reopening of the "Hurva," a Jewish synagogue just a few hundred meters from the al-Aqsa Mosque. With growing numbers of Jewish fundamentalists insisting that they be allowed to pray inside the Haram al-Sharif, many of whom advocate demolishing the al-Aqsa Mosque and building a third Jewish temple in its place, the reopening was universally condemned in the Muslim and Arab world. It was also reported in the Israeli press that according to a 300-year-old rabbinical prophecy, the reopening of the synagogue foretold the construction of the third temple in the place now occupied by the al-Aqsa Mosque. Yet when Palestinian leaders called for a "day of rage" in response to these provocations, the US sharply criticized them for overreacting. Yet only weeks later, Israel opened another synagogue in East Jerusalem 100 meters closer to the Haram, and Washington was silent.

Despite all this, the Israeli and American governments jointly denounce the Palestinians' choice of which street on which to construct a new presidential palace as "wild incitement." Are the Palestinians allowed to be outraged when Israel names streets, every inch of which lie on land that was taken from them, after the commanders that masterminded and executed the cleansing of 70 percent of Palestinian Arabs in 1948? What would the consequences be if Mahmoud Abbas started referring to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who presided over a campaign that "punished and terrorized" the 1.5 million residents of Gaza last winter as an "arch-terrorist"?

Given recent Israeli provocations, and the American response to them, the operative principle is clear: the Israelis are justly defending their democracy, while the Palestinians are savage, uncompromising terrorists. Those fighting for justice and peace in the Middle East must relentlessly confront this narrative, spreading truth and awareness, the only basis on which the conflict can finally come to an end.

The US' Choreographed "Outrage" at Israel

2010-03-28T12:35:00.005-04:00

Originally published at The Electronic Intifada on March 23, 2010.

The speeches at AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group, on Monday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Netanyahu's subsequent meeting with US President Barack Obama are widely seen as drawing to a close what Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren called the "most severe crisis in US-Israel relations" in decades. This rapprochement comes on the heels of a series of seemingly angry statements top members of the Obama Administration released, after Israel announced construction of 1,600 new illegal housing units in occupied East Jerusalem while US Vice President Joe Biden was in the country.

In fact, the basis for the Obama Administration's criticisms of the settlement announcement -- as well as the significance of the crisis itself -- has been widely misconstrued by both supporters and critics of Israel. AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) were "shocked and stunned" that Biden and Clinton called the Israeli announcement "insulting." AIPAC urged the administration to "take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish state" and "move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines directed at Israel." Meanwhile, the ADL mused, "One can only wonder how far the US is prepared go in distancing itself from Israel."

Voices more critical of Israel, such as Richard Dreyfuss of The Nation, suggested that "this is not just the reaction to an insulting announcement during the visit of Vice President Biden," but rather "the Obama Administration is beginning to realize that Israeli intransigence ... is a major obstacle to US policy in the region." Dreyfuss predicted that this "might turn into the most significant confrontation between the United States and Israel" since the 1956 Suez War.

Contrary to both of these positions, the Obama Administration merely reacted to a diplomatic affront it was dealt by the Israeli government. Israel's announcement came on the same day that Biden had arrived in the country to proudly confirm the US' "absolute, total and unvarnished" commitment to its ally, and commence indirect talks with the Palestinians. Following the announcement, protests and violent clashes broke out in Jerusalem and elsewhere throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Responding to this pressure, the Arab League threatened to cancel its endorsement of the indirect negotiations, with Secretary Amr Moussa even announcing that the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had decided not to participate in the talks. As the endorsement was the only political cover Abbas had to re-enter negotiations, the US administration took careful notice of these events as pressure on Abbas to abandon talks from within the territories mounted. With the Arab world outraged and Biden humiliated due to the degree of US complicity that the timing of the announcement revealed, the Obama Administration was forced to react.

Clinton said the timing of the announcement was "insulting," while top aide David Axelrod called it an "affront" that "seemed calculated" to undermine the peace talks. The Obama Administration hopes that this PR display will allow the US to fortify its farcical claim to be an "honest broker" in the peace process, provide Abbas the political cover to re-enter negotiations, and send a message to the Israeli government that American leaders are to be treated with respect. As CNN reported, Netanyahu has now set up a team to investigate why the settlement construction announcement was made during Biden's visit.

Netanyahu may well have been telling the truth when he claimed to be "surprised" by the public criticisms by the US government. The day before, one day after US envoy George Mitchell arrived to broker newly-announced "proximity talks," the State Department explicitly approved Israel's construction of 112 new apartments in an illegal settlement outside Bethlehem. The assent came despite Netanyahu's declaration of a "moratorium" on settlement building, which he has insisted cannot include such illegal construction in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, a position the US has accepted.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has also chastised Israel for its "provocative actions," including record-high rates of stripping Palestinians from Jerusalem their residency rights and infringements on Palestinian religious sites that are clearly designed to incite a Palestinian response or otherwise make it impossible for Abbas to return to the negotiating table. Yet even when the administration was at its most critical of Israel, following Obama's speech in Cairo last year, Israel was reassured that the actions taken by the US would be "largely symbolic." Indeed, Obama unconditionally re-authorized the loan guarantees program and massive US aid -- conservatively estimated at $7 million per day -- has continued without threat of reduction.

Obviously, the Obama Administration is hardly concerned about Israeli violations of international law, previous agreements it has signed, or the human rights of the Palestinians. The implication throughout is that had the announcement come a week before Biden visited (or even a day before, as the Bethlehem announcement did) there would have been no problem. Indeed, just one week later, after the Israeli government announced construction on an additional 426 East Jerusalem settlement homes, Clinton "bolstered her support for the Jewish state," according to The Washington Post. The Israeli army then opened fire on peaceful protestors in Gaza twice in two days, and carried out air strikes on targets in Gaza, while Clinton issued another statement saying that the steps offered by the Israeli government to resolve the dispute were "useful and productive."

The escalating repression continued Sunday, when the Israeli army shot and killed four Palestinian youths in 24 hours in the West Bank, two aged 18 and two 16. Simultaneously, Netanyahu issued a statement proclaiming that Israel would never cease building illegally in East Jerusalem as Ban Ki-moon arrived in Israel. Clearly, recent condemnations of these projects as "illegal" by Ban and the European Union did not stop Obama from welcoming Netanyahu to Washington on Monday with a private meeting, nor Clinton from proudly sharing the stage with him at the AIPAC conference to reaffirm the US commitment to support Israel's rejection of the international consensus for resolving the conflict. Though she did say the settlements "undermine mutual trust," she did not acknowledge their illegality and mostly stressed the threat that US support for them poses to its "credibility" as an "honest broker," thus urging Israel to refrain from such flagrantly provocative behavior while reinforcing that the US-Israel relationship is "rock solid."

The US hopes that this pretended outrage will lend its role as "honest broker" enough credibility to keep the "peace process" moving, itself merely a PR facade that shields Israeli crimes from public scrutiny. If it does not, the US will undoubtedly pay little mind to the harsh words spoken this week and do as it has done before: blame the Palestinians for its failure and support Israeli repression.

NYT's Double Standard on Nuclear Proliferation: Hyping Iranian threat while ignoring Israeli defiance

2010-01-07T12:20:00.008-05:00

Originally published by Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

The New York Times' treatment of Iranian and Israeli nuclear programs in recent months is a clear example of the systematic double standard the "paper of record" displays in international coverage (Extra!, 8/09).

The Times has devoted tremendous space and resources to covering Iran's nuclear program. Even though, as the Times itself explained (9/26/09), there is "no evidence" that Iran is building a bomb, and despite Iran's cooperation with international inspectors, the paper has continued to wave the specter of the "Iranian threat"--calling to mind the paper's warmongering coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Extra!, 12/09). Meanwhile, Israel's longstanding refusal to cooperate in any way with international institutions seeking to monitor its actually existing nuclear weapons is absent from the pages of the New York Times. The contrast once again demonstrates how the Times systematically applies different standards to official allies and enemies of the U.S.--a long-standing and well-documented pattern at the paper (Extra!, 2/09; NACLA, 12/19/08).

On August 28, a long-awaited International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran's nuclear activities was released. While the report was critical of Iran at times, saying "it does not consider that Iran has adequately addressed the substance of the issues," it also noted that Iran and the IAEA "agreed on improvements regarding the provision of accounting and operating records" and on the "requirements for timely access for unannounced inspections." Importantly, the report also concluded that "Iran has cooperated with the Agency in improving safeguards measures."

But the Times' (8/29/09) hysterical coverage virtually ignored Iran's acceptance of additional safeguards. Instead, journalists William Broad and David Sanger wrote that the report described how Iran "continues to expand its nuclear program and deny the IAEA most forms of cooperation." Days later, Sanger warned in a front-page article (9/10/09) that Iran has "created enough nuclear fuel to make a rapid, if risky, sprint for a nuclear weapon."

One would think from the Times' coverage of Iran that its editors view nuclear proliferation and the IAEA as newsworthy subjects--and that the nuclear programs of other powerful nations in the Middle East would likewise be subject to intense scrutiny. For instance Israel, one of four rogue states that have refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and which is known to have secretly developed a large stockpile nuclear weapons (Arms Control Association, 2009). Iran is immeasurably more cooperative with the IAEA than Israel and has no nuclear weapons. Unlike Iran, Israel has never permitted international inspections of its nuclear sites, and has consistently refused efforts to place its activities under international supervision. Israel is also the most aggressive state in the region, having conducted military attacks on other countries at least four times since 2006. Iran, by comparison, has never attacked another country in modern history. Yet when it comes to U.S. allies such as Israel, the paper's coverage takes on a decidedly different character.

This was exhibited on September 18, when the IAEA Board of Governors voted for the first time to request that Israel's nuclear program be placed under international oversight (IAEA,9/18/09). Israeli leaders immediately rejected the call, saying Israel would "not cooperate in any matter with this resolution" (Foreign Policy, 9/18/09). Without a hint of irony, Western diplomats insisted that it was "unfair and counterproductive to isolate one member state" (Reuters, 9/18/09). But the vote, deemed a "major shift" by Foreign Policy magazine (9/18/09), went entirely unreported by the Times, as did the response by Israeli and Western diplomats.

A week after the IAEA vote on Israel, as world leaders congregated in Pittsburgh for the G-20 conference, Barack Obama and other Western leaders "revealed" a "secret" Iranian nuclear facility located on property owned by the Revolutionary Guard in Qom.(New York Times, 9/26/09; Extra!, 12/09). The Times promptly erupted with mountains of coverage--five articles on September 26 alone. In total, according to a Nexis search of the week following the "revelation," the Times published a total of 32 pieces on what it said "may well be the first peek at...a planned, or even partly completed, hidden nuclear archipelago stretching across the country" (9/29/09), including 25 news or news analysis articles (eight of which appeared on the front page), as well as two scathing editorials, three op-eds, one series of statements from world leaders and more than a thousand words of letters to the editor--all this directly on the heels of devoting exactly zero articles to the IAEA resolution on Israel.

Times coverage of the Iranian issue has relied almost entirely on sources with clear U.S. or Western biases, many of them anonymous. Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review (9/30/09) found one article (9/26/09) crafted exclusively from no less than 20 anonymous White House sources. "There was not a single alternative perspective offered from Europe, the IAEA or Mideast specialists," Massing wrote. In another instance, the paper (9/26/09) printed in full separate statements condemning the facility from Obama, French President Sarkozy and Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted, he was described as being "all bluster" as he "mocked" and "made light of the Western accusations" and their "dramatic revelation" (9/26/09) of the Qom facility.

As a result, Iranian acquiescence to inspections of the Qom facility, as well as ElBaradei's finding that there was "nothing to be worried about" at the plant, were barely mentioned by the Times (Reuters 11/05/09). Equally important to the story, yet also downplayed, was Iran's voluntary disclosure of the facility--prior to its "revelation" by Obama and other Western leaders. (Iran notified the IAEA more than six months prior to the commencement of enrichment operations at the Qom facility, as required by its original agreement with the IAEA, though the agency recently criticized Iran for not recognizing a supplementary agreement that would have required notification as soon as construction commenced--Jerusalem Post, 11/28/09; FAS, 8/28/09; Reuters, 11/17/09.)

Instead, the Times focused solely on the story of Western determination to confront the implacable Iranian menace and to counter its "clandestine efforts to design a nuclear warhead" (9/29/09). The possibility of an aggressive strike against Iran loomed in the coverage, with the Times reminding readers that a military attack was "on the table" (9/26/09) and suggesting that "Israel might carry out a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons" (9/29/09). Obama was quoted warning Iran not to "continue down a path that is going to lead to confrontation" (9/26/09).The opinion pages also contributed to this confrontational tone. One op-ed, written by Times U.N. bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar (9/30/09), warned that "the plant could fuel a five-bomb arsenal in less than a year" and called for "protection against what we now know is Iran's determination to build the bomb." Times editorial writers (9/26/09) pushed for sanctions and called "faithless" Iran a "big cheat" that "has a long history of lying and cheating about its nuclear program."

Notably, the Times didn't publish any editorials or op-eds urging the United States or Iran to launch a preventive attack against Israel, or to apply crippling sanctions on that state. There was no suggestion that the U.S. curtail its ongoing efforts to bolster Israeli defiance with U.N. vetoes and massive military and economic aid--totaling more than $7 million per day, according to the Congressional Research Service (5/20/09). As for condemning Israel's long history of lying and cheating about its nuclear program, well, we're still waiting.

Michael Corcoran (MichaelCorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for such outlets as the Nation and the Boston Globe. Stephen Maher (RationalManifesto.blogspot.com) is an MA candidate at the School of International Service at American University.

Health Care Outrage

2009-12-18T12:21:00.006-05:00

What an outrageous bill we have from the Senate, actually worsening the status quo, if that can even be conceived of. It is almost criminal. How can one maintain faith in American democracy anymore; why even bother voting if it does not matter who wins? Not only does voting for Democrats not have any effect whatsoever on our posture of indefinite warfare, expansions of executive power, violations of human rights, and so on, but now this.

The Senate version of the bill has been stripped of everything: no public option, no cap on annual limits, no limits on premiums, no medicare expansion - all of which are massively popular provisions. In contrast, the legal mandate that everyone purchase a private insurance plan (pushed for by the insurance industry) remains in the bill (not to mention Obama's proposed cuts to Medicare, which, combined with the mandates, pave the way for the privatization of Medicare). In other words, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, or Cigna, or whoever, can say "Hey Steve - We alrady paid for $100,000 of healthcare, since your car accident. We have an annual limit, so now you are on your own. Welcome to financial ruin, or maybe death. Oh, and by the way, it is illegal not to buy this product from us." What am utter outrage, made worse by the fact that insurance stocks skyrocketed in the wake of the news.

This is not even "conservative." Rather it is a sick form of corporatism, where we are all forced to subsidize the profits of private companies, who were just handed millions of new customers now legally obligated to purchase their overpriced, shitty product BY LAW - or else face fines (but since they already cannot afford health insurance, one can imagine the impact of such a fine - especially since these measures will hit those without high-paying jobs that provide insurance benefits the hardest, forcing them to buy a plan on their own). Meanwhile, the insurance companies are announcing that they will raise rates. Likewise, the Health and Human Services Dept announced that "the nation's $2.5 trillion annual health-care tab would not shrink under the Democratic blueprint but would grow somewhat more rapidly than if Congress did nothing." And lets not forget Obama's proposed $493 billion in Medicare cuts, which HHS says "could lead to cuts in services" (services which, thanks to the mandate to purchase private insurance products, will now be delivered by private insurers, beginning a sort of creeping privatization of the Medicare system). Despicable.

Thanks Obama, thanks Democrats. Obama and his sycophantic underling Rahm Emmanuel (not the mention the rest of the pathetic Democratic party) have laid naked the fact that they have totally sold out to corporate interests, regardless of public opinion or the interests of the increasing numbers of suffering poor ("a majority of U.S. residents say that they or a member of their household has delayed or gone without health care services in the past year") in this, the most unequal developed country in the world. As the White House has admitted, Obama conducted secret deals with pharmaceutical industry lobbyists at which the administration "agreed to oppose congressional efforts to use government leverage to bargain for lower drug prices" and "not to shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D, which would have cost the industry billions in reduced reimbursements... in exchange for $80 billion over ten years to help push for reform" (despite Obama's promise to conduct all negotiations on C-SPAN). Obama and Emmanuel, in a manner typical of their offensively overt pro-corporate, anti-democratic attitude, have used this as an opportunity to ensure that industry funds continue to flow to the democratic party, and do not stand in opposition to "Ted Kennedy's dream." What a sad, sorry day this is.

Even more sickeningly, as Senator Russ Feingold pointed out, it is Obama - not just Lieberman - who should be blamed for this outcome:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

I strongly recommend reading this article for more information - if you can handle it.

[Thanks to Mike Corcoran for helping here]

Iran v. Honduras: The New York Times Selective Promotion of Democracy

2009-11-19T21:16:00.005-05:00

Published at EXTRA!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

When the results of the June 13 Iranian elections were decried as fraudulent (charges that were later backed up by a detailed study by Chatham House–6/21/09), U.S. media instantly became the champions of the oppressed Iranians who took to the streets in protest. Cries of righteous solidarity echoed from virtually all mainstream editorial outlets, and the large demonstrations were front-page news on every newspaper in the country each day.

The Islamic regime’s harsh suppression of demonstrations was rightfully the focus of prolific news coverage and vigorous editorial discussion. As the pages of the New York Times informed Americans, a “genuine democratic movement…including women, young people, intellectuals and members of the moderate clerical establishment,” had “united” in “resistance” against Iran’s clerics (6/14/09), who used “overwhelming force to crush the demonstrations” (6/16/09), and against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (6/14/09), “an intensely divisive figure here and abroad.”

“Death to the dictator,” the protesters were quoted as crying, after Ahmadinejad’s victory “provoked deep suspicion” given Iran’s tendency towards “vote-rigging” which had “often been raised.” Indeed, the Times (6/15/09) editorialized , “given the government’s even more than usually thuggish reaction, it certainly looks like fraud.”

By contrast, about two weeks later, demonstrators in Honduras who took to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the democratically elected president who had been violently abducted by soldiers that were armed, trained and advised by the United States received no such media support or attention. Hardly a mention that hundreds of protesters–two of whom were killed and 60 injured, according to the Chinese press agency Xinhua (6/30/09)–were confronting tanks and droves of armed forces in the Honduran capital could be found in mainstream news outlets or editorial pages.

The New York Times (6/29/09) framed its reporting on events in Honduras much differently: President Manuel Zelaya, “a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela,”was ousted by the U.S.-backed Honduran military, which was “acting to defend the law” after “months of tensions over [Zelaya's] efforts to lift presidential term limits”–efforts that “critics said [were] part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the constitution’s limit of a single four-year term for the president.”

This portrait of events laid out by Times reporters and opinion writers has been wildly inaccurate and misleading. In reality, Zelaya had called for a non-binding referendum that would have asked whether Hondurans would support the formation of a convention to rewrite Honduras’ constitution (possibly including a change in term-limit laws); that convention would not have been convened until after the general elections in November 2009, in which Zelaya was not a candidate because his term was expiring (Miami Herald, 7/3/09; Rebel Reports, 7/1/09).

The comparison of Zelaya to Chavez, whose name in the Times has always been a pejorative (Extra!, 11/12/06), is telling. To the Times, Chavez has been a “populist demagogue” and an “authoritarian man on horseback” (12/20/98) who “has militarized the government, emasculated the country’s courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela’s once-democratic institutions” (book review, 9/17/06). The Times celebrated the unsuccessful coup against him, rejoicing that “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator ” (4/13/02; Extra! Update, 6/02).

The disparity in the amount of attention given to the protesters in each country is striking, as demonstrated by a Nexis search of the first 10 days following both the Iran elections and the Honduran coup. The Times' first article on the Iran elections (6/14/09) quoted “green revolution” protesters at length, including reformist clerics and students. Op-ed columnist Tom Friedman (6/14/09) that very same day wrote: “But for the first time in a long time, the forces for decency, democracy and pluralism have a little wind at their backs. Good for them.” Two days later (6/16/09), in the online edition, columnist Ross Douthat praised the Iranian upheaval as a happy consequence of the global recession (failing to mention the role played by crippling U.S. sanctions). Likewise, a Times editorial (6/15/09) quickly condemned the shaky election results and Iran’s tepid democracy.

In the days following the military takeover in Honduras, on the other hand, the Times did not condemn the coup in an editorial, nor publish a single op-ed praising the Honduran protesters. In its original report on the coup (6/29/09), the Times acknowledged that “several thousand protesters supporting the president faced off against soldiers outside the presidential palace, burning tires,” but unlike in its Iran stories, the paper failed to quote a single demonstrator rallying to salvage the country’s hijacked democracy. The Times did follow with an article reporting on world leaders’ condemnations of the coup (6/28/09), but the voices of the brave Hondurans, who like the Iranians are fighting for their freedom despite enormous risk, have been conspicuously absent.

The first op-ed in the Times about the coup in Honduras (6/30/09) argued that Zelaya “set a trap for the military” by “pushing the limits of democracy,” and claimed the coup, while not legitimate, “has popular support in Honduras”–citing no evidence and ignoring the thousands who have taken to the street, the election results that put Zelaya in power in 2005, and international law on the matter. Astonishingly, the op-ed–headlined “The Winner in Honduras: Chavez”–linked the whole affair to the Venezuelan president’s “incessant exploitation.”

In the only other op-ed written on the topic as of this writing (”Who Cares About Zelaya?,” 7/7/09), Roger Maran Neda, a columnist for an anti-Zelaya newspaper in Honduras, argued that the ousted leader was “a typical Honduran politician” with a “lust for power,” whose “goal seemed to be a change from our democratic system into a kind of 21st-century socialism…a Hugo Chavez-type of government.” After dismissing those “abroad [who] are obsessing over the question of whether Mr. Zelaya’s ouster was legal or a classic military coup,” Neda casually discarded the right of Hondurans to choose their own leaders: “Mr. Zelaya may or may not return to serve the remaining months of his term. But for the future of Honduras, does it really even matter?”

Equally revealing as the Times’ framing of the news was the volume of coverage of the events in Iran and Honduras respectively. In the 10 days following the Honduran coup, the Times devoted 13 news articles to the events unfolding there–only two of which appeared on Page 1–totaling less that 14,000 words. They ran two op-eds, one news analysis piece, no editorials and no letters to the editor. In the 10 days following the Iranian elections, by contrast, the Times ran 37 news articles on the issue–more than 38,000 words in total–including 15 front-page articles. The paper also published 12 op-eds, six news analysis pieces, two editorials and more than 2,600 words in letters to the editor.

The double standard here is clear. Those protesting a regime that is an official state enemy are brave freedom fighters who merit attention and praise, and the official suppression of these protests is amplified. Meanwhile, those protesting a military coup against a leader who had increasingly supported alternatives to the U.S.-dominated economic world order are either ignored, or their cause distorted practically beyond recognition.

Michael Corcoran (www.michaelcorcoran.blogspot.com) is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He has written for outlets including the Nation and the Boston Globe. Stephen Maher (http://rationalmanifesto.blogspot.com/) is an MA candidate at the School of International Service at American University.

To Keep Us Safe: Examining the Case for War and Occupation in Afghanistan

2009-10-26T09:46:00.007-04:00

Proponents of continuing or increasing the US military presence in Afghanistan often argue that such policies are essential to Keep Us Safe from Terrorists, who are just waiting to attack Americans and would more easily be able to do so if we retreat from the challenge that lays before us. As Monica Crowley writes in the Washington Times, “America's enemies are watching this indecision and calculating that the president doesn't have the stomach for a protracted fight …. Stalling on a troop request for Afghanistan while Americans are dying is a sure way to signal to our enemies that they can win, if only they hang in long enough.” To Crowley, echoing the conventional wisdom among petty propagandists advocating escalation of the war in Afghanistan, the only way “keep us safe from attack” is “American strength,” which is the “best deterrent to violence and chaos.”^¹ As President Obama himself said on CBS's “Face the Nation,” the “top priority” in Afghanistan is to “protect the United States against attacks from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”^²

In fact, in the national debate over the Afghan war strategy (as opposed to the war itself), now almost entirely focused around how many more troops should be deployed (not if more troops should be sent, or whether the war should be continued at all), the fundamental premise that fighting the war in Afghanistan somehow Keeps Us Safe from Terrorism is routinely touted as an all-encompassing justification for escalating violence being carried out abroad. In the pages that follow, I will address this claim by analyzing who and what it is the US is actually fighting in Afghanistan, as well as how it is doing so. In transcending the superficial and narrow debate occurring in the national media over the Afghanistan war, we should be able to gain some insight into the best course of action for the future while uncovering important but hidden truths about the present.

As I mentioned, in order to ascertain whether or not fighting (or escalating) the war in Afghanistan will actually Keep Us Safe from Terrorism, it is important to understand who and what we are fighting in the first place. Media reports and analysis commonly paint “our enemies” in Afghanistan and elsewhere simply as “Al Qaeda” or the “Taliban.” Liberal think tanks and news periodicals have taken to insisting that these two ominous foes have formed an unholy alliance, more threatening to American lives than ever before and thus a development which necessitates the escalation of the war effort. Writing in The New Republic, Peter Bergen describes how “in recent years, Taliban leaders have drawn especially close to Al Qaeda,” today functioning “more or less as a single entity.”^³ “The signs of this” near-total collusion “are everywhere,” Bergen writes, noting how “the Taliban, like Al Qaeda, has tried to attack the West.”^⁴ He begins his analysis by describing the “sobering” case of Najibullah Zazi, “the first Al Qaeda recruit discovered in the United States in the past few years,” who was planning “what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since September 11.”^⁵ Since Zazi is alleged to have “traveled to Pakistan's tribal regions and studied with Al Qaeda members,” it is clear to Bergen that “we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without securing Afghanistan.”^⁶ After all, “nearly every major jihadist plot against Western targets in the last two decades somehow leads back to Afghanistan or Pakistan.”^⁷ Thus, failing to “win the war” in Afghanistan – essential to which is the escalation for which he advocates – would mean that armies of Terrorists (like Zazi) will soon be washing over the United States, leaving us with nowhere to run or hide from the onslaught.

In fact, this analysis is reflective of the woefully uninformed view of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and radical Islam in general that permeates the national discussion on the Afghanistan war as well as US Foreign Policy in the Middle East more broadly. Not only is the Taliban something wholly separate and distinct from “Al Qaeda,” but the latter does not even exist as the singular, monolithic entity that it is imagined to by propagandists cheerleading for war. “Even when at its most organized in late 2001,” writes Jason Burke, a journalist who spent years living in Afghanistan and Pakistan covering radical Islam, “it is important to avoid seeing 'al-Qaeda' as a coherent and structured terrorist organization with cells everywhere... this would be to profoundly misconceive its nature and the nature of modern Islamic militancy.”^⁸ John McLaughlin, the former acting CIA director, echoes this assessment, saying “in the sense that Al Qaeda is decentralized, its much harder to get your hands around.”^⁹ This, of course, is in direct contradiction to the well-organized monolith portrayed by Bergen and others, consisting of a vast “membership,” and a “leadership council” with the capacity to coordinate the actions of subordinate cells all around the world – and, for that matter, to partner with other organizations, such as the Taliban.^¹⁰ Rather, as Burke describes in great detail, “a careful examination of the situation shows that it is wrong to imagine that there was any kind of network of international groups obedient to Bin Laden or created by him.”^¹¹ “It is not about being part of a group,” continues Burke, “it is a way of thinking about the world, a way of understanding events, of interpreting or behaving.”^¹²

Indeed, Bin Laden and a small cadre of close associates, whom Burke refers to as “the hardcore,” were able to access vast networks they had accumulated during the US-sponsored Afghan jihad run out of camps on the Afghan-Pakistani border, and divert their vast supply of funds to various groups. The now-infamous training camps were a concentrated epicenter of Islamic radicals, who contacted one another to fulfill various needs – Bin Laden was able to bring the money, in a big way. As a result, what influence Bin Laden did have over this disparate array of groups “depended on the resources he could offer,” yet “with the loss of his bases in Afghanistan in late 2001 and the continued attention of American, Pakistani, and other security forces... those resources largely disappeared” and “much of his power with it.”^¹³ “The “systematic elimination” of the camps and infrastructure which housed the various radical Islamist networks and protected this “hardcore” began “within weeks of the 9/11 attacks,” largely because “going into Afghanistan in 2001, the CIA had a fair understanding of Al Qaeda's strength, organization, and location” writes Robert Dreyfuss, citing top officials in the intelligence community.^¹⁴ “According to U.S. Intelligence officials,” Drefuss continues, “many – perhaps most – of the group's members were killed in the bombing raids unleashed by the US military.”^¹⁵ Gary Bernstein, a “longtime CIA operations officer and former CIA station chief” who “led the CIA team in the field that was assigned the task of hunting down Al Qaeda,” also described in detail how the majority of those in the camps in Afghanistan were killed or driven away very early on: “before Tora Bora, some did slip out, a dozen here, a dozen there... in Tora Bora, we estimated there were about a thousand who fell back, and many of those broke into two groups, finally. One group, of about 130, was captured in Pakistan. Another group, about 180, got away.”^¹⁶ After the destruction of the camps, “the few who managed to get out – including bin Laden and... Zawahiri – were barely able to scramble to safety.”^¹⁷ Subsequently, the CIA “reaped an intelligence bonanza,” including “computers, files, and organizational records,” from which “our knowledge expanded exponentially” in the words of a retired CIA station chief, allowing us to facilitate the further destruction of what remained of the extant terror infrastructure.^¹⁸

It seems fairly clear after careful analysis that “the organization that attacked the United States on 9/11 has been virtually wiped out.”^¹⁹ After the initial assault on the massive camp infrastructure, the “hardcore was scattered,” and “Al Qaeda” as it once existed was destroyed.^²⁰ Wayne White, a top intelligence official in the State Department, put it quite clearly: “I personally don't believe Al Qaeda exists as a robust organization anymore.”^²¹ As a result, the modern phenomenon of the same name is of an even more decentralized character. “Most activism” nowadays, writes Burke, is by “individuals who look up to bin Laden as a symbolic leader... but are not controlled in any meaningful way by 'Al-Qaeda.'”^²² White agrees that bin Laden is “not much more than a standard-bearer... like a regimental flag-carrier, holding up the flag and trying to inspire people.”^²³ Now, all that is left is “the idea of Al-Qaeda – the precept, the maxim, the formula, not 'the base',” and it “is more powerful than ever.”^²⁴ As Afghan-based journalist Anand Gopal put it, Al Qaeda is “mostly an autonomous homegrown or regional affair in the various countries in which it exists,” and “[t]here's very little evidence of ties between those groups...”^²⁵ In other words, modern-day “Al Qaeda” is little more than a franchise, a name that is adopted by various groups which arise spontaneously around the world who believe themselves to share a common ideology, but which do not coordinate with one another in any significant way.

Perhaps more importantly, “the efforts of Western governments, local regimes and security agencies around the world have been unable” to do much about this remaining element.^²⁶ In the study mentioned above, Dreyfuss spoke with top-ranking members of the US intelligence community, including current assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan, who went even farther, concluding that US policy in the so-called “Global War on Terror” had actually “made the threat worse.”^²⁷ In other words, despite its initial success in destroying al Qaeda, the aggressive actions of the United States have actually placed Americans at greater risk of international Islamist terrorism, according to leaders in the foreign policy community. While this may seem puzzling at first, an honest evaluation of the tremendous cost, in terms human lives and suffering, at which this “victory” has come, inevitably leads to this conclusion. In the Afghan context, when one takes into account how US elites were willing to subject millions of Afghans to starvation, bombardment, and massive oppression, angry and often violent responses – from the “localized insurgency,” not some massive imagined underground radical Islamic movement – no longer seem unreasonable. If we are truly seeking to a policy that will Keep Us Safe, we need to ask some hard questions, which have equally unpleasant answers: where did “al Qaeda” come from, and what still leads Muslims to “look up to bin Laden as a symbolic leader”? Why do they hate us?

The origins of this question – and the obvious conclusions – go back many years, as we can learn from reading the declassified internal record. In 1958, President Eisenhower discussed with his staff the origins of what he called “the campaign of hatred against us” in the Middle East, “not by the governments but by the people.” The National Security Council clearly outlined the source of this curious “campaign” soon thereafter: “in the eyes of the majority of the Arabs the United States is opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab nationalism. They believe that the United States is seeking to protect its interest in Near East Oil by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic progress.” That the perception that the US stands opposed to independence and self-determination in the Third World, in particular the strategically crucial Middle East, is so widespread should not be surprising, the NSC continued, because “our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close US relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries,” blocking progress and development.^²⁸

These conclusions were reiterated in 2004, when Donald Rumsfeld directed the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication to review the impact that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were having on Terrorism and Islamic Radicalism. According to the DSB charter, it is composed of 35 civilian members handpicked by the Defense Department.^²⁹ “Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,'” the report concluded, “but rather, they hate our policies.”^³⁰ The “overwhelming majority” of Muslims are angry over “the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq,” which “in the eyes of Muslims... have not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering.” The massive fury over these wars built on anger which already existed throughout the Muslim world, the report continues, as a result of “one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan Pakistan, and the Gulf States,” closely mirroring the reasoning of the NSC as cited above.^³¹ Accordingly, “there is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies – except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends” [emphasis in original].^³² So, “when American public diplomacy [propaganda] talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”^³³

There is no shortage of examples to support these assessments. According to “new US intelligence reports,” “nearly all the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors,” but rather “ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency.”^³⁴ Despite the fact that “US commanders and politicians” present the image of fighting “holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam,” in reality these fighters “see themselves as opposing the United States because it is an occupying power” according to US intelligence agencies.^³⁵ Mohammed Atta, the “ringleader” of the 9/11 attacks, was also motivated to devote himself to a suicide attack by these very same factors. As Lawrence Wright wrote in his book The Looming Tower, “on April 11, 1996, when Atta was twenty-seven years old, he signed a standardized will he got from the al-Quds mosque. It was the day Israel attacked Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath. According to one of his friends, Atta was enraged, and by filling out his last testament during the attack he was offering his life in response.”^³⁶ These conclusions were also confirmed by the account of New York Times journalist David Rohde of the seven months he spent as a prisoner of the Taliban. “Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi, and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes,” he writes, “as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.”^³⁷ He further describes how his captors were furious about the “large numbers of civilians” who “had been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories in aerial bombings.”^³⁸ Echoing these sentiments, a Kabul resident, speaking about the air raids that were crippling the country, told the BBC “they call themselves a civilized nation and are proud of acting like Hollywood cowboys... They are vultures.”^³⁹

It is quite understandable that the victims of US violence in Afghanistan should feel this way, especially when one considers the human rights record of the occupation and invasion. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “the threat of bombing, and then the bombing, were among the most disgraceful acts of modern history, as was known instantly... [t]hat starvation could cause the deaths of millions was the clear, explicit, unmistakable message of just about every international aid agency and those who cared about the people of Afghanistan.”^⁴⁰ Indeed, the humanitarian crisis that was a predicted consequence of the bombing of Afghanistan is horrifying almost beyond words. On the eve of the bombing, a UNHCR spokesman said that “the population is barely managing to survive,” with nearly one-quarter of the population relying on handouts from international aid groups.^⁴¹ Despite this widespread desperation, on September 16, 2001, it was reported by the New York Times that the US had issued several demands to Pakistan, one of which was “the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population,” a request was predicted at the time to induce “massive starvation.”^⁴²

Once the threat of US bombardment became imminent, this situation drastically worsened. The New York Times described how “the threat of military strikes forced the removal of international aid workers, crippling assistance programs;” refugees reaching Pakistan “after arduous journeys from Afghanistan are describing scenes of desperation and fear at home as the threat of American-led military attacks turns their long-running misery into a potential catastrophe.”^⁴³ “The country was on a lifeline,” one aid worker said, “and we just cut the line.”^⁴⁴ “It’s as if a mass grave has been dug behind millions of people,” in the words of a Christian Aid worker, “we can drag them back from it or push them in. We could be looking at millions of deaths.” On September 20, the UN Food and Agriculture Agency warned that 6 million people, “nearly one-quarter of the population,” were “facing starvation” if the threatened bombing were initiated.^⁴⁵

The bombing and subsequent invasion did indeed have terrible consequences, thought just how awful will perhaps never be known, since the suffering caused by the crimes of the powerful are rarely if ever investigated. The BBC reported in October that “most agencies have stopped deliveries into the country because of security concerns since US-led air strikes began,” placing “millions” at “enormous risk.”^⁴⁶ Meanwhile, US “food drops” were widely acknowledged to be little more than a “propaganda exercise” in the words of the charity Doctors without Borders, as they delivered merely “a fraction of what the population will need to survive winter.”^⁴⁷ The direct consequences of the bombing were also significant. In April 2008, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said “I am not happy with civilian casualties coming down; I want an end to civilian casualties... As much as one may argue it's difficult, I don't accept that argument... It seriously undermines our efforts to have an effective campaign against terrorism.”^⁴⁸ Reviewing the record, his concerns seem well-founded. Human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) have reported that civilian casualties from US bombing in Afghanistan have “been increasing since 2001,” including a 30% jump between 2007 and 2008, “the bloodiest year yet.”^⁴⁹

There are “serious concerns about the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of air strikes” Amnesty writes in its recent report on Afghanistan, “following several grave incidents” which involved large numbers of civilian casualties.^⁵⁰ Furthermore, the use of the chemical agent white phosphorous, which causes “horrendous burns” to all who come into contact with it, has not been denied by the US military, and there is evidence it has been used in civilian areas.^⁵¹ “To fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” Human Rights Watch recently wrote in an open letter to Barack Obama, “many warlords were placed in positions of authority, relied on for military support, and provided weapons and funds by the US... [which] has shown little appetite for sidelining senior warlords when the opportunity has arisen.”^⁵² When the US or its warlord militia allies arrest Afghans, such as during infamous “night raids” in Afghan houses carried out by the US military, they are “hand[ed] over to the NDS, Afghanistan's intelligence service, which perpetuates human rights violations including torture and arbitrary detention with impunity,” or perhaps sent to one of the torture chambers which the US runs directly.^⁵³

Thus, it is US imperialism – the maintenance of brutally repressive regimes all around the world, direct and indirect military invasions and bombings (invariably and inevitably with “large numbers of civilian casualties”^⁵⁴), and other such actions carried out in the interests of US elites – which engenders this anger and frustration among Muslims. Given the large number of Muslim countries which the US has routinely bombed, crippled, and otherwise oppressed, destroyed, and enslaved it should not come as a surprise that such feelings run high among the victims. When these victims see the world in religious terms, these conflicts are perceived and understood through that lens, meriting a response which is in line with a religious interpretation of global conflict and resistance to the US empire. The same can be said of US society. After 9/11, many Americans (with the help of the media and the intellectual establishment) adopted a similar view. Not all of those who saw things this way even rose to the low level of famed Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, who presented the conflict as an inherent “clash of civilizations” in his book of the same name. Others adopted a more messianic posture, such as Blackwater owner Eric Prince, who “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” a view which led him to “encourage and reward the destruction of Iraqi life” after the invasion of that country according to the sworn testimony of a former Blackwater employee.^⁵⁵

There can be no other word for “encouraging and rewarding” the murder of innocent people in the name of a grand religious “crusade” – let alone the other massive crimes discussed here – besides terrorism, a tactic practiced by the US and its agents on a far grander scale than “al Qaeda” or Osama bin Laden could ever dream. The quest to secure and enhance the global domination of US elites has not come peacefully or easily. Where Eric Prince sees himself as a “crusader” for god, our elite leaders destroy and cripple societies, slaughtering and maiming civilians if they deem it neccesary, to secure their reign of terror over the planet and its largely poor, uneducated inhabitants. Unsurprisingly, these actions generate responses, one of which was the attack on September the 11^th. As state managers readily understand, if stopping terrorism and Keeping Us Safe is truly the most important goal as Barack Obama and George Bush tell us it is (to say nothing of keeping Afghans or Iraqis safe), US policy must radically change. That necessary change will almost certainly not come from the top down. We must act to force our leaders to embrace democracy, freedom, and self-determination as values that can bring humanity to construct a more positive future, not threats which need to be suppressed and destroyed, both at home and abroad.

1Crowley, Monica. “McChrystal goes rogue,” Washington Times, October 7, 2009.

2Schmitt, Eric and Tom Shanker. “General Calls for More U.S. Troops to Avoid Afghan Failure,” New York Times, September 20, 2009.

3Bergen, Peter. “The Front,” The New Republic, October 19, 2009.

4Bergen

5Bergen

6Bergen

7Bergen

8Burke, Jason. Al -Qaeda. 2003: Taurus Books, New York, pg 6

9Dreyfuss, Robert. “The Phony War,” Rolling Stone, September 2006.

10Bergen

11Burke, 10

12Burke, 14

13Burke, 14

14Dreyfuss

15Dreyfuss

16Dreyfuss

17Dreyfuss

18Dreyfuss

19Dreyfuss

20Burke, 14

21Dreyfuss

22Burke, 14

23Dreyfuss

24Burke, 14

25Hynd, Steve. “Anand Gopal Interview: 'The Taliban Don't Need Al Qaeda Like They Did Eight Years Ago.” Newshoggers, October 19, 2009. Available at http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2009/10/anand-gopal-interview-the-taliban-dont-need-al-qaeda-like-they-did-eight-years-ago.html

26Burke, 14

27Dreyfuss

28Quoted in Chomsky, Noam. “Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.” 2006, Metropolitan Books: New York, 202

29Charter, Defense Science Board. Available at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/charter.htm Accessed on 10/24/09.

30Report of the Defense Science Board (DSB) Task Force on Strategic Communication. United States Department of Defense. September 2004, pg. 40

31DSB 40

32DSB 36

33DSB 40

34Bender, Bryan. “Taliban not main Afghan enemy.” Boston Globe. 2009 October 9.

35Bender, Bryan. “Taliban not main Afghan enemy.” Boston Globe. 2009 October 9.

36Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower. 2006: Knopf, pg. 307

37Rohde, David. “7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity,” New York Times, 17 October 2009

38Rohde, David. “Inside the Emirate.” New York Times, 18 October 2009

39“Fears of Afghan food crisis.” BBC, 9 October 2001.

40Chomsky, Noam. “The Afghanistan Food Crisis,” Z Magazine. 4 September 2005.

41“Afghans flee cities.” UNHCR Press Release, 17 September 2001.

42Burns, John F. “AFTER THE ATTACKS: IN ISLAMABAD; Pakistan Antiterror Support Avoids Vow of Military Aid,” New York Times 16 September 2001.

43Frantz, Douglas. “A NATION CHALLENGED: REFUGEES; Refugees From Afghanistan Flee Out of Fear and Find Despair,” New York Times 30 September 2001.

44Sifton, John. “A Last Road Trip Through Premodern, Postmodern Afghanistan,” New York Times. 30 September 2001

45“Grave Food Crisis in Afghanistan Could Deepen if Current Situation Deteriorates.” UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Special Alert No. 318. 20 September 2001.

46“Fears of Afghan food crisis.” BBC, 9 October 2001.

47“Fears of Afghan food crisis.” BBC, 9 October 2001; “Taleban 'demand tax' on aid convoy.” BBC, 11 October 2001.

48Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch. 8 September 2008.

49Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch. 8 September 2008. Amnesty International Report 2009. Amnesty International.

50Amnesty International Report 2009. Amnesty International.

51“Afghanistan: NATO Should 'Come Clean' on White Phosphorous.” Human Rights Watch, Press Release. 8 May 2009

52“Afghanistan: New US Policy Should Stress Human Rights.” Human Rights Watch, Press Release. 26 March, 2009

53Amnesty International Report 2009. Amnesty International.

54Troops in Contact: Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch. 8 September 2008.

55Scahill, Jeremy. “Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder,” The Nation, 4 August 2009

Obama and the Peace Process: Quick Reactions

2009-06-09T13:24:00.004-04:00

I woke up this morning, got into my office, and was confronted by an email from Haaretz (the Israeli news daily) urging me to "stand with President Obama" after his "historic address" where he "made clear" that he is committed to a "leadership" role in reaching a two-state solution. While the "usual suspects" will likely rush to characterize the President's bold "insistence" that Israel meet its international obligations as the latest example of his unjust criticism of Israel, the email warns, Obama's "vigorous efforts," bravely and heroically forcing Israel to comply with its responsibilities, is actually "the single most pro-Israel thing an American President can do." Given that this characterization of the debate, based entirely on faulty assumptions about both Obama's and Bush's actions, has been echoed by a large portion of the world's major media outlets, I feel it is important to comment.

The important thing is the issues that are at stake here, and Obama's positions on them, not rhetoric and public relations bluster. We must remember that all that Obama has asked for is a settlement freeze. Right now, the dispute between Obama and Netanyahu is essentially over whether Israel has a right to build within the existing settlement blocks - Netanyahu has already put a freeze in place on building outside the blocks, much to the dismay of the Shas party.

Importantly, Obama says nothing about the settlements that already exist, and has thus implicitly recognized the legitimacy of the existence of blocks in the first place in accordance with US policy. As opposed to viewing the settlements as individual entities, each to be linked individually to Israel if they are to remain Israeli under a final settlement, they are combined into impermeable "blocks," or strips of land which are de facto annexed to Israel. These settlement blocks, including the dense network of bypass roads and system of electric fence, ALREADY divide the Palestinian West Bank into four totally isolated and non-contiguous cantons. Thus, simply freezing building within the blocks that are already acknowleged to exist will do little, if anything, to help the chances of a Palestinian state being created, or of Palestinian rights being recognized and respected.

Building outside the blocks was once an idea harbored and espoused only by the hard Israeli right, with the Labor Party's Allon Plan (formulated after the 1967 war and occupation of Palestinian territory) essentially resembling the current "settlement block" approach, carving the West Bank into isolated cantons; all that Netanyahu has frozen are settlements being constructed within these Palestinian cantons. These "non-block" settlements further divide the four large West Bank cantons into 23 separated islands of Palestinian territory, each fully controlled from the outside by Israel. Obama has not said a word about uprooting any portion of this infrastructure.

It's wonderful that Obama supports the two-state solution, but given the above it should be no surprise that he has declined to say where, when, or how. On what part of the West Bank and Gaza will this state be proclaimed? This question is especially pressing given that during the campaign Obama expressed his support for an "undivided" and Israeli-annexed Jerusalem, despite the fact that the World Court has ruled that Israel does not have one inch of sovereignty in Jerusalem (July 2004 ruling). This, of course, leaving aside the fact that the Israeli occupation has not relented in even the slightest way, with arrests and detentions as well as Israeli incursions and violence in Palestinian villages spiking in the West Bank and the usual routine of checkpoints and roadblocks continuing to make daily life unbearable for the 5 million people imprisoned in the West Bank and Gaza. This also without mentioning the increasingly-violent attacks by Israel's "subcontractor"(former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace), the Palestinian Authority (lead by the US stooge Mahmoud Abbas) against elected representatives, spiritual leaders, and any other Palestinians who might dare to resist the occupation, or speak too loudly about the daily outrages against human dignity committed by the Israelis in the occupied territories.

To top it all off, even on this minor little point (freezing settlements), the tiniest and most insignificant of changes, Obama has refused to exert US pressure on Israel to comply. It's important to compare Obama to his predecessor here. While the George W. Bush administration went a bit beyond words in objecting to illegal Israeli settlement projects, namely, by withholding U.S. economic support for them, Obama administration officials have stated that such measures are "not under discussion," and that any pressures on Israel will be "largely symbolic," the New York Times reported (Helene Cooper, June 1). In fact, on each major element of policy towards Israel, from Hamas' inclusion in a democratically-representative unity government to the settlements, Obama has reiterated the Bush position essentially verbatim (see here if you don't believe me). The only detectable "change" is one of tone and rhetoric - in other words, marketing. Obama is indeed proving to be a better spokesman for the Bush policies than his predecessor.

In short, those of us who want peace had better stop passively and mindlessly "standing with Obama" as the euphoric, almost hysterical liberal American and Israeli press have and demand that the longstanding international consensus - endorsed by the entire world, including the UN General Assembly, the Arab League, the World Court, the Palestinian leadership (both Hamas and Fatah), but rejected unilaterally by the US and Israel.
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UPDATE:

I found this map (.pdf), from the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which reveals plainly how the West Bank is divided in isolated cantons, separated from one another by the settlements, roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences, the wall, the Jewish-only bypass roads, and Israeli "security zones." This is probably the best map out there of the circumstances on the ground today, as it reveals the cumulative effects of Israeli policy on the West Bank, including the impact of the "non-block" settlements and the so-called "illegal outposts," essentially settlements built without the official approval of the Israeli government (but which are mostly protected by the Israeli Army, and often if not usually given approval to become official settlements eventually). Definitely worth a look - I'll try to figure out how to make it into an image which I can post here.

Also worth looking at, below, is an approximation of what the Israelis were offering for a Palestinian "state" at Camp David in 2000. As you can plainly see, the lands on which this "state" would exist (the pink areas) are separated from one another by the large settlement blocks, which, like Obama, Clinton and Barak did not propose removing, but rather sought a Palestinian signature to legitimize their permanent annexation to Israel. As I mentioned, accepting the idea of settlement blocs means the complete dismemberment of the Palestinian West Bank, with or without Obama's "courageous" freeze on further building within the blocks. Believe it or not, this map actually paints an excessively rosy picture, since the outlying settlements (outside the blocs) and the roads which join them are depicted as being in Palestinian-controlled territory; today (as the above UN map shows) these areas are under full Israeli control, and subdivide the four main cantons (the four large pink areas) into much smaller fragments (click to enlarge).

Interview with Steve on the Arab-Israeli Conflict

2009-05-15T15:30:00.005-04:00

New interview, featured in several places on the net:

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Stephen Maher is a graduate student at the School of International Service at American University, where much of his study has focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He recently returned from his second trip to the Occupied Palestinian Territories this year, where he saw first-hand the plight of the Palestinians, the sometimes-fatal struggles of activists against the Israeli occupation and the West Bank wall, and the flawed, dependent nature of Palestinian institutions.

Below is an interview with Maher, which takes a cursory look at the conflict, and recent developments in the region. It is designed to give those not too familiar with the conflict answers to basic questions.

Maher is interviewed by Michael Corcoran, a journalist who has written for the Boston Globe and the Nation, and a graduate student of international relations at the John McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at UMass Boston.

MC: Could you tell readers what brought you to Palestine? What exactly are you doing there?

SM: I first went last summer for three months, when I took part in a workshop which tried to present as wide a spectrum of views on the conflict as it could. After the workshop, which lasted ten days, I did an internship at the Palestinian Legislative Council, which is the legislative arm of the Palestinian Authority, essentially an Israeli sub-contractor in its quest to annex large portions of the West Bank and suppress dissent and resistance.

The workshop and program had many problems, which we can get into, but what amazed me was how much you can learn by observing the situation as it unfolds and immersing yourself in the context of the subject of study. Suddenly, the "issue" you are researching ceases to be an "issue" at all, but rather the lives of your friends in a city in which you once lived. It is amazing how large a portion of what we see and hear everyday about the Palestinian struggle and the arab-Israeli conflict more broadly is refuted or corrected by spending time on the ground, talking to people, making friends, traveling the area, and learning what is going on by living the life of those you seek to understand, seeing the world through their eyes. Needless to say, it goes a long way.

My time working with the PLC over that summer taught me a lot about the functioning of the Palestinian Authority, the entity which is supposedly going to turn into the government of a future Palestinian state after some "interim period" of indefinite length, which we are presently in. From this experience I drew my thesis topic, which deals with the dependent, dysfunctional, and often counterproductive nature of Palestinian political institutions. When it came time to start researching, I really wanted to go back the Occupied Territories, to re-immerse myself and deepen my understanding as I was discussing earlier. I applied for, and received, a grant from my university to travel to the Occupied Territories and conduct independent research, which will become the body of my thesis. My time working for the PLC provided me with high-level contacts in each of the major political parties and factions, which I used to secure high-level interviews across the political and ideological spectrum.

I was able to do much valuable research while I lived in Ramallah for four months. However I would like to believe that my reasons for going to the West Bank were greater than simply obtaining information for use in my study. Perhaps the most important reason I went was to resist the shockingly overt and astonishingly brutal Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people: the theft of land and resources, the imprisonment and crushing of a whole people, an entire society ground into the dirt under the Israeli boot-heel. Anyone who really looks at the outrageous criminality of the Israeli government cannot respond with anything other than moral outrage and anger. The question, then, for the scholar and the intellectual is what he does with these justified, human emotions. I channel them into writing about and exposing what is happening to the people here as much as I can.

MC: For those readers who are not very familiar with the circumstances in the Israel/Palestine, could you describe, generally, what is happening there?

SM: This is a huge question, and one that requires an equally substantial answer. However, I will try to put it as briefly as I can.

Since the mid-1970s, there has existed a broad international consensus for resolving the so-called Palestine-Israel conflict, commonly referred to as the "two-state solution." This solution is based on a simple quid-pro-quo: Israeli withdrawal from the territory it seized by force in 1967, and Palestinian recognition of Israel's right to live in peace and security with its neighbors. For nearly 40 years, the US and Israel have unilaterally blocked the implementation of this solution on two main grounds: 1) Israel refuses to withdraw from the territories it has illegally occupied since 1967, and 2) Israel has opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital. The PLO accepted the two-state solution - ambiguously, to be sure - in 1973, and again, more explicitly, in 1988. All 22 member states of the Arab league have also explicitly accepted this solution. Furthermore, every year the UN General Assembly passes a resolution called "Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question," containing the above formulation for the two-state solution. Year after year, it is passed overwhelmingly by the entire United Nations, with only the United States, Israel, Australia, and some tiny south-sea dependencies standing in opposition (in 2008, it was passed 164 to 7). Meanwhile, the so-called "radicals" on the issue who are claimed to be "obstacles to peace," Iran and Hezbollah, have said they would endorse any solution which the Palestinians accept. The problem lies with US-Israeli rejectionism.

Israeli crimes against the Palestinians are so shocking, and so overt, that the only reasonable reaction is outrage and fury. Importantly, these crimes - most recently including the genocidal attack on Gaza - could not continue were it not for critical US support that Israel receives in all areas, unprecedented in the history of international affairs. According to a 2008 report by the Congressional Research Service, US aid to Israel is as high as $6.8 million per day. Meanwhile, the US shields Israeli policy from international criticism through its exercise of the crucial UN Security Council veto, used most recently to block for weeks a UN cease-fire which would have pressured Israel to stop its obscene slaughter of poor, defenseless Palestinian civilians in Gaza (killing 1500 out of a population of 1.5 million, mostly civilians). The savage attack included the use of white phosphorous, a horrific, indiscriminant chemical weapon which causes severe chemical burns to those who come into contact with it, on densely-populated refugee camps. The phosphorous used by the Israelis - along with the other weapons employed in the massacre - was manufactured and supplied by the United States.

Yet Israeli crimes are for more regular, and - though I shudder to use the term - routine than the occasional extermination of impoverished, defenseless refugees. Since 1967, Israel has embarked on a massive project of annexation in the West Bank, marked by the continuous theft of Palestinian land and resources through a variety of methods. The most noticeable, and newest, is the Apartheid / Annexation Wall (or "separation fence" as the Israelis misleadingly refer to it). While the border between Israel and the West Bank is only a little more than 300 km long, the wall is over 800 km in length, meaning that the wall snakes miles into Palestinian territory, taking the most valuable land and resources on the western, "Israeli" side, and turning Palestinian communities into dungeons, utterly impoverished with no resources or land to sustain themselves.

This enterprise is also advanced by the constant expansion of the illegal settlement colonies throughout the West Bank, which monopolize Palestinian resources and land with the full support of the Israeli state. These colonies are linked to each other and to major urban centers in Israel with a dense network of "bypass roads," designed to bypass Palestinian areas, and thus superimpose a new economic infrastructure which deliberately marginalizes and further impoverish Arab communities in the West Bank. All-in-all, this leaves Palestinian communities dispossessed of their land by the wall and settlements and encircled by the bypass roads, impoverished, and marginalized, separated into cantons, prison cells which are controlled from the outside by Israel.

MC: You mention the support of the U.S., which comes in the form of both large amounts of international aid, as you mentioned, and also public indifference or, in some cases outright support, for Israeli aggression. Since the U.S. plays such a vital role in this issue, what can Americans do, if anything, to oppose these policies? And is there a role for the labor movement?

SM: Actually while many observers, particularly the liberals, criticize the US for "looking the other way" while Israel commits violations of all sorts, this is hardly the case. Israel would not be able to continue its occupation and annexation project for a single day, nor sustain an assault of the kind we saw against Gaza, without critical US support. The United States quite literally subsidizes the whole enterprise, while shielding Israel from international pressure to alter its behavior. Therefore, the US is an active participant and in fact a vehement supporter of horrific Israeli crimes in the West Bank, Gaza, and elsewhere.

In my opinion Americans have a very important role in stopping Israeli atrocities. Since the American government is the primary enabler of Israeli crimes, popular organization in the United States is perhaps the most important key to changing the policy. This has to begin by spreading awareness and educating people about the nature of the crimes, which are largely ignored by the American media. If this crucial step - educating people - is not the first focus of activist work, then any criticism of Israel can be silenced (as it often is) by labeling critics anti-Semites. Such misuse of anti-semitism has been well documented by Norman Finkelstein, in his Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry, both of which are excellent books and which should be read by anyone who is interested in these matters. If education doesn't take a primary role, it would be impossible to expect people to understand why such important actions as divestment and so on are reasonable and even necessary.

The role of the labor movement is to support these efforts, in solidarity with human beings who are undergoing tremendous hardship, including mass murder, at the hands of the US empire. Unfortunately, my limited experience with the radical labor movement in the United States has not been encouraging. While it is important to stay focused on the "workers good, bosses bad" mentality, the insistence on seeing the entire world through this prism is dogmatic and often counterproductive. It is understandable why socialists and anarchists would be hesitant to endorse nationalist movements, such as the Palestinian national struggle. However, in this case, where a people have been dispossessed at the hands of a Jewish nationalist movement, the Zionist movement, to refuse to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian national struggle in favor of adhering to leftist dogma is woefully misguided, and privileges the rights of the Jews, who have already achieved statehood, over the Arabs, who are subject to the occupation and overall domination of the Jewish collective. As Howard Zinn has said, "you can't be neutral on a moving train." If we refuse to stand with the Palestinians in their struggle for a state in the West Bank in Gaza, are we to say that their military rule by Israel should continue until all nation-states are abolished? The consequences of this attitude for self-determination, freedom, human rights, and democracy are tremendous. As an anarchist, I am no supporter of the state. However, as a believer in democracy and self-determination, and freedom from domination, dispossession, and mass murder at the hands of the American empire I find no alternative but to endorse the Palestinian national movement.

MC: What does the U.S. have to gain by supporting Israeli aggression, other than the wrath of much of the Arab world, and the international community more broadly?

SM: This is an interesting question, and actually gets to the heart of the way the American empire functions, all around the world. To illustrate, I think it would be helpful to look at another example. What does the US stand to gain from terrorizing desperately poor Nicaraguan peasants struggling for the most basic human rights, first by propping up the brutal Somoza dictatorship, then, once they have finally managed to overthrow him, tearing the country apart for a decade by funding, training, and even directly commanding Contra terrorists? After all, Nicaragua is a tiny, poor country. And it does not stop at Nicaragua. For approximately a decade, the US waged a horrific campaign of rape, slaughter, and destruction, which wrecked three countries, possibly beyond repair. Why? Why, during these years, was the largest embassy in the world in Honduras? Surely,not because Honduras was the most important country for any perceptible reason. Why has the US worked tirelessly for decades to strangle the economy of the small island of Cuba?

The answers to these questions can be found in internal US planning documents, and the principles they speak to are deeply embedded in any system of imperial domination. As US planners explain, Castro is a dangerous figure not because he posed any territorial or physical threat to the United States, but because the Cuban Revolution represented an example "successful defiance" of US policy. In short, the Cuban people had committed the cardinal sin: they had overthrown a US dictator, Batista, and replaced him with someone of their own choosing, Fidel Castro, who refused to follow US orders. As a result, they had to be starved, terrorized, invaded, intimidated, and so on until they accepted their Washington-designated role as subordinate beings and dutifully carried out our wishes. The threat is that if this defiance is permitted to succeed, it could invigorate copycats elsewhere to follow suit, and refuse to submit to their colonial masters, who are ostensibly on a mission to civilize the world's barbarian hordes.

In Nicaragua, the problem was similar. As an Oxfam report written by Diana Melrose put it, it represented "the threat of a good example" to US elites. In short, the poor majority in Nicaragua had managed to organize, and to fight successfully against the vicious Somoza regime for rights like healthcare, education, and a more fair distribution of wealth under the Sandinista government. The US then became committed to sabotaging the revolution, at tremendous human cost, through the use of blind terrorism. Like the Cuban Revolution, if the Nicaraguan Revolution succeeded, it would have taught others around the world that they do not have to follow American orders, they do not have to resign themselves to a wretched existence in their neocolonial shackles. It is possible to rise up, and it is possible to succeed in making a better life, or at least determining your own future. This logic is deeply engrained in the American imperial system, just as it was the British and others.

I have seen this threat at work in my travels, and can attest that planners in Washington are right to be concerned. Heroes in the struggle against imperialism from all over the world become examples, and role models in the fight for freedom and self-determination. For example, in Egypt, there is a square named for Simon Bolivar, complete with his statue. Bolivar, the Latin American leader who led that continent to its independence from Spanish colonialism, has inspired people a half a world and several generations away. In the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps just outside Beirut, there hang large posters of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The downtrodden and dispossessed Palestinian refugees, like the wretchedly impoverished peoples elsewhere in the third world, are inspired by this man, who in their perception has stood up to Washington's global economic programs and allowed average, poor people, like them, to determine their own future with dignity, even if that means going against US dictates. These survival of these figures, the focus of much of Washington's ire, shows that the might US is not invincible after all, that there are ways its global dominance can be challenged and even defeated. This is the real threat.

In the Middle East, the major energy-producing region of the world, preventing the emergence of such a model is an especially critical goal. This is the reason that the US has historically backed the most reactionary, authoritarian governments in the region, who have assisted it in its goal of squashing the more progressive, or at least independent forces, such as the pan-Arabism of Nasser, or Qasim's Iraq. Should the Palestinians succeed in their national struggle against Israel, the message would ring loud and clear, sending shockwaves to all corners of the region and indeed the world: Israel is not invincible, as the Americans would like you to believe. The mighty empire can be defeated, it can fall; if you fight long and hard enough, you can prevail. The implications of this would be tremendous, as you could imagine.

On another level, the occupation and other aggressive policies often enable Israel to retain or acquire control of vital resources, such as water, which are scarce in the region, and running out rapidly. The 1967 war, for example, saw Israel conquer the water-rich (and strategically vital) Golan Heights from Syria, as well as capturing the fertile West Bank, whose water Israel now controls as well.

MC: Your explanation is quite different than the way U.S. officials put it; namely, that the special relationship between the two countries is a result of their mutual commitments to democracy. Is there any truth to this? Also, could you explain the concept of the "Israel lobby," as some call it, and what role, if any, does it play in shaping either U.S policy or the debate within the country?

SM: Naturally, the rhetoric coming out of centers of power is pure public relations, proclaiming "our" noble intentions and unwavering dedication to the highest ideals as the primary motive behind our policies around the world. Even a cursory look at the facts and a moment's thought could instantly reveal this to be the nonsense that it surely is. If commitment to democracy is the primary motive driving US relations, why is the most important US ally in the world Saudi Arabia? Why does the United States subsidize the cruel Egyptian dictatorship, fully supporting its efforts to stifle democracy in that country? If we seek to explain what makes US policy towards two countries different, it follows that we should try to identify what is different between those countries in the first place. So, for instance, to return to an example we just used, what is the difference between Venezuela and Colombia? Both have some degree of democracy (Venezuela much more so). But Uribe, the President of Colombia, follows US orders faithfully, while Chavez resists US regional designs. As a result, the Colombian government is the top recipient of US aid in the hemisphere, matching its distinction as its worst human rights violator, while Venezuela is vilified and bullied.

To take another example closer to the issue at hand, look at Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both are extreme, repressive fundamentalist regimes, although Iran is a great deal more democratic than Saudi Arabia (which is not saying much, to be sure). Why then is Iran placed under isolating, crippling sanctions while the Saudis are given billions of dollars in weapons contracts and so on? Leaving aside the actual merits of the charge, one could of course make the argument, as Washington does, that Iran supports so-called "terrorist groups" like Hezbollah. But that would still not explain the difference with Saudi Arabia, which has bankrolled radical Sunni groups all over the world for decades with the approval and consent of the US, including setting up the madrassas in Pakistan which spawned the Taliban, generously subsidizing the mujahadeen in Afghanistan which spawned part of what is now commonly referred to as "Al-Qaeda," and on and on. The difference is that Saudi Arabia has been a reliable US subordinate since its creation in 1932, while the Iranians overthrew a US-backed dictator in 1979, a sin for which, like the Cubans and Nicaraguans, they must be punished.

The Israel Lobby argument is tricky, and one which is often simply a veneer for anti-Semitism. First, we must understand that the so-called "Israel Lobby" is by no means exclusively or even predominantly Jewish, but rather is made up of large numbers of frothing-at-the-mouth radical Christian Evangelicals and others as well. The problem with the Walt and Mearsheimer argument, as I understand it, is that they radically understate the scope and power of the lobby. While the "lobby groups" that Walt and Mearsheimer have in mind can do things like get Congress to pass a resolution to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, it is the overall strategic relationship with Israel which guides US policy, not a small evil cadre of individuals in Washington. If the overall elite consensus was not of the view that the US relationship with Israel is of crucial importance, in order to terrorize the region into following US orders, then the Lobby would be out of business in days.

In the article (I have not read the book) their definition of the lobby is roughly those groups in society, which seek to bend public perception of the issue to engender support for Israel. To conduct a rational analysis, the next step after defining the group to be examined is to find out why such groups behave in such a way. The answer, as Chomsky and Herman, for example, have shown, is that they act in this way (in support of Israel) because the crimes Israel commits are in the interests of US elites. After all, the members of AIPAC do not write the editorials in the New York Times, which refuse to condemn Israel for its actions, or the articles which refuse to mention them. These tasks are performed by members of the intellectual elite, who would thus have to be included in Walt and Mearsheimer's definition of the "Lobby." Further inaccuracies are revealed when we observe that it is not just Israel who receives such freedom from criticism from the intellectual elite, but all US allies, or states acting in US interests. Should these crimes no longer serve these interests, they would meet with criticism, from these and other elite forums. Thus what Walt and Mearsheimer are observing is not the devious actions of small cadre, but rather the normal functioning of the uncritical US intellectual elite, who, like all such classes, mainly serve the purpose of "selling" state policy, formulated in the interests of elites, to the public.

For example, in 2005 the Bush Administration imposed harsh military and economic sanctions on Israel, in order to force compliance on a variety of issues, under the pretext of punishment to the Israelis for a weapons deal with the Chinese. Israel had done such deals in the past, and usually simply called them off when Washington expressed problems. However, in this case, the sanctions lasted for many months, including taking Israel off the list of partners in the development of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the suspension of military assistance and cooperation, and so on. In an extremely humiliating way, Israel was forced to pay a significant sum to the Chinese firm for breach of contract, re-write its entire procedure for arms sales, re-arrange staff, and enact a whole host of changes in its policies in the occupied territories including the Gaza "disengagement" plan. Sharon had been too arrogant, and the US applied the necessary pressure, which brought him to his knees, complying with every demand. Most important for our purposes, however, was that during the whole episode the "lobby" was silent - it did not utter a single word of complaint. We can thus see that the Lobby is permitted to exist because it serves the interests of US elites more broadly, not the other way around. If Walt and Mearsheimer's argument were true, we should expect that the US would be forced to capitulate to Israeli demands, enslaved and constrainted by the practices of the vicious "Lobby," which interrupts our normally benevolent and noble policies.

Ramblings of a Wanderer Part III: Sabra and Shatila

2009-03-31T06:16:00.018-04:00

The Sabra and Chatilla Palestinian refugee camps just outside Beirut have been infamous since they were the site of a 1982 massacre carried out by Israeli-allied Christian Phalangist militias, under the supervision of the Israeli army. The Kahan Commission, set up by the Israeli government to investigate what went on (viewed by many to be a whitewash), found Ariel Sharon "personally responsible" for the massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinians (the victims have never been accurately counted) were slaughtered execution-style. After securing the area around the camps, the Israeli forces sent in the Christian executioners, who slaughtered the Palestinians for 48 consecutive hours while the IDF stood watch, launching flares at night to ensure that the killing could carry on round the clock, as efficiently as possible. There is also significant evidence to suggest that even after the Phalangists were called out of the camps and the IDF moved in, the Israeli military continued handing Palestinian victims over to the Phalangists, who carried out further executions in the nearby Cite Sportif stadium.

When the first international journalists entered the camps in the days after the massacre, they were shocked at what they found. Corpses were strewn everywhere, many half-buried under the rubble from the heavy Israeli bombing which had preceded the slaughter, a bombing which has been compared to the horrific 2009 bombing of Gaza for its brutal and indiscriminant nature. As a result, much of the camp had been reduced to ruins and untold numbers killed before the Phalangists ever entered the camps, an important fact which you will not find any mention of in the new film "Waltz with Bashir," for one example. (In case it's not obvious, I did not take any of this first group of pictures. The rest are mine. -SM)

It is for these reasons that my passion for the Palestinian cause drew me to the camps on my recent visit to Lebanon, along with my equally impassioned and driven travel companion, Ivy. We hailed a cab outside of our hotel, boarded, and after a little trouble communicating with the driver we were on our way. We rode most of the way in silence, having no idea what to expect. Sure, we had visited Palestinian refugee camps many times in the past, but this was somehow different. For one thing, we were in Lebanon, where the Palestinian refugee population is notoriously poor and deprived, as the Lebanese government has cut off the residents from most forms of employment without special, hard-to-obtain permits, meanwhile providing only meagher resources for the upkeep and maintenance of the impoverished, partially-destroyed camps. For another, the mere fact that this was Sabra and Shatila we were heading towards, site not only of the above-discussed massacre, but also a legendary hotbed of resistance and conflict during the Lebanese civil war, a base from which Yassir Arafat and the PLO were able to establish de facto control of a large portion of Lebanon, forming a "state within a state" there until the Israeli invasion in 1978, and again in 1982 drove them out to Tunisia.

When the cab stopped, and the driver motioned for us to get out, we were a bit surprised. The camp was not really separated from Beirut at all - no walls to cordon it off from the rest of the city, not even any UNRWA or Lebanese Army outpost to monitor who is entering and exiting the camp, as we had experienced at other camps in southern Lebanon. It merely looked like an impoverished, half-wrecked neighborhood of Beirut, itself a sprawling metropolis. As we walked deeper into the camp, however, and the conditions worsened, it sunk in where we were, and how much different it was from the "rest" of the city. The broken-up, unmaintained pavement quickly gave way to dirt roads, and the conditons around us were rapdily reduced to squalor. Hamas flags flew everywhere, alongside pictures of Yassir Arafat and Hugo Chavez; pictures of the Dome of the Rock and other signs of yearning for the Palestinian homeland were all around. The camp was terribly crowded, and aboslutely filthy.

Everything had such a permanence about it; somehow from walking through this camp, it was easy to see that no one, least of all the Palestinian refugees themselves, expected the "refugee problem" to be solved any time soon. This was not a camp, but a full-fledged neighborhood, a city within a city. It was a desperately poor urban slum, and these Palestinians were simply second-class Lebanese. My heart broke as I thought of how there was little chance any of these people would ever see their families' property inside of what is now Israel; most of the children living in the camp had been born there, along with many of their parents. They were so remote from their roots, so far removed from the idyllic, rolling Palestinian landscapes that their ancestors had once cultivated so dutifully. The brutal Israeli ethnic cleansing of 1948 - the Palestinian Nakba - had separated these families from their roots and traditional lifestyle, from their people and homeland. In that year, the advancing, marauding Israeli army committed massacres, burned and demolished villages, and brought what had been a rising tide of terror and dispossession against the native people to its shocking climax. When the Zionists were finally forced to stop, having shrugged off American and other international calls for the campaign to end, 70% of the indigenous population had been uprooted and driven out, and Arab society was crushed and in chaos.

Since that time, Israel has stood in defiance of countless UN resolutions insisting that the cleansing was unjust, and that the refugees be permitted to return to their homes and to their land which their families had lived on for generations. As part of the Oslo "peace process," in reality a sickening fraud, the great Palestinian hero Yassir Arafat turned his back on the refugees, essentially giving up on the right of return, recognizing that Israel was "right" in 1948, and leaving his dispossessed people to their fates; with no Israeli acknowlegement of the awful, generations-long crime perpetrated against them, no compensation for what was done. Arafat appeared before the world as its now-repentant assailant, a man who had realized he had been wrong to struggle for Palestinian rights all these years, but had now seen the error of his ways, brought to "see the light," and thus permitted to participate in the disgusting display on the White House lawn in which he shook hands with his "friends," Bill Clinton and Yitzakh Rabin, themselves unrepentant mass murders of the people he was supposed to lead.

Unlike the blind optimism I felt in other camps I visited, there was a feeling of darkness all around. Perhaps it was all in my head, but I felt suspicious, almost hostile gazes focused on me from all sides, peering out of dark corners and throgh dirty windows. My skin crawled; I nervously snapped photos of my surroundings, without paying much attention to what I was photographing. Everything was so alien, so remote, that it seemed no matter what I took pictures of I would catch something of interest. I wanted to somehow capture the entirety of this place, to take it with me so I could open it later, when I was ready to absorb it; now I was in a state of shock and near terror, unable to understand or digest what was happening around me. Of course this was impossible; but I continued clicking away, hoping to get something worthwhile.

After we had walked down the main, busy street and emerged onto Beirut city streets on the other side, a large man on a small scooter stopped and asked us if we needed any help. "No," I quickly answered, already walking away before he introduced himself as an officer in the Lebanese army. "Be careful here," he said, a stern look in his eye, "it's not a safe area." We nodded to show him that we knew this, and he asked if we needed anything further. Ivy asked him where the Shatila camp was, since we had just walked through Sabra. He pointed us in the direction, and we thanked him as he drove off. Walking down the street to the adjoining Shatila camp, people nodded to us as we slunk by, some greeting us with a cheerful "Marhaba," others with a solmen "Salaamu Alaikum." As we approached the left turn which the soldier had indicated we should take, I looked up the street with trepidation. It was a narrow, back-alley kind of street which wound its way back into the camp. Before I could turn around to ask Ivy if she thought we should take this street, she was already ahead of me, her head dissapearing into the shadows of the small street. Somewhat apprehensively, I followed her.

On the other side, we encountered a small man who stopped us with a smile, and asked us where we were from in Arabic. "Amriki" we answered, indicated we were from the United States. The man had an ID badge, and seemed to be better dressed than the other men with whom he was conversing over coffee and sheesha, leading me to wonder if he was Palestinian. "Enta Filistiny?" I asked. He shook his head no, informing us that he worked with a Lebanese political party, and was there to help out with the work at the camp. We nodded our heads in approval as he stood up from his coffee, nodded to his companion, and motioned us to follow him. "Don't walk this far back," he said, "you could have problems; someone might rob you or hurt you," he said with caution. "Walk back up this way, and stay in the front of the camp," he pointed down another narrow street which we were to follow. Already jittery and nervous, none of this did anything to relax me.

As we walked down the narrow winding streets, waving and nodding hello to curious passersby, I tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be here with Israeli bombs raining down overhead, or with the vicious Phalangist militias roaming about, executing family and friends mercilessly; I could almost hear the screams and wails. It was unimaginable, it was inhuman. As it was, the camp had a thick air of deep collective trauma, it was as if we had somehow crossed through the looking glass into another world, a wretched, awful, irredeemable place. There is no way to put in words nor show with pictures the feeling in the air of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Soon, we had made it back on to the main road from which we entered and I began to recognize my surroundings as we made our way out of the camp, back toward the city of Beirut, back toward the real world, the world I knew where I could think and breathe. I needed oxygen, I needed to think; I felt confused, angry, and more than a little frightened. I felt ashamed to be an American, embarrassed to be so wealthy. I felt that I was somehow responsible for all this, and that I somehow could and must make it right.

As we emerged from the camp and hailed a cab, I began to feel guilty that I had been so afraid. Perhaps I was merely afraid to face the wicked reality of the world and the awful position of so many in it, perhaps the hostility had been all in my mind (not that I could blame the residents of Sabra and Chatila camps if it was not). I turned to Ivy, and hugged her silently as I looked back at the camp from the streets of Beirut before climbing into the cab.

It wasn't until we were in the cab, with the ruins and slums of the camp fading behind us, that I really made sense of it all. Indeed, I was responsible, not just as a human being but as an American. My country is of prime importance to the continued suffering of the Palestinian people; it was the chief sponsor of the Sabra and Chatila attacks in 1982, just as it was in Gaza in 2009. Thus I am responsible, and furthermore, as a member of the most privileged group in the world, it is my obligation to do all I can to make this right, whatever small contribution that amounts to in the end. It is a thankless and lonely task to be sure, but it is the bare minimum which is required of me in view of my nationality and privilege. As Albert Camus put it in his classic The Plague, all that is needed to stop a horrible epidemic from consuming the entire community is "a little common decency." Just as Camus' heroes may not have been able to stop or even slow a plague, it was their duty to their fellow humans to try, even if that meant simply cleaning the streets, counting and burying corpses, and treating the symptoms of those certain to die. I knew as the cab drove us back to our hotel in Beirut's downtown Hamra district that I would spend a good portion of the rest of my life standing up to the plague of violence, oppression, suffering and injustice, no matter where in the world it was found. Like those facing an unstoppable plague, my efforts may not amount to much, as the forces at play are significantly beyond my command. The fact is, I simply have no other choice.